The Ivy League’s dirty secret Tom Leonard Attenborough’s alpha ego James Walton

17 november 2018 [ £4.50 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

China’s
world
James O’Malley on the rise of
the ultimate surveillance state

BREXIT
BETRAYED
JO JOHNSON
CHARLES MOORE
JAMES FORSYTH
ROD LIDDLE
EURO ZONE €6.95 SOUTH AFRICA ZAR84.90
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The greatest pirate who ever lived Horatio Clare


uring last year’s general election
D
campaign, Theresa May declared
that ‘You can only deliver Brexit if
you believe in Brexit’. Unfortunately, her
deal proves this point. It was negotiated by
a team of people who imagined their job to
be a damage-limitation exercise. They did
not see Brexit as an opportunity and this is
reflected in the terms put before the cabinet.
The deal falls far short of what was prom-
ised in May’s Lancaster House speech. She
said she’d bring back a clean Brexit, taking
Britain out of the Single Market, the Cus-
toms Union and the jurisdiction of the Euro-
pean Court of Justice. The deal she ended
up presenting to her cabinet will, in sever-
al important regards, fail all of these tests.
But May has conveniently forgotten her
tests. She doesn’t mention them any more.
Instead, she talks about the uncertainty that
might be unleashed by no deal (as a result of
her failure to prepare for it) and the political
weakness created by the result of the gen-
eral election she called last year.
She will now be tempted to turn parlia-
mentary approval of the draft Brexit deal
agreed on Tuesday into an issue of confi-
dence. She will be inclined to tell MPs that
whatever they think of this deal, it is the
only one on the table and the only thing sep-
arating us from a chaotic departure from the
EU on 29 March next year. Either accept it,
or the government will collapse and Jeremy
Corbyn will be prime minister.
This is a tactic which May should be care-
ful to resist. It was tried by John Major with
the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, and in the
strict sense of allowing the then prime min-
ister to complete the passage of his bill, it
may seem initially to have worked. But the
price Major paid was to create a poisonous
atmosphere in the Conservative party which
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
A bad deal
resulted in a calamitous defeat four years
later. And in 1993, Sir John still had a major-
ity of nearly 20. Theresa May has none.
Already, the DUP MPs who provide her
majority have indicated they will oppose the
deal. Their concerns will be shared by Scot-
tish Tory MPs who recognise that a weaker
union with Northern Ireland might erode
that between England and Scotland. At first
sight, the deal does away with the need for
an internal customs border between North-
ern Ireland and the rest of the UK. But the
small print shows that the EU is, in effect,
Brexit was never, in itself, going to be
a guarantee of national success. It
represented the removal of a constraint
being given jurisdiction over goods stand-
ards in Northern Ireland. The fear is that if
the UK later wants to make a clean break
with the EU, it would have to leave North-
ern Ireland behind.
No. 10 disputes this interpretation, but
this brings us to the largest single problem
with Mrs May’s deal: we would not be able
to leave it freely, at a time of our choosing. It
would only be possible with the permission
of an ‘independent arbitration committee’.
This is exactly the state of ‘vassalage’ which
Remainers and Brexiteers alike have been
warning about.
Brexit was never, in itself, going to be a
guarantee of national success. It represented
the removal of a constraint: making it work
would require using the UK’s new freedoms
wisely. But the UK will have almost no new
economic freedom under these arrange-
ments. The UK will not be able to become a
more competitive economy 20 miles off the
Continent’s coast, competing for investment
with the promise of lower taxes, freer trade
and a more streamlined regulatory environ-
ment that ditches the precautionary princi-
ple. Instead, the UK will be bound by level
playing field restrictions designed to ensure
that this country can gain no competitive
advantage over the EU27.
May’s deal is not useless. It does bring
back control of borders, farms, fish and
money. Payments to the EU will fall from
about £10 billion to less than £1 billion, sav-
ing some £50 billion over a parliament. We
will be free from the Common Agricultur-
al Policy which has, over the years, done so
much to exacerbate Third World poverty. It
will stop our courts having to look to Stras-
bourg for direction, protecting the common
law tradition on which our justice system
(and the respect for it) is based. For those
to whom Brexit was about immigration and
money, both boxes are ticked.
But to those for whom Brexit was about
sovereignty, and the ability of Britain to
manage its own affairs for a 21st century
that requires a global outlook rather than
European parochialism, this deal is a bit-
ter disappointment. We will not, really, be
able to break free from EU protectionism.
We will end up accepting regulatory dik-
tats under the guise of ‘level playing field’
requirements. We will not be able to strike
new trade deals, to the dismay of Americans
and Australians who had hoped for closer
relations with us — and to the dismay of
millions who voted for Brexit, with all its
risks, but now find the government unable
to share their confidence in the project of
the United Kingdom.
This is why May will struggle for
parliament’s approval. MPs from all parties
will know that there is a better way of doing
this. And that even now, it is not too late
to find one.
3
 Yoko loco, p53
A pirate’s life for me, p44

Vuillard’s muse, p46

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 The all-seeing state CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
7 Portrait of the Week The dark side of China’s 32 Books of the Year, Part II
high-tech society A further selection of the best and
9 Diary My revolutionary Brexit act James O’Malley worst books of 2018
Jo Johnson
13 The fourth weapon 36 Benjamin Markovits
10 Politics May’s maths problem Social credit is just one part of The Life of Saul Bellow, by
James Forsyth China’s new state control Zachary Leader
11 The Spectator’s Notes Charles Parton 38 Alex Preston
Jeremy Corbyn’s anorak 17 Nervous laughter How to Write an Autobiographical
Charles Moore My awful maiden stand-up gig Novel, and Edinburgh, by
14 Ancient and modern Tom Ball Alexander Chee
Call the polis 20 BlackRock in the spotlight 39 Robert Carver
17 Barometer Forest fires, rabies The investment management corp Cult of a Dark Hero, by
and the name Adolf is finally under scrutiny Stuart Flinders
21 Rod Liddle Juliet Samuel 40 Ursula Buchan
The establishment will win again 22 A different league on the year’s best gardening books
22 From the archive US university admissions are 41 William Cook
Trial and punishment anything but meritocratic Dreamers, by Volker Weidermann
Tom Leonard John Levett
24 James Delingpole
I won’t be turning Catholic just yet 25 Dangerous minds ‘The White Sparrow’: a poem
Searching for the origins of violence 42 Ian Kelly
29 Letters Art vs history, Admiral Taj Nathan
Wemyss, cricket and the Iolaire The Birth of Modern Theatre,
by Norman S. Poser
30 Any other business
A run-in with Amazon in Seattle 43 Bill Emmott
Martin Vander Weyer Japan Story, by Christopher Harding
Alistair Elliott
‘Tristan’: a poem

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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The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

 He hates Tabasco, p69 Grand designs, p40

Does that make him crazy? p25

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
transport minister and, under
David Cameron, in the No. 10
Policy Unit. He is a member
of ‘the Sensibles’ — Tory MPs
seeking to soften Brexit. He
writes a sensible diary on p9.
James O’Malley was the
interim editor of Gizmodo UK,
and has previously written for
TechRadar. On p12 he looks
at the dark side of China’s
technology boom.
Dr Taj Nathan is a forensic
psychiatrist and clinical
director of Merseyside NHS
Trust. He is the winner of the
John Murray Prize for non-
fiction writing, and his essay is
published on p25.
Ursula Buchan, who reviews
the year’s best gardening books
on p40, is an award-winning
gardening writer. Her most
recent book is A Green and
Pleasant Land.
Nick Hilton is the director of
Podot, a podcast production
house. He was The Spectator’s
first podcast editor. On p48, he
reviews the video game Red
Dead Redemption 2.

the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 RESTORING VALUE
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Please remember that past performance is not a guide

to future performance. Investment involves risk. The
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down as well as up and investors may not get back the
amount originally invested.

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Formerly Old Mutual Global Investors

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.

Home
heresa May, the Prime Minister,
T defended a 500-page technical draft
of the agreement on withdrawal from the
European Union. She met immediate
opposition from the Democratic Unionists,
from Jacob Rees-Mogg and from Boris
Johnson. Mr Johnson’s brother Jo (a
Remainer) had earlier resigned as a
minister, calling Mrs May’s handling of
Brexit a ‘failure of British statecraft on a
scale unseen since the Suez crisis’. The BBC
reported that several cabinet ministers
had expressed doubts about her Chequers
plan back in July. Jeremy Corbyn, the
Labour leader, insisted that Brexit could
not be stopped, but Keir Starmer, Labour’s
shadow Brexit secretary, said the option of
a new referendum was still ‘on the table’.
Premier Foods put its Ambrosia creamed
rice business up for sale as it began to
spend £10 million to prepare for Brexit.
The Prince of Wales celebrated his 70th
birthday.
he nation had spent a weekend
T solemnly marking the centenary of the
Armistice. Big Ben was allowed to strike
11. The Queen closed her eyes in prayer
and the Prince of Wales laid a wreath at the
Cenotaph. Some people criticised Jeremy
Corbyn, for wearing an anorak and a red
tie there. Bells rang; poppy petals fell; large
engravings of individuals who had died in
the first world war were made on beaches
and washed away by the tide; silhouettes
of the fallen were placed in churches.
The government was said to oppose the
granting of asylum to Asia Bibi (a Christian
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
acquitted of blasphemy after eight years
on death row in Pakistan) for fear of
community unrest. Lord Lester of Herne
Hill should be suspended from sitting in the
Lords until 2022, its Privileges and Conduct
Committee said, after he was found to have
offered a woman ‘corrupt inducements to
sleep with him’ in 2006 by promising her a
peerage; he denied the allegations.
he British economy grew by 0.6 per
T cent in the third quarter and the annual
rate of wage increases rose to 3.2 per cent.
Inflation remained unchanged at 2.4 per
cent. Unemployment rose by 21,000 and
the number of people from Cyprus, the
Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and
Slovenia working in Britain fell by 173,000.
The owners of the Daily Mail were said
to be interested in buying the i newspaper
from Johnston Press. James Brokenshire,
the culture secretary, defended Sir Roger
Scruton’s appointment as the chairman
of a new public body to encourage more
beautiful houses; Labour said he should
be dumped because in 2007 he wrote in
the Daily Telegraph that homosexuality
was ‘not normal’. Adam Thomas, 22, and
Claudia Patatas, 38, from Banbury, a couple
who had given their baby the middle name
Adolf, were convicted of belonging to
National Action, a banned Neo-Nazi group;
a swastika-shaped pastry cutter was found
at their home.
Abroad
n events to mark the 100th anniversary of
I the Armistice, Chancellor Angela Merkel
of Germany and President Emmanuel
Macron of France signed a book of
remembrance in a replica railway carriage
near Compiègne. President Donald Trump
cancelled his visit to a US military cemetery
because it was raining and he wouldn’t be
able to use a helicopter. At a ceremony in
Paris, President Vladimir Putin of Russia
shook him by the hand and gave him a
thumbs-up. During a meeting Mr Macron
put his hand on Mr Trump’s knee, but later
in a speech he said: ‘Patriotism is the exact
opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a
betrayal of patriotism.’
t least 48 died in wildfires sweeping
A California and scores were missing.
Some 300,000 had to flee their homes. In
Paradise, 6,700 homes and businesses burnt
down. Thousand Oaks lost scores of houses
days after 12 people were shot dead in a
bar there by a former US marine who had
served in Afghanistan; he is believed to
have committed suicide. One of those killed
was Telemachus Orfanos, 27, who had
escaped death last year when a gunman
killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
P alestinian guerrillas in Gaza fired
more than 400 rockets into Israel and
Israeli aircraft hit 150 targets, killing six
people. Turkey sent an audio recording
of the killing of the Saudi journalist
Jamal Khashoggi to western powers and
to Saudi Arabia. Sri Lanka’s Supreme
Court suspended the President’s move
to dissolve parliament and hold snap
elections. A Spanish court ordered the
former Catalan leader Artur Mas to repay
the €4.9 million costs of organising 2014’s
illegal vote on independence. CSH
7

acob Rees-Mogg observed that
J my resignation last week was ‘the
“Emperor’s New Clothes” moment
in the Brexit process’. If this is right,
that makes me the child, too young
to understand the importance of
maintaining pretences, who blurts out
before the embarrassed townsfolk
that the emperor is naked. I’ve been
surprised by the noisy reaction to my
departure from the middle ranks of
the government. The video I made in
my office setting out my reasons for
going had two million views in two days.
Maybe this is an example of Orwell’s
dictum that in a time of deceit telling the
truth is a revolutionary act.
he deceit is that we’re making a
T success of Brexit. William Hague
once described the goal of Conservative
policy as being ‘in Europe, but not
run by Europe’. The government’s
proposals will see us out of Europe, yet
run by Europe, bound by rules which
we will have lost a hand in shaping.
Worse still, there is no real clarity about
how this situation will ever end. The
proposed Withdrawal Agreement parks
many of the biggest issues about our
future relationship with Europe into a
boundless transitionary period. This is
a con: there is no evidence that the kind
of Brexit that we’ve failed to negotiate
while we are still members can be
magically agreed on once we’ve lost our
seat at the table.
he ‘deal’ the PM is now finalising
T in Brussels and across Whitehall
makes Brexit an entirely self-defeating
and pointless exercise. Will we be able
to do worthwhile trade deals with third
countries? No. Could we turn ourselves
into a low regulation tiger economy?
No. Will we ‘take back control’? No,
we cede control to the other European
countries that will determine the rules
governing huge swathes of our economy.
When we were told Brexit meant taking
back powers for Parliament, no one
said to my constituents that this meant
the French parliament and the German
parliament, not our own. This is an
utterly abject and shameful national
humiliation. And that’s why I resigned.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Jo Johnson
o great to see an MP putting country
S before party, some people have said to
me. Actually, it’s both party and country,
because if the Tories allow this deal to
become the basis of a new relationship with
the EU, it’s in trouble. Others have different
views about how to extract ourselves from
the hole No. 10 is digging. EEA this, EFTA
that. Norway. Canada. Whatever. Brexit is at
risk of becoming a parlour game, in which
we fantasise about ways of having our cake
and eating it. The reality is, the PM has done
her best to manage the trade-off between
restoring powers to Westminster and
Tagliatelle: Diamond, gold and silver rings
Cassandra Goad, 147 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9BZ
Telephone: 020 7730 2202 cassandragoad.com
maintaining privileged access to our most
important market but her deal is a turkey.
emember Brexit means Brexit?
R Brexit now means slavery, according
to Jacob. Put that on the bus. Staunch
Brexiteers, including my brother Boris,
are publicly admitting we’d be better off
staying in the EU than becoming a vassal
state. Proceeding on this basis is an act of
collective madness. One telling sign is that
the government never argues the ‘deal’
is better than our current membership.
The PM knows she cannot honestly make
that claim and, sensibly, declines to do
so. The only comparison she ventures is
that it is better than having to turn the
Garden of England into a lorry park,
trashing manufacturing supply chains
and stockpiling food and medicines by
quitting without a deal. That’s a low bar.
Time to allow the people the final say on
whether they still want to leave the EU
now we know the deal that’s on offer.
ow do you know you’re no longer
H a minister? You get in a car and it
doesn’t move, goes Peter Lilley’s old
gag. My family knew something was
up when the lovely Department for
Transport driver knocked on our front
door for the second time in half an hour
and said he was collecting the red box
full of ministerial papers he’d delivered
minutes previously. I also enjoyed the
instantaneous deletion of my wonderful
policy adviser’s entire email system from
her smartphone while she was in the
middle of sending a message. I’ll miss the
department’s fantastic officials most.
he person this country misses most
T is Jeremy Heywood. I was lucky to
learn from him during the two years I ran
the No. 10 Policy Unit ahead of the 2015
election. He sent me a nice note after
our manifesto came out, welcoming that
it had recognised Britain’s ‘impartial,
professional and highly capable civil
service [was] admired around the world
and one of our nation’s strengths’.
The civil service is now stretched to its
limits by Brexit, to the detriment of our
ability to tackle the challenges we face:
a housing crisis, poor social mobility, an
ageing society and so on. A great man.
9

May’s maths problem
he bad news for Theresa May is that
T Brexit isn’t over. She might have
agreed terms with the European Com-
mission and discussed these with her cabinet,
but perhaps her most difficult task awaits:
she must now get it through Parliament.
Even if she had struck a good deal, it
would have struggled to pass. May only has a
majority thanks to her confidence-and-sup-
ply deal with the Democratic Unionist Party.
Northern Ireland was always going to be
one of the most contentious parts of Brexit,
as the EU has demanded that its future is
decided first — in the legally binding with-
drawal agreement — rather than in the com-
ing UK/EU trade negotiations.
In theory, the DUP has agreed to sup-
port the Tories over Brexit. But things look
different now: their language and tactics
(including voting against the government,
and for the publication of the legal advice
on the backstop) suggest they won’t back
her deal. It seems the government suspects
as much, which is why the DUP appears to
have been kept out of the loop with both
its Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, and
Arlene Foster attacking the putative deal.
No. 10 claims victory, saying May has
removed the Northern Ireland backstop by
making the backstop UK-wide. However,
there are still Northern Ireland-specific pro-
visions tucked away in there.
Rather like the princess who could still
feel the pea despite umpteen mattress-
es being placed on top of it, the DUP can
sense the Northern Ireland-specific require-
ments buried under the UK-wide backstop.
For this reason, it is highly unlikely to sup-
port the withdrawal agreement. Without
DUP support, the vote begins to look very
tight for May — and that’s before you even
consider the many Tory rebellions she is
likely to face.
The first will come from Brexit ultras
who don’t regard her deal as a proper Brex-
it. The ERG, the largest Brexiteer lobby in
the party, talks about 80 MPs being opposed
to the course May has embarked on, though
it accepts that the whips will succeed in
reducing this number, perhaps by half. After
all, MPs are being asked to vote for a with-
drawal agreement, not for May’s Chequers
10
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
proposals. There will also be much in the
political declaration to please those who
favour a Canada-style free trade deal with
the EU, suggesting that this might, still, be
where we end up. But the backstop (which
will be in the withdrawal agreement) will
complicate that. A more cautious view
would be that 20 Brexit-supporting Tories
will vote against May’s deal.
They will face blood-curdling threats
from No. 10, including a second referendum
or a general election. They’ll be called ‘pur-
ists’ who endanger the whole Brexit pro-
ject. But most of these 20 MPs view the deal
May is proposing as genuinely worse than
EU membership, so they are not so scared
of a second referendum. Compounding this
problem is bullishness in Brexiteer circles
that they would actually win a second vote.
Not even Labour Brexiteers can be
relied on by May. Kate Hoey, for
instance, opposes the deal
The threat of a Jeremy Corbyn government,
though, might prove to be a rather more
effective way of whittling down this num-
ber. When May was trying to win over one
wavering cabinet minister, she majored on
the dangers of a Corbyn government rather
than the risk of a second referendum. And
with some success.
But it won’t only be Tory Brexit ultras
voting against the deal, as Jo Johnson’s res-
ignation showed. It will also be opposed
by some on the opposite wing of the party.
Emboldened by the language of those on
the Brexit side, they will argue that May’s
deal is worse than EU membership so Brit-
ain should abandon Brexit and stay in.
There were always going to be a few
Tories who fell into this category. But
what will worry No. 10 is that this number
appears to be growing. It currently looks
closer to a dozen than half a dozen. There
is a feeling that the criticisms by the ERG
and Boris Johnson give them covering fire,
meaning that it is harder to equate voting
against whatever May brings back with
disrespecting the referendum result. If
some of those who campaigned hardest for
Brexit regard this deal as a betrayal, then it
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
is easier to argue that the public deserve
another crack at it.
These Tory rebellions mean that the gov-
ernment will need Labour votes to get the
deal through. This will not be easy. Not even
all the Labour Brexiteers can be relied on
by May. Kate Hoey, for instance, opposes
the deal because of what it would mean for
Northern Ireland.
One set of Labour MPs that the gov-
ernment might have some success with are
those who were moderate Remainers in
2016 but represent heavily Leave seats and
so don’t want either a second referendum
or a general election fought on Brexit. The
chief whip told colleagues recently that he
thought there were 15 Labour MPs who the
government could win over.
Some ministers think they could secure
more Labour MPs than that. They point out
that 15 voted with the government against
EEA membership, which would require
free movement, back in June, and that didn’t
involve squeezing every last drop out of the
Labour lemon. They reckon that this deal,
which will mean the end of free movement
once the transition period is over, could gar-
ner support from as many as 25 Labour MPs.
But even that would not be enough if the
DUP is opposed, unless the Tory rebellion
can be considerably shaved down. At the
same time, no whip ever likes having to rely
on MPs from another party. This applies par-
ticularly to Labour MPs, given the current
circumstances. A huge number of them are
jittery about being deselected. Any Labour
backbencher who votes for May’s Brexit
deal knows that he or she would infuriate
both the Corbynite and pro-Remain wings
of the membership, thereby making their
lives extremely difficult.
How then might this deal get through
the Commons? One theory that is already
being discussed by cabinet ministers is that
it might take two votes. In this scenario, after
the first vote, rejecting it, the markets panic
and MPs are staring over the abyss, so they
have a second vote at which it passes. This
would be, to put it mildly, high risk. But it
is hard to see how the deal could, in other
circumstances, pass, given the forces now
ranged against it.

t’s time for Bond — Basildon Bond,’
‘I is the joke among pro-Leave MPs
as Theresa May serves up her mess of
pottage as Brexit. Market research,
however, shows the joke does not work
on MPs under 40 because they do not
know what Basildon Bond is. So perhaps
I should explain to the hip Spectator
crowd that Basildon Bond remains the
commonest brand of quality paper on
which to write letters. There need to be
48 such letters sent to Graham Brady,
the chairman of the 1922 Committee,
to provoke a vote of confidence in Mrs
May among Conservative MPs. There
are certainly far more than 48 who do
not, in fact, have confidence in her. It
does not automatically follow, needless
to say, that they will say so when asked.
The weapon can be used only once in
12 months and could recoil upon those
who wield it. Or it might provoke what
Tories call ‘the catastrophe of a Corbyn
government’. But what to do about the
catastrophe of the May one?
feel a proprietorial interest in Labour
I leaders’ attire at the Cenotaph,
because Michael Foot’s famous donkey
jacket in 1981 caused me to write almost
the first article in my career to attract
any public notice. It was a leader for the
Daily Telegraph, headlined ‘Dressed to
Wound’, and it attacked Mr Foot for
his jacket, flapping trousers, Cornish-
pasty shoes and his laying of his party’s
wreath ‘with all the reverent dignity
of a tramp bending down to inspect
a cigarette end’. It seemed to crest a
wave of reader indignation at Mr Foot.
Hundreds wrote or telephoned in
support. For years afterwards, I felt I
had been unfair to the dear old boy, but
when I subsequently learnt that he had
taken money from the KGB, I reverted
to my original indignation. So I watched
Jeremy Corbyn’s anorak closely on
Remembrance Day. It was not as bad
as the donkey jacket; but compare the
Corbyn rig in his first wreath-laying
as leader in 2015 with his outfit today.
As a cautious cadet three years ago, he
carefully avoided the Foot trap, wearing
a sober suit, dark tie and conspicuous
poppy. Now he is politically dominant, he
can risk the anorak. If he becomes PM,
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Charles Moore
perhaps he will wear a white poppy and a
Frida Kahlo T-shirt.
he Queen has been attending Cenotaph
T ceremonies since before even Mr
Corbyn was born. I am grateful to Robert
Hardman’s fascinating new book about
her as a global figure (Queen of the World)
for the information that ‘On her first tour
of Canada, in 1951, she was introduced to
Benjamin Mansell, an old soldier of such
advanced years that he had been too old
for the Boer War. Mansell, of Springfield
Junction, Nova Scotia, had served in
Afghanistan during the 1870s…The Queen
must, therefore, be the only person who has
heard first-hand accounts of both the Anglo-
Afghan War of 1878 and the 21st-century
Afghan war against the Taliban’ (including,
in the latter case, from her grandson).
bituaries of Bob Bairamian, the
O colourful prep-school headmaster,
paid tribute to his gift for teaching classics,
glamorising education and helping his
pupils win scholarships. He was also a
generous man, taking pupils out to lavish
celebratory dinners. But I wonder where
the money came from. A dear friend of
mine and neighbour of Bairamian, also
a prep-school master, bumped into the
great showman in a local pub, roughly 30
years ago. ‘I say,’ said Bob, ‘I’m in a spot
of trouble because some parents haven’t
paid their fees on time. You couldn’t see
your way to tiding me over for a month,
could you?’ My friend, who was excessively
innocent and kind, wrote a cheque for
£28,000. This was, apart from his small
cottage, his entire life savings. Bairamian
only ever paid him back £500. Despite my
urging, my friend was too embarrassed to
complain. By the time he died in a care
home two years ago, he had run out of
money. These ‘larger than life’ charmers
often have much to answer for.
ne of Bairamian’s skills was
O recruiting pupils from West
Africa. When the social history of
mid-20th-century prep schools comes
to be written, it will show that they
were among the few entrepreneurial
institutions in post-war Britain. With
big-house rural property prices very low,
regulatory costs minimal and lots of ex-
officers looking for work, bright sparks
could easily fill a school with about
60 sons of friends and get going. Rich
people in poor, far-flung countries were
identified as valued customers. When I
went to my own prep school, Claremont
(of which Bairamian much later became
headmaster) in 1966, it was a fine
example of what we now call diversity.
The first prefect to shout at me was the
son of the sports minister of Liberia.
The father of our most colossal cricketer
was the recently assassinated president
of Nigeria. There was a dignified boy
from Iran, and a large contingent of the
academically very able sons of Indian
grocers from the Canary Islands. Such
prep schools went ‘rainbow’ long before
the state system, but of course they still
studied Kennedy’s Latin Primer and the
Dragon Book of Verse.
ane Goring was killed last week in
J a drag-hunting accident. She came
to unwanted fame last year when she
was filmed striking out at a masked
hunt saboteur who had grabbed her
frightened horse’s bridle, shouting at
him to let go. If she had lived, the case
might have come to court. I do not
know its exact rights and wrongs, but
anyone who has seen masked ‘antis’ at
work will recognise how hard they try
to provoke riders by threatening horses.
Such people have gleefully trolled Jane’s
death, of course. Jane, whom I knew, was
a lovely, funny, warm-hearted woman,
who will be grievously missed. Because
she was married to Richard Goring, of
the hotel family, and because she liked
hunting, she was described by the Sun,
who reported the fracas, as ‘aristocrat
Jane’. This amused Jane’s friends,
because she was red-blooded, not blue-
blooded. The paper had forgotten it, but
she started her working life in the 1980s
as a page-three girl in the Sun.
11
 The all-seeing state
The dark side of China’s high-tech society
he bullet train from Beijing to Shang-
T hai is the fastest in the world. It takes
just over four hours to travel the
819-mile journey. From the train, it is impos-
sible to ignore China’s economic success.
There are cities the size of London that
many westerners will never even have
heard of. They are filled with glass towers
and shopping centres, selling Cartier watch-
es and Gucci bags.
As the train sets off from each station,
an announcement plays in both Chinese
and stilted English: ‘Dear passengers, peo-
ple who travel without a ticket or behave
disorderly, or smoke in public areas, will be
punished according to regulations and the
behaviour will be recorded in the individual
credit information system. To avoid a nega-
tive record of personal credit please follow
the relevant regulations and help with the
orders on the train and at the station.’
As a technology journalist, I’m used to
hearing Silicon Valley executives talk about
how liberating new technology is. Yet this
announcement startled me. It was a remind-
er that the same technology that has trans-
formed liberal democracies is now starting
to be used by authoritarian governments
who want to tighten their grip on society.
‘Personal credit’ is essentially a perma-
nent record of an individual’s behaviour.
In the case of the train announcement, the
record is maintained by China’s transport
department. If you’re caught travelling
without a ticket or smoking on the train,
you’ll be put on a blacklist. You may even
find yourself banned from the railways.
In principle, this might seem like a good
idea. But what gives the system a sinis-
ter edge is the government’s stated inten-
tion. By 2020, it wants to join up the railway
blacklist with similar blacklists held by other
government departments, municipalities
and even private sector businesses. These
records will then form part of a national
‘social credit’ system.
Social credit works in a similar way to
how we rate our Uber drivers and Deliveroo
orders. It allows individuals to be rated and
scored. Good behaviour is rewarded with
points, while bad behaviour is penalised.
12
JAMES O’MALLEY
Run a red light? Lose some points. Donated
to charity? Bonus points. Sold contaminated
food in your restaurant? That’s going to hit
your social credit rating hard.
The score is constantly updated. If it falls
below an acceptable threshold, then it’s
game over. You could be denied the right to
travel, purchase luxury goods or gain access
to services. In some cases, you may even be
publicly shamed with your face displayed
on billboards. An infraction in one area of
life could easily come back to haunt you in
another. According to a State Council policy
If your score falls too low you
may be publicly shamed with your
face displayed on billboards
document: ‘If trust is broken in one place,
restrictions are imposed everywhere.’
Dr Rogier Creemers, perhaps the West’s
leading expert on the system, explains how
moral authority has been a central part of
Chinese politics for the past two millennia.
‘China never had a separate church in the
way that western countries did, and so the
moral authority of the church is also held by
the state. This isn’t just about people obey-
ing the law; it’s about the state claiming the
moral authority to define what virtue is, and
then demanding that people live virtuously.’
There isn’t yet a single system of control.
The Chinese government is still working
on knitting together the various databases
and systems so that different parts of gov-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
ernment can access data held in different
silos. But there are around 40 local trials
currently in operation, each of which has dif-
ferent rules and punishments. Once in place,
the social credit system will act as a way of
enforcing existing laws and regulations.
In China’s tech hub Shenzhen, a city of
12.5 million people, jaywalkers are punished
using the social credit system. Pedestrians
who don’t cross the road at the right time or
do so in the wrong place have their photos
posted on a government website, and on bill-
boards on the sides of the roads. One firm,
Intellifusion, is reported to be building a sys-
tem that will automate this with facial recog-
nition technology. Not only will the system
be able to identify offenders automatically,
it will then text them to let them know they
face punishment.
Another local trial is taking place in the
city of Jinan, but this one is for dog owners.
Individuals start with 12 points, but can lose
them for infractions like walking their pet
without a leash, or letting the animal bark
too much. Lose all your points and the gov-
ernment takes your pooch away.
The private sector has been just as keen
to adopt social credit. Sesame Credit was
launched by e-commerce giant Alibaba
in 2015. Much like Amazon, Alibaba is a
platform that connects buyers and sellers.
But unlike in America and Europe, most
Chinese people didn’t have a bank account
until recently, so financial tools such as credit
checks were unavailable. A system was need-
ed to create trust within the marketplace.
Enter social credit. Users who opt in to
the system are given a score — somewhere
between 350 and 950, based on different
metrics: how much a user spends, how much
personal information has been entered into
the app, whether bills and credit card pay-
ments have been made on time and how
many verified friends a user has.
These metrics are then used as a proxy
for trust. If someone has bought plenty of
items without a problem, or has friends who
use the platform whom the company has
already verified, and so on, the system will
divine that the person is more trustworthy.
As with the government systems, scores
are important. If you have a sufficiently high
score, you unlock perks, such as the ability to
rent bicycles without paying a deposit, use
massage chairs (which are strangely ubiq-
uitous in China) for free, or even fast-track
your application for a Schengen visa.
What makes Sesame Credit controver-
sial is that the algorithm that drives it is kept
secret. Most users will have no idea how
their score is calculated. But the company
has admitted it is partially based on the types
of products people buy. ‘Someone who plays
video games for ten hours a day, for example,
would be considered an idle person,’ Li Ying-
yun, Sesame’s technology director, has said.
Buying products for your child would mark
you out as a more responsible citizen.
Economies are built on trust and China’s
economy has matured at an astonishing rate.
Those who support the system say that it’s
designed to manage low-level misdemean-
ours and will help create more trust.
But it’s easy to see where the next steps
could lead. You don’t need to read too much
dystopian science fiction to imagine how
such an opaque system, where a mysterious
number decides your rights and privileges,
could be used to control a population. Some
trials have already led to alarming results. In
The phone system warned anyone
calling a person on a debtor blacklist
that they were untrustworthy
one region, the phone system was configured
so that anyone calling someone on a debtor
blacklist was warned that they were contact-
ing an untrustworthy individual.
While we might trust the people cur-
rently in charge of the new high-tech secu-
rity apparatus, how can we be sure that
the people in charge in the future will use
it responsibly? In other words, even if you
inexplicably trust the Chinese government
to behave responsibly today, how can you be
so sure that Xi Jinping or his successors will
behave the same way tomorrow? China’s
innovative use of new technology may not
just enable perfect surveillance. It will align
an individual’s motives with those of the
state itself.
Technology is only going to develop fur-
ther. Processing power will increase, as will
facial recognition. The number of devices
containing cameras and microchips will
increase too. It will keep getting easier to sift
through huge amounts of information, in the
hunt for anything subversive.
What China has achieved in such a short
time is staggering. But the announcement
I heard on the bullet train made me nerv-
ous. It was an ominous reminder that there
is a darker side to China’s growth, which
may soon affect us all.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
James O’Malley and Cindy Yu on China’s
social credit system.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The fourth weapon
Social credit is just one part of the new state control
CHARLES PARTON
hairman Mao talked of ‘three
C
magic weapons’ for seizing power:
the united front, the armed strug-
gle and construction of the Communist
party itself. Now the priority for China’s
government is to remain in power. To
ensure that, President Xi Jinping’s party
is developing a fourth ‘magic weapon’.
The social credit system is a part of
this, but the ‘weapon’ also extends far
beyond it. By combining big data, arti-
ficial intelligence, recognition technolo-
gy and other police techniques, China’s
government intends to create a compre-
hensive method of political and social
control.
It may not live up to everything
that is promised: after all, government-
implemented computer systems rarely
work as well as intended. But it will affect
— is already affecting — Chinese society
and human rights more profoundly than
any other reform or development insti-
tuted by the party.
The Chinese government has always
been interested in keeping files on citi-
zens. In the past, each citizen had a
dang’an, or file, that covered their life.
Nothing could be done without the
dang’an. Everything was entered in it:
marriage, social position, job. But this
was, by necessity, pretty rudimentary. The
magic weapon now being created can
update that surveillance for an infinite-
ly more complex age by tying all man-
ner of information to a person’s personal
ID number.
The weapon is to have several com-
ponents. There is recognition technol-
ogy, with databases covering the face,
voice, fingerprints and DNA of every
Chinese citizen. Then positional moni-
toring, including mobile devices, which
even now can report on the location of
1.4 billion citizens (the trick will be to use
AI to make that information recoverable
in real time), backed up by other public
systems, such as linking up more than
170 million cameras (said to rise to
400 million by 2020).
Next is lifestyle monitoring. Databases
concerning the individual, be they health
or education records, details of purchas-
es made or internet activity, will be moni-
tored. This is where we find data from the
social credit system, which is like a finan-
cial credit rating but far broader. Anyone
deemed anti-social (or anti-Communist
party) will find themselves blocked from
buying air or train tickets, getting a mort-
gage or even graduating.
Finally, there is the ‘grid system’ infor-
mation, which divides cities into small
parcels overseen by citizens who are paid
The East Germans had a Stasi:
in the 21st century, China
enlists far more people
to report unusual activity to the police.
The East Germans had a Stasi: in the 21st
century, China enlists far more people. In
Chaoyang district in Beijing, for instance,
there are around 120,000 paid inform-
ants in operation. The information they
provide is sifted through using computer
power and artificial intelligence.
As early as 2000, the Golden Shield
project aimed to link up information
on all Chinese citizens. At a basic level
it would allow authorities to know eve-
rything about a particular person within
seconds. But it aimed to go beyond that,
predicting who might cause trouble to
the regime, anticipating the organising
of any action deemed inimical to the
party, and curtailing the freedom and
actions of any suspect citizen, by, for
example, taking away the ability to fill up
a car with petrol or even, in the future, to
start their engine.
Unsurprisingly, any tool that helps
to maintain stability is welcomed by
the party. Meng Jianzhu, the ex-head of
the security system, hailed big data and
modern information technology at a
conference in September last year, talk-
ing of ‘extending social governance to
the smallest social units, such as villages
and communities, in order to realise pre-
cise governance’. His emphasis was on
anticipating threats. Earlier in July on a
tour of Guiyang, described by the state >
13
news agency Xinhua as ‘a pioneer of the
application of big data technology in various
sectors, including police work’, he had called
on the country’s police to make full use of
big data and AI. In August he repeated the
message in Xinjiang. The State Council’s
national artificial intelligence development
plan declares that, ‘AI is indispensable for
the effective maintenance of social stability’.
This is very much in line with the politi-
cal zeitgeist. Past politburos were populated
by engineers, who saw security solutions in
terms of grand projects; the current lead-
ership looks to a new age of ‘informatisa-
tion’ and IT as aids in governance, and this
fits President Xi’s desire for increased cen-
tral control. So, for example, if students are
feared as a perennial catalyst for protest, is it
surprising that the Ministry of Education has
suggested monitoring their political senti-
ments by collating data from library records,
surveys, social media posts and more?
Xi puts great emphasis on ‘law-based
governance’; the Chinese phrase should not
be translated as ‘rule of law’, because the
party is expressly in control of the law. But
amid the mass of recent legislation there is
Petrol stations allow cars to be
filled only through facial recognition
linked to ID cards
little which limits the collection and use of
people’s private data; nor, given the impor-
tance of maintaining stability for regime sur-
vival, are there likely to be safeguards.
Last year, Human Rights Watch doc-
umented the surveillance work already
under way. A voice-recognition database is
being built in Anhui province. In the Xinji-
ang region, where China is engaged in the
repression of the minority Uyghurs, much
money and effort is being spent combining
elements of the new magic weapon. Petrol
stations allow cars to be filled only through
facial recognition linked to ID cards. In addi-
tion, all Uyghurs must download an app that
automatically reports their browsing history,
as well as their given location.
Can all this be united into a totalitarian
straitjacket? It depends on support from
government, business and the public. It’s
also unclear if China can afford the costs
in the long term. Beyond the computing
development and equipment, there are the
costs of recognition-system hardware, of the
personnel to run and maintain the system,
of the payments to the grid system volun-
teers. If Beijing’s Chaoyang district’s 120,000
volunteers are paid 300 yuan a month, that
equates to £50 million a year. Rolled out
nationwide, the sums become enormous.
The bigger risk is that all this erodes the
trust between people and party. At present,
the party offers a balance between accepting
a convenient electronic life in exchange for
personal information and control, but that
14
may not always be seen as a worthy trade-
off. The party is building a considerable
constituency of ordinary, non-dissident peo-
ple who cannot travel or book hotels with-
out being subject to over-frequent checks.
These are still early days, although examples
of arrests through technology are multiply-
ing and the Supreme Court has announced
that 6.7 million people have been banned
from buying air and train tickets.
Party members, too, might be unhap-
py at what is being filed away about them.
Interesting questions arise: at what level of
seniority do officials cease to have all their
personal doings and sayings recorded? Will
citizens who are talented and wealthier
prefer to emigrate, voting in the only way
allowed them, with their feet?
New technology is neither inherent-
ly good nor bad: all depends on use, and
restraint. Facial, voice and DNA recogni-
tion technology can help in the fight against
crime and terrorism. Big data and artificial
intelligence can yield otherwise unobtain-
able conclusions about tackling diseases
and finding cures. But this same technology
might also supply would-be totalitarians with
a previously unimagined power to control.
So there is a battle of values shaping up
between western liberal democracies and a
new authoritarianism. China’s new system of
control and repression will accentuate that
battle. President Xi talks of a ‘community
with a shared future for mankind’. A quar-
ter of mankind looks set to share its future
in every detail with Xi’s party. If the tech-
nology is extended or sold abroad — some
countries are already importing aspects of
the system — that fraction might rise. And
might eventually, dear reader, include you.
Charles Parton is an associate fellow at
the Royal United Services Institute. This is
adapted from an article first published by
the Chatham House magazine, The World
Today.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
ANCIENT AND MODERN
Call the polis
If Brussels
is willing to offer the British
Parliament only a dog’s Brexit,
that should tell Parliament
everything it needs to know
about any future prospects for
a Britain tied in with the EU.
It is about time for Parliament
to say, ‘Enough is enough’. As
every Greek polis (city state),
however small, averred, its aim
was to ensure that it alone was
the arbiter of its own freedom.
Antiochus III, a distant
successor to Alexander the Great,
had ambitions in 196 bc to ‘bring
all the cities of Asia under his
domination, as they once had
been’. But while Antiochus was
sure that many Greek cities on
and around the western coast
of Turkey (according to the
historian Livy) ‘were ready to
accept his yoke because they
had little confidence in their
location, fortifications, weapons
or warriors’, there were two still
holding out and ‘there was a
danger that if they were allowed
their way, other cities would follow
their lead’. (Sound familiar?)
On top of a show of force, ‘he
also tried soft words and a mild
reproach for their stubbornness, in
the hope that he would persuade
them that they would be free,
as they had hoped, just as soon
as they made clear that their
freedom was due to him, and not
to their own desire to seize it’. (All
very EU.) ‘To this they replied
that Antiochus ought not to be
surprised or angry if they were not
inclined to submit impassively to
the deferment of their freedom.’
Which should be our reply to
Brussels. The fact is that no one
could have tried harder than
Theresa May to reach a mutually
acceptable deal, but she was
unable to persuade the EU to
abandon their interests for ours.
After all, why should they? Why
should we? So we must walk away.
As a Greek statesman said: ‘If you
follow my advice, we shall possess
a free polis and be our own
masters, able to respond like men,
on our own terms, to anyone doing
us good or harm.’ — Peter Jones
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 Nervous laughter
My awful maiden stand-up gig
TOM BALL
t 8.45 p.m. I was back in the toilets
A again feeling pure terror. In front of
me was a narrow window which I
thought I might be able to squeeze out of if
I dislocated both my shoulders. This seemed
a more attractive proposition than the alter-
native: leaving the loo and stepping out on
stage to deliver my maiden stand-up come-
dy performance.
In theory, a few months ago, it sounded
like a great idea. Everybody is anxious at the
moment. I’m anxious, you’re anxious, eve-
ryone born after 1990 is anxious, or so the
newspapers tell us. I stay up at night haunt-
ed by a sense of strange foreboding. I once
went to a party and found four people crying
in the bathroom. Counsellors, therapists and
psychologists are making a killing out of my
inconsolable generation, but no one knows
what to do about it. I read once that there’s
nothing like facing up to your fears in order
to conquer them, and that’s why I ended up
in this predicament.
Imagine all the things that might make
you nervous in an average day: work
appraisals, presentations, meeting new peo-
ple. Stand-up comedy is all of those rolled
into one and magnified. So I signed up for
the open mic night at the Fox and Duck in
Kingston. With only four days to prepare,
I consulted some people who had been at it
for a while.
‘Try and give yourself some kind of “point
of entry”,’ said Ben, who’s been playing the
London circuit for a couple of years. ‘Suc-
cess in the low-level arenas, where you’re
only given a few minutes to make an impact,
is all about having a “thing”. Some people
go for snide and snarky, others go for wild
and unhinged. Whatever it is, it just has to be
something people can latch onto quickly and
go “Oh, so that’s his thing then, is it”.’
Gigi was very much from the opposite
school of thought. ‘Just try and be yourself.
Personal experience is where all the best
material comes from,’ she said breezily, hav-
ing just come off stage performing a set that
mostly revolved around her three failed
marriages. And what if ‘myself’ isn’t funny?
‘Well, the worst they can do is not laugh.’
From inside the gents I could hear the
final chords of ‘My Sharona’ being hacked
out by the aged cover band on before me
and I felt a fear far more visceral, much more
animal than the usual existential anxiety.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
If someone had put a pen in my hand and
asked me to write my name, it would have
looked like a scribble. I thought: ‘I’ll tell the
compère it was all a mistake, that they got
the wrong man. I’ll pay my bar tab, sidle out
of the back door and run off into the night
as fast as I can and I’ll be careful never, ever
to mention this to another human being as
long as I live.’ But it was too late for that.
Already the man with the microphone was
struggling to drag out the two syllables of
my name into an exciting-sounding intro-
duction. To the indifferent applause I left
my cubicle and took to the stage.
For those reading this hoping for cathar-
sis, expecting that everything went amaz-
ingly well and I’m now pursuing a career in
comedy: you’re mistaken. It was bad. Actu-
ally, even I was surprised at how bad it was.
Before I’d even had a chance to switch on
the mic, an overweight man in a Burger
King crown began heckling me — the usual
stuff about my act being shit, which though
prescient, seemed unfair. In the heat of the
moment I forgot that in dealing with heck-
lers the comedian is expected to be witty.
So I said: ‘Shut up.’ Big mistake. The man
looked genuinely hurt. ‘He’s only having a
laugh, mate,’ cried somebody. ‘Yeah, pick
on someone your own size!’ cried some-
body else. He got a bigger laugh than I did
all night.
At 9.07 p.m. I was back in the bogs. Not
one of my jokes could be said to have gone
down well. For the most part, my increas-
ingly plaintive attempts at coaxing the audi-
ence into laughter were met by winces and
snuffles. There wasn’t even any ironic laugh-
ter. Despite all that, I did feel a small twinge
of masochistic satisfaction, as if I’d walked
across flaming coals and survived, or spent
half an hour doing yoga. I’d looked my worst
fears in the eye for a full seven minutes and
come out the other end no worse for wear.
As for my nerves, they took a while to
subside. That night I was up welcoming the
dawn chorus, waiting by the window for the
adrenalin rush to fade away. But as for my
dark forebodings, these were noticeably
absent, and when finally I did nod off, I did
so in a state of repose long forgotten since
boyhood. It would be too much to ask of the
Fox and Duck that they let me back on stage
every time I feel those fears come back, but
it’s enough to know that it worked.
BAROMETER
Hard bitten
A British tourist died after contracting
rabies from a cat bite in Morocco. Whatever
happened to the prominent anti-rabies
posters at British ports?
— The last case of rabies contracted in the
UK was in 1922 but rising cross-Channel
traffic led to a fear that infected animals
could unwittingly be brought in.
— A 1974 regulation introduced long spells
of quarantine and those once-familiar
posters, then restrictions were eased in the
1990s thanks to pet passports.
— The last case of human infection in
France was in 1923, but the country was
not declared rabies-free until 2001 – a
status it lost for two years from 2008.
— Worldwide, rabies kills 59,000 people a
year, 95 per cent in Africa or Asia and 99
per cent with infections from dogs.
Man powered
South Eastern Trains and Greater Anglia
said they wanted more women train drivers,
as fewer than 5 per cent are female. Some
occupations where female employment is
recorded by the ONS at zero — meaning
there are fewer than 1,000 employed:
— Air traffic controllers, butchers,
fork-lift truck drivers, groundsmen and
greenkeepers, pets control officers,
plasterers, production managers and
directors in mining and energy, welders.
Fired up
California forest fires were blamed on
climate change. Have wildfires got worse
over the years? This is the average annual
acreage (in millions) of US forest burned:
1928-37 ................................................ 41.7
1938-47 ................................................ 25.9
1948-57 ................................................ 10.9
1958-67 ................................................... 4.2
1968-77 ................................................... 3.6
1978-87 ................................................... 3.0
1988-97 ................................................... 3.4
1998-2007 ............................................... 6.6
2008-17 ................................................... 6.6
Source: National Interagency Fire Center
Fewer and Führer
A British couple who named their son
Adolf were convicted of belonging to
banned neo-Nazi group National Action.
How widespread is the name today?
— In 2010 it was reported that 20 baby
Adolfs had been registered since 1945.
— In the US, five babies were given the
name in 1990. Every year since, the figure
has been listed vaguely as ‘less than five’.
— A sample of 27,000 babies born in
Germany in 2006 revealed one Adolf.
There may have been more, as the sample
covered less than 5 per cent of births.
17
 Everyo
will rea
But only a few will read this.
At Orbis, we also look past
headlines to focus on details.
Seeking what others overlook,
finding long-term value.
We’re not for everyone.
And we’re not like anyone else.
But then neither is
our performance.
Ask your financial adviser
for details or visit Orbis.com

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one
ad this

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 BlackRock in the spotlight
The investment management corp is finally under scrutiny
few months ago, an aggressive US
A pressure group called the Campaign
for Accountability declared that it
had a new target: the Wall Street behemoth
BlackRock. Quickly, the American press
picked up on this campaign against exces-
sive corporate power. Soon we were reading
about how BlackRock, like Goldman Sachs
before it, ‘rules the world’.
Despite BlackRock’s supposed omni-
potence, it is relatively unknown in Britain.
It might be the biggest private manager of
assets in the world but, in political terms, the
company has existed in relative obscurity.
That is, until last year, when it handed
George Osborne a £650,000 contract for
giving ‘advice’ one day a week.
In recent months, the firm’s political
profile has been rising. When the former
German MP Friedrich Merz suddenly re-
emerged into German politics as a possible
successor to Angela Merkel, BlackRock’s
name appeared again: Mr Merz is the chair-
man of its growing German business.
Long before BlackRock spread its ten-
tacles into politics, however, it was upend-
ing Wall Street’s hierarchy and changing the
way people invest. In the late 1980s, Black-
Rock was spun out of the US private equity
firm Blackstone. It began life as a small
outfit offering a new way to manage risk
and invest in bonds. Within months, under
the leadership of its co-founder and chief
executive Larry Fink, its approach caught
on and the company began to grow.
By the time the financial crisis hit in
2008, BlackRock was already a substantial
player in the world of asset management —
investing money on behalf of regular sav-
ers, insurers and pension funds. While the
crisis proved devastating for so many banks,
it provided BlackRock with an opportunity.
Barclays, keen to raise cash to rebuild its
investment bank, put its asset management
arm up for sale and BlackRock beat rivals
to snap up the business for $13.5 billion.
Ten years later, it is clear who made the
right bet. While Barclays has struggled and
shrunk, BlackRock has become a giant in a
league of its own, managing $6.3 trillion for
investors in 100 countries.
With success has come greater scrutiny.
In the immediate aftermath of the crisis,
20
JULIET SAMUEL
politicians and regulators turned their fire
on banks, blaming them for the financial
meltdown and whacking them with thou-
sands of pages of regulations. The regulatory
orgy forced banks to change their business
models to survive, but it didn’t stop there.
Soon, authorities began to set their sights
on financial markets in general and all of the
big players within them. BlackRock, as the
biggest, has naturally come under scrutiny.
Regulators have even coined a contentious
new term to describe the industry’s role:
‘shadow banking.’
As it grew, BlackRock expanded its lob-
bying operations, especially in Washington
DC and Brussels. Its ranks have swelled with
employees who have regulatory or political
‘BlackRock is petrified of regulators
turning the screws on them the
way they did with the banks’
experience. According to the Campaign for
Accountability, the firm has hired at least 84
former US government officials since 2004.
Since the crisis, the company has had 400
meetings or calls with senior US officials
and more than 50 with senior UK officials,
including presidents and prime ministers,
the campaign group claims (BlackRock
declined to comment on these figures).
‘BlackRock is petrified that regula-
tors will turn the screws on them the same
way they did with the banks, so they want
to pre-empt that,’ said Octavio Marenzi,
founder of Opimas, a financial consultancy.
BlackRock’s political hires include
Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl
Mills; the former chairman of Switzerland’s
‘What are the odds on that?’
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
central bank, Philipp Hildebrand; a former
senior adviser to Jacques Chirac, Jean-Fran-
çois Cirelli; and George Osborne’s former
chief of staff, Rupert Harrison. Many of its
government hires are there for their exper-
tise, not just their connections: Mr Harrison,
for example, is not a lobbyist but analyses
markets and co-manages an investment fund.
But the presence of so many formerly
powerful policy figures has furthered the
impression that Fink harbours political
ambitions. He has been vocal on corporate
governance issues like boardroom diversity
and was talked about as a potential treasury
secretary in a Hillary Clinton presidency.
BlackRock says that it recruits staff from
‘a very broad set of backgrounds’ who can
offer its clients ‘a unique and valuable per-
spective’. And in many ways, the company’s
activities should not be controversial. It is
essentially a boring business whose success
stems from developing a risk-management
technology superior to that of its rivals. Its
other major source of growth — the expan-
sion of its ‘passive’ funds, in which portfo-
lios simply track indices like the FTSE 100
rather than choosing which stocks to buy —
has done investors a favour by slashing fees
dramatically and driving many of its fat and
expensive rivals to the wall. Through our
pension funds, we all benefit from this trend.
The company’s ruthlessly efficient cul-
ture has helped to transform the industry.
Investment management was once consid-
ered a stuffy, sleepy backwater of old duffers
and oak panelling. It has now become slick,
technologically advanced and highly corpo-
rate. BlackRock employees tend to possess
the same CGI-quality neatness as the most
square-jawed investment banker, but unlike
the City’s old masters of the universe, they
also exude an almost-tedious air of straight-
laced conservatism that is probably more in
tune with modern times.
Size breeds suspicion, however, and
whatever BlackRock does now, it cannot
escape political scrutiny. BlackRock is on its
way to becoming the next corporate bogey-
man of the age, both as a proxy for the power
of financial markets and because it has
become a well-paid, glamorous sanctuary
for dormant politicians. Its lobbyists’ wage
bill is only likely to increase.

The brutal suppression of a peasants’ revolt
easants’ Revolts tend not to work out
P too well in this country, for the peas-
ants. I suppose that is why we have
so comparatively few of them. There is a
flurry for a while and then normal service
is resumed. It is often said that Wesleyan
Methodism helped to quell any uppity ten-
dencies among the working classes during
the Industrial Revolution, but I suspect it
was more a case of the proles understanding
that whatever they did, they would not win.
Too much ranged against them, marshalled
by people who naturally knew much better
about what was good for them.
And so it is with our latest Peasants’
Revolt on 23 June 2016 — a mass outpour-
ing of anger at the ruling elite in Britain and
Brussels, a passion for the nation state and
sovereignty, a long weariness over immigra-
tion and a great disdain for the well-heeled
liberal establishment that believes Leave
voters are all ill-educated racist scum who
should shut up and get back in their boxes,
to their call centres or wherever it is they
work these days. If they work.
What we voted for does not matter,
because they will not let it happen. We
have endured two years of hysteria, bed-
wetting and tantrums from our masters, our
defeated masters. There have been threats,
dire predictions, spiteful calumnies flung
at those who dared to vote in a way with
which they did not agree; columnists sug-
gesting that democracy has maybe gone too
far; shrieks of fury and temper strops; con-
tinued attempts to use unelected bodies to
overturn the vote; demands for a new vote
which would be a ‘People’s Vote’ (different
from the original vote because that allowed
feral animals into the polling booth); alle-
gations from ninnies that Poles and other
foreigners were being set on fire or spat at
in the street, that racism is rising; lectures
every evening from pencil-necked berks on
the BBC about how Brexit is ruining us or
will ruin us.
We’ve been told that we will starve and
won’t be able to fly anywhere and industrial
production will cease. We’ve had big com-
panies screaming they’ll go out of business
because they can’t employ some benighted
Romanian for 40p an hour. The IMF and,
of course, the EU have been insistent that
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
we’re headed for suicide — despite the fact
that their statistics suggest the opposite.
Hell, you think that stuff about £350 mil-
lion a week to the NHS was a lie? It has
nothing on what we’ve been told since by
the people who lost the vote: the multi-
tudes of the well-heeled mobilised on their
marches, waving their EU flags, packing out
the Albert Hall for Last Night of the Proms,
all of them insisting that the morons who
voted Leave have now changed their minds
and citing polls which show precisely that
— much, in fact, as polls, showed a desire
to stay in the EU on the evening before the
actual referendum, when Remain had up to
an eight-point lead.
And we ought to face it: these voices of
For a year or so politicians paid
lip-service to the notion that the
people’s voice ‘must be respected’
the establishment, the liberal establishment,
have won. It’s as brutal a victory in a way as
that which saw Wat Tyler stabbed to death
in Smithfield in June 1381: a continual fugue
of outrage, disinformation, lies and chican-
ery, broadcast by those with vested interests.
And, of course, a grotesque betrayal, intend-
ed all along.
Because there are no palatable options
on the table now for those who voted Leave.
It is either back a deal which ties us to the
European Union, except without even a
vote in return for our continued subjuga-
tion, or back no deal which stands no chance
whatsoever of getting through Parliament.
Or maybe accept another referendum,
‘You spend too much time reading articles
worrying about screen time.’
because they didn’t like the result of the first
one — and which will be gerrymandered so
that the Leave vote is split.
None of this is the consequence of the
rights or wrongs of Brexit. All of it is a conse-
quence of a failed government and a major-
ity in the House of Commons that does not
actually want the UK to leave the EU.
Sure, for a year or so the politicians of
the two major parties paid lip-service to
the notion that the people’s voice ‘must be
respected’. But the passage of time is a won-
derful thing and nobody seems to think that
any more. Not the Labour party, which has
apparently resiled from its original stance
and will vote against whatever hopeless
arrangement is presented before it by the
Prime Minister. Not the Remainers within
the Conservative party either — perhaps the
primary villains of the piece, capable of trot-
ting out with bovine sincerity the injunction
that the People’s Vote must be honoured,
while doing everything they possibly can to
weaken the government’s hand in negotiat-
ing with the EU.
Time and again, the hapless May would
trot off to meet Michel Barnier or Jean-
Claude Juncker while at home cabinet min-
isters would brief about the calamity of
a no deal, and how it must be avoided at
all costs. Thus she would stand at the crease
and even before the first ball was bowled
would find that her bat had been broken,
to borrow an analogy from that dead sheep
Geoffrey Howe.
And yet May was also a Remainer. And
so too was her Chancellor. Their hearts are
not with leaving the EU, their hearts are for
staying within it as far as is possible. May’s
sole purpose at the moment is to stay in
power — although, frankly, why she should
want to eludes me entirely. But imagine what
a government with confidence and imagina-
tion might have done, secure at home and
therefore immune to blackmailing. Leaving
a trade organisation is not, in reality, a terri-
bly troublesome business. Nevertheless, we
have made it so.
I am told quite frequently that a failure
to leave will lead to riots on the streets. No it
won’t. It will lead only to a sullen acceptance
that once again, you can’t beat the establish-
ment. It will always win in the end.
21
 A league of their own
US university admissions are anything but meritocratic
here comes a point in a New York
T expat’s life when you suddenly real-
ise that the liberal elites that run this
town have feet of clay.
You have watched them joining anti-
Trump marches, opening their beautiful
homes for Democrat fundraising parties
and noisily bidding ludicrous sums at char-
ity auctions. Then the time comes for their
children to apply to university and the whole
elaborate façade comes crashing down.
My wife and I couldn’t help noticing that
the parents of our daughter’s American
friends didn’t exactly share our blind panic
as we tried to work out where she should
apply for university.
Why were people who usually couldn’t
shut up for worrying about their children’s
schooling suddenly so much more blasé
about the future than we were? Their chil-
dren were bright, but not that bright. The
universities in their sights were among the
best in the country: Harvard, Princeton, Yale
and the rest of the Ivy League.
What these teenagers did have and our
daughter didn’t, however, were parents
who had been there, too. More often than
not, their parents had even met there. Their
success therefore was not quite guaranteed
but vastly more likely than for us poor Brit-
ish saps and, more importantly, for the vast
majority of their fellow Americans.
It’s shocking enough to learn that proud-
ly meritocratic America is about the only
country whose universities give precedence
to its richest, most entitled applicants. It’s
doubly dispiriting to learn that liberal col-
leges, parents and, frankly, children collude
without so much as a blush at this outra-
geous exercise in hypocrisy and inherited
privilege.
The dark mysteries of the grandiosely
titled ‘legacy preference’ system have just
been laid bare in a Boston courtroom. The
case concerns Students for Fair Admissions,
an anti-affirmative action campaign group
that is suing Harvard University on the
grounds that it discriminates against Asian-
Americans.
The court has heard all the evidence
and now awaits a judge’s ruling. It was told
22
TOM LEONARD
that Harvard’s admissions gauleiters give
low ‘personality ratings’ for criteria such as
courage, likeability and kindness to Asian
applicants — often without even meeting
them. The university insists it doesn’t dis-
criminate against any racial groups.
However, these allegations pale beside
what the case has revealed about how Har-
vard falls over itself to ensure rich parents
and alumni parents — preferably both (and
in elite Harvard’s case, they usually are) —
get their children accepted. Far from being
a Harvard quirk, the legacy system operates
at three-quarters of America’s top 100 uni-
versities, including all but one of the very
smartest ones (the exception being Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology).
Writing about the Harvard case, the
New York Times columnist Nicholas Krist-
of recently described legacy preferences as
progressive America’s ‘dirty little secret’. It’s
certainly dirty but hardly much of a secret,
given that nobody involved feels they have
anything to hide. By clinging to the notion
that the US is a meritocracy, richer Ameri-
cans can always argue that whatever their
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Trial and punishment
From ‘The Kaiser’, 16 November 1918:
What is to be done with the Kaiser?
For the question must certainly be
answered. If we may venture to judge
the feelings of our countrymen, we
should say that, though there is no trace
of a vindictive hostility towards any
of the Germans who may seriously be
trying to enter upon a better way of life,
there is a very strong feeling that the
Kaiser must be brought to trial. This is a
perfectly logical conclusion. The British
government have announced that
all persons proved guilty of offences
against the laws of humanity during
the war shall be duly punished. It is
unthinkable, therefore, that the Kaiser
himself should be exempt. The whole
idea of justice would fall into ridicule
and disrepute if justice stopped short at
the person of the Kaiser.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
rewards, they got them on their own talent.
What was missing, until now, was a
detailed explanation of how it works in
practice. Thankfully, the Harvard court case
and a cache of staff emails obtained by the
plaintiffs have been very helpful. Welcome
to the world of ‘ALDCs’, or athletes, lega-
cies, dean’s or director’s interest list and
children of Harvard staff. The dean’s or
director’s interest list is largely composed
of the children of very prominent people
and wealthy donors. One imagines Malia
Graduating from a top US
university is often just the beginning
of a lifetime’s relentless networking
Obama — whose parents are such dough-
ty champions of equal opportunity — was
on the dean’s interest list when she got into
Harvard. It’s hard to think her formidable
parents didn’t know that.
Thanks to what Harvard coyly calls a ‘tip’
(what the rest of us would call a ‘leg-up’), leg-
acy applicants are five times as likely to be
admitted as non-legacies. The gap between
ALDCs and the rest is even larger — they
are ten times more likely to win a place.
A study last year found almost the same
number of Harvard students came from the
top 1 per cent of America’s richest fami-
lies as from the bottom 60 per cent. Mean-
while, the US’s most famous and smuggest
university likes to boast about its exclusiv-
ity, annually selecting just 1,660 from 40,000
applicants.
If Harvard officials weren’t squirming
to hear their emails to each other on this
subject read out in court, they should have
been. In one, dated June 2013 and headed
‘My hero’, the then dean of Harvard’s Ken-
nedy School of Government, David Ellwood,
lavished praise on William Fitzsimmons,
Harvard’s dean of admissions. ‘Once again
you have done wonders,’ he gushed. ‘I am
simply thrilled about all the folks you were
able to admit.’
Syrian refugees fleeing Raqqa? Not
exactly. He was talking about the children
of super-rich donors. One donor ‘has already
committed to a building’, he went on; anoth-
er gave ‘major money for fellowships —
before a decision from you!’ Billionaires
will dole out millions to Harvard without
even knowing if their child will definitely
get a place.
n other emails, the dean of a Harvard grad-
I uate school praised the admissions chief
for accepting certain students who were
‘all big wins’. Some went into detail about
applicants’ social connections with the rich
and famous. Donor names were redacted in
court to spare billionaire blushes.
One chain of emails revealed quite how
calculating Harvard can be in these sensitive
matters. Offering Fitzsimmons advice on a
potential student whose family had given
$8.7 million, a Harvard fundraising official
said the family had been generous in the
past, but that more recent years had been
‘challenging’.
The officer added bleakly: ‘Going for-
ward, I don’t see a significant opportunity
for further major gifts. [Name redacted] had
an art collection which conceivably could
come our way. More probably it will go to
the [name redacted] museum.’
Universities claim the legacy system
merely helps determine the choice between
equally able candidates. However, the
trial was shown a chart that, in the words
of Judge Allison Burroughs, demonstrat-
‘This free fruit initiative is a terrific idea!’
ed that a ‘big chunk of athletes and lega-
cies’ wouldn’t have got in without a ‘tip’.
Harvard’s Fitzsimmons justified favour-
ing rich students for financial reasons, spe-
cifically mentioning the cost of awarding
scholarships. Yet that cost would barely
make a dent in the annual returns of the
university’s staggering $40 billion endow-
ment. Universities also argue legacy pref-
erences are important to keep alumni loyal
and generous, but research has found that
the system makes negligible difference on its
own as to whether old boys and girls donate.
If legacy preference only helped in get-
ting a good education, that would be reason
enough to object. However, graduating from
a top US university is often just the begin-
ning of a lifetime’s relentless networking.
The average Ivy League alumni associa-
tion would give the Freemasons a run for
their money when it comes to mutual back-
scratching. Martha Pollack, president of
Cornell, recently told her university newspa-
per that legacy admissions help perpetuate
‘a Cornell family that goes on for genera-
tions’. She saw this as a virtue, not a fault.
Critics note that the proportion of leg-
acy students in US university admissions
remains pretty constant each year, suggest-
ing an informal quota system is operating.
Legacy undergraduates remain dispropor-
tionately white as well as rich.
Americans love to see Oxford and
Cambridge as quaint bastions of privilege
but UK universities abolished legacy pref-
erences in the middle of the last century.
Our daughter got into Cambridge and some
New York friends were genuinely shocked
to learn we’d advised her it was probably a
bad idea to mention that her mother is an
alumna at her interview.
Meanwhile, Downton Abbey: The Exhi-
bition continues to pack in the punters
on its epic US tour. Americans are com-
ing in droves to shiver with pleasure at the
iniquities of feudal old Europe and its self-
perpetuating ruling class. But if they really
want a good dollop of hereditary privilege
to gasp at, they could look much closer
to home.

INTRODUCING A NEW SPECTATOR PODCAST

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This week’s guest

Emma Barnett
BBC presenter & Sunday Times columnist

I think you are disliked more if you’re a woman

trying to get somewhere. I think I have developed a
talent for being disliked

UPCOMING GUESTS: LIZ TRUSS & DAME HELENA MORRISSEY

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the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 23


I won’t be turning Catholic just yet
didn’t get an audience with the Pope
I when I visited Rome last weekend. But
given that he’s a borderline commie, an
open borders advocate and an increasingly
fervent evangelist for the climate-change
religion, we probably wouldn’t have found
much to say to one another. Nice art
collection, though.
Well, it would be if you had it to your-
self which of course you don’t. Even in the
autumn off-season, the Vatican museums
feel like shuffling in the midst of a zombie
horde from The Walking Dead. I’m surprised
the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel haven’t
peeled off by now, what with the collected
acid exhalations of the 25,000 tourists who
pass through every day.
There’s only one way to do it: book the
8 a.m. Smug Tour, where you pay over the
odds for privileged early access ahead of the
crowds. Then reward yourself afterwards
with a cappuccino in the gardens outside
the café and watch the unwashed masses
being prepared for their cultural experience.
Arrayed along the pathways are perhaps
two dozen boards, each with a reproduction
of Michelangelo’s two sets of frescoes, each
with a guide explaining to his or her group
what the details signify. ‘Been there. Done
that,’ you think. Smugly.
Is it worth it? Only so you can knock
it off the list of items on your bucket list
and then tell all your friends how thoroughly
overrated it is. St Peter’s Basilica especially.
What a blowsy, kitsch monstrosity that is.
Some of my best friends are Catholics — the
soundest of the sound — and I’ve occasion-
ally toyed with the idea of doing an Evelyn
Waugh and joining them. But I didn’t come
away thinking that the papacy is a very
good recruitment advert.
Do you know it makes more than
£80 million a year from tickets to its art col-
lections alone? Yes, part of me was grateful
that all those sculptures and mosaics and
paintings had been kept safe in one heav-
ily guarded collection for all eternity. But
another part of me thought: ‘What a bunch
of spivs and rob-dogs and plunderers and
pederasts and thugs those old popes were!
They just went round the vestiges of ancient
Rome, looting. And imagine what Jesus
24
JAMES DELINGPOLE
would say if he’d turned up today and saw
what was being done in his name.’ It would
be like the Cleansing of the Temple II.
Spaghetti schadenfreude
At a trattoria called Felice a Testaccio, I
ate a spaghetti alla carbonara so delicious,
so perfect in every way that as far as doth
the Capitol exceed the meanest house in
Rome so far did this ambrosial concoction
tower above all other pasta dishes ever
made. (You’ll gather that this vegan diet I’m
supposed to be on slipped while I was away.)
But the best thing of all was that the Fawn
didn’t order it. She picked another dish, not
quite as spectacular. This enabled me to
What a bunch of spivs and rob-dogs
and plunderers and pederasts and
thugs those old popes were
spend the whole lunch congratulating myself
on my menu skills, glowing with schaden-
freude, and occasionally charitably offering
Fawn little pity-morsels from my plate to
help remind her what she was missing.
Felice was on a long list of expert recom-
mendations given to me beforehand by Tim
Watson, a teacher at Oundle who knows
Rome like the back of his hand because he
leads a party of schoolkids there every year
on a gastronomic and cultural rustic route
march, starting at Siena. On the last trip, Boy
went — which is the main reason we’d gone
to Rome in the first place. Boy had been
banging on about the glory that is Rome —
‘You’ve got to see the Caracalla Baths! And
‘I hope he’ll still talk to us!’
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
the Pantheon! And the Aventine Keyhole in
the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta. And for
God’s sake don’t order a cappuccino after
11 a.m. or a doppio espresso which is only
for tourists’ — for so long, that we felt we
had to put him out of his misery.
Obviously it’s quite pleasing when your
kids turn out not to be complete philistines.
The worry is, though, that the only career
that their refined aesthetics fit them for is
one that doesn’t pay. Really, Boy would have
done so much better had he been born an
Agnelli or a Pamphilj. On the other hand, I’ve
noticed, there’s almost nowhere a fit, posh
heiress type likes to hang out in more than
an art gallery — so maybe all that fancy
education will pay off yet.
A fan in the Forum
Wandering aimlessly in the Forum, not
really having a clue what the various ruins
were, we did that thing where you eavesdrop
on a guided tour and hope your hovering
presence isn’t noticed. But it was. Happily,
by an extraordinary stroke of luck, this guy
was one of my biggest fans. ‘I looked round
and was going to offer you a free tour but
you’d already gone,’ he told me via a mes-
sage on Twitter, pleading for me to meet
up with him later.
Once I’d persuaded the Fawn he wasn’t
a psychopath — wives find it hard to imag-
ine any sane person seeing anything to
recommend in their useless husbands — we
did meet up. Anton (Anton Nagle if you
want to follow him on Twitter) is a charming,
motormouthed autodidact who stopped
off in Rome on a bicycling trip to China and
15 years later is still there.
We learned more in three hours with
Anton than in the rest of the trip put togeth-
er. It’s so handy being with someone who
knows the answer to every single question
you ask. Like, where exactly is the barber-
shop where Audrey Hepburn got her crop
in Roman Holiday? It’s on the right as you
face the Trevi Fountain (it’s now a bag shop)
and there’s a great story behind this, actually.
You see, when Nicola Salvi was building the
fountain... oh dear. We’re out of time. Guess
you’ll have to book a tour with Anton.
 Dangerous minds
Searching for the origins of psychotic violence
here was no reason for Edward
T Drummond to believe this Janu-
ary day was going to be different to
any other Whitehall working day. Hav-
ing completed his civil service chores and
visited the bank, he set off back to Down-
ing Street where, as the prime minister’s pri-
vate secretary, he had an apartment. He was
passing a Charing Cross coffee shop when,
without any warning, he felt a searing blow
to his back and, according to a witness, his
jacket burst into flames.
The bang drew the attention of a quick-
witted police officer, who dashed across
the road as a man prepared to shoot at Mr
Drummond again. But even with the assis-
tance of passers-by, the officer struggled
to disarm the shooter. He violently resist-
ed and discharged a second shot, though
this time without causing injury to anyone.
Eventually overpowered, the shooter — a
man named Daniel McNaughton — was
arrested and detained in police custody.
Drummond’s initial prognosis seemed
hopeful. But then his condition worsened
and within five days of the shooting, he was
dead. McNaughton’s crime had become a
capital offence.
Despite his resistance to police at
the scene, McNaughton was surprisingly
co-operative under questioning. But it
wasn’t only his willingness to admit to the
shooting that surprised the police. It became
apparent that his intended target had been
the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel.
McNaughton was a Scottish craftsman
who, following a brief acting career, set up
his own woodturning workshop in Glas-
gow in 1835. An industrious and frugal man,
McNaughton ran his workshop for five years
and was able to save a considerable sum of
money, teaching himself French and attend-
ing lectures on anatomy in his spare time.
Under police questioning, he appeared
unconstrained in sharing the extent to which
he felt he had been terrorised by the rul-
ing elite. The shooting, it emerged, was the
denouement of a conspiratorial tale that on
first hearing appeared fantastical. Known to
have radical political views, McNaughton
had complained to both the Glasgow com-
missioner of police and an MP that he was
being followed by Tory spies.
A series of prosecution witnesses, includ-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
TAJ NATHAN
ing McNaughton’s landlady and his anato-
my teacher, testified that they had observed
no signs of mental derangement. But to
the eight eminent physicians and surgeons
called by the defence it was obvious that
McNaughton had accepted unquestioning-
ly a fiction invented by his psychotic mind.
Their evidence proved compelling. The jury
was directed to reach a verdict and, without
even retiring, the foreman announced on
4 March 1843 that they found the prisoner
not guilty on the ground of insanity.
The public was aghast: convinced that
criminals and violent madmen would be
encouraged to terrible deeds by such leni-
ency. To the press too, the verdict was an
outrage. This was a carefully plotted and
fully confessed crime — yet McNaughton
was being found not guilty. Queen Victoria,
reminded of the attempt on her life three
The more I have examined the
criminal mind, the more I have seen
the limitations of medical diagnosis
years earlier by a man also deemed by the
courts to be insane, was moved to intervene.
In correspondence with Sir Robert Peel,
she asked Parliament for a tighter definition
of insanity.
In response, the rattled criminal justice
system laid the foundations for an enduring
approach to understanding the mental ori-
gins of criminal behaviour. McNaughton’s
name has since become part of legal histo-
ry — the McNaughton Rule declares that
the defence of insanity requires clear proof
that the accused was labouring under such a
defect of reason, from a disease of the mind,
as not to know the nature and quality of his
actions. Reason and disease were placed
centre stage in the law’s assessment of the
criminal mind.
The medical model relies on the process
of diagnosis to identify underlying disease,
which is then treated by either reversing or
removing it. I have practised forensic psy-
chiatry for 21 years and acted as an expert
witness in innumerable cases. And the more
I have examined the criminal manifestations
of the human mind, the more I have seen
the limitations of medical diagnosis. To me,
reducing types of consciousness to broad
brush diagnostic labels obscures rather than
reveals the fascinating patterns created by
a constant swirl of interacting thoughts, per-
ceptions, feelings and impulses.
Today’s system of classification of mental
illness can be traced to the attempts to organ-
ise the confused psychiatric nomenclature
that prevailed at the time of McNaughton’s
trial. An influential broad dichotomy of
insanity was introduced by the German psy-
chiatric empiricist Emil Kraepelin in the
1890s. He proposed two types: episodic man-
ic-depressive psychosis (later updated to
bipolar disorder); and a progressively dete-
riorating psychosis which he called dementia
praecox (‘a precocious madness’); a label that
was to fall out of fashion in favour of schizo-
phrenia. Repeated subdivisions over the fol-
lowing 120 years have produced more than
500 diagnoses within today’s iteration of the
controversial Diagnostic and Statistical Man-
ual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Despite
these refinements, hair-splitting debates over
a patient’s diagnosis remain a regular feature
of psychiatric case-conferences.
As a forensic psychiatrist, I have also
become accustomed to a much more testing
and combative arena. Not only are criminal
courts adversarial by design, but the ques-
tions are far more challenging since lawyers
often do not accept the basic assumptions
that psychiatry takes for granted. My opin-
ion that a homicide is attributable to the kill-
er’s diagnosable condition is not enough for
their lawyers to present a defence of dimin-
ished responsibility to a murder charge.
The court needs to know how the condition
affected his mind so as to cause him to kill.
e attribute the social and psycholog-
W ical problems of modern society to
the fact that society requires people to live
under conditions radically different from
those under which the human race evolved
and to behave in ways that conflict with the
patterns of behaviour that the human race
developed while living under the earlier
conditions.
These words were penned by a former
professor of mathematics who was also the
author of a campaign of indiscriminate hom-
icidally motivated violence stretching over
17 years. Driven by hostility towards moder-
nity, Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski dispatched >
25
incendiary devices across the United States
killing three people and injuring another 23.
Known as the Unabomber, due to his
targeting of universities and airlines, Kac-
zynski had been a brilliant mathematician.
With an IQ of 170, he became an under-
graduate at Harvard University aged just 16,
and went on to earn a Master’s and PhD in
mathematics at the University of Michigan.
He joined U.C. Berkeley in 1967, but then
— without explanation — abruptly resigned
after two years. Frustrated by the rapidly
changing world, Kaczynski had shunned
academic life and moved to Montana, where
he began building a cabin in the woods. He
lived there as a hermit, completely cut off
from the modernising world.
It was in this hideaway that, between
1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski manufactured
16 increasingly sophisticated bombs. Even-
tually, he offered to halt his revolutionary

How could schizophrenia be squared

with Kaczynski’s capacity to execute
meticulously planned crimes?
actions if his manifesto, Industrial Society
and Its Future, was published.
The 35,000-word manifesto appeared
in the Washington Post and the New York
Times in September 1995. After reading it
David Kaczynski noticed content and stylis-
tic similarities with his older brother’s let-
ters from the 1970s and went to the FBI. In
the spring of 1996 Theodore Kaczynski was
arrested at his cabin.
During the subsequent trial, a court-
appointed psychiatrist’s assessment was that
Kaczynski suffered from schizophrenia. Had
present-day diagnostic approaches been in
use in the 1800s, Daniel McNaughton would
also have received the same diagnosis.
The controversy in both the McNaughton
and Kaczynski cases centred on the apparent
lucidity of the men in spite of claims by the
experts of insanity. How could a diagnosis of
schizophrenia be squared with Kaczynski’s
capacity to execute meticulously planned
crimes, to avoid detection for so long, and to
compose a novella-length manifesto? While
bizarre and dangerous in parts, Industrial
Society and Its Future contained ideas to
which large sections of society would sub-
scribe. After its publication, professor James
Q. Wilson of University of California wrote
in the New Yorker that the manifesto was ‘a
carefully reasoned, artfully written paper’
and that ‘if it is the work of a madman, then
the writings of many political philosophers
— Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl
Marx — are scarcely more sane’. Is it his
willingness to act on these beliefs — and to
cause harm to members of the public — that
separates Kaczynski from Rosseau, Paine
and Marx? What has become increasingly
clear to me is that diagnosis does not illu-
minate the causes of behaviour. I have been
26
involved in too many trials in which the cen-
tral issue has been on whether the criteria
for specific diagnosis were met.
In the case of Ted Kaczynski, the matter
was never resolved. The trial was brought to
an abrupt halt when, faced with the prospect
of his legal team humiliatingly portraying
his philosophy as the ravings of a madman
(against his express wishes), Kaczynski
changed his plea to guilty of murder.
oes it help our understanding of their
D criminal behaviour to know whether
or not Kaczynski or McNaughton suffered
from schizophrenia? Here we return to the
problems with the disease model in psychia-
try. When I ask trainee psychiatrists to define
schizophrenia, they talk about psychotic
symptoms such as hallucinations and delu-
sions. If I ask them to define a physical health
condition such as asthma they talk about an
inflammatory airway disease resulting in
bronchospasm: they may include symptoms
(wheezing and shortness of breath) in their
answers, but do not rely on symptoms alone.
Pondering whether the diagnosis is schizo-
phrenia or not, which we spend so much time
doing in clinics and court, takes us down an
explanatory blind alley.
A different and newer type of expertise
seems to offer a better way of explaining
the criminal mind. With the technology to
remotely visualise the activity of the brain’s
hardwiring, neuroscientific evidence has been
introduced to criminal courts. These quantita-
tive researchers — measuring blood-flow as
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
a proxy for nerve cell activity — crunch
group-level data to identify commonalities
within groups. Yet as a forensic psychiatrist
I strive to trace the source of an individual’s
flawed choices and behaviour. Mine is an
exploration of the individual’s uniqueness.
Neurobiological studies have undoubt-
edly improved our understanding of the
origins of violence by highlighting possible
brain mechanisms. But its advocates over-
look the fundamental limitation of neu-
robiology as an explanation of behaviour.
The goal of this scientific field is to produce
an objective depiction; one to match the
inflamed airways explanation of asthma.
The difference is that brain-based repre-
sentations describe, but they don’t explain.
In itself, a neurobiological narrative will
never be sufficient for understanding men-
tal disorder or criminal behaviour. Human
behaviour cannot be fully explained with-
out including the subjective perspective.
In explaining violence, the physiology of
the brain has to be contextualised by psy-
chological abstractions of the mind such
as impulses, urges, motives, and inhibitions.
Understanding these subjective phenomena
is central to eliciting the origins of violence.
This essay was the winner of the John
Murray Prize for a non-fiction essay on the
theme of ‘Origins’, launched this year in
association with The Spectator, to mark the
250th anniversary of the publishing house.
Dr Nathan wins a £20,000 book contract
with John Murray.

Hearts as well as heads
Sir: Simon Jenkins suggests we should stop
remembering and start forgetting about
the first world war (‘Don’t mention the
war’, 10 November). His beef is with artists
in particular, claiming that art ‘drenches
history in emotion’. He prefers to read
history books.
No one would argue against history
books, but surely it is not a question of
either/or. Artists tell a story in a different
way from historians, often to a different
audience. They can move people to want to
find out more: to look in the box of letters
in the attic, to find out about their family
connection to the war, to think again about
the past and how it impacts on our present.
Good history books open our minds to new
ideas and perspectives. Good art opens our
hearts and our minds.
The 14-18 NOW programme of first
world war centenary arts commissions has
invited some of the world’s leading artists
to create new work in response to the
centenary. With funding from government
and the Lottery — though nothing like the
sums Jenkins referred to — as well as vital
corporate and philanthropic support, our
artists have reached more than 35 million
people in the UK so far, including many
young people.
Jenkins says he will ponder the war with
the help of historians, not artists. That’s fine.
But let others experience the work of artists,
who invite us to imagine and participate as
well as think. The fact that we haven’t learnt
the lessons of history is not a justification
for forgetting the horrors of war.
Jenny Waldman
Director, 14-18 NOW
London SE1
World view
Sir: David Woodhead (Letters, 10
November) described Tony Abbott’s
WTO trade solution as ‘disingenuous’ on
the basis of all existing WTO members
having additional bilateral and regional
trade agreements in place, and therefore
a WTO solution for the UK would not be
comparable.
It is Woodhead who is being
disingenuous. The WTO solution
represents a fundamental basis upon which
additional trade agreements can be built.
Those additional trade agreements are not
even essential but they represent a possible
enhancement, especially when the UK
would have the authority to negotiate them
in its best interests.
Staying in the Single Market condemns
the UK never to negotiate bilateral
agreements and to be subject to the rules
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
of a bureaucracy that favours the most
powerful EU lobbyists without any say in
those rules. The Single Market is neither
the best economic option nor what the
population of the UK voted for.
David Harper
Bude, Cornwall
Admirable timing
Sir: The happiness felt by the dancing
Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, supreme
allied naval commander, on Armistice Day
(The Spectator’s Notes, 10 November) was
short-lived. He did not receive the grant
of £100,000 which Parliament awarded
all the other first world war commanders;
while they received earldoms, he got a mere
barony, for which he was made to wait a
year. He told his family these misfortunes
were the result of disobeying Lloyd
George, who had instructed him ‘to arrange
that the Armistice should commence at
2.30 p.m. in order that he might announce
it in the House of Commons between
2.45 p.m. and 3 p.m’. According to his
account, Wemyss telephoned George V and
got him to tell the government that the 11th
hour would be a far better time to bring the
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 1919 have been thoroughly researched by
Armistice into effect. ‘When he reported
to the prime minister and cabinet on
19 November, he was shocked to find them
ungrateful and vindictive.’
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
My family at war
Sir: I found myself very moved by Liz
Hunt’s description of her visit to Danny
Mulholland’s final resting place (‘We will
remember him’, 10 November).
Due to my age, my grandparents were
able to tell me much of their own second
world war experiences. Family folklore
even claims — quite correctly as it turns out
— an Agincourt archer as our kith and kin.
Yet sadly we know nothing of our family’s
involvement in the Great War. Like Liz, it is
high time I righted that wrong.
Mike Prince
New Milton, Hampshire
Howzat for an error?
Sir: Peter Oborne’s recent review of Simon
Wilde’s book England: The Biography
mentioned the (statistically) worst-
ever first-class cricketer, the Harrovian
McMaster: out first ball, no wickets, no
catches in his only match. He deserves
immortality under his correct initials, which
were J. E. P. (Joseph Emile Patrick) rather
than C. E. B.
Harry Beresford
London SE1
Remembering the Iolaire
Sir: Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence
gives a moving account of the loss of two
American troopships off the island of Islay
a few weeks before the Armistice (Diary,
10 November). There was another tragedy
on 1 January 1919 at the approach to the
harbour in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, when
HMY Iolaire, coming home in a force
ten gale and crowded with more than 200
servicemen, was dashed against rocks
and sank. The men were within yards of
the shore and had survived the horrors of
the Great War only to be killed so near
their own homes. The effect on the island
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ŐĂ ì
è catastrophe was not talked about.
Æċ
In the recently published The Darkest
Dawn, the events of New Year’s Day
Malcolm Macdonald and Donald John
MacLeod. There are witness statements,
personal descriptions, maps and analyses,
but the cause of the loss is still debatable.
Catherine Montgomery Blight
St Austell, Cornwall
29
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Anyone seen Jeff Bezos? I’m
here to talk to him about tax
Los Angeles/Seattle
S stocks briefly rallied after the
U midterm results as markets looked
favourably on a divided Congress
and the possibility of cooperation between
Donald Trump and House Democrats. The
Fed kept interest rates on hold until next
month, while remarking on strong growth
and a continuing fall in unemployment.
That, in a nutshell, is the economic news as
I land at Los Angeles — but a more vivid
update is delivered, as ever, by the talkative
cab driver who takes me into the city.
He’s from Mexico, and his story is a
cameo of the vigour with which Americans
build their own prosperity as best they can.
He didn’t vote because he’s still awaiting cit-
izenship after many years in the US, where
he owns a house that’s rising in value and his
son serves in the military. But he would have
voted Republican because ‘Democrats give
people welfare, make them lazy’. And, in a
vivid expression of the ‘nativist’ tendency of
settled immigrants to turn against those who
try to follow, he thinks Trump is right to rage
against the caravan of would-be immigrants
from Honduras: ‘They want to come here
but they don’t want to work.’
Lunching with a friend in Malibu the fol-
lowing day, I watch sunlight dancing on the
ocean and a sense of West Coast wellbeing
surrounds us. Yet that same evening there’s
a multiple shooting in a bar at nearby Thou-
sand Oaks, and 48 hours later my friend’s
home is reduced to ash by rampaging out-
of-season wildfires. America’s prosperity
also has dark undertones and omens.
Richer and poorer
I carried that thought to a conference in
Seattle, the handsome waterside city that is
the home of Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft and
Starbucks — but also, we swiftly learn, of
many homeless people for whom the pros-
perity generated by these global corpora-
tions has made local housing unaffordable.
Here, too, are the world’s richest men, Bill
Gates and Jeff Bezos, both now at the stage
30
when they are judged more by their phi-
lanthropy than their potential to accumu-
late even more wealth. Indeed I wrote last
year about the rather meaningless debate as
to which is actually the richer, both having
passed the $90 billion mark. I concluded that
although Bezos’s Amazon shares may be
worth more than Gates’s stake in Microsoft,
Gates is ahead by a distance in the practical
sense that he has found more fruitful ways
to spend his money and, in doing so, causes
people to admire him. Contrasting visits to
the Gates Foundation and Amazon’s corpo-
rate HQ confirmed my view.
The Foundation — the world’s best
endowed charity — offered a warm wel-
come. I learned that it is not only trying to
eliminate polio and malaria from the plan-
et, but also investing $400 million in bring-
ing cleaner toilets to the half of the world’s
population that lacks safe sanitation; that’s
as down-to-earth as billionaire benevolence
gets and will do vastly more good than, for
example, Jeff Bezos’s space travel project,
Blue Origin. But Bezos and his company do
street-level philanthropy too: we hear much
about Mary’s Place, a hostel that accommo-
dates 60 homeless families within Amazon’s
city-centre office campus, and that Bezos is
planning to expand.
Jeff’s Balls
I had wanted to quiz Jeff personally about
how many other families around the world
might be helped if Amazon paid the same
taxes as the domestic competitors it crush-
es, rather than employing towers full of tax
magicians to minimise the company’s global
bill. However, my hopes were disappointed.
He was not to be found in the jungle-planted
geodesic domes known locally as ‘Jeff’s
Balls’ that provide a showpiece workspace
for some of his staff. But at least I gained a
rather startling glimpse of the secretive and
defensive corporate culture he has fathered
on his technologically awesome business.
I was still hoping to ask someone my
tax question at the next tour stop. This was
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Amazon Go, a supermarket without check-
outs where sensors identify you, track any-
thing picked off the shelf and charge you for
it through your phone. But no sooner had
I downloaded the app than all hell broke
loose. Whether or not it was the ceiling cam-
eras that identified me, my visitor badge was
abruptly unclipped and I was ushered off the
premises. It turned out I’d been blacklisted
by Amazon’s PR people and should never
have been allowed on the tour. Bizarre, you
might think, for a retailer whose top ‘leader-
ship principle’ is ‘customer obsession’ — but
good to know The Spectator strikes fear into
one of the world’s mightiest corporations.
West Coast fads
I observe two new consumer crazes here.
The first is rented electric scooters: Ford just
paid $80 million for a two-year-old San Fran-
cisco start-up called Spin which operates
scooter fleets in a dozen US cities. Two other
scooter ventures, Bird and Lime, ‘each hit
the $1 billion valuation mark faster than any
other US start-ups in history’, says the Wall
Street Journal. But if this fad reaches the UK
I predict trouble: even American urbanites
who rarely walk anywhere find it tiresome
to have earphone-clad riders weaving along
sidewalks and dumping scooters randomly
at the end of the ride, which is how the busi-
ness model seems to work. We British are
a nation of pedestrians, and the scooter peril
could be our next great irritation.
The other craze is sous vide: slow vacu-
um-pack cooking in water at controlled —
and unusually low — temperatures. First I
overhear two learned UCLA professors
discussing it over dinner, then I find myself
visiting ChefSteps, a Seattle start-up co-
founded by Chris Young — Heston Blu-
menthal’s former sidekick at The Fat Duck
— who has perfected a digital water heat-
er called Joule that is, I gather, the iPhone
of the sous vide scene. Young’s entrepre-
neurial zest is infectious and Joule is my hot
(but never too hot) suggestion for the keen
cook’s Christmas present.
Robert Carver describes

© 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
Books of the Year
A further selection of the best and most overrated books of 2018,
chosen by some of our regular reviewers
Daniel Swift
I feel as though I came late to the Sarah
Moss party. Nobody told me she was this
divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her
themes: the cycles of history, male absurd-
ity, the forms female subversion may take,
in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that
she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny.
Her new book, Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99),
is the shorter, spikier companion piece to
her previous novel, The Tidal Zone. It is
about ancient Britain and its re-enactment
in the present day, and like all the novels I’ve
loved best this year, it’s also a parable.
Other parables: I was hugely moved
by Jesse Ball’s allegorical Census (Granta,
£14.99), about love and Down’s Syndrome,
and am so glad that the austere Australian
fabulist Gerald Murnane is getting the wide
attention he deserves.
Sara Wheeler
I gulped down Last Stories by William Tre-
vor (Viking Penguin, £14.99). Up to his usual
stellar standard but, as we lost him two years
ago, the pages sang like a threnody. Is it pos-
sible that there won’t ever be another Tre-
vor to look forward to? I shall have to start
32
at the beginning again and work my way
through the oeuvre.
I greatly enjoyed the ruminative, gothic
travelogue The Immeasurable World: Jour-
neys in Desert Places by William Atkins
(Faber, £20). Besides the Gobi, Atkins tack-
les a sliver of the fearsome 370,000-sqkm
Taklamakan. It’s a vital topic. ‘It has been
estimated,’ he writes, ‘that desertification
affects a sixth of humankind and 70 per cent
of all arid areas.’ The book is as much history
as travelogue.
The welcome trend for rewriting myths
produced Pat Barker’s The Silence of the
Girls (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99), which
is the Iliad from a female perspective.
I loved it.
Mark Cocker
It has been a fishy year for me, and Charles
Rangeley-Wilson’s terrific Silver Shoals:
Five Fish That Made Britain (Chatto, £18.99)
is among its highlights. The author manages
to lay bare this country’s abuse of its aston-
ishing former fish abundance, but without
name-calling or losing his sense of simple
wonder at fish as vital, vibrantly wild inhab-
itants of our encircling seas and waters.
In turn, his book led me to reread
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Tom Fort’s classic The Book of Eels, pub-
lished in 2003. Fort is narrower in scope
but deeper and, aided by what is arguably
the most slippery, strange but fascinating
fish species on Earth, he more complete-
ly conjures the mysteriousness of what
lies beneath.
Marcus Berkmann
I read non-fiction for work and fiction for
fun. This year’s discoveries for me were the
spy novels of Mick Herron and the later,
more abstract works of the science-fiction
writer Christopher Priest. Herron’s Jackson
Lamb books are mesmerisingly good, com-
bining the best double, triple and quadru-
ple-crossing traditions of Len Deighton and
early Le Carré with the mordant humour of
Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels.
Priest, who is now 76, has been writ-
ing a lot about an invented place he calls
The Dream Archipelago. The Islanders
(2011) is an ingenious book of short stories
masquerading as a travelogue; The Adjacent
(2013) is utterly bizarre, and I may have to
reread it soon to work out what it’s about;
and The Gradual (2016) is the next novel I
intend to start, after I’ve got all this bloody
work out of the way.
 A.N. Wilson
James Pope-Hennessy’s Life of Queen Mary
was the best 20th-century royal biography.
Hugo Vickers bought a copy as a schoolboy
and has been an obsessive royal-watcher
ever since. In The Quest for Queen Mary
(Zuleika, £30),Vickers gathers up the inter-
views and conversations with the queen’s
friends and relations, collected by Pope-
Hennessy, which were too indiscreet to be
included in his masterpiece. Almost every
page is a gem, but the chapter about Henry
Duke of Gloucester must be one of the
most hilarious pieces of English prose in
our language.
Two other superb royal books: Lucy
Worsley’s Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife,
Mother, Widow (Hodder, £25) has much of
the abundant charm of its author; and Franc-
es Welch’s The Imperial Tea Party (Short
Books, £12.99), recounting visits from the
Russian royal family to their English cous-
ins, is poignant and comic in equal measure.
Claire Lowdon
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife,
1965–2005 by Zachary Leader (Cape, £35).
On his deathbed, Bellow asked a friend:
‘Was I a man or a jerk?’ In the second and
final volume of his meticulously objective
biography, Leader resists the temptation to
answer that question. Instead, he gives us all
the information from every angle, rewarding
the patient reader with a multi-dimensional
portrait of this contradictory, conflicted, bril-
liant, difficult human being. And although
this is a big book, it’s actually a miracle of
compression and clarity, given the size of
the life. Best of all, Leader always makes
time to remind us why we’re here: for the
work itself, which he quotes from generously
and with relish. Whatever you think of Bel-
low the man, you’ll find it impossible not to
agree with Leader’s moving conclusion that
‘the fiction is his great gift — the great gift
of his life’.
Honor Clerk
Three books about books. Edward
Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked
Books (William Collins, £25), the fascinating
history of Christopher Columbus’s illegiti-
mate son Hernando, guardian of his father’s
flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogu-
er supreme, whose travels took him to the
heart of 16th-century Europe. Lulah Ellen-
der’s Elisabeth’s Lists (Granta, £16.99), the
story of the author’s grandmother, whom she
never met, improbably conjured up from the
books of household lists she kept as a dip-
lomat’s daughter and wife — an intelligent
and moving family narrative. And, finally, a
life organised by books: Sally Bayley brought
herself up with the aid of Milly Molly Mandy,
Betsey Trotwood, Jane Eyre and Miss Mar-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
ple and tells her extraordinary story in Girl
with Dove (William Collins, £14.99). Bril-
liantly original, funny and clever.
Nicky Haslam
Foremost is Hugo Vickers’s meticulous-
ly annotated The Quest for Queen Mary
(Zuleika, £30), and Cressida Connolly’s ele-
giac After the Party (Viking, £14.99). Adam
Zamoyski refreshingly downsizes the Cor-
sican commander-in-chief in his Napoleon:
The Man Behind the Myth (William Collins,
£30). New to me, but first published in 1647,
is Baltasar Gracián’s Pocket Oracle and the
Art of Prudence, edited by Jeremy Robbins
(Penguin Classics, £9.99): every maxim a les-
son for our time. Worst book of the year?
Hmmm. Perhaps Andrew Morton’s fatuous
Wallis in Love (Michael O’Mara, £20).
Susan Hill
The law is endlessly fascinating, in its history,
rituals, manners, language and, above all, in
the people whose lives revolve, temporar-
ily or in the long term, around its practise.
In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law
by the barrister Sarah Langford (Double-
day, £16.99) tells the stories of some of those
caught up in its complex workings. It is rivet-
ing — and quite alarming.
Best novel this year by a country mile
is Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber,
£13.99), the work of an Irish novelist who
has sprung from nowhere to both liter-
ary eminence and great popularity in two
books. Her characters are those non-existent
‘ordinary people’, whose emotions, rela-
tionships and daily lives she reveals with
sympathy and understanding but also cool
detachment. Brilliant.
How many biographers can entirely
change not one’s view of their subject but
what you might call ‘the universal view,’
and do so with carefully, calmly presented
evidence? I daresay many like me, with an
interest beyond the casual in Tudor history,
thought they had Thomas Cromwell sewn up.
Diarmaid MacCulloch has blown our view
apart with his long, absorbing and exciting
Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Allen Lane, £30).
A masterpiece of scholarship and my read
of the year.
Graham Robb
Having just binge-read seven novels by
Haruki Murakami, I’m expecting his lat-
est, Killing Commendatore (Harvill Secker,
£20), to be my book of the year, but I think
I’m getting it for Christmas, so I’ll have to
wait. It has received the accolade of a Class
II: Indecent Materials rating from the Hong
Kong Obscene Articles Tribunal.
Among the books I have read, I admired
Éric Vuillard’s Goncourt Prize-winning
novel The Order of the Day (Picador,
£12.99), a fly-on-the-wall account, with occa-
sional flights of fancy, of the part played by
captains of industry in Hitler’s rise.
Olivier Rolin’s Stalin’s Meteorologist
(Harvill Secker, £8.99) tells the painfully
engrossing tale of Alexey Wangenheim, a
patriotic pioneer of wind power. It is based
on the letters and drawings he sent to
his wife and daughter from the Arctic gulag
to which he was inexplicably banished by his
hero, Comrade Stalin.
William Dalrymple
In his magisterial The British in India (Allen
Lane, £30), David Gilmour draws on more
than 30 years of research in the archives. Here
he presents an astonishing harvest from dia-
ries, memoirs, letters and official documents
of the period, many previously unused.
Prostitutes and punkah wallahs, pig-stickers,
pagoda-hunters and viceregal palaces — all
British colonial life in India is here present-
ed in elegant prose: 350 years of battles and
durbars, maharajahs’ balls, tiger shoots and
Simla shenanigans distilled in 600 pages of
telling anecdotes and witty vignettes.
Manaku of Guler: The Life and Work of
Another Great Indian Painter from a Small
Hill State (Niyogi Books, £73), by India’s
leading art historian, B.N. Goswamy, com-
pletes his lifetime of labour researching
33
BOOKS & ARTS
the most talented of all the families of art-
ists at work in India in the 18th century.
The book closes a diptych that he opened
two decades ago with the publication of
Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter
from a Small Hill State.
The pleasure of reading Manaku of Guler
derives in part from discovering the extraor-
dinary painting of this forgotten genius, as he
brings into visual form some of the most sub-
tle of Indian philosophical texts; but equally
in Goswamy’s close reading of the images,
and the amount of information he manages
to wring out of them. He notices, for exam-
ple, that when Radha instructs Krishna to
paint her breasts with sandalwood paste,
Krishna does so using his left hand: ‘Is it
possible,’ asks Goswamy, ‘that it was not
Krishna but Manaku who was actually
left-handed?’
Andrew Taylor
Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange (Penguin,
£14.99) is a beautifully written novel, mainly
set 50 years ago in a decaying stately home
where three youngish people play out their
doomed hopes and sinister fantasies dur-
ing a long, hot summer. There are echoes of
Barbara Vine and Daphne du Maurier here
and also, faint but curiously insistent, of Bar-
bara Pym. C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (Mantle,
£20), the seventh novel in his bestselling
Shardlake series, is technically a murder
mystery. In practice, it is also an enthralling
fictional account of Kett’s Rebellion, the
little known and even less understood 1549
insurrection.
Finally, if you are a fan of Mick Herron’s
wonderful Slough House spy novels, there
is a Christmas treat available in the form
of The Drop (John Murray, £9.99). A wry
and elegant novella about what happens to
redundant spooks.
Ruth Scurr
Because Christmas is a terrible challenge
for all who suffer from eating disorders,
I am choosing Laura Freeman’s The Read-
ing Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite
(Weidenfeld, £16.99). This is not a misery
memoir or self-help book but a joyful cel-
ebration of literature and a candid account
of how reading about other people enjoy-
ing real or fictional meals helped Freeman
recover from anorexia.
Vicarious enjoyment of food, which can
take many forms, including studying reci-
pe books, obsessively watching Bake Off
or cooking elaborate meals for friends and
family without participating in them, is com-
mon among anorexics. Freeman transforms
this into a real pathway to recovery. Invit-
ing her readers to share picnics, feasts, good
suppers and strong teas, she takes them on
a quirky literary journey, from Richard Jef-
fries’s Bevis to Joanne Harris’s Chocolat.
34
And of course the Cratchits’ Christmas pud-
ding is included.
Sam Leith
More and more I find I look above all else in
fiction for sureness of touch with sentences
— and that was abundantly in evidence, in
different ways, in Michael Ondaatje’s War-
light (Cape, £16.99) and in Catherine Lac-
ey’s short story collection Certain American
States (Granta, £12.99). Ondaatje’s is an
elliptical and atmospheric hybrid of family
story and second world war spy caper; Lac-
ey’s an often very funny collection of anx-
iously talky stories about people in crises of
one sort or another. But both of them have
the unmistakable stamp of knowing exact-
ly what they’re doing. I was also struck by
the compressed farce and horror in the 1951
Dutch novella An Untouched House by Wil-
lem Frederik Hermans, in David Colmer’s
new translation (Pushkin, £7.99).
In non-fiction, Paul Kildea’s Chopin’s
Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism
(Allen Lane, £20) was fascinating, even for
a musical ignoramus like me. I also tip my
cap to Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walk-
ing With Destiny (Allen Lane, £35). I’m sick
to death of Churchill and did not welcome
yet another book about him, especially with
that subtitle, yet Roberts’s telling is so fresh
it utterly won me over.
Jane Ridley
Who’s In, Who’s Out: The Journals of Ken-
neth Rose Volume I edited by D.R. Thorpe
(Weidenfeld, £30). An insider’s account,
this gossipy and acute diary will become the
indispensable guide to the Establishment in
the years between 1944 and 1979.
I have enjoyed two books published in
paperback this year. Kathryn Hughes’s Victo-
rians Undone (4th Estate, £9.99), a collection
of stunningly original and thought-provok-
ing essays about such unexpected subjects
as Darwin’s beard or George Eliot’s hand.
And Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in
May (Vintage, £9.99) is interesting not just
for the story of Churchill’s incredibly unlike-
ly ascent to the premiership but also for the
way in which the author uses his novelist’s
skills to write a gripping and original histori-
cal narrative.
James Walton
My favourite novel of this year was Tim Win-
ton’s blistering The Shepherd’s Hut (Picador,
£14.99): a miraculously assured combination
of beguiling narrative voice, wild landscape,
page-turning plot and characters that are
simultaneously archetypal and utterly indi-
vidual. I also much enjoyed Now We Shall
Be Entirely Free (Sceptre, £18.99), in which
Andrew Miller returned to more orthodox
historical fiction after 2015’s The Crossing
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
and triumphantly proved there’s plenty of
life in the old form yet. Finally, A.J. Finn’s
The Woman at the Window (HarperCollins,
£12.99) took the conventions of a psycholog-
ical thriller and gave them both literary pol-
ish and real heart.
Richard Ingrams
It sometimes seems as though a new Donald
Trump book is being published every week,
but we ought not to forget the pioneering
Michael Wolff, whose Fire and Fury (Little,
Brown, £20) was the first to give a frighten-
ingly vivid picture of the leader of the free
world — ‘twinkle in his eye, larceny in his
soul’: an ignorant inattentive hoodlum who
likes to spend his evenings watching three
TV screens at once while guzzling cheese-
burgers. Though published this year, Wolff’s
masterpiece now reads like ancient histo-
ry, with many of the pieces swept from the
board, notably the improbable figure of
Steve Bannon, self-styled ‘Trump’s brain’,
who put the words into the President’s
mouth, notably his outlandish inauguration
speech. ‘What weird shit is this?’, George
W. Bush was heard to murmur. A comment
that seems to sum up Trump’s regime.
Tom Bower tried to be on his best behav-
iour with his biography of Prince Charles,
Rebel Prince (William Collins, £20). But
though he made a commendable attempt to
see good in the heir to the throne he could
not hope to dispel the impression left with
his readers that Charles is every bit as weird
as Trump. One can overlook, perhaps, the
eccentricities that Bower describes — the
special cushions and loo seats that accom-
pany the Prince on his travels — but what is
one to make of his belief in the ‘sacred geom-
etry of the body’, or his recommendation
that coffee enemas could be effective in the
treatment of cancer? Bush’s words, however
crude, seem the only appropriate response.
Jonathan Sumption
As a general rule, biography is a poor way to
learn history. Concentrating on a single life
oversimplifies the complex texture of events.
But there are exceptions, and two of them
were published this year. One is Julian Jack-
son’s A Certain Idea of France (Allen Lane,
£35), the best biography of De Gaulle in any
language and the latest evidence of Anglo-
Saxon domination in the field of modern
French history. The other is Diarmaid Mac-
Cullough’s Thomas Cromwell (Allen Lane,
£30), a real history to supplant the histori-
cal fictions that surround Henry VIII’s great
minister. Both of these books manage to
study events through a life, and not the other
way round. Both are written to uncompro-
mising standards of scholarship by profes-
sionals who have devoted their lives to their
subject. But they know how to tell a good
story well.
 Jeff Noon
R.C. Sherriff, the author of the play
Journey’s End, also wrote a number of
novels, all but forgotten now. This year, how-
ever, Penguin Classics reprinted The Hop-
kins Manuscript (£8.99), his one attempt
at a science fiction story. Published in
1939, it imagines the moon slipping out
of its orbit and heading towards Earth,
all seen through the eyes of Mr Hop-
kins, a poultry breeder from a tiny village
called Beadle. I loved this book, by turns
funny and tragic, and filled with poet-
ic descriptions of the approaching moon
and the changing landscape. It moves
between abject despair and good old-
fashioned British stoicism with ease.
It’s worth the cover price alone for the
moonlit cricket match on the village
green one night before the world is due to
end. Magical.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Whereas some novelists seem perfectly
happy to carry on recycling the same old
narrative tricks, Michael Ondaatje’s War-
light (Cape, £16.99) stood out this year for
its skill in making even the most familiar
fictional terrain seem strange and unset-
tling underfoot. It’s hardly unusual to write
about an adult looking back at traumatic
childhood events and trying to work out
how far they have formed (or deformed)
him into the person he has become. It’s
even less unusual to write a narrative that
moves choppily back and forth between
the wartime past and the supposedly more
peaceful present. Yet every time we think
we’ve pinned down what Ondaatje is doing
in this novel, he somehow manages to wrig-
gle free. It’s a quite brilliant act of fictional
escapology. Why it didn’t make the Man
Booker shortlist is one of the great literary
mysteries of the year.
Tim Martin
Since I judged the Man Booker Interna-
tional prize earlier this year, it may seem
a bit undignified to carry on shilling for the
winner, but Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (Fitz-
carraldo Editions, £9.99) is a book that
deserves all the praise I can throw at it and
more. It’s a positive constellation of wit
and deep thought and I’ve read it so many
times that bits of Jennifer Croft’s transla-
tion have shown up in my dreams.
Richard Powers’s superb eco-doorstop,
The Overstory (Heinemann, £18.99), had
me wandering about gaping at trees for
months — little contemporary fiction is so
attentive to the non-human world — and
I found the bleak, off-beam, laugh-or-be-
sick spirit of the age uncannily reflected in
Ben Marcus’s Notes from the Fog (Gran-
ta, £12.99), a collection of stories that fea-
tures, inter alia, a pair of architects who
‘made their mark by designing large pub-
lic graves where people could gather and
where maybe really cool food trucks would
also park’.
David Crane
This, like nearly every other for the past
200 years, has been a good one for Napo-
leon watchers. Michael Broers’s Napo-
leon: The Spirit of the Age (Faber, £30)
more than delivers on the promise of his
first volume; while for anyone looking
for a single-volume biography, or an anti-
dote to Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon the
Great, Adam Zamoyski’s Napoleon: The
Man Behind the Myth (William Collins,
£30) offers a pacy and characteristical-
ly unintimidated picture of how and why
Napoleon achieved what he did and then
succeeded in screwing it all up. Not big on
the battles, but 600-plus pages of narrative
history will seldom pass so easily.
Also, I very much look forward to
C.J. Sansom’s latest Shardlake novel,
Tombland (Mantle, £20), centring around
Kett’s Rebellion.

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the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 35

 BOOKS & ARTS

fin in a Chicago boycotted to protest against the war in Viet-

GETTY IMAGES

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-
water. And yet Leader’s biography is an
attempt to address another kind of failure
of sympathy — of Bellow’s previous biog-
rapher, James Atlas, who knew his subject
and let the work be coloured by his personal
feelings (not to mention his own ambitions).
Leader’s portrait manages to be both sub-
tle and even-handed. Bellow could be a real
jerk, but he could also be a decent colleague,
a generous teacher, a conscientious
reader, a lively father and a thoughtful friend.
And part of the pleasure of the biog-
raphy is the light it shines on some of the
work. Leader writes well about the books
themselves — not just on their biographi-
cal sources but on their virtues and liter-
ary faults. Characters from Bellow’s life
kept recurring in his fiction (even if, as his
last wife, Janis Bellow, warns, ‘Biographers,
beware; Saul wields a wand, not scissors’).
But you also see the way his human failings
show up in the work. His vivid depictions of
women sometimes get in the way of more
natural relations with them. And the char-
acteristic Bellovian narrator, articulate but
also a little goofy, dreamy and out of it, in
need of what he calls ‘reality instructors’,
is a front that conceals the determination
of the author to get his own way. Bellow
tended to imagine himself in his fiction as
something related to but other than what
he was. Instead of the famous, wealthy,
world-travelling Nobel Prize-winning nov-
elist, for example, he figured himself as an
academic, or botanist, or musicologist, and
the displacement partly accounts for some-
thing missing in his portraits of each: the
decent mediocrity of ordinary lives.
But the biography also gives glimpses of
Bellow’s extraordinary literary intelligence,
shaping and seeing him through the mess of
his own life. Bellow’s fourth marriage, to the
Romanian mathematician Alexandra Iones-
cu Tulcea, failed partly, Leader writes (quot-
ing one of the many interesting and subtle
insights of the writer’s children), ‘because she
was not going to take care of him... on a deep
level the attachment was not strong enough’
to see him through the final stages. And in
fact his last marriage — his fifth — to one
of his former students, Janis Freedman, turns
out to have been his happiest — and did the
heavy labour that he needed it to do. Apart
from anything else, their relationship made
Ravelstein possible, his last great work, based
on the life of Allan Bloom, published when
Bellow was 85.
Leader’s two-volume biography is an
astonishingly detailed and thoughtful record
of an important life. American kids playing
football in the street tell each other to ‘go
long, go deep’, before hurling a pass down-
field. Leader goes long and deep here, using
Bellow as a kind of supersensitive canary
to guide us down the mines of 20th-century
culture wars. And whatever else you think
of him, the guy could sing.
38
You couldn’t make it up
Alex Preston
How to Write an Autobiographical
Novel: Essays
by Alexander Chee
Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 280
Edinburgh
by Alexander Chee
Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 228
Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir
Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Mem-
ory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’
for the writer who calls ‘something whol-
ly autobiographical fiction, something
wholly fictional autobiography’. When
Nabokov did this, Pamuk said, it changed
‘the secret centre of the story’. The fertile
interplay of fact and fiction animates a pair
of books by the Korean American author
Alexander Chee: one a collection of essays,
the other Chee’s debut novel, published in
the US in 2001 but appearing in Britain for
the first time.
There’s something strangely nostalgic
about reading Edinburgh (it’s set in Maine;
the title is a reference to a book that features
in the novel). Written in the early 1990s and
originally rejected by 24 publishers before
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being issued by a small, now-defunct press,
Edinburgh has gained a cult following in
recent years, driven by the success of Chee’s
second novel, the gaudy and expansive The
Queen of the Night. The publishing scene at
the time that Edinburgh was being written
was dominated by misery memoirs, the lit-
crit landscape by new ideas about trauma
and recovered memory. It feels like these
two come together in Chee’s tale of Fee,
a Korean American choirboy, aged 11 at the
book’s start, who is abused at singing camp,
tormented by guilt for not preventing the
abuse of his friend Peter, and then, years
later, dredges up recollections of this abuse
when he develops an obsessive interest in
one of his students.
There are repeated references in Edin-
burgh to mythology, both Japanese and
Greek, and particularly to tales of metamor-
phosis and transformation. We understand
that this is what abuse does to the victim;
that there is always a before and an after, the
shadow-presence of the child who wasn’t
molested walking alongside the one that was.
It’s painful to read the early scenes of Fee’s
abuse, but much of that pain comes from
the fact that Chee doesn’t shy away from
showing how much the newly pubescent Fee
enjoys some aspects of the abuse, the way
that, necessarily, early sexual encounters —
even ones as horrifying as these — provide
blueprints for our adult desires.
Edinburgh is a fine first novel, but the
reason behind its reappearance is the pub-
lication of Chee’s heartfelt, writerly essays,
many of which detail the strange gesta-
tion of his debut. In a piece towards the
end of the collection, called ‘The Guard-
ians’, Chee writes of teaching a class about
stereoscopic narratives — stories presented
from multiple viewpoints — to his creative
writing students. This idea of being pre-
sented with competing accounts of a single
event is a familiar literary trope, but reading
Edinburgh alongside essays about it is an
obscurely compelling experience, as if the
author were whispering in your ear as you
read his book. We are granted privileged
access to the ‘secret centre’ of the story,
witnessing the sublimation of autobiogra-
phy into fiction, the mysterious process of
enchantment by which Chee turns the cha-
otic facts of his ruined childhood into the
elegant, emblematic fiction of Fee.
Chee describes Edinburgh as a palin-
ode, an exculpation for a historical sin. As
a young man in New York, he appeared in
a film about gay life called Sex Is… In it,
Chee spoke flippantly of the abuse he suf-
fered, as ‘an education, even a liberation’.
Edinburgh is a 228-page refutation of this
claim, picking through the aftermath of the
abuse, showing the repercussions echoing
down the years. It’s interesting that Hanya
Yanagihara, the author of A Little Life, was
one of the editors that turned down Edin-
burgh. Reading Chee’s debut and essays

‘Attack on the Sealkote mutineers by General Nicholson’s Irregular Cavalry, 1857.’ Illustration by Charles Ball
together has an impact not unlike that of
Yanagihara’s novel — the sense that you’ve
been plunged deeply into the pain of anoth-
er, that you, too, simply by this contact, have
been changed. It’s not a pleasant reading
experience, but it’s a powerful one.
Iron in the soul
Robert Carver
Cult of a Dark Hero:
Nicholson of Delhi
by Stuart Flinders
I.B. Tauris, £25, pp. 320
‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with
a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as
prime minister in 1942, to his secretary of state
for India, Leo Amery.
Like John Nicholson, Churchill had sol-
diered on the subcontinent as a young man,
and both men saw fighting on the North-West
Frontier. Nicholson was a career officer in
the East India Company army. ‘I dislike India
and its inhabitants,’ he said as a young man,
and never changed that opinion. Duty, obli-
gation and a career kept both men in a coun-
try they loathed; the graves of more than
two million Britons in India demonstrate
that it was not simply a place to get rich
in, but a place, too often, to die in at an
early age.
Nicholson was a fundamentalist evan-
gelical Protestant from Ulster, the descend-
ant of lowland Scots immigrants. His mother
was a widow and he had many siblings. ‘If
I could earn £200 a year there, I would come
back to Ulster,’ he wrote to his mother. But he
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
couldn’t. He remitted £100 of his salary back
home to help with his brother’s education.
He was captured during the first Afghan War
and was treated brutally, enduring the terri-
ble experience of being the first to discover
his brother Alexander’s body, murdered and
mutilated, the genitals severed and placed
in the mouth. After Afghanistan, the iron
entered Nicholson’s soul. He never trusted or
believed any Indian ever again.
He was certainly brave and dashing, and
was revered and admired by his men; but
he was disliked for his arrogance and sneer-
ing contempt by many of his fellow officers.
Nicholson believed that India was a barba-
rous land and that God had called upon the
British to civilise it by forcibly stamping out
crime and disorder. His watchwords were
duty and honour. He was not only a highly
effective leader of Indian soldiers but also
a rough and ready administrator in the newly
conquered Punjab.
His direct interventions to arrest and pun-
ish miscreants made a strong impression.
Within a year he had reduced a region sunk
in anarchy to peace and order by brutal, vio-
lent methods. Flogging and hanging were
Nicholson’s tools of pacification. For the mid-
Victorians he was viewed as a chivalrous hero,
brave, noble, self-sacrificing. Modern histori-
ans are less complimentary: ‘An imperial-
ist psychopath’, claims William Dalrymple;
Ronald Hyams calls him ‘a homosexual
paedophile bully’.
‘I am sorry I am late, gentlemen, but
I have been hanging your cooks,’ Nichol-
son told the officers in his mess one evening.
A poison plot had been discovered. The cooks
had refused to drink the soup and a pet mon-
key, force-fed the broth, died in agony. The
GETTY IMAGES
cooks were strung up from the nearest tree
with no further ado.
Nicholson found his apotheosis during the
Sepoy Revolt of 1857. He formed a Moveable
Column, comprised mainly of Punjabis and
frontier tribesmen out for loot, and marched
on Delhi, where during the storming of the
city he was shot, possibly by one of his own
men, and died aged 34. Apotheosis is right —
for even in Nicholson’s lifetime, a group of
Indian fakirs had decided that he was a god,
Flogging and hanging were Nicholson’s
tools of pacification. The Victorians
saw him as noble and chivalrous
and they would worship him. He had them
flogged for blasphemy, but the cult of Nikal
Seyn lasted into the 21st century.
This is the first life since Hesketh Pear-
son’s 1939 hagiography, The Hero of Delhi.
Stuart Flinders has gone back and exhumed
a great deal of original material, including let-
ters and diaries. He takes a more critical view
than Pearson, but nonetheless still accepts
many of Nicholson’s qualities as admirable.
His conclusion is much the same as Pearson,
whom he quotes: rebellions and mutinies in
all armies are put down with great severity.
Nicholson was brutal certainly, but territories
are only won and held by main force. As long
as the British empire was regarded as a good
thing, Nicholson was seen as a hero. Since the
1960s the zeitgeist has flowed against such
men, and unsurprisingly he has been wide-
ly criticised. Well-researched and very read-
able, Flinders’s book is as fair and balanced
a biography of this contentious figure as we
are likely to see.
39
 BOOKS & ARTS
ANDREA JONES
A river of green topiary cascades down the terrace steps at West Dean.
Cotoneaster horizontalis covers the wall on the right
Gardening books
Other men’s flowers
Ursula Buchan
There are probably no more gifted pro-
fessional gardeners in England than Jim
Buckland and Sarah Wain, husband and
wife and joint head gardeners at West
Dean in Sussex. On the verge of their
retirement, after 27 years of effecting
a renaissance in the gardens and grounds of
this country house arts centre (bequeathed
by Edward James), the couple have
described their work and achievements in
At West Dean: The Creation of an Exemplary
Garden (White Lion, £40).
The lucid, educated text, written by
Jim and overseen by Sarah, is, mercifully,
no empty exercise in heart-tugging nostal-
gia but an unsentimental account of hard-
won practical experience in a multi-faceted,
forward-looking horticultural enterprise,
where precise care, elevated standards,
close teamwork, attention to aesthetics
and grindingly hard work have combined
to make West Dean a potent lure to paying
visitors. The demonstration of long-estab-
lished, exquisite skills — particularly in
glasshouse and orchard — practically brings
tears to the eyes of a trained gardener like
me. (How I should love to have worked at
West Dean.) Moreover, this book presents
a touching, because thoroughly understat-
ed, picture of a very close and enduring
partnership. The photographs by Andrea
40
Jones, set throughout the book, are of
unsurpassable quality and aptness; on
the strength of them alone, £40 is cheap
at the price.
The work of the West Dean gardeners is
intensely precious because it is in an almost
extinct tradition. Garden designers since
the war have necessarily turned away from
that tradition, attempting instead to lay out
imaginative gardens appropriate to their
shrunken size and the shortage of good pro-
fessional gardeners. No one in this country
has been more influential in developing
a more practical aesthetic than John
Brookes, who died in March, just as A Land-
scape Legacy — part memoir, part work ret-
rospective — was published by Pimpernel
Press (£40).
This tour d’horizon of his projects across
the world and across the decades since
1960, points to the ways in which design
has evolved, and amply demonstrates why
Brookes was for so many years an enor-
mous influence on both private and pub-
lic garden making. We are fortunate that
he lived to complete this book, for he was
an inspired teacher and mentor as well as a
designer, and every page, with its plans, ele-
vations and photographs, underscores not
only his expertise but his powers in com-
municating it.
An even more accomplished commu-
nicator is Fiona Stafford, whose The Brief
Life of Flowers (John Murray, £20) is
a description of the botany, lore and litera-
ture of some common flowers, shot through
with her own memories. Each chapter fea-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
tures a particular native or
garden plant — elderflow-
er, roses, pinks, foxgloves,
bluebells, for example — so
there is unity of a kind. (Sev-
eral of these chapters were
originally aired on Radio 3’s
The Essay.) Botanical mis-
cellanies are not thin on the
ground but few, if any, offer
prose as cultured, scrupu-
lous and engaging. Anyone
who can connect a portrait
of the members of the Som-
erset House Conference in
1604 with bluebells, or who
knows of an early draft of
Milton’s poem ‘Lycidas’,
deserves respect.
As Professor Stafford
reminds us, Charles Darwin
wrote that nothing gave him
more satisfaction in his sci-
entific life than making out
the meaning of the structure
of primroses. We all know
he studied earthworms,
Galapagos finches and bar-
nacles but, as Ken Thomp-
son makes clear in Darwin’s
Most Wonderful Plants:
Darwin’s Botany Today (Profile Books,
£10.99), he spent just as much time inves-
tigating how climbing plants twine, orchids
and primroses are pollinated, and insects
are trapped by sundews, when formulat-
ing his theories of evolution. Dr Thompson
— plant biologist, Daily Telegraph column-
ist and writer of popular science that even
I can understand — both demystifies Dar-
Henry Cecil, the racehorse trainer,
planted rugosa roses round his fillies’
yard because they liked eating the hips
win’s botanical research and describes mod-
ern scientific discoveries that expand or
confirm his conclusions. This is Darwin for
a dummy, with a sense of humour and an
enquiring mind.
You won’t need an enquiring mind for
The Generous Gardener: Private Paradises
Shared (Pimpernel Press, £30), a compila-
tion of Sunday Times articles by Caroline
Donald, since the book consists of shortish
interviews with famous or rich people (as
well as a few well-known garden designers),
some of whom live abroad and a number of
whom are dead.
It is pleasant to think of busy, impor-
tant people finding consolation and res-
pite in their gardens and, in truth, the rest
of us have an unconquerable weakness for
gawping at our betters. However, in my
experience, celebrities don’t necessarily
have much to offer the gardening reader,
since they often pay other people to do the
sweaty stuff and even sometimes the vision
thing as well. These articles have appeared
over the past 15 years, so Donald has help-
fully provided short updates and, in the hal-
lowed tradition of celebrity interviews, they
accentuate the positive: the one concerning
the wife of a ‘successful property financier’
with a garden in Kent, reads:
Her husband has since departed for pastures
new, but, on the plus side, it gives her more
time both for gardening and for her new inter-
est: stitching.
That apart, there are things to enjoy
in this book, in particular the unpreten-
tious keenness of Jim Carter and Imelda
Staunton, the Lancastrian self-restraint of
Sir Harrison Birtwistle, and the old-school
charm of the late Lord Carrington. I am
glad I now know that the late Sir Henry
Cecil, the racehorse trainer, planted rugosa
roses round the fillies’ yard, because they
liked eating the hips. I’ve got the rugosas all
right — I’m just a bit short of racehorses.
A brief glimpse of utopia
William Cook
Dreamers: When the Writers Took
Power, Germany 1918
by Volker Weidermann
Pushkin Press, £16.99, pp. 253
Today Munich is a prosperous and peaceful
place — Germany’s most affluent, attrac-
tive city. Wandering its leafy avenues, lined
with handsome apartments and shiny
new BMWs, it’s hard to picture anything
remotely revolutionary happening here.
However, exactly 100 years ago this cosy
bastion of conservatism was overrun by
one of Europe’s most unlikely revolutions,
led by an idealistic theatre critic called
Kurt Eisner. For a British equivalent, imag-
ine a socialist insurgency led by Kenneth
Tynan. Of course, like all well-intentioned
revolutions, it was doomed to fail.
For several chaotic months, Eisner’s
Free State of Bavaria teetered between
tragedy and farce, before succumbing to
a vicious counter-revolution led by the
Freikorps, the violent forerunners of
Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts. Yet while
Hitler’s unsuccessful Munich Putsch has
become a staple of school history books,
Eisner’s (briefly) successful power grab has
been virtually forgotten. Volker Weider-
mann’s dramatic book brings the turbu-
lent events — and, above all, the frenzied
atmosphere — of that bizarre interregnum
back to life.
Thankfully for the general reader,
Weidermann is a journalist rather than an
academic, and so this is a compact and col-
ourful account, with the breathless pace of
war reporting rather than the ponderous,
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
long-winded prose one usually associates
with German history books by German
historians. Many of the proponents wrote
extensively and eloquently about their
experiences, and Weidermann draws heav-
ily on these first-hand accounts to great
effect. By favouring impressionistic report-
age over background detail, his narrative is
sometimes a bit confusing, but it gives the
reader a vivid sense of what it actually felt
like to live through this exhilarating and
terrifying time.
Weidermann clearly sympathises with
Eisner and his fellow dreamers, but like all
good journalists he delights in pointing out
the absurdities of their brave new world.
One of Eisner’s principal bugbears, non-
sensically, was the proletarian appetite for
kitsch cabaret, as opposed to highfalutin
drama. ‘Politics is as much an art as paint-
ing pictures or composing string quartets,’
he declared, airily. Inevitably, his beloved
workers didn’t share his elevated vision. As
the German poet Ricarda Huch observed,
Eisner was merely an abstract moralist —
a hopeless highbrow sorely ill-equipped
for the brutal Realpolitik of government.
‘Criticism and theory make neither a good
ruler nor a good artist,’ she remarked,
astutely. ‘One has to be able to do it.’
When elections were finally held,
Eisner’s Independent Socialists polled
a pathetic 2.5 per cent. Farcically, tragical-
The White Sparrow
Towards the end and sightless
she woke up to swear
she’d seen a white sparrow
shaking off drops of rain
under the photinia.
Tonight, clearing our garden,
I glimpse the crestfallen ghost
of a robin,
its red breast drained
to a white affront,
its stillness lit
by the first spill of dusk,
adding a touch of make-believe
to forked-up roots,
the hole they leave;
a delicate beat
as though warmth still clings
to the thin white bands
of slipped-off rings:
impossibilities
and their possible wings.
— John Levett
ly Eisner was shot dead (by a right-wing
terrorist) on his way to tender his resig-
nation. This gratuitous assassination gave
him a posthumous popularity he’d never
achieved during his lifetime, and lent his
utopian uprising a new, albeit shortlived,
lease of life. Hitler was among the 100,000
mourners who attended Eisner’s funeral,
wearing a red armband, as a soldier in the
Soviet army of the Bavarian Free State.
If anything, the politicians who suc-
ceeded Eisner were even more unworld-
ly. Ernst Toller had been condemned by
psychiatrists as ‘a severe hysteric with
a pathological addiction to making him-
self seem interesting’. Gustav Landau-
er, his commissioner of Enlightenment
& Public Instruction, was more interest-
ed in reciting poetry than enacting legis-
Like a Teutonic Haight-Ashbury,
Munich was soon flooded with all
sorts of cranks and do-gooders
lation. ‘Let each discharge his duty, and
a general happiness will alleviate each
individual trouble,’ he declared, quoting
Goethe. Doctor Franz Lipp, the people’s
delegate for foreign affairs, had a morbid
fear of telephones, and was declared insane
after sending a telegram to the Pope com-
plaining that Karl Hoffmann, the lead-
er of Bavaria’s government in exile, had
taken the key to the lavatory with him
when he’d fled.
Like a Teutonic Haight-Ashbury,
Munich was soon flooded with all sorts
of cranks and do-gooders. ‘Some believe
that the root of all evil is eating cooked
food, others the gold standard, others
non-porous underwear,’ wrote Toller,
despairing of the torrent of quackery his
colleagues had unleashed. Like monkeys
typing Shakespeare, they chanced upon
a few worthwhile schemes. Landauer abol-
ished corporal punishment in schools
— pretty progressive for 1919. He also
abolished homework, arguing (correct-
ly) that it made schoolteachers lazy. Sil-
vio Gesell’s economic theories inspired
John Maynard Keynes. Yet for every good
idea, there were numerous bad ones, most
notably draconian assaults on savings
and private property. When the Freikorps
marched into town, they met insufficient
resistance. It turned out that the proletari-
at didn’t want to live in a socialist paradise
after all.
In the resultant bloodbath, around
1,000 people were slaughtered. This set the
moral tone for Hitler’s Munich Putsch a
few years later, and, ultimately, the Third
Reich. Whatever their failings (and there
were many), at least Eisner’s dreamers
meant well, which is more than can be said
for the sadistic Freikorps. ‘Civil war is vio-
lence of the most potent kind; moderation
41
BOOKS & ARTS

is stupidity,’ wrote Manfred von Killinger, David Garrick

a Freikorp (and later a Nazi member of in Shakespeare’s
the Reichstag) in his memoir, Serious & Richard III,
Humorous Incidents from Putsch Life. Tol- painted by
ler escaped and fled to America. ‘You can- Francis Hayman
not just avoid reality when it is different
from what you wished it to be, and excuse
yourself by saying: that was not what I
intended,’ he reflected, sadly, wisely, in his
memoir, I Was a German. He committed
suicide in 1939.

Riots in the stalls

Ian Kelly
The Birth of the Modern Theatre:
Rivalry, Riots and Romance in the
Age of Garrick
by Norman S. Poser
Routledge, £24.99, pp. 208

The age of Garrick, Norman Poser, a law

professor, insists, gave us much of what
we take for granted today in the theatre:
‘naturalistic’ acting, and, as Dr Johnson
remarked, the very idea of the business of
acting as a profession. Hence this book’s
portentous title. Its curtain raiser trumpets
themes of fame, personality, interiority and
cultural self-knowledge, but regrettably
Poser’s main show offers a trawl through
anecdotes in a style and structure more
wooden than the monopedal comic actor
Sam Foote’s peg leg. GETTY IMAGES

Naturalism in acting, it is often said,

originated in this era. But it’s a subject as
large as it’s slippery. There is limited source
material on what the style was really like,
and there is no obvious chain of apostol-
ic delegation to be found, as Poser asserts,
from Garrick through to Stanislavski, let
alone to ‘Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino and
Hilary Swank’.
As Lord Fellowes recently remarked,
every generation, no matter how it repines
the passing of old times, believes two
things of itself: that it has worked out
a better way to parent and a better way to
act. That’s always wrong. The point is to
try to work out what might have changed
and when and why. The power and meta-
phorical heft of theatrical art is its eva-
nescence — it exists for that moment and
that audience. Quoting the musical Ham-
ilton or referencing Angelina Jolie in the
body of the text, while showing a suit-
able enthusiasm for the performing arts,
isn’t enough to understand these changes
and that audience. Much better to turn to
the novel, or indeed to the portraiture of
Garrick’s friend Reynolds, or the works
of the French philosophes with which Gar-
rick was familiar, to discuss what might
have been the burgeoning sense of interi-
ority and how it was represented.
Poser evidently loves London and its
42
theatres. He is good on the largely forgot-
ten Actors’ Strike of the 1740s, and on the
important ‘Irishness’ of the British thea-
tre in this period — and on theatre-going
as an experience — where anecdotes pile
up into a sort of theory-of-audience, giv-
ing a greater sense of why riots were not
only tolerated but almost encouraged.
However, he presents no evidence to sup-
port his assertion that these riots were
a symptom of the ‘seething cauldron of class
resentment, even hatred’ in London, and he
may well be wrong: riots began as often as
not in the more expensive seats.
He is also wrong to impose a modern
sensibility on ‘the habit of young rakes
[invading actresses’ dressing rooms] with
impunity’, which fundamentally misunder-
stands the economy — actual and sexual
— of 18th-century society. The interesting
issue is the way a prurient regard into the
private lives of ‘stars’ was traded in the
economy of fame itself — something very
familiar to the selfie generation but born
exactly of this period.
Poser goes further afield elsewhere, sug-
gesting that the main reason that acting
gained the status of the other liberal arts,
such as painting, music and literature, in
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Augustan London was ‘due to the celebrity
of Garrick and a few others’. That is highly
questionable. It took another two genera-
tions for an actor to be knighted; and the
term ‘celebrity’ was unknown to Garrick or
his famous friends.
And minor errors abound. Susannah Cib-
ber did not face an ‘adultery lawsuit’ per se
from Theophilus Cibber; he sued her lover,
as was standard. ‘Rule Britannia’ was written
for a theatrical masque, as part of Thomas
Arne’s Alfred; Rosaline is an offstage char-
acter in Romeo and Juliet; and Cannons, not
Cannon, Park, is almost certainly not where
Foote lost his leg, which in any event is some
60 miles from London, not 12. He probably
lost his left leg, not his right.
Our guide to the past looks unsteady on
his raked stage. Somewhere buried under
the palimpsest of half-recorded perfor-
mance memories, somewhere under the
larrikin story of the boy from Dr John-
son’s school in Lichfield and the first mod-
ern metropolis, just as it begins a discussion
with itself about personality and about
what is funny and true and honest, can be
found the genesis of modern acting and
the ongoing importance of modern thea-
tre. But not here.
The reinvention
of a nation
Bill Emmott
Japan Story: In Search of
a Nation, 1850 to the Present
by Christopher Harding
Allen Lane, £25, pp. 504
When Japan hosts the Rugby Union World
Cup next year, and still more so the sum-
mer Olympics in 2020, all eyes will be on its
omotenashi (hospitality), perhaps its tech-
nology, certainly its efficiency, but there
will be little thought of symbolism. Not so
for the 1964 Tokyo games, when the Olym-
pic flame was carried up its last 160 steps
by a 19-year-old named Yoshinori Sakai,
who had been born, near Hiroshima, on
the day the atomic bomb was dropped.
‘Atom Boy’ bore twin messages: that
Japan had been a victim of an unbeliev-
able horror; and that it was now reborn as
a modern, democratic state.
The running theme of Christopher
Harding’s elegantly written and compel-
ling history of Japan’s past century and a
half is that of competing narratives, which
bring with them a sense of a country bat-
tling to forge, or perhaps preserve, its iden-
tity as it emerged from a two-century-long
period of prosperous, peaceful but tech-
nologically backward isolation. A cultural
historian at the University of Edinburgh,
Harding traces these stories not just in
events and in politics, but in poems, novels,
films, philosophy and even psychotherapy.
As such, his focus is largely on those who
were critical of, or alienated by, the course
the country was taking at various times. This
brings in some familiar characters, such as
the quixotic novelist-patriot Yukio Mishi-
ma, who in 1970 staged a futile and pathet-
ic coup d’etat which ended in his ritual,
stomach-cutting suicide. There are also col-
ourful protestors and malcontents whose
names have been largely forgotten, includ-
ing a teacher, Hideko Kageyama, known
as ‘Japan’s Joan of Arc’, who in 1885
became the first woman in modern Japan
to be imprisoned for political activism when
caught carrying explosives to Nagasaki for a
revolutionary movement.
We also, however, meet other, more
refreshing souls, such as the pair Harding
frames the book with: Heisaku Kosawa,
who from the 1920s onwards blended Bud-
dhism with Freudian psychotherapy; and
the novelist Harumi Setouchi, who became
the elderly Kosawa’s patient in the 1960s,
and now lives as a Buddhist nun under the
name of Jakucho Setouchi.
The main narratives that Harding
believes were in competition during the
turbulent 20th century were those of Japan
as Asia’s first successful moderniser, able
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Tristan
for Chris and Sylvia
O Corbière, poet of heart confused with beer,
Windy-paws patting at the solid houses
Where we lie comfortably with our spouses,
Insomniac tyrant of the hypnosphere
Teasing us with unfathomable jokes,
The flavours of forgotten turns of phrase,
Fuzzy but never wuzzy, you amaze
Us cyclists with your backward-turning spokes.
Forsaken Mormon, seaman up the creek
In Paris, booby, hatch’d beside the Seine,
And flying nowhere, following your beak
Into the sinful villages of the plain,
Inspire us with your arbitrary pique,
Inflate us with the gusts of your disdain.
— Alistair Elliot (1932–2018)
to take on the West at its own games, and For example, although Harding says
of Japan as a special, superior place, excep- quite a lot about religion’s role during
tional since time immemorial. He sees the Japan’s early emergence into the world
country as one that was buffeted by huge during the late 19th and early 20th centu-
social, economic and political changes, and ries, in the postwar period he finds space
which often responded by reaching back, to include only one of the country’s ‘new
religions’. This was the small Aum Shinri-
Japan’s 70,000 centenarians kyo doomsday sect which in 1995 killed
12 people on the Tokyo underground using
are a new but central part of the sarin nerve gas and whose leader, Shoko
modern nation’s identity Asahara, was finally executed in July.
This was certainly a noteworthy and
sometimes through invented traditions, for horrifying event, but to cite it in isolation
anchors of Japaneseness (such as the Shinto is a bit like describing modern American
religion and the revived role of the emper- religion just by reference to Kool-Aid and
or) so as to hold the nation fast. the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. The far big-
This approach, of using culture and psy- ger and politically influential Soka Gak-
chology as the backdrop for history and kai doesn’t even merit a mention in Japan
chronology, ends up being a lot stronger Story, despite having millions of adher-
on answering ‘why?’, ‘when?’ and ‘where?’ ents and, through its allied political party
than ‘how?’. There is much fine detail of Komeito, forming a key part of the current
what happened and what was said and writ- governing coalition.
ten about it, but too little analytical expla- National identity is a slippery idea, as
nation or comparative context from other we see in every attempt to pin down Brit-
countries or times. ishness, Frenchness or indeed Japanese-
On the book jacket is an effusive quote ness. But it is built, as Harding says, out of
from Neil MacGregor, which makes per- the stories we tell about ourselves. In 2020,
fect sense once the reader sees that Japan when the great festival of youth and sport-
Story closely resembles the former Brit- ing prowess comes back to Tokyo after 56
ish Museum director’s great shows, wheth- years, the biggest untold story will be that
er on Germany or the history of the world of ageing. How fitting it would be if this
in 100 objects. It is an often intriguing and time the Olympic flame were to be carried
thought-provoking patchwork, connected by one of Japan’s 70,000 centenarians, a
by a clear narrative, but at times notable for new but central part of modern Japan’s
what it misses out and at risk of feeling shal- identity. Perhaps the steps to the urn could
low on some issues. be replaced by an escalator.
43
BOOKS & ARTS
Pirates on parade
Horatio Clare explores the fact – and fiction – of piracy
vast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation
A
founded on piracy (the privateer Sir
Francis Drake swelled the excheq-
uer by raiding the Spanish, who were in no
doubt that he was a pirate), it is appropri-
ate that Britain should give the international
archetype of the pirate his language.
The language of the Victoria & Albert’s
exhibition A Pirate’s Life for Me at the
Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is
a banquet of humour and doggerel. Wheth-
er you arrive a slipperslopper sea-cook,
reeking of Havanas, or pushing treasures
in a pram, you will stare at walls, speak in
tongues and smile.
These master (and mistress) mariners of
yore have their grappling hooks deep in the
psyche of maritime nations. In their infan-
cies, modern states needed pirates. The
Barbarossa brothers scourged the Mediter-
ranean from a base on the North African
littoral. Their regency of Algiers became
the first corsair state until Suleiman the
Magnificent made Khidr Barbarossa grand
admiral of the Ottoman fleet. French cor-
sairs — licensed privateers — inflict-
ed magnificent damage on rival nations,
retarding British trade after the Glorious
Revolution; French kings received a third
of the booty.
You find few such stories here. Instead,
parrots, ships’ dogs, cats and monkeys,
swords and antique firearms. This is what
kids love, as well as the lawlessness and the
silly words. And as we grow, it sticks. I hon-
our the Jolly Roger’s signifieds: fun, freedom
and mischief. Actual pirates, who I have also
encountered on my travels, are different.
‘We heard screaming,’ a sailor said, in
the Bay of Suez, as we were ferried off our
container ships to land and safety. Recent-
ly, before armed guards were routine on
vessels in the Red Sea, pirates fired from
skiffs at ships’ bridges with assault rifles and
44
ARTS SPECIAL
RPGs — impoverished tactics compared
with those of Blackbeard and John Roberts,
whose mere appearance was often enough
to win. ‘We heard them on the radio, scream-
ing,’ the seafarer repeated. His ship was
within electronic earshot. The screamers, the
crew, might easily have been his shipmates.
The shooters were not the wolfish freemen
of the age of sail but ex-fishermen, almost
certainly fathers and family men, their
options annihilated by war, state collapse
and the plunder of fishing grounds by fleets
hailing from happier lands. As the film Cap-
tain Phillips documents, what is worse than
piracy, now, are the conditions that create it.
‘Slash bang wallop! Waving a sword and
shooting is a good way of getting people to
The greatest pirate ever was Ching
Shih. Widowed, she took over and
expanded her husband’s fleet
listen to you, but what really impresses peo-
ple is keeping your gun nice and shiny…’
cautions a notice in the V&A. My inner
mother smiled. Dirt is a worthy foe.
The show begins in a gorgeous space: low
tables, puzzles, treasure maps, clues. Blue and
mauve and parrot-hung, Balthazar’s Bazar is
open from 10 a.m, no licensee in sight, serv-
ing minors. Behind the bar there’s a secret
passage. It teases you into its second space, a
lovely dock, where a Lego schooner tilts and
rides. One Golden Hind-like beauty is slyly
augmented with a wind turbine astern the
main mast, ensuring parents pay attention.
But where does the archetypal pirate
actually come from?
Sure, Brits (and Belgians: take a bow,
Hergé, Red Rackham, Captain Haddock
and your translators and publishers, Michael
Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper) gave
him his tongue.
But whence our popinjay’s colours? His
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
loon pants? His earrings, bee-eater gold?
His sash of vermillion, shining like sillion?
Where have you seen Jack Sparrow
before? From the train, beside the tracks. In
the trailer park; in the lay-bys and the horse-
drawn caravans of old children’s books. He
is a Roma gypsy, or ‘land-pirate’ as they were
called in the 17th century.
The ‘pyrate’ was introduced to the world
by ‘Captain Charles Johnson’, who may
have been Daniel Defoe, in his A General
History of the Robberies and Murders of the
Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724.
This was the book that first press-ganged
readers into knowledge of Blackbeard,
Israel Hands and Calico Jack. Also of Anne
Bonny and Mary Read, which left read-
ers, unlike the curators of this exhibition,
in no doubt as to the wonder and ferocity
of female pirates. R.L. Stevenson and J.M.
Barrie devoured their copies and scribbled
out their own fleets.
But mental pictures did not sate mass
markets. So all hail Howard Pyle, admiral of
American illustration, whose glowing grape-
shot of sketches, paintings and portraits tore
through the printed media of 1880s Ameri-
ca, co-opting the Roma into service as west-
ern culture’s most glamorous villain. The
post-impressionist pirate Van Gogh was
a fan of Pyle’s work writing: ‘He strikes me
dumb with admiration.’
Pyle’s America knew pirates. The US
navy was formed in response to horrendous
tribute and ransom demands from the Bar-
bary states. The minister to France, Thomas
Jefferson, sanctioned annual million-dollar
payoffs from 1786 (each representing 10 per
cent of Federal revenue in 1800). As presi-
dent, Jefferson halted payments in 1801. Two
Barbary wars later, British and Dutch ships
supported victorious American squadrons,
bombarding Algiers in 1816.
Seawolves, rovers and marooners: they

PETER NEWARK PICTURES / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
have shaped the ways we picture and name
ourselves, from Tiny Rowland to Red Adair.
The attractions of pirate life were mul-
tiple. Ships were not over-crewed, so con-
ditions were better than in the navy;
management structures resembled a coop-
erative (give or take a lunatic captain); but
your chances of ending up with a parrot, a
lover and a chest of doubloons were similar
to an author’s of winning the Booker.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The greatest pirate who ever lived was
Ching Shih. Widowed, she took over and
expanded her husband’s fleet. With more
than 1,500 ships she controlled more of
the South China sea than the PRC does
now. She beat the Chinese, British and
Portuguese navies, was offered peace in
1810, married her first mate and retired.
That she is invisible, and that her sea-sis-
ters are insignificant presences in the V&A
‘He strikes me dumb
with admiration.’
Van Gogh on
Howard Pyle’s pirate
illustrations
exhibition, is an ugly gap in its smile.
Few of our children will become pirates,
hopefully, but there is much that they can
learn from sea-gypsies. Pirates prized hon-
our, statutes (their ‘articles’), courage,
panache and innovation. One feels sure that
Britannia could find work for them now.
A Pirate’s Life for Me is at the V&A
Museum of Childhood until 22 April 2019.
45
BOOKS & ARTS
‘The Laden Table’, c.1908, by Édouard Vuillard
Exhibitions
All about his mother
Laura Gascoigne
Maman: Vuillard & Madame
Vuillard
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham,
until 20 January 2019
Fin-de-siècle Paris was not just the art capital
of the world, it was also the fashion capital.
In 1901, 300,000 Parisians were employed in
the rag trade, and one of them was Édouard
Vuillard’s mother.
Stout, sensible and self-sufficient, Mme
Marie Vuillard was no Mimi out of La
Bohème, embroidering flowers in a draughty
garret. She was the independent patronne of
a dressmaking atelier — more of a couture
flat, admittedly, than a couture house, oper-
ating out of rented apartments in the gar-
46
ment district. Before being left a widow with
three children, she had prudently invested
in a small business producing dresses and
made-to-measure corsets for a fashion-con-
scious petit bourgeois clientele. With her
seamstress mother and daughter Marie —
coincidentally known as Mimi — among her
employees, Mme Vuillard was a multitask-
We recognise the figure of Maman,
sewing, cooking, cleaning: a domestic
goddess worshipped by her son
ing materfamilias, managing the workshop
and the household while supporting her son
Édouard in his artistic ambitions.
Édouard returned the favour by featur-
ing his mother in more than 500 paintings,
of which a small selection is on show at Bir-
mingham’s Barber Institute in a charming
exhibition marking the 150th anniversary
of his birth. Centring on the Barber’s own
‘Madame Vuillard Arranging her Hair’
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
© TATE IMAGES
(1900), these intimate pictures are a radi-
cal departure from the usual French fin-de-
siècle celebrations of woman as love object,
let alone sex object. They’re a celebration of
‘her indoors’ from a filial perspective: images
of female domestic industry and the atmos-
phere in which it was wrapped — an atmos-
phere Vuillard had breathed since childhood.
He was still living at home, aged 61, when
his mother died in 1928. The homes changed
as one small rented flat was exchanged for
another but the domestic routines continued
uninterrupted, the women sewing around
the dining-room table while the man of the
house painted in his ‘bedroom studio’. We
recognise the same pieces of furniture —
the dining table, straight-backed chairs and
large armoire, its mirror complicating the
fiddly perspectives of the cramped spaces.
Above all, we recognise the figure of
Maman, sewing, cooking, cleaning, dishing
out parental advice, tending the sick — if not
centre stage, then on the periphery of vision,
a comforting presence glimpsed through
doorways, part patronne, part skivvy;
a domestic goddess worshipped by her son.
With their keyhole views of women in
confined spaces, Vuillard’s small interiors
feel closer to the Dutch Golden Age than
to French post-impressionism, but unlike
the patterned surfaces in Dutch paint-
ings — the tiles and rugs — his patterning
is pretty much wall-to-wall. Between the
wallpaper, carpets, upholstery and fabrics
worn by his women there is barely a chink.
Everything feels wrapped in a familial fug.
More air is let into lithographs such as ‘The
Cook’ (1899), a proto-kitchen-sink image
of his mother drying up; the paintings, by
comparison, are thick with smudges repli-
cating the muzziness of memory. You have
to get in close to unlock the puzzle and even
then you can’t always tell what’s what. The
‘Two Seamstresses in the Workroom’ (1893)
are as well camouflaged as tropical fish on
a coral reef.
There’s nothing voyeuristic about these
images. Vuillard is an insider, not a voyeur;
his women are almost part of the furniture.
A revealing entry in his journal records his
Vuillard was still living at
home, aged 61, when his
mother died in 1928
reaction on waking to find his mother among
the familiar furnishings of his bedroom: ‘In
the middle of all these objects I was aston-
ished to see Maman enter in a blue peignoir
with white stripes. The arrival of Maman was
surprising — a living person.’
Some pictures hint at stories. ‘The Chat’
(1893), which shows his sister in her wedding
dress blushing into her corsage as Maman
delivers the dreaded last-minute sex talk,
could be a scene from one of the suffocat-
ing symbolist dramas for which Vuillard was
designing sets at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.
The soon-to-be marital bed leering in the
background plays as important a role as the
two figures. Beds take centre stage in other
pictures: a sickbed in ‘The Lullaby’ (1894), in
which Maman watches over a feverish Mimi;
a deathbed in ‘Woman near Bed’ (c.1893),
where she keeps vigil over a hump of bed-
ding that possibly conceals her dying mother.
In the late 1890s Vuillard acquired
a hand-held Kodak. A few of the hundreds
of photographs he took of his mother —
who printed the photos from negatives in
a soup bowl — are in the show. In the last
one, taken in the year of her death, she is
towelling her feet after a bath. The pose
could be from a drawing by Degas, except
that the model is 89 and bald, her shrunk-
en body dwarfed by the high ceiling of the
spacious apartment her successful son can
now afford. As an image, it is too intimiste
for comfort. Vuillard didn’t paint it, but only
eight years earlier he confessed to his first
biographer: ‘Maman, c’est ma muse.’
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Music
Britten’s Blackadder
moment
Richard Bratby
RLPO & NDR Radiophilharmonie/
Manze
Liverpool Cathedral
Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra/Karabits
Lighthouse, Poole
‘What passing-bells for these who die as cat-
tle?’ We’ve heard a lot, lately, of the knell
that tolls through the opening bars of Ben-
jamin Britten’s War Requiem, and at Liver-
pool’s Anglican cathedral it was played on
actual church bells. The Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic Orchestra’s percussionist
Graham Johns has had a set specially cast,
and as he struck them video screens relayed
the moment all the way down the cathedral’s
length. The orchestra was a one-off, assem-
bled half-and-half from the RLPO and the
NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover (the
conductor Andrew Manze holds positions in
both cities), and this was a major civic occa-
sion, attended by gold chains of all sizes and
preceded by speeches from city worthies.
In truth, though, you could whistle ‘The
Frog Chorus’ in Liverpool Cathedral and it’d
still inspire awe. Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense
structure doesn’t so much echo the music per-
formed within it (though that echo is as vast as
everything else) as absorb and transfigure it.
Stand on the corner of Gambier Terrace and
Upper Duke Street and the cathedral erupts
from the sandstone gorge of St James’s Cem-
etery as if the rock itself is thrusting towards
heaven. Construction started in 1904 when
Liverpool was the second port of the Empire.
By the time it was finished, the city had been
reduced to the butt of glib jokes. Yet there it
stands, this stupendous physical affirmation of
faith and endurance: perhaps the last building
in European history to be started in the full
knowledge that it would take more than one
lifetime to complete.
Can Britten really measure up against
that sort of conviction? Manze and his com-
bined Anglo-German forces solved the prac-
tical problems of performing in the cathedral
as well as I’ve ever heard. Discreet electron-
ic enhancement never really imposed itself
between performers and audience and Manze
even managed to keep the combined Hanno-
ver and Liverpool boys’ choirs together with
the orchestra over a distance of what looked
like about 50 metres. As for the interpretation:
well, the cathedral enforces its own terms, and
soloists Benjamin Appl and Ed Lyon com-
pensated, understandably enough, with fierce
over-articulation. At the moments (such as
the first climax of the ‘Libera Me’) where the
music seems to demand furious abandon, you
felt Manze tugging back on the reins — acous-
tic chaos being the only alternative.
Against that was the intense concentra-
tion of the orchestral sound, the fearless,
powerfully characterised solo playing of the
subsidiary chamber ensemble (five Liver-
pudlians, seven Hanoverians) and some of
the warmest, most beautifully controlled
singing I’ve heard in four decades of listen-
ing to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
chorus. Everyone present rose to the level
of the occasion. The soprano soloist Susanne
Bernhard sang from the pulpit, and when
her voice wheeled, glowing, over the whole
ensemble you could believe you were listen-
ing to a masterpiece.
You’re not, though — are you? I honestly
can’t decide about the War Requiem. ‘Noth-
ing can please many, and please long, but just
representations of general nature’: sure, and
people certainly respond to the piece. There
must have been some 2,000 audience mem-
bers on their feet at the end of this perfor-
mance. But still, there’s that feeling of being
lectured by a firm but faintly disapproving
emotional manipulator — and that the con-
clusion towards which we’re corralled by
all those portentous trumpets and artfully
framed chunks of Wilfred Owen is as pre-
scribed as any primary-school project. It’s
become classical music’s answer to Blackad-
der Goes Forth, simultaneously unchallenge-
able and troublingly simplistic.
Other acts of musical commemoration are
available, and to be fair the classical music
world has made some effort to find different
perspectives. The BBC Philharmonic is play-
ing Musik für Orchester by Rudi Stephan
(who died in the war), Andrew Davies has
recorded Bliss’s Morning Heroes — a pro-
to-war requiem from 1930 whose haunted
search for meaning in loss feels as sincere as
Britten feels contrived — and last year The
Spectator’s Alexandra Coghlan surveyed
recordings of Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis
pacem for Radio 3.
In Poole, where the Bournemouth Sym-
phony Orchestra’s Ukrainian chief con-
ductor Kirill Karabits saw his own country
invaded not in 1914 but in 2014, they’ve
commissioned a song cycle from Mark-
Anthony Turnage. Testament sets Ukrainian
poets to music of such transparent diatonic
clarity that you might not at first realise that
it was by Turnage. He’s woven Ukrainian
folk songs into the score: pairs of woodwinds
lament in close harmony and a solo flute
trails birdsong across the eloquent vocal
lines, sung with understated expression and
wine-dark tone by Natalya Romaniw.
The final song deals harrowingly with
recent events, and tastes all the more bitter
for being so lucid, and so obviously without
any musical agenda other than compassion.
The BSO, whose strings were sombre, sin-
ewy and utterly Slavic, played Testament as
if it were as much of a classic as the Britten.
Give it time.
47
 BOOKS & ARTS
ROCKSTAR GAMES
Games without frontiers: a scene from Red Dead Redemption 2
Gaming
The good, the bad
and the ugly
Nick Hilton
Red Dead Redemption 2
Rock Star Games
Every era has its western. For 30 years,
from The Big Trail through to The Search-
ers, John Wayne reigned supreme across
American cinema, a dispenser of justice
forged on the battlefields of the Civil War.
Then, from the 1960s, John Ford’s foun-
dations were mixed with Italian influenc-
es to create the brutal anti-heroes of the
spaghetti westerns. After that, the western
began to feel old-fashioned, and started to
be lampooned in films such as Blazing Sad-
dles and Three Amigos for its reliance on
archetype and cliché, before, at the close of
the century, Cormac McCarthy reinvented
it as something sparse, literary and realistic.
And now, this era’s western takes that one
step further.
Red Dead Redemption 2, the eagerly
anticipated sequel to Rockstar Games’s
48
groundbreaking 2010 open-world western
video game, has been described as ‘unprec-
edented’, ‘landmark’ and ‘a masterpiece’.
It has been greeted with the sort of rev-
erent praise usually reserved for the lofti-
est of high culture, despite being marketed
almost exclusively to teenage boys with £50
to burn. The game revels in the kitschiest
of North American landscapes, the per-
fect metaphor for the poetic mundanity of
You face the choice of whether to beat
to death, strangle or free a man you’ve
captured (I beat him to death)
death. In short, it is a good game that knows
it’s a good game.
But it’s also a game of such attritional
violence as to stop those not totally inured
in their tracks. This is the western as envis-
aged by McCarthy, not Ford. Within the
first stretch of gameplay you’ll dispatch a
dozen combatants with pistol and rifle, loot
corpses, lasso and hog-tie fleeing enemies
and, in a particularly gruesome sequence,
face the choice of whether to beat to death,
strangle or free a man you’ve captured. (I
opted to beat him to death.) At one point
you are encouraged to fillet a deer in the
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
last throes of death, and the guttural nois-
es it made as it departed were sufficiently
harrowing that my dog (my genuine, on-
the-sofa lurcher, not the canine compan-
ion the game gives you in order further
to divest you of any need for interactions
outside the game) started barking at the
screen. It is a gameworld in which cruelty
is commonplace.
Right and wrong, good and evil; for all
the gun-slinging, blood-soaked violence of
the western, the moral poles have remained
consistent. If the hero’s family has been
murdered, his vengeance is justified. If
the hero is defending an underclass from
marauders, his acts of butchery are excus-
able. If the hero is fighting a man who has
murdered a child in the opening scene, then
he’s allowed to choke him with a harmoni-
ca. Those are the rules.
Our hero here — by no means the Man
with No Name — is Arthur Morgan, a
simmering avatar of masculine disaffec-
tion. When Clint Eastwood was honoured
with a lifetime achievement award by the
American Film Institute, he remarked that
his character in the Dollars Trilogy ‘had no
name, so we could fill in our own’. Morgan
is no such cipher. He is a gruntingly verbose
outlaw with a personality so far from my
own neuroticism that he remained a stran-
ger, even when I repeatedly switched from
the third-person perspective, which lingers
behind Morgan, to the first-person, where
all that’s present in your field of vision are
his gnarled hands, the loop of a lasso, or the
glint of a revolver. And yet when I’m hit-
ting that O button and Morgan’s (my) fist
is connecting with teeth, causing the con-
troller to shudder with excitement, the dis-
tance evaporates.
What can the world of Red Dead
Redemption offer that is new, other than
the chance to act as the settler of scores,
the dispenser of rough justice? It emerges
back into the pop-cultural zeitgeist hot on
the heels of HBO’s big-budget adaptation
of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, where a
billion-dollar theme park based on the Wild
West gives tourists the chance to rape and
murder their way through a horde of almost
sentient robots. The show sets up an ethi-
cal question — is violence against almost
sentient robots really violence — but the
moral ambiguity is quickly undermined by
revelations about the development of AI.
It is also a romping, bloody yarn. The cake
is had and eaten as we are invited to sym-
pathise with the robots while at the same
time revelling in the carnage and the sight
of sexy, naked replicants.
‘Beyond superb!
The performances,
the choice of
repertoire, the
venues... all perfect
in my opinion!’
Martin Randall Festival participant in 2017
Photo: Gabrieli, performing at ‘Music
in the Cotswolds’ 2018, ©Bill Knight.
Contact us:
+44 (0)20 8742 3355
martinrandall.com/festivals
ATOL 3622 ABTA Y6050 AITO 5085
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The stray figures that populate the
world of Red Dead Redemption do not
trouble our sympathy in such ways. Though
the landscapes of the game edge closer to
photorealist facsimiles of the Northwest-
ern United States — and though the game
is considered to be one of the biggest writ-
ing tasks in literary history — passers-by
still recur with the repetitious inscrutabil-
ity that made ‘…but then I took an arrow
to the knee’ one of the internet’s favour-
ite memes. So the player is not much vexed
by the prospect of violence against the
men and women of the American fron-
There is no moral cake to be had here
at all, as I blow a farrier’s head off
just to test my new shotgun
tier, almost universally labelled ‘Stranger’.
There is no moral cake to be had here at all,
as I blow a farrier’s head off just to test my
new shotgun.
The first-person shooter has always
had this question hanging over it, from
Doom and Half-Life through to Halo and
Call of Duty. Is it just a means of letting
off steam? Or is there something unset-
tling about the ease with which we resort
to inhuman violence? Rockstar Games,
which developed Red Dead Redemption,
was also responsible for the Grand Theft
CELEBRATING MUSIC AND PLACE
The J.S. Bach Journey
West Country Choral Festival
Music Along the Danube
Sacred Music in Santiago 26 or 28 September–2 October
The Thomas Tallis Trail
Opera in Southern Sicily
Auto franchise, in which players could
murder prostitutes, waterboard enemies
and pull out their nails if need be. There’s
been no GTA game for the eighth genera-
tion of consoles since the fifth instalment
was published in 2013, and there are no
sequels on the horizon, with the company
focusing on Red Dead Redemption and
a new spy franchise. While GTA was a criti-
cal and commercial triumph, it is hard to
see how it could be published in 2018 with-
out diluting the atopia that game theorist
McKenzie Wark describes as ‘a safe haven
in which to enact the problem of being…
but without the oppressive stakes of one’s
own life on the line’.
Better, then, to add the distance of histo-
ry. Just as a dragon immolating prisoners of
war in Game of Thrones doesn’t hark back
to napalm bombs in Vietnam, so the relent-
less gun violence of Red Dead Redemption
doesn’t carry the weight of the Pittsburgh
shooting. Still, it is unsettling to play a game
where the mechanics focus so much on
bringing it closer to the tedium of real life
— from cleaning saddles to cooking rab-
bits on a campfire — while permitting an
unexamined streak of savagery. So, the real
question posed by the modern western is:
how close can we get to the act of violence
before we get squeamish? And if we never
flinch, what then?
13–19 May 2019
7–11 July 2019
31 August–7 September 2019
2019
1–3 November 2019
5–11 November 2019
49
BOOKS & ARTS
Radio
Sounds of war
Kate Chisholm
Amid all the remembrance, Radio 3 came
up with a simple yet effective way of reflect-
ing on war’s impact. Threaded throughout
the day on Sunday were ‘sonic’ memorials,
three minutes of silence, or rather opportu-
nities to stop and reflect. Not the music of
a requiem mass, or a lonesome bugle, but
the sounds of those places where the worst
battles in recent history — from Antiet-
am in America (during the Civil War) to
Huaihai (between the Kuomintang and
communists in China) via the Somme, Stal-
ingrad and Afghanistan — were played out.
Allan Little introduced each pause in the
day’s schedule, explaining in the barest out-
line what happened, how many were killed,
who was fighting whom, what the place of
desolation looks like now, before we were
left with just the sound of crickets hum-
ming, birds singing, wind blowing through
sun-bleached grass.
In Kent, beneath the white cliffs, the
Battle of Britain is remembered each year,
the first major air battle in any war. The
Last Post faded out as the sound of the
aircraft looming overhead grew louder
and louder. We could picture the men on
The sound of gunshot, as it burst
into my kitchen, assaulted not just the
ears but the stomach
board, trapped in a metal cylinder, deaf-
ened by the noise of the engines, the rattle
of gunfire. Off the coast of Denmark, 8,000
seamen lost their lives in the Battle of Jut-
land, their bodies now at rest at the bot-
tom of the sea along with the 25 ships that
were destroyed. We could hear the barren
loneliness of that bleak coastline; the salt-
laden spray hitting the microphone, the
eerie wailing of the wind like a chorus of
grief. No words were necessary. This was
storytelling through sound alone, evoking
all the emotions that remembrance of war
arouses. In Helmand province, the silence
was punctuated by gunshot, shocking in its
physical impact as it burst into my kitch-
en, assaulting not just the ears but punch-
ing the stomach. The war still goes on in
Afghanistan after 17 years, Little reminded
us. ‘How do you memorialise a war that’s
not yet over?’
On the World Service, Naomi Grimley
was in conversation with 90-year-old Joe
Tydings, a close confidant of John F. Ken-
nedy and his brother Robert. Tydings was
born into the American political aristocracy,
his grandfather sent to Russia to foster rela-
tions with Stalin. As a young man Tydings
joined the Young Democrats, booked JFK
as a speaker and became ‘a big fan’. He
50
worked closely with the future president
on his campaign. ‘My God it was exciting,’
he recalled. ‘He was extraordinarily hand-
some… that great smile… people were fall-
ing over themselves to shake hands.’
Tydings was at the White House when
news that JFK had been shot reached
Washington. Even now, he cannot recall
that day without becoming emotional. ‘It
was hard to believe this could happen to
us, to America,’ he said. ‘It was just so trag-
ic, so tragic for the country.’ When Lyndon
B. Johnson was sworn in as president, all
of us were crying. ‘He shouldn’t have been
sworn in.’
From Truman to Trump (produced by
Bob Howard) was recorded just in time
as Tydings died in October. He visited the
troops in Vietnam as the senator for Mar-
yland. It convinced him that the war was
wrong: little children, he recalled, were
waving the American flag, but none of
‘our people’ could speak Vietnamese. He
worked very closely with Robert Kennedy
and knew him ‘like a twin’. His assassina-
tion was, if anything, ‘more crushing’ than
JFK’s, Tydings said, because Bobby would
have stopped the war in Vietnam much
sooner if he had become president. Nixon
would have been ‘blown away’. Watergate
would never have happened.
We also discovered that Mar-a-Lago
(now owned and presided over by Donald
Trump) was built by Tydings’s grandmoth-
er. ‘It’s not a happy thought,’ says Tydings.
Stranger still was his revelation that Trump
has also taken over the family crest award-
ed to Tydings’s grandfather by the Col-
lege of Heralds after he had served as an
American diplomat at the Potsdam confer-
ence in 1945 alongside President Truman.
The crest now adorns Mar-a-Lago with its
original inscription, ‘Integritas’, changed to
‘Trump’. Friends offered to pay the legal
fees for Tydings to take Trump to court,
but he refused. ‘Don’t get in a to-do with
a skunk.’
There’s much to deplore about the
money being spent on the new BBC app,
BBC Sounds, because it can only mean that
vital money is being taken away from pro-
duction, especially of plays, the vital blood
of BBC radio. But it’s proving to be a real-
ly useful tool for navigating the burgeon-
ing audio scene as podcasts compete with
broadcast programmes for our attention. By
chance I caught sight of a replay of a drama
first broadcast in 1999, replayed on 4 Extra
and now available on the Sounds website.
Encore by Nan Woodhouse is a clas-
sic two-hander starring Timothy West and
Julia McKenzie as a couple trying to get
together again after five years of separa-
tion. They’re also ageing actors in need of
a good part. Why not devise their own two-
hander? West and McKenzie give a master-
class in microphone acting, razor-sharp and
timed to perfection.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Painting
Face time
Martin Gayford
Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits
National Gallery, until 10 February 2019
You can, perhaps, glimpse Lorenzo Lotto
himself in the National Gallery’s marvel-
lous exhibition, Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits. At
the base of an altarpiece from 1541 a gag-
gle of paupers stretch their arms up in hopes
of receiving the charity being handed out
by Dominican friars above. One of these, a
bearded, red-robed man, is supposed to be
a self-portrait.
If that is the case, it was a characteristic
place to put himself. Lotto (1480/1–1556/7)
was an intensely pious man and, in later life,
poverty-stricken. But the most unusual point
about this picture is that for the rest of the
crowd of indigents he made studies from life
of genuine poor people (and noted the model-
ling fee he paid them in his book of accounts).
Few other Italian Renaissance artists would
have striven so hard for verisimilitude.
Like Caravaggio more than half a cen-
tury later, Lotto seems to have been an artist
who preferred to work as much as possible
from life. The results he got could be star-
tlingly close to photography. His portrait
of ‘Bishop Bernardo de’ Rossi’ (1505) (see
p31) is an amazingly exact account of the fall
of light across this man’s soft features, deli-
cately picking up each fold of skin, the moles
along the line of his chin and the indentation
at the point of his nose.
Lotto, though erratic, was at his best a
truly great painter of human individuals. But
he also painted portraits not just of people
but of things. The untidy desk in the double
portrait of ‘Giovanni Agostino della Torre
and his son, Niccolo’ is a careful depiction of
real bureaucratic clutter, down to the white
inkstand spattered with drops of black.
Time and again Lotto focuses sharply on
a single item such as this humble office uten-
sil or one of the Anatolian rugs he painted
so memorably that they’ve been given the
name ‘Lotto’ carpets. One of these, and sev-
eral other oddments including a 16th-centu-
ry dress, are included here for purposes of
comparison.
However, he was not simply a realist. In his
work there was a strange crossover between
the human and the holy, with the result that
several religious paintings pop up unexpect-
edly in this exhibition. In the first room there
is a beautiful early altarpiece from 1506 show-
ing ‘The Virgin in Glory with Saints Anthony
Abbot and Louis of Toulouse’. But the Mary
in this altarpiece is not the standard represen-
tation, but stolid and middle-aged with a faint-
ly disapproving air.
Scholars argue that this is a portrait of
Caterina Cornaro, a Venetian woman who
 ‘Portrait of a

© COMUNE DI MILANO, TUTTI I DIRITTI RISERVATI / PHOTO: SAPORETTI 2001

Young Man
with a Book’,
c.1524–6, by
Lorenzo Lotto

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

© BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD

Brought to book
Ed West
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms:
Art, Word, War
British Library, until 19 February 2019

‘The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea

drives us to the barbarians; between these
two means of death we are either drowned
or killed.’ So wrote the British monk Gild-
as in his 6th-century proto-polemic On the
Ruin of Britain, recording the arrival of the
hated ‘Germans’ to the island. Bad news for
the Britons, but fantastic for visitors to the
British Library, now running perhaps the
most significant exhibition of recent times,
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
Historians dislike the term ‘Dark Ages’,
but by any measurement western Europe
saw a collapse in living standards, literacy,
population, trade and significant cultural
output from 500 ad. Yet that only makes the
flame that appeared all the more striking,
and the exquisite art so inspiring.
The first thing that greets you is a small
figurine called ‘Spong Man’, dating to the 6th
century and unearthed at a pagan burial site

The next time these great treasures are

reunited we’ll all be as obscure as the
Egberts and Ethelwulfs of the world
in Norfolk. Carved on to the lid of an urn, he
looks like a middle-aged man sat down in his
chair contemplating his worries. Spong Man
represents a quite mysterious, distant world
and the page only lights up with the arrival of
Christianity from 597, which brought with it
the written word and institutionalised learn-
ing. It was in far-off Northumbria where this
culture burned brightest, King Oswald bring-
ing over Irish churchmen to Christianise
the kingdom, with the priory at Lindisfarne
founded by St Aidan; the gorgeous Lindis-
farne Gospels was one result.
Nearby Monkwearmouth-Jarrow monas-
tery gave us Bede and his Ecclesiastical His-
tory of the English People, completed in 731.
Remarkably these items can now be viewed
in the same room alongside the Codex Ami-
atinus, an absolutely gigantic bible made at
Jarrow but taken to Rome as a gift in 716 by
St Ceolfrith, an enormous undertaking that
killed him. The oldest surviving bible in Latin,
it later ended up in Florence although its ori-
gins were by now forgotten. Indeed, in the
frontispiece the dedication to ‘Ceolfrith of the
English’ was erased and replaced with ‘Peter
of the Lombards’, and the great act of plagia-
rism was uncovered only in modern times. Just
a metre or so away is the St Cuthbert Gospel,
found in the saint’s coffin and the oldest west-
ern European book still in one piece.
This exhibition contains more words
52
King David with his musicians: a page from the
Vespasian Psalter, 8th century
than war, but then the Anglo-Saxons, along the far east today with slogans like ‘Ham-
with the Irish, had perhaps the most exten- burger friend’.
sive vernacular literature of the early medi- A slightly tedious idea that has followed
eval era. And yet the metalwork is also coverage of this exhibition is that it puts paid
captivating. The serpentine Sutton Hoo belt to those stupid Brexiteers and their notions
buckle and the pectoral cross from the Staf- of Anglo-Saxon exclusivity. It’s a straw man
fordshire Hoard must have been intensely no one serious has suggested, certainly not
prized once. the archaic English themselves. They called
The Hoard dates from the 7th centu- the Germans ‘the Saxons overseas’ in recog-
ry, perhaps to the period of Mercia’s still- nition of their kinship, and felt a strong con-
pagan king Penda, who killed Oswald in nection to Rome, which had its own Schola
battle. Within a few decades the Midlands Saxonum, from about 700. Indeed, so inti-
kingdom was ascendant, a time of growing mately did Anglo-Saxons feel part of a wider
Frankish influence as Europe’s collapsed Christian world that they invented a word
trading routes began to open up. King Offa for it — ‘Kristintumr’, or Christendom.
was a contemporary of Charlemagne, and The story culminates with West Saxon
numerous works such as the Utrecht Psalter dominance, and that most famous of early
reflect growing Frankish-Anglo-Saxon col- Englishmen, Alfred the Great. As a child
laboration, the genesis of a long love-hate Alfred had been taken to Rome with his
relationship. The tiny Mercian coins also father and he became a scholar-king; even
show an increased awareness of the inher- the gorgeous Alfred Jewel, found in Somer-
itance of Rome, one displaying Offa’s wife set in 1693, is now thought to be for pointing
in the old imperial style. Another coin has at text. After Alfred had saved Wessex from
Offa Rex and ‘There is no God but Allah’ in Viking conquest, England was united under
Arabic, which would have been as meaning- his grandson Athelstan, a largely forgotten
less to Mercians as English T-shirts sold in leader who was also an obsessive bibliophile.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
He is shown here in the oldest image of an
English king, holding a book.
There is so much to see here — I haven’t
even mentioned Beowulf — and the British
Library’s pitch that this is a ‘once in a genera-
tion’ exhibition seems absurdly modest. The
next time these great treasures are reunited
we’ll all be as obscure as the Egberts and
Ethelwulfs of the world, alas; but perhaps
that is all just Anglo-Saxon understatement.
Television
Monkey business
James Walton
The opening episode of BBC1’s Dynasties
— the new Attenborough-fronted series
from the Natural History Unit — intro-
duced us to ‘a territory ruled by a strong and
determined leader: an alpha male known
as David’. Despite what you might think,
though, this wasn’t a reference to the Nat-
ural History Unit itself, but to a troop of
chimps in Senegal, whose power struggles
unfolded on Sunday in an almost Shake-
spearean way.
As ever, Sir David started by demonstrat-
ing that he can still handle a spot of location
shooting, in this case bellowing a few lines
from a jeep speeding across the African
savannah. But after that, he was again con-
tent simply to supply an authoritative voice-
over and the occasional joke.
When we joined the chimp troop, the
simian David’s leadership was already under
attack from two whippersnappers called
Luther and Jumpkin. The threat was serious
enough for David’s close-ups to show him
looking alternately worried and calculating;
and for him to form an alliance with an older
male by grooming him with affecting ten-
derness. (‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch
yours,’ the non-simian David duly chuck-
led.) This initially seemed to work — until
David was so badly beaten up by his rivals
that the following morning he appeared to
be dead. Fortunately, in perhaps the pro-
gramme’s most memorable moment, and
certainly its most unashamedly theatrical,
we then saw him twitch a toe, open an eye,
drag himself to his feet and set off to reclaim
his kingdom.
He succeeded too — so much so that
Luther was soon begging for a forgive-
ness he never received: at which point you
half-expected him to be offered the chimp
equivalent of a bottle of whisky and a pearl-
handled revolver. Before long, David’s re-
established status meant that the females
were flashing their swollen privates at him
just like in the old days. Even so, he decided
that he needed more alliances if he was to
stay on top.
Needless to say, all this made for a spectac-
ular watch. Yet, it was possibly just as well that
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
David Attenborough did sound so authori-
tative — and was David Attenborough —
because now and again the heretical thought
occurred that if Dynasties had been on Chan-
nel 5, with an actor narrating, you might have
wondered about its reliability. (Not since
Walking with Dinosaurs have I spent so much
time inwardly shouting ‘But how do you
know?’ at the screen.) Was it definitely true,
for example, that after his post-beating return
David deliberately hid from the troop how
wounded he was and ended up ‘fooling them
all’? For that matter, wasn’t the whole narra-
tive a bit too suspiciously shapely?
Happily, in the meantime, the David-
related double entendres continued,
reaching a climax in the making-of-the-pro-
gramme section at the end. ‘David is very,
very charismatic. He reminds me of Marlon
Brando,’ said a camera operator — while,
according to a scientist of chimp behaviour,
‘David has been alpha for almost double
[the time] we’ve seen with other alphas. He’s
been challenged a few times but he’s been
able to hang on.’
Surprisingly — or maybe not — some of
David’s tactics were much the same as those
we saw in Inside the Foreign Office (BBC2,
Thursday), where the permanent under-sec-
retary Sir Simon McDonald began by explain-
ing Britain’s need for alliances once it became
apparent we could no longer rule alone.
The series is based on ‘a year of unprec-
edented access’ to its subject, which, as
usual, appears to involve a trade-off. On the
one hand, there’s well, that unprecedented
access. On the other, this is clearly the For-
eign Office as it would like to be seen: moral,
ever-competent and unexpectedly diverse.
‘I’m not the lesbian ambassador,’ said our
woman in Kiev. ‘I’m an ambassador who
happens to be gay.’
So it was that we watched Britain lead-
ing the world in the fight against Russian
perfidy and for human rights in Burma.
Even Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary
during filming, was on his best behaviour,
departing from the script only when he sug-
gested to his advisers on Syria that ‘we must
accept that our plan, that Assad must go, has
totally failed’.
Nonetheless, it was the suave Sir Simon
who stole the show, with his habit of mak-
ing unambiguous declarations that he’d then
qualify in a way that left them considerably
less unambiguous. (I think my favourite was,
‘The ends don’t justify the means. But we
need to be sometimes more flexible about
the means than we first thought.’)
Still, for a master diplomat he did rath-
er give the game away towards the end. His
knack at dinner parties, he told us, is to leave
people feeling they’ve heard some genuine-
ly confidential material — until they look
back later and realise they haven’t really.
For all the incidental pleasures along the
way, this was exactly the effect of Inside the
Foreign Office.
THE LISTENER
Yoko One: Warzone
Grade: A+
Ooh, you can have some fun with
this when the unwanted guests
swing by this Christmastide. These
are the ‘greatest hits’ of a serially
indulged caterwauling loon with
the political disposition of a spoiled
seven-year-old, redone to make
them even worse than they were
before.
So, put on ‘Why’ as you hand
around the cocktails and the seasonal
canapés. Trumpeting elephants, angry
crows, an ominous synth and Yoko
howling ‘Why? Whhhhhhhhhhhhy?
Wok Wah Wheeeeeeeee! Ag ag ag
ag ag! Whhhhhhy?’ Like a
particularly angry and talentless
Diamanda Galas.
But don’t let a smile give the
game away as this unendurable,
pretentious garbage resounds
around the room. Instead, flip to
‘It’s Gonna Rain’. ‘You say life is a
bowl of cherries, you give me a bowl
of pits. Try not to step on your eggs.’
Look your brother-in-law in the
face and say: ‘I think there’s a lesson
in that for all of us, Bob, especially
at Christmas.’ Then skip forward
to ‘Teddy Bear’. ‘I saw a little girl.
Crying. She said she lost her teddy
bear. Oh then I can get you another
one. NO NO NO NO oh NO. It was
MY teddy bear.’ And nod your head
meaningfully.
Trust me, the guests will be gone
even before Yoko has observed, on
‘Where Do We Go From Here’, that
there are ‘cats on the hill, ready to
kill’. You probably won’t even have
to hear her shrieking about ‘Woman
Power’ (‘Men flashing their guns and
balls’).
You can take the album off,
keeping it handy for when the
neighbours drop round later.
— Rod Liddle
53
BOOKS & ARTS
Animal magic: Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Cinema
You’ve lost me
Deborah Ross
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of
Grindelwald
PG, Nationwide
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
is the sequel to the Harry Potter prequel
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,
and either J.K. Rowling’s plots are now so
labyrinthine she makes your average John
le Carré look like Noddy, or I failed to put
in sufficient homework, or it’s a plain mess.
Whichever, I hadn’t a clue what was happen-
ing most of the time.
I like the whole Potter industry well
enough, but I can’t say I’m a superfan.
I don’t even have an opinion on wheth-
er Dumbledore is gay or not, which is the
surest sign of non-superfandom. But while
a film should cater to those in the know, it
should also be open to all, surely. Or maybe
it’s like the Pirates of the Caribbean or Bond
franchises, and coherence just doesn’t mat-
ter any more?
54
I did do some homework in that
I watched the first film. It is set in the 1920s,
before Harry has even been born, so there’s
none of the usual crew, although I don’t
think this film sucks because Ron Weasley
isn’t in it. Our hero is now Newt Scaman-
der (Eddie Redmayne), a ‘magizoologist’
who carries a bottomless suitcase filled with
fantastical beasts. I did love the beasts, and
would give anything to own a Murtlap. (Very
cute, even if it does bite.) Directed by David
Yates with a screenplay by Rowling, this film
J.K. Rowling’s plots are now so
labyrinthine she makes your average
John le Carré look like Noddy
takes off where that film left off so it’s essen-
tially Newt’s continuing battle against Grin-
delwald the dark wizard, played by Johnny
Depp with one opaque, red-rimmed eye
although that may be the least of his prob-
lems these days.
This is mostly set in Paris, for no good
reason, with occasional cuts to Hogwarts
and Jude Law as a younger Dumbledore,
now so stylish he looks as if he’s stepped out
of a menswear spread in GQ. (If I had an
opinion I’d go with gay, definitely.) There is
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
the main Scamander vs Grindelwald plot,
but also many subplots that are themselves
subplotted and further subplotted. None
of the strands is ever allowed to build up
a head of steam and some characters seem
pointless. Newt now has an assistant, Bunty,
who appears to be in love with him, but she
disappears after one scene.
I started by giving this the benefit of the
doubt — it was my fault for not knowing
enough — but now I’m veering more towards
the overly labyrinthine, plain-mess theory.
The film just doesn’t tell a clear story. Instead,
it jumps constantly from set piece to set piece
without ever offering any through line or
time to get to know a character. (Bunty, was
it something we said?) It’s still visually deli-
cious, admittedly, but where’s its sense of
humour? The romance between Jacob Kow-
alski (Dan Fogler), a muggle, and Queenie
(Alison Sudol), who is magic, provided the
heart of the first film, and quite a few laughs,
so what does Rowling do with them here?
Right at the beginning, the couple break up.
There is also no proper conclusion.
Instead, it just sets it up for the next film,
which in turn will set it up for the next film,
which in turn will set it up… and so on and
so on, probably until the end of time.

Theatre
This will end badly
Lloyd Evans
Pinter Three
Harold Pinter Theatre, until 8 December
Don Quixote
Garrick Theatre, booking to
2 February 2019
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
Bush Theatre, until 24 November
Pinter Three appeals to opposite poles of the
play-going spectrum. The birdbrains like me
will enjoy the music-hall sketches while the
goatee-strokers will have fun pretending
that Pinter’s deadly earnest memory plays
are worth seeing. Watching the first piece,
Landscape, is like receiving a jigsaw puz-
zle in instalments. Two characters, Duff and
Beth, speak to us without acknowledging
each other. Maybe they’re married. Maybe
they aren’t. Duff, played by Keith Allen, is a
barking, aggressive know-all who works as
a chauffeur. Tamsin Greig’s Beth is a prat-
tling Irish scullery maid who witters on
about ‘having a baby’ with a lover who may
be Duff, or an unseen chap named Sykes, or
I can imagine Allen and Greig
watching Lee Evans’s acrobatic
clowning enviously from the wings
simple and hilarious. Apart From That is a
short dialogue written at a time when mobile
phones were new. Two lovers exchange gos-
sip while their connection keeps breaking up.
Pinter’s gift for oblique off-kilter conversa-
tion is perfectly suited to this set-up and he
invests the phrase ‘I lost you’ with a surpris-
ingly ambiguous tenderness. But like most of
his sketches, and many of his plays, the piece
lacks a proper conclusion.
His best attempt comes in a 1959 skit
about a factory strike. The boss is bemused
by his workers’ refusal to manufacture
machine tools. ‘What do they want to make
instead?’ ‘Trouble,’ says the foreman. Not
a great joke but Lee Evans delivers it with
a comic force it doesn’t quite deserve. His
acrobatic clowning is the best thing in Pinter
Three. I can imagine Allen and Greig, both
gifted comedians, watching Evans from the
wings and wondering why they missed out
on the fun and lumbered themselves with
Pinter’s cryptic piffle.
Cervantes’s Don Quixote has an inex-
plicable charm and sincerity that doesn’t
easily translate to the stage. The RSC’s ver-
sion starring David Threlfall is handsomely
designed but dramatically weightless. Threl-
fall, near-invisible behind an avalanche of
snowy whiskers, blunders around Spain
attacking windmills, butchering sheep by
accident, settling village feuds, fighting low-
energy jousts with undangerous opponents
and propositioning a man disguised as a
damsel. But who cares about any of it? The
foolish knight has nothing to win or lose
other than his daft conception of himself
as a servant of justice. He’s like a medie-
val Andrew Adonis, a harmless and slight-
ly snobbish busybody with a strong ascetic
streak who likes to meddle in other people’s
lives because it lends his existence an air
of purpose. Sancho Panza (Rufus Hound)
breaks the fourth wall and indulges in ‘now-
then-boys-and-girls’ patter that belongs in
a pantomime. When in character, he plods
around after Don Quixote like an amused
gap-year student hired to prevent an autistic
pensioner from harming himself.
Director Angus Jackson seems to have
twigged that this isn’t grown-up materi-
al and he distracts the audience with bun
fights, squirtings of water and games of catch
played between actors positioned around
the auditorium. At press night, the crowd
affected to be entertained by these circus
antics. It might be better to market this as a
family show for the under-tens.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is an
investigation into millennials and it purports
to take their side. Inadvertently, it highlights
their worst characteristics. Cosseted by over-
indulgent parents, today’s twentysomethings
expected adult life to be a paradise of fun
jobs, rising incomes, cheap homes and social
justice. They feel let down. But this pessi-
mistic show compounds their problems by
offering no vision or hope, just a fatalistic
eye roll. It ends with a bizarre foul-mouthed
challenge to the young. ‘Live ya lives I fuck-
in dare ya!’ All right, Mr Angry, they’re
doing their best.

someone else. Without that unsolved puz-

zle, the script is just a long sliver of garru-
lous reminiscence located in the days when
a pint of beer cost two shillings and three-
pence (12¼p).
A Kind of Alaska places the same actors The Croissant
in another fatuous brainteaser. Allen plays
Dr Hornby whose amnesiac patient Debbie After the croissant, as I finger-sweep
(Greig) accuses him of sexual molestation.
Doc Hornby responds to her allegations the fallen flakes into a heap, the small
with a careless Jimmy Savile shrug. Debbie savings of breakfast, I recall
indulges in 15 minutes of fragmented jabber the words of Mark: ‘They gathered up
whereupon the nonchalant medic announc-
es: ‘You’ve been asleep for 29 years.’ A pity twelve baskets of the fragments that remained.’
he didn’t mention that earlier. Enter Deb-
bie’s sister Pauline (Meera Syal), whom she Time to go through the notebooks, brush
hasn’t seen since childhood. Debbie is sur-
prised by her sister’s breasts and she coyly the dandruff out, choose from the windfalls,
asks if Pauline is their middle-aged aunt. and rearrange the window. This might be
This is funny, sort of, but Debbie’s roly-poly the last collection. I should make them see
chitchat is maddening to sit through because
she doesn’t know who she is. As always, Pint- a geyser rising, not a casual flush.
er lacks a strong finish.
The sketches are better. Girls is a crazed Feel for the eggs in the henhouse.
rant played at 100 mph by the amazing Tom
Edden. He plays a hyperventilating academ- Look in the hedge where Chuckie liked to nest.
ic who’s fixated by a female student whom I’ve got the butter and the runny cheese.
he overheard mentioning that girls like to be Harness the gelding while I pick some pears,
spanked. His obsessive analysis of her cas-
ual remark conceals an obvious and rather Let’s drive to market jingling, at our best.
touching sexual passion for her. It’s brilliant, — Alistair Elliot (1932–2018)
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 55

ll roads lead to Rome, the say-
ing goes. Well, all roads except for
the Roman road of Watling Street,
which at one end takes you to Dover
(Dubris) and at the other Wroxeter (Viro-
conium) in Shropshire.
I was always only vaguely aware of this
thoroughfare but the name began, in recent
years, to nag on my weekly visits to Canter-
bury (Durovernum Cantiacorum). When
approaching the city centre from the station,
I would see a street sign bearing the name on
the side of a branch of Boots. It took some
time to dawn on me that this was the very
same Watling Street I had been told about in
school history classes. The street sign in Can-
terbury isn’t unique, though: ‘Watling Street,
EC4’ is affixed to a wall a few minutes’ walk
from London Bridge station.
Strictly speaking, Watling Street isn’t
a Roman Road, as the trackway was first
used by the pre-Celtic and then the Celtic
inhabitants of Britain. The author of St Paul
in Britain (1861), R. W. Morgan, recalled:
‘From Dover to Holyhead ran the Brit-
ish Causeway, constructed by Dynwal and
his son, Beli the Great, 400 bc, called Sarn
Wyddelin, or the Irish Road.’
Watling Street came to be associated with
the Romans since they were the ones who
paved it, beginning in 47 ad, soon after they
56
NOTES ON …
Watling Street
By Patrick West
ISTOCK
The defeat of Boudica is believed to
have been fought on Watling Street
invaded. Aulus Plautius, conqueror of Kent,
also proceeded to straighten the grassy dirt
path for the purpose of conveying his sup-
plies and material of war from the Continent.
From Shropshire, one tributary continued on
the historical route to the tip of north-west
Wales, while another headed north, past
Hadrian’s Wall to Pictish Scotland.
Its English name derives from the
Anglo-Saxons who settled in St Albans
(Verulamium) after the Romans had gone.
They were a tribe named the Waeclingas,
who dubbed the place Wætlingaceaster. By
the 9th century the road passing through
the settlement had become known as Wæcl-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
inga Stræt, a name eventually extended to
the entire road. The pathway had by then
achieved legend as the avenue on which
Boudica was defeated in 60 or 61 ad. It
later came to mark the south-west border
of Danelaw. St Augustine used it on his way
to Canterbury, as did pilgrims to the city’s
cathedral, who returned wearing badges of
Thomas Becket as a sign that they had made
their virtuous journey. It is thus assumed
that it was also the path taken by Chaucer’s
pilgrims from Southwark.
Watling Street fell into disuse thereafter
and only in the 18th century did it resume
its role as a thoroughfare, when a toll system
was established throughout England. By
the 20th century, most sections of Watling
Street had been transformed into modern
roads, although some parts had fallen into
disrepair. ‘A disused stretch of old Watling
Street, a road which has been unaccount-
ably neglected and is actually dangerous for
fast motor traffic, is to undergo long over-
due widening from St. Albans,’ reported
Country Life in November 1936.
Today, that part of Watling Street has
become the A5, while the section between
Dover and Canterbury is the A2. Along the
A2 travels the National Express coach route
007, after which Ian Fleming, resident of St
Margaret’s Bay, named his secret agent.
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As the flowers were laid next to her
grave, the only utterance from the vicar
was: ‘The rabbits will feast well tonight’
— Dear Mary, p69
High life
Taki
New York
A little Austrian count was born to my
daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the
morning of 9 November, becoming my third
grandchild. Through modern technology, I
was flooded with pictures of a blond, fuzzed
and pink baby boy less than a day old. The
mother of my children, who was flying in
from Gstaad, did not make it on time, which
was just as well. Like most women, she tends
to overreact where babies are concerned.
Unlike us tough guys, who tend to hit the
bottle and celebrate instead.
And speaking of the fair sex, Lionel
Shriver is some columnist, the best Ameri-
can writer by far, and she has sure got the
#MeToo phonies down to a tee. We’re lucky
to have her. The one I’m angry at is Mary
Wakefield, who only now tells us that some
women do fantasise about Greek tycoons.
But when a real-life Greek tycoon — OK,
mini tycoon — had her in his sights, she ran
like a Saudi who is facing equal odds.
Never mind. I’ve been in love with Mary
for so long that I forgive her. Grandfathers
are forgiving types, and I don’t mind it when
my friends sometimes call me granddad in
nightclubs and embarrass me in front of
younger women. The first time someone
called me a grandfather I wasn’t one, and
he was on his knees when he said it. I had
put him there with a foot sweep. It hap-
pened long ago in Athens and the genuflect-
ing young man was Greek. I was driving to
karate and had made an illegal right turn.
He was on his motorcycle and I almost
crashed into him. I stopped and apologised
but he came towards me like Orlando Furio-
so. So I foot swept him, then jumped into the
car and drove off. ‘Come back, you cowardly
old granny,’ he yelled at me. I was laughing
so much I almost crashed again.
I suppose that old age demands some
gravitas, but I love life too much, and girls
even more, ever to act my age. Perhaps if
old men such as Woodrow Wilson had not
taken themselves so seriously (and that
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
includes that awful frog Marshal Foch),
and had not taken such revenge on Ger-
many following the ceasefire 100 years ago,
we would not have seen the horrors of the
second world war and the atomic bombs
dropped on the Japanese. Wilson was seen
as a saviour of mankind. The little Prince-
ton professor’s imagination soared and he
believed himself to be Alexander the Great.
He bloviated and virtue-signalled end-
less meaningless bromides and managed
to impose such terrible terms on the Ger-
mans that it is a wonder it took as long as 20
years before they came back for revanche.
Wilson also subjected the defeated Ger-
mans back home to his punitive ideas. War
resisters went straight to the pokey despite
the fact that not many Americans wished
to get mixed up in a European war. Isola-
tionism became a good word after the little
prof messed up. Thank God he had a stroke
and his wife ran the country for the rest of
his term.
I suppose that the Wilson bum was the
first globalist, and now another little man,
Macron, a little frog actually, is telling us
how we should all be nice little globalists
and let little frogs and German Hausfraus
run our lives. All I know is that their road
will lead to the kind of endless immigra-
tion conflicts that their predecessors caused
in the Middle East because they thought
they knew better. Let everyone and every
country decide what is best for them, says
grandfather Taki, and don’t let the Macrons,
Junckers and Merkels of this world tell us
they know best. They don’t, but the Hungar-
ians, the Poles and the Italians do. Sure, the
unelected ones will call them fascist, just as
they will say that Brexit was not democratic.
But look who’s talking: the unelected crooks
of Brussels and the unread hacks of the New
York Times. Puleez, give me a break, as they
say in Brooklyn Heights.
As the Taki family expands, I have to
look to higher things in order to inspire
the troops. Getting drunk in nightclubs,
and sometimes even getting into fights, is
undignified at my age, however enjoyable it
might be. So I’ve been reading some poet-
ry to calm me down as I sit on my rock-
ing chair dreaming of kicking sand into
the face of someone disgusting like Philip
Green. The collection Facing the Persians
by my friend and Speccie reader Ian A.
Olson was a start. Inspiring stuff. The poem
‘Bright Ribbons’ ditto. Olson is a hell of a
poet and people should get his book. I’ve
read some poetry along the way — Keats
was the best and always will be — but the
modernists leave me cold, as does their
architecture and their fiction. A great poet
who died tragically in a car accident back in
1957 was the South African Roy Campbell,
and so said T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
Campbell was no sandal-wearing fruit-juice
drinker, as George Orwell described left-
ies in The Road to Wigan Pier. He fought
on my side in Spain, so crappy Bloomsbury
types shunned him. Which means he was
lucky. His ‘Horses on the Camargue’ and
‘Autumn’ are wonderful and expose the
double standards the left practises every-
where and on every level. Plato would have
been shunned because he would have seen
through them.
So there you have it: a quiet week, a new
little count, and now I’m bored and need to
leave the rocker and hit the nightspots with
some young you-know-what. Yippee!
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
The monument to this French village’s war
dead is a plain white stone block with the
head of a grizzled old French infantryman
chiselled on top. His big capable hands are
gripping the block’s edge, as though he is
peering intently over the parapet of a trench.
On Sunday we assembled around him to
honour the 53 local men, from a population
of 1,800, who lost their lives in the first world
war. Schoolchildren queued at a microphone
to sing out their names. A ladies choir sang
a plangent song about Verdun. The state bell
tolled for 11 minutes. The major made an
interminable speech in the rain. Everybody
sang the Marseillaise.
Around 300 people turned out (beneath
about 100 umbrellas) from a winter popula-
tion the same size as it was 100 years ago.
A regular soldier with a machine gun and
a rakish beret patrolled vigilantly, his eyes
peeled for Islamist terrorists. Apart from the
final singing of the rousing national anthem,
this young man and the peering poilu were
the only military notes. No medal-boasting
61
LIFE
veterans were present; the only uniforms
were those of the fire brigade. Otherwise it
was all anoraks flapping in the squalls. The
prevailing atmosphere was light-hearted,
I would say. People on the outer fringes
chatted and smoked and at the slightest
provocation — the trendy teacher failing to
control his daft children, for example — eve-
ryone laughed.
Yet one wondered. One wondered espe-
cially about the small plaque that had been
fixed to the monument comfortably within
living memory dedicated to ‘Nos glorieux
martyrs de la Résistance’. Five names are
inscribed on it: Albert Benzo, Jean Gauti-
er, Félix Maille, Léon Gérard and Gabriel
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
a company of ‘auxiliaries’ (many of whom
were local Frenchmen), surrounded the
At the Paris commemorations,
Mr Putin seemed to be
the only adult
Bessillon. These auxiliaries brought with
them ten hostages taken from the local
prison, among them 54-year-old Gabriel
Philis, the respected secretary to the town
mayor. The ten had been rounded up and
imprisoned over the previous three days
on suspicion of supporting the Battaglia
group. The auxiliaries used them as porters
to carry ammunition boxes to the mountain
summit. The Maquis group was quickly liq-
uidated: the hostages — job done; thanks,
lads — were summarily shot. Local man
Léon Gérard, 33, a resistance organiser,
had run up the mountain to warn them, but
too late. He also was shot and died in agony
three hours later.
Locals recovered the massacred bod-
ies and ceremoniously and ostentatious-
ly interred them two days afterwards. The
telephone lines from the village were cut
beforehand to prevent any more grassing.
Today there is a rue Gabriel Philis and
a rue Léon Gérard. On VE Day the mayor
was assassinated, shot in the head as he
walked along a road, and everyone knows
who did it. We know the assassin’s son by
sight. Newcomers like me are darkly warned
not to enquire too deeply about the goings-
on during the second world war, however,
because it’s none of our business.
So one did wonder, during last Sun-
day’s commemorations around the monu-
ment aux morts, who had stayed away. Also
what a useful, even fun, distraction it was
62
to piously honour the innocent, manly and Merkel, to the Paris commemorations. Mr
courageous first world war dead when the Putin appeared to be the only adult. Beside
social divisions engendered by the more him, everyone else was behaving like hys-
recent occupation are still festering. And I terically narcissistic teenagers. Or so it
can sympathise. It must be awfully difficult, seemed to me, walking past the screen with
especially for the youth, to have one’s coun- my empty glass and returning with it full.
try overrun by young Nazis, then contained Mrs Macron seemed to think she was
by these Nazis’ elderly fathers and grand- hosting a charity fashion gala for all her
fathers with a little help from their friends powerful new friends and she was quite
among the occupied. drunk with happiness. The proprietress of
After the ceremony, we went to a local the bar we were in was drunk too, but on red
bar. On the huge high-definition TV screen wine. She must have spotted an urgency in
inside they were showing President Macron my drinking behaviour because she laughed
(looking thin and strained and mad) wel- hideously and mimed injecting heroin into
coming other world leaders, including Pres- her forearm with a syringe every time every
idents Trump and Putin and Chancellor time I went to the bar for another.
If 2018
Students at Manchester University have scrubbed Kipling’s poem ‘If’
from a wall in the School of Oriental Studies because they claim it is ‘racist’.
If you can stay in bed when all around have been up hours,
Vote Green and march to save the planet
But can’t switch off a light or shut a bloody door against the draught;
If you don’t go ten minutes without a sugar snack and fizzy drink,
And turn vegan ’cos you can’t stand cruelty to eggs,
Give up breakfast cornflakes for you can’t be arsed to wash a bowl;
Eat burgers and thrill-seeking mashups all day long,
From personalised plates;
Still operate your iPhone while wiping your bum
And take 2,000 selfies in a week;
If you are into Me first and body image
Wear lingerie as apparel:
Nude bodysuits, overly distressed denim, graphic T-shirt profanity Califuk
And gawp out from behind oversized round opticals;
If not a square inch of your whitewashed frame is undefaced by bilious tattoos
Nor any protrusion left unpierced, un-ringed
If you stream Bebe Rexha, Ariana Grande, Calvin Harris, Jonas Blue and Zane
And call these music;
If you can tell your quinoa from your acai and your poke
Retreat to your safe space where no one can offend you,
Enjoy the degree course as your Personal Development Journey
Studying Equestrian Psychology or Ethical Hacking
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Then you’ll be a snowflake my dearie.
— Peter Mullen
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
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Real life
Melissa Kite
Left at the Dementia Café, right at the Sleep
Office, past the Spiritual Care Centre…
This was my journey through the ground
floor of my local hospital until I came to
the physiotherapy department where the
Calf Stretching Education Group was
being held.
Hospitals are very different places now-
adays from the forbidding buildings of my
childhood where doctors and nurses in
starched uniforms used to attempt to cure
people.
Now they host Costa Coffee shops and
M&S mini food halls and art exhibitions
along the walls, which you peruse in spite of
yourself as you pass these marvellous new
departments. You wonder what happens at
the Dementia Café and the Sleep Office
and the Spiritual Care Centre.
But mostly you get the feeling that
healthcare has evolved to be about empow-
ering people to feel good about dying.
No more starched, old-fashioned curing.
Hospitals provide education, enlighten-
ment, spiritual guidance and a good cap-
puccino.
They offer you the opportunity to take
control of your condition, to pick up your
infirmity and, well, run with it. If you can
run.
I ran all the way down the corridor past
the Sleep Office and the Spiritual Care
Centre because I was ten minutes late for
the Calf Stretching Education Group.
It had taken a while to check my car in
to the car park by typing my registration
on to a screen. Then, once I got to the phys-
io department, I had to check myself in on
another screen.
And by then the group had started. A
receptionist came off the phone and told
me to follow her. After a while of us walk-
ing past rooms and her saying ‘Oo, I don’t
know, I think it might be in here, but then
again I don’t think it is’, I decided to just
fling open the door to a small gymnasium.
‘Calf Stretching?’ I asked a nurse sitting
in front of a whiteboard as three women
and one man sat on plastic chairs in front
of her looking marooned.
‘Yes!’ she said, welcoming me in. I went
to sit in the second row next to an old lady
leaning on a walking cane who looked mur-
derous.
I imagine if you get to a grand age and
your GP responds to you being crippled by
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
sending your calves for re-education you’re
going to be on the verge of poking someone
in the face with your cane. So I left a seat’s
space between us.
The nurse was telling everyone how the
gastrocnemius (calf) muscles work, with a
view to understanding how incorrect walk-
ing techniques lead to tight calves, which
impact on the feet producing problems
such as bunions.
It was, on the face of it, rather embar-
rassing. But I don’t think our bunions were,
actually, the result of our own recalcitrant
tightness, for we all looked rather fit, apart
from the old woman leaning on her cane.
No. I think the reason we were there
was that some management consultant had
discovered an algorithm proving that if the
NHS stops doing bunion ops and starts
doing calf stretching education groups it
can save millions of pounds.
And so after a lengthy lecture about
how to walk, we were told to take off
our shoes in order to practise on the calf
stretching boards.
At this point, the old lady stormed very
slowly out, grunting something about how
she really had to get on — with hobbling on
her bunions, presumably.
The rest of us removed our shoes and
stood on the boards and two nurses — for
another had appeared — now explained
the finer points of calf stretching.
They really were lovely, these nurses.
Hospitals provide education,
enlightenment, spiritual guidance
and a good cappuccino
They were polite, sweet, pretty and end-
lessly patient. When one of the women
wouldn’t stop talking about her feet, the
lovely nurses just kept smiling and being
polite and sweet long after the rest of us
had decided we wanted to stick her feet
where the sun didn’t shine. But these nurses
went on being sweet. Sweet about her feet.
They were sweet about my feet too.
They couldn’t have shown more forbear-
ance in helping me learn how to stand on
a calf stretching board. I was impressed. I
have not felt this welcome in a hospital for
a long time.
Finally, the lead physio wound the ses-
sion to a close by declaring: ‘So, do this for
three months and your condition will be
resolved.’
‘You mean I won’t have a bunion any-
more?’ I asked.
‘No, you’ll still have a bunion,’ she said.
‘Oh. So resolved in what sense?’ I asked.
‘Resolved as in not any worse.’
‘Great!’ I said, and I almost meant it.
I have not been cured of my bunion in a
clean, tidy, well-run hospital by courteous,
friendly staff.
And in the current climate, I am rating
that experience as excellent.
Bridge
Susanna Gross
It’s no surprise that so many bridge players
are computer programmers or systems ana-
lysts; it’s an ideal game for those who excel
at logic and puzzle-solving. But at the highest
level, a strong imagination is what really gives
you the edge. Certain players have an extraor-
dinary ability to visualise their opponents’
cards, put themselves in their shoes, and then
persuade them to go wrong. It’s a rare gift that
elevates the game almost to an art form.
Artur Malinowski, the manager of TGR’s
rubber bridge club, is one such player. Dur-
ing a recent high-stake game, he pulled off
this coup against two formidable opponents,
Robert Sheehan and Gunnar Hallberg:
Dealer North Game all
zQ8 6
yQJ 3
XJ 9 6
wJ 8 3 2
z 8 7 z 2
N
y 10 8 6 2
y AK9 7 5 W E
X8 4 S X KQ 7 5 2
w A 10 7 4 wQ 9 5
z AK J 6 5 4 2
y4
X A 10 3
w K6
West North East South
Pass pass 4z
pass pass pass 
Robert (West) led the yA, then switched
to the X8. Gunnar played the XQ and Artur
won. Next he played z A and a spade to
dummy’s zQ. Gunnar discarded the y10 —
a clear suit preference signal for diamonds.
The only legitimate chance of making 4z is
to play towards the wK, hoping East has the
wA — as anyone else would. But Artur felt
sure West held the ace: otherwise East would
surely not have encouraged diamonds.
Was there anything to be done? Putting
East on play was hopeless: he would inevitably
switch to a heart and Artur would be left with
two club losers. But what if he put West on play
and somehow persuaded him to cash the wA?
After a moment’s thought, this is how he did it:
he played the yQ from dummy and discarded
the X10! Robert now assumed he had started
with XA10 and three low clubs. A diamond
switch would therefore be fatal: Artur would
ruff the XK, return to dummy with a trump,
and discard two clubs on the yJ and X9. And
so he cashed the wA and played another club
— handing Artur his contract.
65
LIFE
Chess
Paradise mislaid
Raymond Keene
World champion Magnus Carlsen missed
several chances to win with black in the first
game of his title defence, currently
continuing in London.
A black win right at the start is by no
means ultimately a match winner, but is
rather like breaking serve in the first set of
the Wimbledon final.
Alexander Alekhine, in 1927 against José
Capablanca and again Vassily Smyslov in
1957 against Mikhail Botvinnik, both went
on to seize the supreme title after black
wins in game one.
In this case, Carlsen built up a dominating
position after some highly original opening
strategy and an inspired temporary pawn
sacrifice and now came the time to reap the
harvest.
Caruana-Carlsen: World Championship,
London (Game 1) 2018; Sicilian Defence
(see diagram 1)
Here Carlsen played 34 ... h5 but 34 ...
Qe5, with the intention of invading on the
queenside dark squares, would have led to a
winning position as White has no way to
organise his defences, e.g. 35 Qh1 Qc3 36 Rc1
Rg3 37 Nf3 b5! and ... c4 will follow ripping
White apart on the queenside.
(see diagram 2)
Carlsen now played 38 ... Be5. Instead he
should have capitalised on the advance of the
h-pawn to h4, which enables the thrust 38 ...
Rg3. After 39 Nxg3 hxg3 40 Re2 Qa1 the
white queen and rook are hemmed in by the
pawn duo on f4 and g3 and his queenside will
collapse.
(see diagram 3)
Carlsen now played 39 ... Qg7, missing his
last chance to maintain a serious advantage.
He should play 39 ... b5, planning ... b4
softening up the queenside dark squares
after which Black will quickly obtain a
decisive attack. White is unable to defend
against this plan.
PUZZLE NO. 532
Black to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-
Caruana (Game 2), London 2018. White has
forked the black bishop and queen. How should
Black react? Answers to me at The Spectator by
Tuesday 20 November or via email to victoria@
spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first
correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal
address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Qh5
Last week’s winner Ray Fisher,
Buxton, Derbyshire
66
Competition
Headline in here
Lucy Vickery
Diagram 1 In Competition No. 3074 you were invited to
submit a scam letter ghostwritten by a well-
WDkDWDrD known author, living or dead.
Falling for a scam is costly and tedi-
0WgWDWDW ous (and more easily done than you might
W0pDWDW0 think), but the comedian James Veitch
found a silver lining when he decided to
DW0WDW1W engage with his persecutors: the ensuing
WDWDP0WD correspondence — lengthy, labyrinthine and
often hilarious — went on to form the basis
DPDPDQDP of a popular TED talk and book.
PDPDKDWH It was a tricky assignment, judging by
the smallish postbag, but you made some
DWDWDRDW clever choices of author whose prose style
lent itself well to the art of phishing: poor
spelling (Molesworth via Geoffrey Willans);
Diagram 2
apparently outlandish claims (Kafka). The
WDWDWDrD winners, printed below, earn £25 each.
0kgWDWDW Dear Supporter of Justice
W0pDWDWD Someone has been telling lies about Mr. A. He has
been taken in, to his great exasperation, for
DW0WDWDW questioning on a subject about which he knows
nothing. He had intended to go out in the evening
WDWDP0W0 — despite the snow falling, it was a pleasant walk
— when his freedom was arbitrarily curtailed.
DP)PDQDP Despite his protestations, has he been listened to?
PDWIW$WD On the contrary, he has been sedulously ignored.
Has he perhaps misunderstood the gravity of his
DWDWDN1W predicament? Has he offended anyone? It is a bad
dream! Since his arrest, the experience of which he
found both troubling and yet trifling, he has had a
run of luck which would tax the most decent and
Diagram 3 honest individual. The only way to assist Mr. A. is
to provide him with a decent Advocate. You can
WDWDWDrD help by donating to his JustGiving page at www.
0kDWDWDW likeadog.com. Thanks in advance.
Bill Greenwell/Franz Kafka
W0pDWDWD
Felicitations from the Holy Land,
DW0WgWDW Where I, the sole survivor from a band
WDWDP0W0 Of mercenary soldiers stashed away
Much booty; and concealèd it shall stay
DP)PDQDP Until a boat’s procured to sail me home.
I found your name within the Domesday tome,
PDKDW$WD A family respected and adored;
And honest — one I wish to share my hoard
DWDWDN1W Of riches with, for gems and jewels and gold
In England can be fortunately sold.
We’ll partner up, and since we’re men of wit,
I’m offering a fifty-fifty split.
To hire the needed boat, tonight, my man
rDb4WDkD Will visit to initiate our plan;
And once you’ve paid the thirty noble toll,
0pDWDp0W For secrecy, I urge you burn this scroll.
Paul A. Freeman/Chaucer
WDWgpDW0
1WDnDWDW You may curse me for a whoreson scurvy knave
and there’s many would agree — though pot,
PDNDWGWD kettle, say I — but as an old sea-cook who once
sacrificed a leg in mortal combat for his country’s
DW)W)WDW sake, I swear on the life of my parrot, Captain
Flint being dearer to me than a host of my fellow
WDQDB)P) humans, that what follows is a true tale.
DWDRDRIW I have in my possession (do not be asking how
or why), a treasure map of sworn veracity, marked
with the spot where the spoils of piracy have been
buried. Its history is stained with blood and shame,
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

but its value is inestimable, and can do

redeeming good. Crossword
Be my ally in this mission, and like good
Christian men we shall turn evil into good, and
2385: R and R
Silver into gold. A mere hundred guineas for
needful outlay will bring me post haste to your
by Pabulum
doorstep.
G.M. Davis/Robert Louis Stevenson The theme is two historic peo-
ple who were contemporar-
On occasions of this kind my duty to ies. Unclued lights give their
communicate becomes a pleasure. I have nothing forenames, places of birth and
to declare but the genius of fortune that has death and occupations. A geo-
smiled on you. To lose someone is of course a graphical feature (5) linking
misfortune but misfortunes seldom travel empty the two will appear in the com-
handed. A relative whom you may not know has pleted grid and must be shaded.
bequeathed to you, in the dearth of closer Elsewhere, ignore an apostro-
beneficiaries, a sum of surprising magnitude, a phe. The solutions at 22 and 27
sum that will supply you with all you have ever share the same two unchecked
desired to live gloriously beyond your present letters.
means. The truth is never simple and in your case
has involved months of research; but the truth is Across
you are now worth millions. From a woman of no 4 Harmless wag recast an
importance, perhaps, you will take your place economic principle
among the wealthy of the world. A prompt return (11, two words)
is needed and I request you complete the details 11 Eating away, in love indeed
below. I cannot overstress the importance of being with empty oarsman (7)
early with your reply. 14 Sarah acquires seemingly 5 Thong emir’s worn (4) 42 Alto and treble perhaps
Frank McDonald/Oscar Wilde good old watch (5) 6 Old aristo from Spain men make good (4)
16 Papa gets behind in start to like (4) 43 Couple caught out bank (4)
Dere Deserving Resipient, river race (5) 7 Holiday dresses – see-
My late uncle, the Duke of Lagos, hav left me 19 Many ships fighting lass through? (7) A first prize of £30 for the
£50 million! Of course, he is only an uncle by boards (7) 8 Slander involves brilliant first correct solution opened on
marridge; a true Molesworth hav no Nigerian blud 21 Strange duke colonel (murderer?) (7) 3 December. There are two
in his vanes. But he hav made one stippulashun: whipped lasher (4) 10 Grain harvest, one runners-up prizes of £20. (UK
I must give half of it to 25 Deserving Resipients, 24 Insect sting upset (4) garnered by an Omani? (7) solvers can choose to receive the
chiz! So I hav selekted you to reseeve a million 25 I’m inspiring liberal peer to 15 Stunner shed tears … (5) latest edition of the Chambers
smackers. (My grate frend Peason sa ‘Give me a house Amerind (7) 17 … when old Alun largely dictionary instead of cash —
million, then’, but I tell him that sumone who is a 32 Roué playing bubbly changed, becoming ring the word ‘dictionary’.)
weed and uterly wet canot be considered a music (7) vegetative (7) Entries to: Crossword 2385,
Deserving Resipient.) 34 Astronomer loves radio 18 Person in need of P45 The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
To cover my leegal and other costs, plese put telephony (4) was this (4) Street, London SW1H 9HP.
£100 in a sealed enverlop and drop it in the hole 36 Rare mineral, very devil to 20 Plants spaniel Please allow six weeks for
in the hollow tree just outside St. Custard’s Skool. screw in (7) destroyed (7) prize delivery.
Once I hav reseeved this poultry sum, I send you a 38 Note cruel tyrant cycling (4) 22 Pater’s worried (3)
letter orthorising your clame. To get yore million, 39 Muslim jurist nearly left 26 Larvae in river woman
Name
just present it to my lawyers, Messrs Sue, Grabbit after typical bigot crosses (5)
and Runne. advanced (7) 27 Copy of recording
41 Poet’s place in heaven tenor cut (3) Address
Brian Allgar/Geoffrey Willans
being Bluegrass State (5) 28 Sweet Patsy (4)
Dear ___, 44 Plump little boys planted 29 Hairstyle in fashion? Of
Want more than your share before anybody else small tree (5) course (7)
has any? Me too. Signing up to the enclosed Get 47 Bertie twice has female 30 Letter consisting of note
Rich Quick Scheme has this to be said for it: it’s flyer round for drink about chemical element (7)
better than squandering the rest of your morning (7, two words) 31 Granny’s wonderful cotton
gurning your Narcissus Metamorphosing Into Down cloth (7)
Methuselah face into the shaving mirror or trying 1 Eat, gobbling almost every 35 About fifteen tangled
to chisel that unfeasibly hard white substance from item of food (7) ropes (6) Email
the roof of your hungover mouth with toothpicks. 2 Kris possibly has use no 37 Horlicks cross theologian
Don’t bother reading the small print which, like longer for pebbled fabric (6) imbibed (6)
the internal combustion engine or a wife, you don’t 3 Pole receiving second 40 Tunnel in Qatar leads to all
need to understand for it to work. The car and the heart (5) nine air terminals (5)
girl, even the yacht if you can stomach seasickness,
are waiting. Too good to be true? Well, somebody
has to get rich and, as I already am, why not you? SOLUTION TO 2382 : A POINTED REMARK
All you’ve got to lose is the ridiculous conviction
that things this good don’t happen to you. Illogical,
The quotation is 10/11/39. Remaining unclued lights are
considering this one just has.
all daggers.
Adrian Fry/Kingsley Amis
First prize G. Snailham, Windsor
NO 3077: SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET Runners-up Lynne Gilchrist, Willoughby,
New South Wales; Kevin Bentley, Anglesey
You are invited to submit a sonnet with the
name of a Shakespearean character hidden
in each line. Please email entries to lucy@
spectator.co.uk by 28 November. Only three
entries each per competitor, please.
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 67
LIFE
No sacred cows
Academics who dare
not speak their names
Toby Young
hen I first read about plans
W for a new academic period-
ical called The Journal of
Controversial Ideas, I got the wrong
end of the stick. Fantastic news, I
thought, particularly when I saw the
distinguished group of intellectuals
behind it. They include Jeff McMa-
han, professor of moral philosophy at
Oxford; Peter Singer, the well-known
Australian philosopher; and Frances-
ca Minerva, a bio-ethicist at the Uni-
versity of Ghent. An authoritative
magazine bearing the imprimatur of
these distinguished free-thinkers is
a great way to persuade other, less
celebrated academics to stick their
heads above the parapet and publish
essays that dissent from groupthink.
Then I spotted an important
detail: all the material will be pub-
lished pseudonymously. That’s
right — the contributors won’t use
their own names. Far from a cause
for hope, this is confirmation of my
worst fears. The Maoist intolerance
of anyone who dares to challenge the
‘woke’ orthodoxy has reached such a
pitch that the only way to persuade
non-conforming intellectuals to con-
tribute to public debate is to guaran-
tee they won’t be identified.
When I described universities as
‘left-wing madrassas’ in a Sunday
paper earlier this year, I was accused
of being alarmist by various higher
MICHAEL HEATH
68
education ‘experts’, including some
conservatives. Sam Gyimah, a higher
education minister, told vice-chancel-
lors that, ‘Our best universities are
not ivory towers. Still less are they
“left-wing madrassas”, as one contro-
versialist chose to describe them.’
I wish I had been exaggerating, but
when eminent academics are forced
to go to these lengths to protect col-
leagues from the career-ending con-
sequences of expressing heterodox
views, even the most sanguine observ-
er has to admit there’s a problem.
‘I think all of us will be very happy
if and when the need for such a jour-
nal disappears, and the sooner the
better,’ Professor McMahan told the
BBC. ‘But right now in current condi-
tions something like this is needed.’
McMahan was being interviewed
for Monday’s Radio 4 documentary
University Unchallenged, about the
lack of viewpoint diversity in British
higher education. Matthew Flinders, a
politics professor, interviewed a cross-
section of academics in the social
sciences and humanities. They con-
firmed that there is a left-wing bias in
their fields, but some queried wheth-
er that means other political views
are suppressed. After all, hasn’t the
academy always skewed left? Noah
Carl, a research fellow at Cambridge
who has studied this phenomenon,
Any told Flinders that the imbalance has
suggestion recently got a lot worse. Until about
15 years ago, left-of-centre academ-
that the empire ics outnumbered those on the right
was not an by two to one; at the last general elec-
unalloyed tion, it was more like seven to one.
evil is heresy Interestingly, Flinders had diffi-
culty persuading any hard-left aca-
among ‘woke’ demics to talk to him and suspected
historians an organised boycott — a rather self-
the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
defeating tactic if their object was to
demonstrate how open-minded they
are. However, he did manage to find
one willing to go on the record: an
historian at King’s College London
called Jon Wilson. ‘Behind this issue
there’s a right-wing agenda,’ Wilson
said, explaining why his left-wing col-
leagues didn’t want to be interviewed.
‘What people who complain about
the lack of viewpoint diversity mean
is that their conservative views are no
longer dominant.’
A tad implausible you might think,
given that conservatives haven’t been
dominant on campus for at least 75
years. But Flinders then revealed that
Wilson was a leader of the outrage
mob that went after Oxford histo-
rian Nigel Biggar last year for call-
ing for a measured reappraisal of our
colonial past. Any suggestion that the
empire was not an unalloyed evil is
heresy among ‘woke’ historians and
Wilson helped to organise a letter-
writing campaign that saw Biggar
condemned by more than 170 other
academics. Listening to Wilson deny
that the left tries to stifle intellectu-
al debate reminded me of a commu-
nist apologist from the Cold-War era
claiming the Soviet Union was the
most democratic country in the world.
Flinders concluded by saying that
he found the idea of a new academic
journal where dissenters like Nigel
Biggar can publish articles under
pseudonyms rather depressing, and
it’s hard to disagree. Still, at least it
will make it impossible to deny that
free speech is under threat in Brit-
ain’s universities.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.
 to City. This personally doesn’t both-
Spectator Sport
Time to waste,
er me much, as long as they carry on
playing the sort of football they play,
which is the best ever seen in this
money to burn country. Better than Ferguson’s, bet-
Roger Alton ter than the Arsenal Invincibles.
Rules are rules, though, and will
the football world love City as they
should? It’s hard to tell and they cer-
arvellous team, the All tainly didn’t pull a capacity crowd to
series of bold decisions and daz-
A zling selections by chief selector
Ed Smith have put English cricket in
a strong position, long-term as well
as in the current series in Sri Lanka.
And anyone with any lingering
doubts should have heard the huge-
ly impressive interview with Keaton
Jennings at the weekend. Smith kept
faith with him in the summer when

M Blacks, of course. But they

certainly know how to
waste some time. Here are some
things you may want to do when the
New Zealand forwards are making
their way to a line-out with a one-
point lead and the clock running
down: change your energy supplier,
clear those clogged winter gutters or,
for the more adventurous, nip out to
Santa Pod Raceway in Bedfordshire
and do a quarter of a mile in a drag-
racing car. Either way, those mighty
Kiwi forwards won’t have moved far.
uch to the annoyance of some
M big footballing beasts like Bay-
ern Munich, Manchester City appear
to have been channelling away mil-
lions of pounds in funding from
owner Sheikh Mansour so as to beat
the Financial Fair Play rules. (It’s no
coincidence that the leaks came via
Der Spiegel, a German news maga-
zine.) But we know that City’s spon-
sors are owned by the Abu Dhabi
royal family, as is the stadium, and as
is more or less everything connected
Wembley for a league game against
Spurs. Still, all that money can go to
maintaining Mikel Arteta’s precision
haircut and building up Pep Guardio-
la’s collection of cashmere cardigans.
City still have to deliver in Europe
before they can be judged truly great,
but make no mistake: the demolition
of United in the Manchester derby
last weekend was a big moment. Not
just because of City’s excellence,
but because the slow decline of José
Mourinho was brought into focus.
You used to get the sense that play-
ers were automatically galvanised by
him, would run till they dropped and
were a tight unit against the rest of
the world. It doesn’t seem like that
any more. His teams look slack and
confused, almost mutinous, and he
doesn’t seem to have time for his
Manchester own people, which was never the
City are case in his first seasons at Chelsea.
playing the The force of his charisma had a lot to
do with his power, and it has mostly
best football worn away now, to the point where
ever seen in Mourinho seems petty and faintly
this country ridiculous. It’s a pity.
batting was so difficult for everyone
and has been amply rewarded. It is
no surprise that Jennings was head
boy at school. He is dignified and
clearly very resilient, and could easi-
ly be a future England captain unless
his batting collapses completely. And
if that happens, he can always try
Strictly Come Dancing.
I fear for Graeme Swann in Black-
pool, though: fine mimic he may be,
but the triple Ashes winner could
have his work cut out to get through
on Strictly this week. There is lit-
tle that top-class cricketers seem to
enjoy more than a good Strictly run
and this engaging finger spinner has
certainly had my vote every week so
far. Yet whether a pair of shocking
pink shorts can guarantee survival
without the tabloids monstering his
dance-off rivals remains to be seen.
But come on, Swanny. Remember
Australia 2010-11, when you helped
England take the Ashes with those
three innings victories and, more
memorably, invented the sprinkler
dance. You can do it.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. A difficult couple of our
acquaintance always object
to other guests at dinner and
can be very rude to them. In
consequence, we have fallen into
a pattern of dining at each other’s
houses in London, just the four
of us. They are sticklers for what
they see as correct behaviour.
Last week, however, we were
told, the day before we were due
to host, that they had a friend
staying the night; could they bring
him along? This was someone I
vaguely knew, but had not seen
for 20 years, and someone my
wife has never met. Neither of us
desired his company. I suggested
perhaps we choose another date,
but feathers were ruffled. Mary,
what would you suggest?
— Name and address withheld
A. It would appear that, in
declining to accommodate this
extra friend, you secretly wanted
to play the couple at their own
game and punish them for their
previous rudeness to your friends.
However, the tease has backfired.
Life is too short to lose friends,
particularly difficult ones, who
are often the most interesting. You
have made your point so move
quickly on and issue another
invitation before things fester.
Q. My mother died recently.
At her requiem in London, I
arranged to have flowers, seasonal
and full of autumn colour. An
elegant blanket of these was
draped over her coffin. The
canon who celebrated the Mass
commented repeatedly on their
beauty. A day later we buried my
mother in Sussex. The flowers
travelled safely and, as they were
laid next to her grave, the only
utterance from the vicar was ‘The
rabbits will feast well tonight’.
Mary, what is the etiquette on
sneaking back to the graveyard
to save the flowers from the
churchyard vermin? Should I
have sneaked back at dead of
night by the light of a ghostly
moon? Like most gardeners, Mum
would not have liked the idea of
the rabbits chomping away as she,
hopefully, ascended heavenwards.
— N.C., Stanton St. Bernard
A. You might have sneaked back
in broad daylight and sprayed a
rabbit-repelling solution of 1 tbsp
Tabasco sauce and one gallon
of water onto the floral blanket,
remembering to protect your eyes
when spraying, and to wash your
hands afterwards. Rabbits dislike
the taste of hot sauce.
Q. Apropos T.L.’s letter about the
dangers of dancing barefoot, I
recently attended a wedding and
was surprised to see a large box
of (new) flip-flops being loaded
into a car destined for the dinner-
dance venue. I was told it is now
de rigueur for these to be provided
so that those in precipitous heels
can dance safely once their shoes
have been removed.
— L.H., Cornwall
A. Thank you but party hosts will
find roll-up, disposable ballet
pumps at £1.50 a pair online; in
safety terms, a superior option
to flip-flops.

the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 69

LIFE

Semites? One? Two? Three? 0.5 of
Food a paragraph?
Nova kosher For Jews, threat means, inevitably,
renaissance. It is what comes next.
Tanya Gold Jews know their duty. Most Jews. Not
Jewdas, the ‘radical voices for the
alternative diaspora’, who invited
Corbyn for Passover. They practise
their cod shtetl schtick like Rosen-
crantz and Guildenstern trapped in
Fiddler on the Roof, but they are real-
ly hack Marxists who have watched
too many Tarantino films. We eat
in our own defence, always, and we
won’t be stopped now. Why would we,
ish is a new grand café in Bel- when the glory of being Jewish is real-
This leads to some rage over reserva-
tions, as Jews tend to treat kosher res-
taurants as their own home and are
amazed that they cannot get a table
in their own home thanks to having
so many relatives whom they hate.
It used to be a branch of Giraffe, in
which I remember a lurid and very bad
Sunday lunch. Tish, of course, should
be in Hampstead, not Belsize Park, but
an Israeli restaurant opened in Hamp-
stead last year and the market can’t
bear so much Jewish solidarity.
Tish is calm, considering it is really
an agonised political meeting dis-
guised as a grand café that has gone

T size Park, north London, but

kosher. There are not really
enough Jews to fill a kosher restau-
rant in London, and they tend to fall
into dust, like the ten tribes, and the
temple. 1701, the unwise and subtle
restaurant by Bevis Marks synagogue,
has gone; Bloom’s in Golders Green
has gone, too. Most British Jews aren’t
kosher because chicken without but-
ter isn’t worth having, even if you do
believe that bushes speak and people
want to kill you. Mostly, the food will
kill you. But not always.
The north London restaurant most
favoured by Jews is Oslo Court, which
is actually a specialist in seafood, plus
cream cakes. Oh Jews! What do you
want — really? Or we go to Fischer’s
on Marylebone High Street which,
although a pre-war Austrian tribute
café without Nazis (and very good
too), isn’t kosher either. But it does
serve a wondrous Wiener schnitzel.
These are raging times. How many
paragraphs should I give it before I
call Jeremy Corbyn and his cohort
of appalling child zombies anti-
ly the extent to which it annoys peo-
ple? (I never said it wasn’t insane.)
So, you can’t get a table at Tish
for solidarity. Tish is as busy as a
Momentum meeting filled with accu-
Tish is as sations that Jews — sorry, Zionists
busy as a — have subverted British democra-
Momentum cy for their own ends. Because, with-
out Jews and their media — yes, that
meeting filled means me — Corbyn would look
with claims pretty bloody electable. (Pause for
that Jews have laughter.) And to say otherwise is a
subverted smear made up by Jews. Jews like me.
That is, very busy. If Corbyn were to
democracy for walk in, he’d be attacked. And eaten.
their own ends Without butter. Which is a shame.
‘There’s loads of kids around — is it half term?’
kosher due to political fragmentation.
It is finely wrought, with high ceil-
ings to contain the babble and icy
blue walls and mad blue chairs with
pink flowers. It’s a Jewish homage to
the Wolseley, and that is no bad thing.
The food is better than Bloom’s or
1701, which is the weirdest name
I have yet heard for a restaurant.
Bloom’s was too bad, and 1701 too
good; haute cuisine feels wrong for
people always on the move. Our most
famous bread — the matzah cracker
— was invented while running away.
And then we wrote a book about it,
which did quite well.
I eat scrambled eggs and sweet
bagel toast. My companion eats tomato
and pepper casserole. It is the least we
can do in a country fond of mindless
acts of solidarity; both are excellent.
So, I recommend Tish and look for-
ward to seeing Sadiq Khan there soon.
Because not everyone is monstrous.
Sometimes it just feels that way.
Tish, 196 Haverstock Hill, London
NW3 2AH. Tel: 020 7431 3828.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Gammon
In the annual dictionary wars to
nominate words of the year, in
the hope of attracting publicity,
Collins has made single-use its
first choice for 2018. But of more
interest is its second choice:
gammon. It is used by Twitter
trolls and other supporters of
Momentum to signify ‘a male,
middle-aged and white, with
reactionary views, especially one
who supports Brexit’. His face
resembles ham.
Collins said that in Nicholas
Nickleby (1838), ‘Dickens used
the word gammon to describe a
large, self-satisfied, middle-aged
man who professes an extreme
patriotism in large part to disguise
his essential selfishness and
corruption’.
I’m afraid the people at the
dictionary have completely
misunderstood what they read. I
suspect they picked this up from a
piece by Jonn Elledge in the New
Statesman in May, later publicised
by the Guido Fawkes blog.
In Nicholas Nickleby, Mr
Gregsbury is a pompous MP
with ‘a tolerable command of
sentences with no meaning
in them’. At a meeting with
constituents, one calls out from
the back that Gregsbury’s
remarks ‘savoured rather too
much of a “gammon” tendency’.
‘The meaning of that term –
gammon,’ said Mr Gregsbury, ‘is
unknown to me. If it means that I
grow a little too fervid, or perhaps
even hyperbolical, in extolling
my native land, I admit the full
justice of the remark. I am proud
of this free and happy country. My
form dilates, my eye glistens, my
breast heaves, my heart swells, my
bosom burns, when I call to mind
her greatness and her glory.’
Dickens didn’t mean that
Mr Gregsbury was a gammon
or looked like one. He meant
he spoke gammon – rubbish or
cant, a meaning in use since the
18th century. It developed from
gammon meaning an accomplice
who distracts the victim of a
crime, such as one who ‘jostles up
to a Man, while another picks his
Pocket’ (1718).
Gammon and patter meant
criminal or similar jargon.
Gammon and spinach meant
nonsense, as in the nursery rhyme
collected in 1807: ‘With a rowly
powly, Gammon and spinnage, O
heigh, said Anthony Rowly.’ So,
to the claim that in 1838 gammon
meant ‘a pompous reactionary
male’, I say: ‘That’s all gammon.’
— Dot Wordsworth

70 the spectator | 17 november 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

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