ESTABLISHED 1828

The right balance hen lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being deprived of their liberty only for a few weeks. The W idea of criminalising basic community behaviour — welcoming a guest into your home, educating children, going to church to pray — was viewed as an extreme measure with a short shelf-life. One of the big surprises of the pandemic is to see that lockdowns, in fact, are popular in large quarters. People have complied for far longer than was ever envisaged. But it’s a careful balance — and examples of overzealous policing risk upsetting that balance. It does not help that the rules change regularly, with even government ministers saying (in private) that they have given up trying to keep track of them. If the confusion spreads to the police, then officers end up targeting people engaged in perfectly lawful activity — as happened to the two women in Derbyshire recently fined £200 each for driving five miles to meet up for a walk. Lockdown has exposed much of the best of human nature, with people willingly making huge sacrifices. A recent study by UCL into public attitudes towards the restrictions shows ‘majority compliance’ with the rules has remained at well over 90 per cent since the beginning of the crisis. It is true that the same study also shows ‘complete compliance’ peaking at just under 70 per cent in April and largely staying between 40 and 50 per cent ever since. But these figures tell a story: the vast majority of people can see the need to suspend their social lives and to keep away from other people as much as possible, but there are times when they find themselves breaking the letter of the rules — perhaps because on occasion they find it difficult, if not impossible, to comply. So it is wrong, for example, to say that because there is more traffic on the roads than in April, this is a sign of non-compliance which requires a stronger police response, bigger fines or more government warnings. The steady trickle of ministers and officials who have been caught bending the rules to suit them shows the problem. If those who advocate the rules find it difficult to abide by them, then it is hardly any wonder that the general population might also struggle at times. As Matt Hancock accepted in an interview with this magazine last week, some of the rules introduced for the first lockdown — such as preventing people from attending funerals of loved ones — were simply inhumane. It would be possible to tighten things further. There are calls to suspend freedom of worship, to close nurseries, to stop people taking a walk with a friend. But ministers would struggle to quantify what difference such measures would make to the pandemic. With fatalities growing, they are increasingly desperate and may feel compelled to show they are doing something, even if tightening the rules would make no meaningful difference to the spread of the virus. In doing so, they would risk pushing people too far and undermining the broad compliance that we have seen for almost a year now. A more humane balance is being struck this time, and this approach is all the more effective for its broad public support. ESTABLISHED 1828

Sir David Barclay, 1934-2021 hen Sir David Barclay, along with his twin brother Sir Frederick, bought The Spectator in 2004, the magazine came as a side dish with their purchase of the Daily W Telegraph. Under their ownership, that quickly changed. The Spectator (1828) became a separate company with no financial cross-entanglements. The Barclay method was to apply the three most valuable commodities any publication could ask for: patience, investment and editorial independence. We will leave readers to judge whether the magazine has improved under their ownership. But our sales have almost doubled, in a market that has more than halved, and we have had the resources to embrace the digital age with relish. Sir David’s opinions — and those of the rest of his family — on the politics of the day were a mystery, even to the editor of this magazine. No hints were dropped, no editorial favours asked. In the history of proprietorship, this is unusual, even unique. The only remit passed down was that The Spectator, the world’s oldest magazine, was at its best when serving its readers, and no one else. When Sir David died last week after a short illness, he left an extraordinary business empire, built with his brother, and will also be remembered for the philanthropy for which they were both knighted in 2000. The independence and success of this magazine is part of his legacy. PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK

Home he government, in the face of overwhelming numbers of people with Covid-19 being T admitted to hospital, told everyone to stay at home and threatened them with unspecified harsher measures. The law brought into force on 6 January allowed any amount of exercise and visits to food shops, dry cleaners, takeaway restaurants, banks, pet-food suppliers, off licences, public lavatories, garden centres, bicycle shops and libraries (for collection of books ordered in advance) or anywhere for the purpose of picketing. The Speaker asked MPs to wear masks in the House, except when speaking. Two women were stopped by Derbyshire police as they walked in the country, told that the cups of peppermint tea they carried were ‘classed as a picnic’, and had to pay a £200 penalty each; five days later police rescinded the penalties.

t the beginning of the week, Sunday 10 January, total deaths (within 28 days of testing A positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 80,868, including 6,298 in the past week. London’s Nightingale hospital began to admit patients, none suffering from Covid. A third vaccine, from Moderna, was approved but would not be available until the spring. The government set a target of 15 million people to be vaccinated by mid-February, having vaccinated 2.3 million by 11 January. The Queen, aged 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, were vaccinated against Covid-19.

t least 160 migrants crossed the Channel to England in ten boats on Saturday and Sunday. A Khairi Saadallah was sentenced to his whole life in jail for murdering three homosexual men with a knife in a Reading park in June. Kwasi Kwarteng became Business Secretary in place of Alok Sharma. James Brokenshire, found to have lung cancer three years ago, is to leave his post as a Home Office minister for surgery on a lung tumour. Sir Simon Rattle is to leave the London Symphony Orchestra to conduct the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, in Munich, in 2023. Sir David Barclay, owner with his twin Sir Frederick of the Telegraph Group, died aged 86. Katharine Whitehorn, the Observer columnist, died aged 92. Chorley beat Derby County and Crawley beat Leeds in the FA Cup.

Abroad he Capitol in Washington DC was overrun by weird people supporting President Donald T Trump. One, a woman, was shot dead by law officers; a policeman died of his injuries and three other people died incidentally. Plain-clothes police drew handguns at a barricade across the door of the chamber of the House of Representatives. Scores got into the building through smashed windows and thronged the rotunda, some letting themselves down by ropes into the chamber after Congressmen had been led to safety. One man lounged in the office of Nancy Pelosi the Speaker; another carried a Confederate flag. A bare-chested man in a two-tailed coonskin hat with horns stood at the podium in the Senate. Before the riot, Mr Trump, in an open-air speech of nearly an hour, punctuated by chants of ‘Fight for Trump!’, had insisted that he had won the election: ‘Everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.’ Congress was debating objections to election results. After dark, Mr Trump tweeted: ‘Go home with love and in peace. Remember this day forever!’ The next day, after Twitter had blocked his account, he said: ‘The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.’ Democrats introduced a resolution to impeach Mr Trump again, accusing him of incitement of insurrection; no action need follow for 100 days.

he total number in the world who had died with coronavirus reached 1,928,531 by the T beginning of the week, an increase of 85,425 from the week before. Although Britain had the highest number of dead in Europe, its mortality at 1,188 per million was not as bad as Italy’s at 1,298 or Belgium’s at 1,721. The United States, with 379,120 dead, had a mortality per million of 1,142. China placed 11 million people in the city of Shijiazhuang under Covid lockdown. Eight gorillas tested positive for the virus at San Diego Zoo, California.

ike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, said: ‘Al-Qaeda has a new home base: it is the M Islamic Republic of Iran.’ Prince Khalid bin Abdullah, the racehorse owner, died aged 83. A Boeing 737 with 62 on board crashed into the sea after taking off from Jakarta. Snow blanketed Madrid and temperatures fell to -25˚C at Molina de Aragón. CSH DIARY Andrew Sullivan

he thing we most need to understand right now is how you deprogram people who have T been in a cult. By cult, I mean a group of people living out an imaginary world view created by a charismatic leader. These things sometimes end with the guru hopping on a private plane to escape the authorities; others end in mass suicide; still others go up in literal smoke, as David Koresh did, or sometimes they collapse in a welter of claims of abuse and corruption. But when the cult is political, and when the guru is the sitting president of the United States, it all gets a little messier.

hat’s what the core of the Trump movement is. Not all Trump voters, by any means. But the T core: a cult. And these lost souls will believe anything and everything the leader says. Trump is currently denying there was anything in his speech that could be understood as incitement. But this is what he told them, just before they stormed the Capitol: ‘We beat them four years ago. We surprised them. We took them by surprise and this year, they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before… We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it any more and that’s what this is all about. To use a favourite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal.’

o the one thing you cannot say about that mob that stormed the US Capitol last week is that S they were crazy. From their point of view — a rigged election, fomented by Democrats and weak Republicans, suppressed by Fake News in league with Big Tech — they were being perfectly rational. If it were true, after all, that a vast left-wing conspiracy had used specially constructed voting machines to rig the election so that Trump’s landslide victory was erased, why would you not storm the Capitol? It would, indeed, be obligatory for a patriotic American to fight in such a case of treason. I might have picked up a musket myself.

he trouble is that Trump is mentally ill and delusional and will never concede an election he T still claims he won in a landslide, and his diehard followers will always believe him. That’s been the core problem for five years. Trump created a mass movement that took over an entire party. That party has done nothing but appease him. And the immense gravity of Trump’s charge — a grotesque rigging of the election — is such that violence of various sorts is a terrifyingly rational response. That threat is going to hang over the looming inauguration, and will not go away after Wednesday.

rom that day on, America will have not just one man claiming to be the legitimate president, F but two. Only Joe Biden will exercise any legal or constitutional authority, of course. But he will have a pretender to the throne cavorting around the country, with a third of the population believing he is not the pretender at all. The years in which Republican elites could pretend not to have heard Trump speak or tweet, or put the most benign gloss on grotesque rhetoric, or just muddled through as his unhinged ambitions became clearer, are now over. You either have to endorse the illegitimacy of the last election and therefore of the US government (including the Congress, elected in the same ‘rigged’ election); or you can attempt to put a lawful, sane party back together again without him.

he other day, a friend asked if I would be leaving DC for a while. He was taking himself and T his husband to the Delaware coast until the risk of violence subsided. Others are packing their bags. Walking the streets of my neighbourhood, I’m beginning to see the shop fronts being boarded up, as they were last summer. We’re told there are multiple pro-Trump marches on state capitals looming, and a big crowd in DC expected on 17 January as well as 20 January, the day Biden is supposed to be sworn in. A briefing for Democrats from the FBI about the plans for far- right attacks has left them aghast, we are told. Anti-fascist groups will organise a response: they created mayhem during the Trump inaugural. Just imagine if they confront a mob of Proud Boys and far-right militias next week. It’s getting very Weimar-y.

or those of us who live here, violent and non-violent demonstrations become banal over time. F We’ve seen it all. Half the city burned down in 1968. I watched riots from my window as recently as 1990. The Million Man March; last summer’s explosion; and on and on. But not this. Not these streets emptied by Covid and small businesses hanging by a thread. Not a defeated president boycotting the inauguration of his successor and screaming treason in the streets. Not the bludgeoning of a cop with an American flag on the steps of the Capitol. Not this evacuation, when usually people flood into DC for inaugural parties and balls. Not this unbearable lull before something, perhaps even darker, returns. BAROMETER

Parliamentary objections

The US Capitol was raided by Donald Trump supporters trying to prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory. How close have protestors come to entering our own parliament? — In May 2004, protestors calling for fathers’ access rights to their children threw a condom full of purple flour from the public gallery of the Commons, hitting the then prime minister, Tony Blair. — Four months later, five pro-hunt protestors succeeded in entering the Commons chamber, after getting into parliament by posing as building contractors. — In January 2008, protestors against airport expansion tried to storm parliament but got no further than hammering on St Stephen’s door. — In June 2015, police formed a human chain to prevent disability campaigners wheeling their way into the Commons chamber. — In April 2019, climate change protestors stripped partly naked in the public gallery of the Commons. — In November 2020, three climate change activists succeeded in scaling scaffolding outside the Houses of Parliament. Low standards

Spain recorded its lowest-ever temperature, -35.8°C at Vega de Liordes. Some other countries whose lowest temperature records have been set in the past decade, in spite of a rising trend in global temperatures: Buffelsfontein, South Africa (23 Aug 2013) | -20.1°C Shoubak, Jordan (15 Feb 2013) | -16°C Meron Golan, Israel (10 Jan 2015) | -14.2°C Dieng Plateau, Indonesia (26 June 2019) | -9°C Hong Kong (24 Jan 2016) | -6°C Abu Samra, Qatar (5 Feb 2017) | 1.5°C Tetulia, Bangladesh (8 Jan 2018) | 2.6°C IPSO correction

An opinion piece by Matthew Parris, published on 25 July 2020, headlined ‘In an age of science, why are face masks a matter of opinion?’, stated that Covid-19 was ‘killing millions worldwide’. However, this was incorrect. The global death toll, at the time of publication, was significantly lower (circa 650,000). This has been published following a complaint upheld by the Independent Press Standards Organisation. Editor’s note: Matthew Parris was referring to the expected total global death toll for the pandemic, as yet unknown. Estimates vary from two million to four million. ANCIENT AND MODERN

Words to that effect

In his 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) wondered why we wished people ‘Happy new year’ (primum anni diem laetis precationibus faustum ominamur), or said ‘Bless you’ (sternuentes salutamus) when someone sneezed. Was this mere superstition, or something else? Pliny devoted a lot of time to denigrating all forms of superstition and magic, arguing that they were attempts to control the uncontrollable in human affairs, and citing Nero as an example of someone whose interest in magic was nothing but an ‘overwhelming desire to force the gods to do his will’, as if such a thing were ever possible. Beliefs about such phenomena, whose origins Pliny found in man’s search for cures from illnesses when human efforts yielded no results, struck him as contrary to man’s dignity and independence. But Pliny felt differently about the possible efficacy of words and incantations. These were a different order of things, representing an intelligible agreement between rational beings, man and god, and a credit to mankind. Consisting of fixed verbal formulae, which must be word perfect and uninterrupted, they covered everything from sacred rituals e.g. to ensure sacrifices were valid, to prayers repeated three times before a journey to make sure it would be safe (a practice of Julius Caesar ‘after a dangerous accident to his carriage’), and so on. Further, history provided countless examples of prayers that turned events in Rome’s favour. So ‘if we agree that the gods hear certain prayers or are influenced by any form of words, we must answer the whole question [of their effect] in the affirmative’ – though Pliny was in two minds about whether all such words would affect us, e.g. Cato’s gibberish to fix a dislocated hip (chant ‘huat hauat huat ista pista sista dannabo dannaustra’). On top of that, the augurs had also decreed ‘the greatest imaginable divine blessing’: that if the force of words or omens worried us personally, ‘they do not affect those who at the outset of any undertaking declare that they will ignore them’. In other words, man was no puppet of gods, or man. One was not compelled to have a happy new year. . Peter Jones LETTERS

Lockdown damage Sir: I am sick and tired of people taking the moral high ground and looking down on ‘lockdown sceptics’ like me as if we don’t care. It’s ironic, because while there is no clear evidence to date that national lockdowns actually save more lives (contra the interview with Matt Hancock, 9 January), there is plenty of evidence that lockdowns ruin lives. If anyone should take the moral high ground it is those, like myself, who witness this ‘collateral damage’ on a daily basis. Yes, the health issues are complex. And who would want to govern at this time? But when you know that your chosen strategy will result in avoidable deaths, such as those from cancer, it seems obvious that it is not an option that should even be considered — certainly not for the length of time it has been. At the very least there ought to be an ‘effortful pause’ so that we can debate this properly. One gets the disturbing feeling that we are being governed by mantras rather than by wisdom. The Revd Dr Ian Stackhouse Guildford, Surrey

Going, going, gong Sir: Andrew Knight argues that no journalist should ever ‘carry a title or wear a gong’ (‘Honour bound’, 9 January). Ralph Blumenfeld, editor of the Daily Express between 1902 and 1929, clearly agreed. After the general election of 1922, Blumenfeld was offered a knighthood in recognition of his newspaper’s role in bringing down Lloyd George’s coalition. Blumenfeld declined the honour, and asked whether he might instead be granted membership of the Carlton Club. As an American Jew, Blumenfeld recognised that this was a more reliable indicator of acceptance by the British establishment. The Revd Sam Aldred Swansea, West Glamorgan

A pinch of salt? Sir: Working in the nuclear industry, I was surprised at Tim Ambler’s claim (Letters, 9 January) that molten salt reactors are already operating in Canada; I can find no source that corroborates this. Molten salt reactors and other small modular reactor designs — which have their own section in the government’s ten-point plan — may be a useful addition to the energy mix in years to come, but most are at the prototype stage and would take many years to be approved by the nuclear regulator before they could start construction in the UK. The reality is that for a long- term strategy of stable electricity supply at a half-decent price, we need a mix of nuclear for day and night baseline electricity which will be best provided by Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, natural gas to meet the daily peak demand when we turn on the oven for tea, and renewables to fill the gaps if we are to meet carbon targets. Jamie Steel Paris

Shear luck Sir: Robert Walls (Letters, 9 January) suggests all products sold in the UK should clearly state the country of manufacture on the packaging. A slight difficulty is that many goods include components sourced from different countries. Anyway, rather than another regulation being introduced, could nimble entrepreneurs not do the job? Already, many proudly announce that their materials come from sustainably managed forests or are gluten-free, etc. Some months ago, having failed with searching for ‘garden shears not made in China’, I googled ‘garden shears made in Taiwan’ and found a suitable model. However, the manufacturer emailed to advise me against buying their product, as they had no distributor in Britain and the price would be exorbitant. Perhaps there is a niche market of would-be China boycotters waiting to be exploited? Jonathan Coles Great Clifton, Cumbria

Bah Humboldt! Sir: Many readers will have groaned on reading of Tristram Hunt’s new Humboldt-inspired vision for the V&A, which is modelled on Berlin’s Humboldt-inspired ‘Enlightenment project’ (Arts, 9 January). Notions of ‘nurturing global citizenship’ and combating mindsets shaped by a ‘Eurocentric Enlightenment hierarchy’ signal all too clearly what is in store. Yet few perhaps realise that the ‘Humboldtian’ model of self-learning fits like a glove into the contemporary ideology of deconstruction and multi-culture. For Humboldt, Bildung (self- formation) did not involve initiation into a cultural inheritance, or a political and moral community, but a free-spirited individual encounter with the totality of the world’s cultures and traditions. He was, as J.W. Burrow put it, a ‘cultural connoisseur’ abroad in ‘the moral museum of the world’s history’. Much better to stick with Michael Oakeshott, the great conservative philosopher, for whom a liberal education was an ‘orderly initiation’ into a cultural inheritance — and that meant our cultural inheritance. Alistair Miller Sunbury, Surrey

Holier than thou Sir: James Hickman (Letters, 9 January) arrives at the wrong conclusion on the egalitarian nature of the English as revealed by their use of language. The adoption of the previously formal ‘you’ in place of ‘thou’ for all should be seen as an early example of levelling up. He does, however, note the failure of the virtue-signalling by the Quakers: hopefully a sign for our times too. Melvyn Pound North Newton, Somerset

Top of the egg Sir: As a mathematician, I enjoyed the terminological correctives from Dot Wordsworth (Mind your language, 9 January). However, I feel compelled to correct her on one point. The cap of a boiled egg is an ovoid cap, not a spherical one. James McMeehan Roberts By email

THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES Charles Moore

ven with its 27 amendments, the US Constitution is only 7,591 words. I keep it beside me, E and find in it — as Sir Walter Elliot found in the Baronetage — ‘occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one’. The final part of Section 3 of Article 1 is relevant in this distressed week: ‘Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to Removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’ To use, after Donald Trump’s departure, a device designed to remove a president seems strange. Surely there are two important things to reconcile — to make sure he cannot hold office again; and to find ways of convincing more than 70 million Trump voters that the process used is just.

wice last week, almost unreported, electricity generators were able to command a mad price. T On Thursday evening, it reached £1,400 per megawatt hour; on Friday, £4,000. The typical price is £40 per megawatt hour, so the shortage of power on Friday multiplied the price 100 times. The changing pattern is ominous. There were no price spikes above £1,000 before 2016. Until last week, there had been ten since that date, so two such events in two days is quite something. The lucky recipient of the top price was West Burton power station in Lincolnshire. Things could get worse in the autumn, as we leave wicked old fossil fuels behind. We may begin to shiver when the wind fails to blow.

am sorry that the rest of this column takes obituary form. Sir David Barclay, who has just died, I was co-proprietor (with his twin, Sir Frederick) of The Spectator since July 2004, a longer reign than any since the early 1950s. He was also the least visible. He never came to the office or met the editor. He was so averse to publicity that I feel slightly guilty writing even this, but his proprietorial distance is worth saluting. On the one occasion I met him, I at first failed to recognise him. I quite often talked to Sir David on the telephone, however, mainly in relation to my biography of Margaret Thatcher. He and Sir Frederick admired her, and made sure she could afford to spend the last months of her life in a suite at the Ritz, which they then owned. She died there, and the brothers installed a commemorative bust. When she heard in late 2003 that the Barclays wanted to buy the Telegraph Group (which included The Spectator), she said to me: ‘When the Barclays decide they want something, they see it through to the end.’ David Barclay made a great fortune, founded on property. It was a source of pride to him that he started life in a two-bedroom, top-floor flat measuring 700 square feet in Sinclair Road, Shepherd’s Bush, and ended up in his own castle measuring 74,500 square feet. Early on in the Barclays’ ownership, I wrote a column in the Telegraph attacking suggestions that a law should prevent insults of the prophet Mohammed, even if these included calling him a paedophile. I received veiled death threats. Told I would get a call from Sir David, I feared a ticking off for causing trouble. In fact, he rang to offer me private security. I declined, but was touched.

atharine Whitehorn, who has also died, first made her name as a writer in this paper. She K began a column called Roundabout in 1959. ‘I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it,’ she later wrote. ‘It was to start with a report on something — a book, an event, a trend — and then make a thoughtful, or ribald, point from it, so that it was not just reportage.’ Her stance, rare in the press of the time, was that of a modern woman — funny, tolerant, sharp but rarely angry. Her first by-lined Spectator column is set in the girls’ school uniform section of a department store. She complains about the extreme dreariness of the clothes. The piece ends: ‘“But they do look so nice when you see them all together in their navy tunics,” the girls’ department head insisted.”’ ‘They,’ Whitehorn signs off, ‘Neither she nor anyone I spoke to said she.’

n the following year, she published the bestselling book Cooking in a Bedsitter. Part 1, I ‘Cooking to stay alive’, is much longer than part 2, ‘Cooking to impress’, but her skill was to help young women combine necessity and pleasure with an almost complete lack of room. Its spirit is just right for young people now working from home in tiny flat-shares during Covid. The technology has changed, of course. The entry on milk in the book’s ‘Beginner’s Index’ assumes you don’t have a fridge: ‘To stop milk going off in really hot weather, scald it.’ One of the modernities she advocated was the casserole, introduced thus: ‘A French politician representing a somewhat backward district in Africa was found to have been eaten by his constituents. The journalist who discovered this used the phrase: “Je crois qu’il a passé par la casserole” (I think he ended up in a casserole). Clearly the Africans knew what they were about. For making a meal out of tough and intractable material, the casserole has no rival.’

n the same week as Katharine Whitehorn died Albert Roux, the king of the other end of I cooking. In my Note last week about Edward Cazalet’s memoirs, I did not have space to mention that Roux’s first job in England (in 1959) was as chef to the Cazalets at Fairlawne. Since it was a racing yard, he devised slim dishes, including what Edward describes as ‘the perfect thinning meal — hot consommé, a lamb cutlet and mountains of spinach, followed by a sort of puree of fresh oranges’. Roux took to riding out regularly with the Fairlawne string. Weekends were different, and dishes like soufflé Suissesse (Roux’s recipe is online, I notice), sole mazai, pot-au-feu ‘and other mouthfuls of joy, such as foie gras on artichokes and roast sea bass with a special meat juice cause’ helped persuade guests as various as the Queen Mother, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Christopher Soames, Anthony Powell and Noel Coward that Fairlawne was the place to be. After eight years, Roux left to found Le Gavroche. JAMES FORSYTH Brexit Britain’s new place in the world

hat will Brexit Britain do differently? This is going to be the most important question in our politics for the next decade. If the answer is that nothing much will change, it W would be hard to argue that the disruption of the past four and a half years has been worth it. But if Brexit means the country becomes quicker at adapting to changing circumstances, then the electorate’s decision in 2016 will have been vindicated. The quick decision to remove VAT from tampons and sanitary towels is a small, early sign of how Brexit enables parliament to respond more directly to public pressure. The decision not to join the EU’s vaccine procurement programme let us move faster with immunisation: the UK has currently vaccinated more people than France, Italy and Germany put together. If this saves lives and allows us to exit lockdown more quickly, there will be a substantial benefit. Perhaps the biggest question is what kind of role this country will now play in the world. Since the referendum result, Boris Johnson has enthusiastically talked up the rather nebulous idea of ‘global Britain’, to try to show that Brexit does not mean retreat. He wants to use the UK’s 2021 presidency of the G7 and this year’s COP26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow to demonstrate what this soundbite actually means. He hopes to launch the D10, an alliance of democracies that share an interest in countering China. Australia, South Korea and India have been invited to the G7 meeting to this end; Downing Street hopes that this will demonstrate the UK’s convening power. COP26 in November is meant to show the UK’s commitment to multilateralism and ability to deliver an effective summit. Last week’s decision to move Alok Sharma from his role as Business Secretary to take charge of this conference full-time is an admission that it needs more work. But the election of Joe Biden and China’s decision to commit to net zero by 2060 mean that the event has a fair wind behind it, and a decent chance of success. Meanwhile, the strengthening of Britain’s stance on China continues, and in ways that are hard to dismiss as tokenism. Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, this week condemned the treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, saying they are subjected to ‘forced labour, torture, forced sterilisation’ and more. Liz Truss, the International Trade Secretary, noted that the Modern Slavery Act forbids British companies from buying goods which may have, in part, been produced by forced labour. Most of China’s cotton, she said, comes from Xinjiang. The UK guidance has been strengthened in an effort to make sure nothing made by forced labour in China ends up in Britain. Some argued that Brexit Britain would have to subordinate everything in its foreign policy to economics and the need for trade deals. Instead, last summer there was an about-turn over the plans to have Huawei — a company with close links to the People’s Liberation Army — play a key role in the UK’s 5G network. As one figure closely involved in the formation of this policy puts it: ‘The entire period has revealed China’s preferences more clearly. Look at cyberspace, Hong Kong, military basing.’ There is a recognition that this demands a response. All this is designed to send a message to the incoming administration in Washington: the UK will put principles before profit even at the expense of the inevitable economic retaliation from Beijing. The EU, meanwhile, is still pursuing a David Cameron-style policy of seeking Chinese investment. Look, for instance, at the recent economic treaty with Beijing (a policy which, ironically, Britain encouraged while it was an EU member state). One cabinet minister tells me the EU deal with Beijing, heavily pushed by the Germans during their presidency of the EU Council, ‘shows the EU isn’t going in the same direction as us on China’ and remarks that it’ll be ‘interesting to see what the Biden administration thinks about that’. Some hawks in government want to go even further. One tells me: ‘The big pitch to Biden should be to break the Chinese domination in tech. We need to move these companies out of China.’ Interestingly — and in contrast to the Trump administration — the primary motivation isn’t to bring this manufacturing back to the West, but simply to shift it out of China. This will likely require an alternative mass manufacturing hub in Asia. There is significant interest in Whitehall in how Samsung, the South Korean electronics firm, is increasing its presence in Vietnam. Although Vietnam doesn’t qualify for D10 membership — it’s a communist dictatorship, not a democracy — the country is a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the UK wants to join. It has its own concerns about Chinese expansionism and isn’t seeking to undermine the global system in the way Beijing is. The UK is determined to become more involved in the Indo-Pacific region in the coming years. This is where a lot of economic and strategic action will be as efforts are made to counter China’s rise. The UK also has similar views on the rules-based international order to the East Asian democracies; one of Raab’s favourite facts is that no country’s voting record is closer to the UK in international organisations than South Korea’s. Ultimately, though, the most important security alliance for the UK will remain with the US. The incoming Biden administration is far more interested in diplomacy than Trump’s, which wasn’t inclined to try to build consensus on an issue before acting. Britain will have a role to play in the rejuvenation and broadening of the western alliance. The Brexit deal makes this far easier. If we had left with no deal, UK-EU relations would have soured, which would have been bad for regional security, and the acrimony would have complicated dealings with the Biden White House. Britain will need strong relations with the US, the EU, like-minded powers such as Canada and Australia, and the Asian democracies. Having left the EU, and the protection that being a member of a large bloc affords, the UK has a particular need for the current threats to the liberal rules-based order to be overcome. That can only happen if all these groups work together.

‘‘Look Joolz, a new coffee shop.’’ ROD LIDDLE Who volunteers to be lectured by children?

he screenwriter Russell T. Davies has said that only gay actors should be cast in gay parts, believing this leads to greater authenticity. The obvious question here is how would T Russell know who is gay and who is not gay when he comes to casting? It is not always obvious, surely. Do all gay actors who attend casting sessions enter the room humming hits from Mamma Mia! before enthusing over the decor? Perhaps Russell just guesses, like I do when I’m watching the BBC weathermen flouncing around. The other obvious question is that if it’s authenticity you’re after, surely gay men must never be cast in straight roles? For reasons never properly explained, authenticity doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to straight roles. Unless it is a straight black role: then authenticity becomes even more important. Or, to double down, a trans-gendered black role: then this ectoplasmic concept of authenticity is the only thing that really counts. If they were to shoot another remake of True Grit and decided to cast in the role of Marshall Rooster Cogburn a blind, transgendered paraplegic dwarf, such casting would be warmly applauded by the progressive left. In other words, authenticity has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. In a sense, the more inauthentic the better, because in their strange, monomaniacal view of the world, such inauthenticities chip away at the horrible straight, white hegemony under which oppressed people like the millionaire Russell T. Davies OBE live their undoubtedly difficult lives. Russell is most famous for having written many episodes of Doctor Who, as well as many plays and screenplays about the lives of hedonistic gay folk (which would have been improved greatly by the arrival halfway through of several Daleks screaming ‘exterminate’ and going after the cast right, left and centre from that egg whisk thing they have). It is not the slightest use explaining to Russell and the rest of the woke crew that the job of acting is to pretend to be something you are not for a bit. That kind of argument has no purchase in Russell’s post-rational world. While Russell was making his statement about gay actors, presumably in the hope of winning the coveted Deranged Woke Idiot of the Week award, the National Trust revealed that it had been inviting teams of children into its properties to lecture staff volunteers about the horrors of colonialism, thus snatching the award away from Russell at the very last moment. Employees and volunteers were ‘reverse mentored’ by ‘child advisory boards’ in a scheme which sounds a little bit like the kind of thing Pol Pot might have come up with. Or John Wyndham. One of the two. This was part of the ‘Colonial Countryside’ programme directed by Leicester University professor Corinne Fowler. Corinne’s love and pride in Great Britain can be gauged by the title of her recent book: Green Unpleasant Land — ideal for the NT, then. For four years the Trust has been shrieking about slavery and racism when, in truth, its largely elderly members simply want to look at pleasant old things and flower beds, have a nice cup of tea and use toilets with one of those gentle disabled access ramps. Conservative MPs have attacked the Trust, calling it hopelessly out of touch with its members. Its members have attacked it too, for climbing on a woke bandwagon and displaying a ‘biased’ view of British colonialism. Even the Charity Commissioner has suggested gently that the Trust might serve its members a little better by concentrating on the upkeep of stately homes and not being ‘drawn into the culture wars’. The trouble is they haven’t been drawn in: they were ardent volunteers. Gathering employees together to be lectured by children about their vile involvement in racism and how awful Britain is seems to me a tad humiliating, even if the Trust insists that these re-education sessions were not compulsory. I sometimes comment that this jubilant disembowelment of our history is part of the progressive’s left commitment towards self-flagellation. But of course it is not. Lionel Shriver is quite right when she points out that the people running these sorts of programmes are not self- flagellating at all — they are committed instead to flagellating the rest of us. They feel themselves pristine and above the fray, a tiny proportion of the electorate who are in sole possession of the Truth and that their job is to dispense this Truth to the pig-ignorant, the lumpenproles, the lowly, the elderly, the irredeemably white. In this they are a little like the members of the quasi-religious sect to which a relative of mine belongs, shrieking that Covid does not exist and it’s all a conspiracy got up by the Jews and the commies. Except that the scions of wokedom have power. Power, if not hegemony. I would have liked to listen to some of those children’s essays. It would have been fun disabusing the kids of the simplistic and warped idiocies pumped into them over the years by a teaching profession which can show you racism in a handful of dust and manages to shoehorn its political agenda into almost every subject the students study. Literature, history, geography, religious studies, all seen through the prism of gender and race, devoid of nuance and thus real truth. And worst of all, PSHE — personal, social, health and economic education, which now takes up at least two hours of teaching time per week in state secondary schools, and in which the poor children are simultaneously indoctrinated and indulged in their manifest teenage fantasies. You just hope that in the end some, out of intellectual curiosity, will rebel. But intellectual curiosity, when it is pointed in the wrong direction, can get you suspended from schools these days. We’re losing a generation to the post-rationalists of Russell T. Davies and the National Trust.

‘‘I told you this journey wasn’t absolutely necessary.’’ LIONEL SHRIVER We believe what we want to believe

ollowing his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance. But one artefact of this disreputable administration will survive F Trump himself: doubt over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, shared by some 39 per cent of the electorate, including two-thirds of Republicans. However refuted in the courts, Republicans’ pervasive conviction that the election was ‘stolen’ must be partially rooted in their rollercoaster emotions while watching the returns. On election night, Trump seemed to be winning. Trump himself declared victory. Only across the following four days, as counts of mail-in ballots dribbled in, did the President’s lead slip agonisingly away. It’s far more upsetting to appear to win something only to be ‘robbed’ of that victory than to lose outright at the start. Most Trump voters feel the election was stolen because that was their subjective experience of that week. Trump’s own demented belief in his pilfered ‘landslide’ must have become quite so bitterly consuming because he’d enjoyed that brief period of elation on the Tuesday night, which was, however temporarily, based on fact. Granted, Trump had primed his constituency to expect the Democrats to cheat for months in advance. Yet however consequential this ‘alternative fact’ for the American public’s shared faith in their political system, the astonishingly prevalent myth of the ‘steal’ exemplifies a far bigger problem than this one highly contagious lie. At its inception, the internet promised instant universal access to more information than people had ever historically enjoyed by orders of magnitude. During the web’s early days in the 1990s, expectations were idealistically high. We would all become wiser and better educated. With hard data and qualified expertise at our fingertips, we’d actually know what we were talking about, rather than spout rubbish off the tops of our heads. We’d communicate with a vast range of social and professional contacts, resulting in an explosion of innovation and personal empathy. I know. Painful to recall. Almost funny, except it isn’t. Little did we anticipate that loads of information is not the same thing as loads of accurate information. We didn’t remember what people are like. We form opinions first and look for evidence later. We believe what we want to believe, and we’re suckers for whatever promotes our perceived self-interest. We’re not, in the main, rational creatures, and act more from emotion than reason. We prefer interaction with the like- minded, who fortify what we already think — meaning we instinctively seek out the very antithesis of education. If anything, the internet has made us stupider. Putting people in touch with one another has proven a dubious business as well. The formation of geographically dispersed but ideologically uniform ‘communities’ magnifies myths and multiplies misinformation. One of the main reasons we believe something is that other people believe it. One can now locate scads of folks fiercely convinced that the US is controlled by Satanic paedophiles. All this agreement feeds itself. Crazies who mix exclusively with other crazies feel perfectly sane. Given America’s political segregation — now more drastic than racial segregation — many Republicans will not know a single person who thinks that the 2020 election was free and fair. In the US, this crisis — over no less than what is reality — has been exacerbated by media polarisation, which has tainted once-reliable news sources with partisan advocacy. In fact, the integrity of the mainstream media has been one of the most dispiriting casualties of the Trump era. Presenters on latter-day CNN sound like evangelists. For most of my life I’ve turned to the New York Times for dependable factual content. No longer. (I especially distrust any article about Britain, on which the paper has been waging a vicious propaganda war since the referendum.) To triangulate, I now subscribe to a plethora of newspapers and magazines, an impractically costly solution, and I haven’t the time to read them all. In the end, I’ve still little choice but to broadly trust mainstream news, if only because regarding all sources of information as dishonest is exhausting, and logically leads to disengagement and apathy, if not to nihilism and misanthropy. Nevertheless, how do we know what we think we know? Most of us imagine that cult-like belief systems sustained by self-reinforcing feedback loops are the pitfalls of other people — the loons who spend all day watching fringe firebrands on YouTube. Few Britons will be susceptible to the counter-factual universe in which Trump’s 2020 ‘landslide’ was ‘stolen’. Nevertheless, 85 per cent of Britons endorse lockdowns to suppress Covid-19, and the stricter the better. Yet liberal democracies have never before responded to contagious disease by rescinding civil rights, repressing family and social life and stifling their economies. Just as conspicuously, lockdowns, and the UK’s equivalent high-tier restrictions, demonstrably have not worked. Turn on the news: lockdown is not working now. The coronavirus is ‘out of control’ because it’s never been in control. Biology does not respond to government fiat, much less to absurd micromanaging like having to order a ‘substantial meal’ with a pint or classifying a coffee as a ‘picnic’. Joining some two dozen similar international studies, yet another peer-reviewed paper from Stanford University documented last week that while mild interventions like social distancing and appeals to the public have some epidemiological effect, lockdowns do not: ‘We fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.’ Yet so imperviously certain is the fact-proof popular belief in lockdown that anything I might write to debunk the policy will fall overwhelmingly on deaf ears. For many readers, I’ve merely revealed once more that I live in the same sort of dangerously deranged, even murderous, alternative universe as the ‘stop the steal’ camp that ransacked the US Capitol. Lockdown advocates have the numbers. But crowds are known for both wisdom and madness. And people believe what they want to believe. No one wants to imagine that they’ve made often drastic personal sacrifices and helped ravage their country into the bargain to no purpose. How can you be sure which of us is living in a delusional, self-reinforcing bubble? MATTHEW PARRIS A new perspective on the Prince of Darkness

att Forde, the stand-up comedian and presenter of his regular Political Party Podcast, has hit on an overlooked technique for getting the most out of big-name interviewees. M He pretends to know nothing. Wide-eyed and star-struck (actually he is neither), Forde puts them at their ease in conversation with an apparent fanboy ingénue. ‘Do keep up, Matt,’ said Peter Mandelson, affectionately, as in his Christmas holiday interview Forde claimed to be unaware of some half-forgotten political turbulence that Lord Mandelson, his star interviewee, once encountered. It worked a treat. Lord Mandelson is normally a wary interviewee, but with Forde I have never heard him so unguarded: more confessional even than in his own autobiography. I listened partly out of curiosity. What was Peter now saying about my run-in with him some 22 years ago? Challenged by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight to substantiate my claim that being gay was no longer a bar to joining the cabinet, I mentioned Mandelson. Paxman’s jaw dropped. The world seemed to go crazy, Jeremy cycled off to Peter’s house that night to deliver an apology absolving himself of collusion; the press affected shock; and the BBC banned all mention of this minister’s private life. Sacked from my column in the Sun, I feared for my whole career. But it all blew over, and in some quarters I gained kudos for being some kind of a truth-teller. Nonsense. Peter had been ‘outed’ a decade before on the front page of the News of the World, and his sexuality had often been mentioned since. I knew he’d helped Ian McKellen with our campaign against Section 28, prohibiting the endorsement in schools of homosexuality. I’d not supposed I was revealing anything new. I was not being brave. The response bewildered me. Forde asked about this. To my mild surprise, Peter echoed my own incredulity. He thought the BBC’s panic was bizarre. He’d never hidden his sexuality. His father, mother and all his friends had always been totally relaxed. He’d watched my interview unperturbed. But, he said, the media went mad. It was then (he told Forde) that he began to suspect a campaign of persecution. Listening, a missing piece fell into the jigsaw of my understanding. Months later, Mandelson continued, he was hounded from office after Fleet Street went wild about a mess-up over some help with a mortgage. He had, it appeared to him, been gunned down by a hostile media. I’d seemed to him like the first sniper. I do think Peter rather over-egged his earlier relaxedness about his private life; but as he talked to Forde, for the first time in two decades I began to see things from his point of view. It could well have looked like ambush to him. In politics, those disinclined to join up the dots and spot danger often perish. In this case, Mandelson may simply have joined up too few dots into too scary a picture. I suppose I’m the only person who will ever know with absolute certainty that nobody put me up to ‘outing’ him; but nobody did — I had no agenda at all. As the interview proceeded, Forde drew more from him that I’d never suspected. I’d always thought of Tony Blair as Mandelson’s great patron and sponsor. Peter made clear to Forde that he doesn’t see it that way. Though warm about Blair, he lamented that his prime minister never saw him as much more than a maestro of political communications. It struck me that of the ‘new’ Labour trio of Blair, Gordon Brown and Mandelson, Peter was arguably more thinker than spinner, invested in the new Labour credo because he thought it best for Britain rather than just an election-winner for Labour. It became a habit to see him as mainly a message-maker; time and again (he told Forde) senior colleagues would revert to the assumption that they were the story, Mandelson the storyteller. ‘Is this policy right?’ engaged him deeply, but ‘How can we sell this policy?’ was the question on which his advice was more often sought. It emerged from the interview that he is, if not bitter, permanently sad about that. I do see why. As the Times sketchwriter, I used to watch Mandelson at the Commons dispatch box. I never saw a more competent, engaged or obviously happy secretary of state than during his brief time as trade and industry secretary. His stint later as the EU trade commissioner was a natural sequel. Peter complained to Forde that he’d been wrongly pigeonholed as a PR wonk, and I think that’s true. But Mandelson was partly complicit. He took evident pleasure in the Prince of Darkness moniker. As the years went by, he started camping up the honeyed but menacing tones. It wasn’t forced on him: the truth is more melancholy, and goes wider than Mandelson. As we age, we all of us begin to notice, as often as not unconsciously, where we most reliably get our applause, our gasps, our laughs, our audience, our brand recognition. Often without even knowing it, we start to accentuate this element in our behaviour, play along with it, our unique selling-point: play it up. In time it becomes expected of us. Yes, we’ve been trapped — and I agree Peter was — but who took the bait? Boris Johnson is trapped too — but who took the bait? Almost since boyhood, buffoonery has worked for him. By the time the self–caricature begins to constrain, to diminish, to chafe, it is often too late for reinvention. I saw this happen to Margaret Thatcher: the cautious, hesitant, careful woman I worked for when she was opposition leader. Yes, she was always opinionated, true to her instincts, but there was so much less strut. Impulses were checked. Advice was taken. Later I watched the grande dame, the dominatrix, the Widow Twankey emerge, as cartoonists chuckled and Tory conferences cheered. She too was now trapped. She’d taken the bait. So did Peter Mandelson, a man who could have been prime minister.

” ANY OTHER BUSINESS |MARTIN VANDER WEYER Why Tesla has to be a better bet than bitcoin

Which is madder, bitcoin at $41,500 — oops, make that $31,000 on Monday — or Tesla shares at $880 apiece? Don’t get me started on the crypto-mania in which the Financial Conduct Authority has warned gamblers ‘they should be prepared to lose all their money’. But Tesla, relatively speaking, is a real thing: a California-based carmaker which has expanded the frontiers of the electric vehicle market that’s going to become huge in the next decade and could soon make carbon–fuelled road transport extinct. Put that way, it’s not so surprising — in tech stock terms — that investors should value Tesla higher than the rest of the US auto industry combined. But those investors are not making an objective calculation based on projected profits or dividend flows. They’re just betting on the self- propulsion of a share that has risen tenfold since March and, while the old economy remains on its knees, may have a way to go yet. In that sense they’re not far removed in mindset from the wackos who are hypnotised by bitcoin. But at least Tesla shareholders are the ultimate owners of a clutch of ‘giga-factories’ and car designs, whereas bitcoiners own nothing but an evanescent idea. If you’re in that zone, ‘Sell bitcoin, buy Tesla’ still looks like a sensible trade.

How to spend it

Tesla’s surge made its maverick founder Elon Musk the richest man in the world when he briefly overtook Jeff Bezos of Amazon, both now sitting on notional fortunes of $180 billion. Conferred as they are on unlovable people by irrational markets, you could say these rewards make capitalism look grotesque. But the benefit, I suggest, is that they don’t appear to buy happiness and are so huge that only a tiny portion can ever be spent on lifestyle — so in the end, they will have to be given away to good causes. Bill and Melinda Gates, with Warren Buffett, have made global impacts in healthcare through the Gates Foundation. Bezos, after a slow start, has committed $10 billion to climate change action and $2 billion for the homeless. Musk put $250 million worth of Tesla stock into a charitable foundation but is still asking Twitter followers what he should do with it, while tiresomely talking about ‘building a city on Mars’. He should find an earthly cause soon and fund it large: I’ll be happy to forward your suggestions.

Forget Big Bang

A good sub-editor advised me ages ago to avoid the suffix ‘2.0’ to describe a new iteration of anything because ‘it’s already a tired cliché’. So I was sorry to hear the Chancellor waffling about ‘Big Bang 2.0 or whatever’ in a City AM podcast in which he also played down the potential harm to UK financial services from the Brexit trade settlement of which I wrote last week. My own long-term judgment of the first Big Bang — the 1986 reforms that sought to remake London in the image of Wall Street — was that it demolished much of what was good about the City while encouraging excessive risk-taking in increasingly volatile markets. Another round of deregulation aimed at pulling business back from Europe, if that’s what ‘2.0’ might mean, could do the same again. What’s needed instead is a renaissance of the niche specialism, high integrity and fleet footwork that gave the City its global clout in earlier golden days: Big Bang had nothing to do with it.

Sharp wit

The news that the former Goldman Sachs banker Richard Sharp is to succeed Sir David Clementi as chairman of the BBC provoked less hostile reactions in media circles than might have been expected, given that Sharp is also an ally of the Chancellor with a long connection to the Centre for Policy Studies free-market thinktank. But as several commentators pointed out, he’s not Charles Moore (the Prime Minister’s provocative first choice for the job) and his views on the future of the licence fee on which he’ll now lead negotiations with ministers are unknown; furthermore, he’s a generous arts patron and philanthropist. If BBC folk think they’re in for an easy ride, however, I must warn them that their new boss is as sharp as his name. In 2011 he took part in a Spectator debate on the question: ‘City bonuses: are they deserved or should they be curbed?’ From the chair I invited him to speak first, expecting a balanced defence of the system that had awarded him an estimated £100 million by the time he retired from Goldmans in 2007. Instead, with a mischievous glint, he opened with a head-on attack on me as an ex-City man who had turned, in print, to biting the hands that once fed me. How sneaky was that?

Recipe of the day

Northern Ireland’s supermarket shelves are bare while Europe’s hauliers are hiking freight charges to the UK for fear their trucks will take weeks to get out again. But the saddest Brexit story concerns Scottish fishermen who face sending container-loads of langoustines, scallops, oysters, lobsters and mussels to landfill because long–established next-day delivery lines to continental customers have broken down, defeated by border paperwork and incompatible IT. If problems are not swiftly resolved, some already struggling suppliers won’t survive — not least because the alternative domestic market for their produce is so small. We just don’t eat enough of these delicacies, but now would be a good time to acquire the taste. Bold entrepreneurs should create a national chain of pop-up stalls, perhaps in temporarily closed restaurants — following the example of one London lunchtime favourite, San Pietro in Stratford Road, whose window now offers (says my Kensington correspondent) ‘a cheering cornucopia of glorious seafood’. And as relief from Chris Whitty, let’s have Rick Stein’s recipe of the day on the end of the Downing Street briefing.

Control, halt, delete Can anyone stand up to big tech?

NIALL FERGUSON

o see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite ‘T easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly all American conservatives were in favour of standing up to big tech: the majority of them were also against changing the laws and regulations enough to make such a stand effective. The difference is that, unlike the German threat, which was geographically remote, the threat from Silicon Valley was literally in front of our noses, day and night: on our mobile phones, our tablets and our laptops. Writing in this magazine more than three years ago, I warned of a coming collision between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley. ‘Social media helped Donald Trump take the White House,’ I wrote. ‘Silicon Valley won’t let it happen again.’ The conclusion of my book The Square and the Tower was that the new online network platforms represented a new kind of power that posed a fundamental challenge to the traditional hierarchical power of the state. By the network platforms, I mean Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Apple, or FATGA for short — companies that have established a dominance over the public sphere not seen since the heyday of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. FATGA had humble enough origins in garages and dorm rooms. As recently as 2008, not one of them could be found among the world’s largest companies by market capitalisation. Today, they occupy first, third, fourth and fifth places in the market cap league table, just above their Chinese counterparts, Tencent and Alibaba. What happened was that the network platforms turned the originally decentralised worldwide web into an oligarchically organised and hierarchical public sphere from which they made money and to which they controlled access. That the original, superficially libertarian inclinations of these companies’ founders would rapidly crumble under political pressure from the left was also perfectly obvious, if one bothered to look a little beyond one’s proboscis. Following the violent far-right rally at Charlottesville in August 2017, Matthew Prince, chief executive of the internet service provider Cloudflare, described how he had responded: ‘Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.’ On the basis that ‘the people behind the [white supremacist magazine] Daily Stormer are assholes’, he denied their website access to the internet. ‘No one should have that power,’ he admitted. ‘We need to have a discussion around this with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and … Mark [Zuckerberg] shouldn’t be what determines what should be online.’ But that discussion had barely begun in 2017. Indeed, many Republicans at that time still believed the notion that FATGA were champions of the free market that required only the lightest regulation. They know better now. After last year’s election Twitter attached health warnings to Trump’s tweets when he claimed that he had in fact beaten Joe Biden. Then, in the wake of the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, Twitter and Facebook began shutting down multiple accounts — including that of the President himself, now ‘permanently suspended’ from tweeting. When Trump loyalists declared their intention to move their conversations from Twitter to rival Parler — in effect, Twitter with minimal content moderation — Google and Apple deleted Parler from their app stores. Then Amazon kicked Parler off its ‘cloud’ service, effectively deleting it from the internet altogether. It was a stunning demonstration of power. It is only a slight overstatement to say that, while the mob’s coup against Congress ignominiously failed, big tech’s coup against Trump triumphantly succeeded. It is not merely that Trump has been abruptly denied access to the channels he has used throughout his presidency to communicate with voters. It is the fact that he is being excluded from a domain the courts have for some time recognised as a public forum. Various lawsuits over the years have conferred on big tech an unusual status: a public good, held in private hands. In 2018 the Southern District of New York ruled that the right to reply to Trump’s tweets is protected ‘under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court’. So it was wrong for the President to ‘block’ people — i.e. stop them reading his tweets — because they were critical of him. Censoring Twitter users ‘because of their expressed political views’ represents ‘viewpoint discrimination [that] violates the First Amendment’. In Packingham vs North Carolina (2017), Justice Anthony Kennedy likened internet platforms to ‘the modern public square’, arguing that it was therefore unconstitutional to prevent sex offenders from accessing, and expressing opinions on, social network platforms. ‘While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views,’ Justice Kennedy wrote, ‘today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace — the “vast democratic forums of the internet” in general … and social media in particular.’ In other words, as President of the United States, Trump could not block Twitter users from seeing his tweets, but Twitter is apparently within its rights to delete the President’s account altogether. Sex offenders have a right of access to online social networks; but the President does not. This is not to condone Trump’s increasingly deranged attempts to overturn November’s election result. Before last week’s riots, he egged on the mob; he later said he ‘loved’ them, despite what they had done. Nor is there any denying that a number of Trump’s most fervent supporters pose a threat of further violence. Considering the bombs and firearms some of them brought to Washington, the marvel is how few people lost their lives during the occupation of the Capitol. Yet the correct response to that threat is not to delegate to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and their peers the power to remove from the public square anyone they deem to be sympathetic to insurrection or otherwise suspect. The correct response is for the FBI and the relevant police departments to pursue any would-be Trumpist terrorists, just as they have quite successfully pursued would-be Islamist terrorists over the past two decades. The key to understanding what has happened lies in an obscure piece of legislation, almost a quarter of a century old, enacted after a New York court held online service provider Prodigy liable for a user’s defamatory posts. Congress then stepped in with the 1996 Telecommunications Act and in particular Section 230, which was written to encourage nascent firms to protect users and prevent illegal activity without incurring massive content management costs. It states:

1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. 2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of … any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.

In essence, Section 230 gives websites immunity from liability for what their users post if it is in any way harmful, but also entitles websites to take down with equal impunity any content that they don’t like the look of. The surely unintended result of this legislation, drafted for a fledgling internet, is that some of the biggest companies in the world enjoy a protection reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Try to hold them responsible as publishers, and they will say they are platforms. Demand access to their platforms and they will insist that they are publishers. This might have been a tolerable state of affairs if America’s network platforms had been subject to something like the old Fairness Doctrine, which required the big three terrestrial TV networks to give airtime to opposing views. But that was something the Republican party killed off in the 1980s, seeing the potential of allowing more slanted coverage on cable news. What goes around comes around. The network platforms long ago abandoned any pretence of being neutral. Even before Charlottesville, their senior executives and many of their employees had made it clear that they were appalled by Trump’s election victory (especially as both Facebook and Twitter had facilitated it). Increasingly, they interpreted the words ‘otherwise objectionable’ in Section 230 to mean ‘objectionable to liberals’. Throughout the summer of last year, numerous supporters of Black Lives Matter used social media, as well as mainstream liberal media, to express their support for protests that in many places escalated into violence and destruction considerably worse than occurred in the Capitol last week. One looked in vain for health warnings, much less account suspensions, though Facebook says it has removed accounts that promote violence. Compare, for example, the language Trump used in his 6 January speech and the language Kamala Harris used in support of BLM on Stephen Colbert’s show on 18 June. Neither explicitly condoned violence. Trump exhorted the crowd to march to the Capitol, but he told them to ‘peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’. Harris condemned ‘looting and… acts of violence’, but said of the BLM protestors: ‘They’re not going to stop. They’re not. This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels.’ What exactly was the significance of that ‘beware’? Earlier, on 1 June, Harris had used Twitter to solicit donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for people charged with rioting in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd. It would be easy to cite other examples. ‘Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,’ Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times told CBS in early June, at a time when multiple cities were being swept by arson and vandalism. Her Twitter account is still going strong. The double standard was equally apparent when the New York Post broke the story of Biden’s son Hunter’s dubious business dealings in China. Both Twitter and Facebook immediately prevented users from posting links to the article — something they had never done with stories damaging to Trump. You don’t need to be a Trump supporter to find all this alarming. Conservatives of many different stripes — and indeed some bemused liberals — have experienced the new censorship for themselves, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has emboldened tech companies to police content more overtly. In the UK, TalkRadio briefly vanished from YouTube for airing anti– lockdown views that violated the company’s ‘community guidelines’. A recording of Lionel Shriver reading one of her Spectatorcolumns on the pandemic was taken down for similar reasons. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, two Oxford academics, fell foul of Facebook’s censors when they wrote for this magazine about a briefly controversial paper on the efficacy of masks in Denmark. You might think that FATGA have finally gone too far with their fatwa against a sitting president of the United States. You might think a red line really has been crossed when both Alexei Navalny and Angela Merkel express disquiet at big tech’s overreach. But no. To an extent that is remarkable, American liberals have mostly welcomed (and in some cases encouraged) this surge of censorship — with the honourable exception of the American Civil Liberties Union. True, during last year’s campaign the Biden team occasionally talked tough, especially about Facebook. However, it is increasingly clear that the most big tech has to fear from the Biden- Harris administration is protracted antitrust actions focused on their alleged undermining of competition which, if history is any guide, will likely end with whimpers rather than bangs. Either way, the issue of censorship will not be addressed by antitrust lawsuits. It is tempting to complain that Democrats are hypocrites — that they would be screaming blue murder if the boot were on the other foot and it was Kamala Harris whose Twitter account had been cancelled. But if that were the case, how many Republicans would now be complaining? Not many. No, the correct conclusion to be drawn is that the Republicans had their chance to address the problem of over-mighty big tech and completely flunked it. Only too late did they realise that Section 230 was Silicon Valley’s Achilles heel. Only too late did they begin drafting legislation to repeal or modify it. Only too late did Section 230 start to feature in Trump’s speeches. Even now it seems to me that very few Republicans really understand that, by itself, repealing 230 would not have sufficed. Without some kind of First Amendment for the internet, repeal would probably just have restricted free speech further. As Orwell rightly observed, ‘we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.’ Those words sum up quite a lot that has gone on inside the Republican party over the past four years. There it was, right in front of their noses: Trump would lead the party to defeat. And he would behave in the most discreditable way when beaten. Those things were predictable. But what was also foreseeable was that FATGA — the ‘new governors’, as a 2018 Harvard Law Review article called them — would be the true victors of the 2020 election.

” Lessons from Hong Kong The West’s approach to China must change

CHRIS PATTEN

he veteran British diplomat the late Sir Percy Cradock said that Chinese leaders may be ‘thuggish dictators’ but ‘they were men of their word and could be trusted to do what T they promised’. Well, the past year has put an end to the latter half of that statement. From coronavirus to the brutal treatment of Hong Kong, the behaviour of the Chinese Communist party has made it clear that the approach of liberal democracies to China must change. Last week, when the West’s media was distracted by the chaos in the US Capitol, police in Hong Kong arrested 55 pro-democracy activists on the charge of subversion. It is the latest example of the consequences of the national security law imposed by Beijing on the city in June. The law has been accompanied by what amounts to the takeover of the city by a CCP boss and enforcer, Luo Huining, and a gang of security officials, all directed by Han Zheng, a Chinese Vice-Premier and member of the CCP’s standing committee of the politburo. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s nominal Chief Executive, does what she is told. In a few months, the elected legislature has been trashed; democracy campaigners and supporters are being locked up; and civil servants are obliged to pledge their support for the new law. Free speech has been curtailed. The police, who colluded with triad gangs to deal with the demonstrations, have in effect been placed above the law. ‘Patriotic education’ is being forced into schools, and teachers threatened with the sack if they step out of line. Universities, too, are being forced into the communist straitjacket. The separation of powers — a fundamental part of Hong Kong’s constitution — has been junked. Judges have been targeted by pro-Beijing thugs for not taking a harder line with demonstrators and for throwing out clearly fabricated police evidence. People have also been encouraged to become ‘snitches’, informing on neighbours and workmates for alleged breaches of the law. Such measures are familiar in China’s police state, where the law was once described by the American sinologist Perry Link as like ‘an anaconda in the chandelier’. Step out of line, even unknowingly, and the python falls down on your head; enveloped by its coils, you are dragged to a secret trial. The effect of this on Hong Kongers’ sense of their own citizenship is obvious; the damage on the economy remains to be seen. Hong Kong has thrived as a great international financial hub on a tripartite foundation — freedom of capital, freedom of information and the rule of law. Without all these attributes, it is difficult to imagine a future remotely as successful as its past. It is not China that is the problem. It is communism. China and the CCP are not politically consubstantial. But party bosses are adamant: to love China is to love the party. Most citizens in Hong Kong and Taiwan have found this impossible to swallow. For the first dozen or so years after 1997, Beijing by and large stood by the core principles of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. But Xi Jinping’s ascent to the dictatorship changed that. By the end of his predecessor’s term, Chinese leaders were starting to become nervous about their ability to hold on to absolute power in an era of globalisation, urbanisation and the internet. The enemy in their sights was liberal democracy and its attributes, many of which they saw exemplified in Hong Kong. In 2013, instructions were given to party and government officials by a committee chaired by Xi to fight every example of western liberal democracy. These orders, ‘Document No. 9’, have been at the heart of Xi’s policy since he became lifetime boss and have been followed by similar instructions for universities and schools. They make up a comprehensive assault on the values that sustain open societies, from human rights and western-style journalism to constitutional development and ‘historical nihilism’ (essentially the pursuit of evidence-based truth about the past). Teachers are regarded in the words of Stalin as ‘engineers of the soul’. Ambassadors and their acolytes are instructed to fight against democratic values, engaging in intellectual property theft, malign use of social media and ‘road rage’ political behaviour in foreign countries. They are supported by United Front activists, a network of Beijing toadies organised and heavily funded by the CCP. Attempts to construct a sensible policy on China are bedevilled by lobbyists in our own democracies who believe that China should never be publicly crossed. Mao’s first chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, was derided as a ‘whateverist’ — whatever Mao had said or done was fine with him. Here, in the West, our own whateverists resort to ‘what about’ arguments based on moral relativism. Criticise what amounts to genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang and they come back with accusations of Islamophobia in America and Europe. Mention censorship of the media in China and they point their fingers at Fox News and Rupert Murdoch. What is the difference, they ask, between Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protestors and the rioters who attacked the US Capitol? Then there are half-baked economic arguments purporting to be about the national interest. Of course we should want successful economic partnerships with the surging Chinese economy. But China, which breaks the letter and spirit of trade and investment rules, does not do business with us as an act of charity. China today has a trade surplus in goods and services with the UK of about £20 billion. Not a bad bargain for Beijing. As for Chinese investment through state-owned enterprises in the UK, when that money arrives it is directed to projects which make a profit and give China a foothold in key industries such as nuclear energy. But some of the money never arrives. Provided that British ministers visiting China stick to Beijing’s script and keep quiet about human rights, they are invariably promised a dollop of investment as a reward. But we still await much of what was promised during the ‘golden age’ of our relationship with China. So how should Britain respond? For starters, it is worth remembering that we are dealing with ‘peak China’, to borrow a phrase from the former diplomat Charles Parton. China is probably stronger economically in dealing with us now than it ever will be again. In the decade ahead it will increasingly have to overcome the problems of debt, demography and drought, as well as the existential weakness of its system of government. Meanwhile, we should be absolutely clear that we are not seeking to launch a cold war on China. But the CCP is fighting a values war against the West. We should call it what it is, and work with our democratic friends to stand up to it. We have already done much that should be applauded. Boris Johnson’s government was right to offer all those who hold British National Overseas passports in Hong Kong a route to work, study and even assume full citizenship here. The Prime Minister should establish a government committee that manages the totality of our relationship with China. We should work with the new Biden administration, the G7 countries and others such as Australia, India and South Korea to form a partnership of open societies for a balanced world order based on agreements that are kept, free markets and the rule of law. President Trump rightly recognised many of the threats posed by China. But to counter them we need alliances, not megaphones. What is required are strong partnerships with like-minded countries on trade and security and the digital economy. When our friends and partners are threatened and bullied by China — as is happening with Australia — we should speak out on their behalf. At home, the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and the China Research Group have provided us with a useful agenda, from investing in technology and other products and services which ensure that we are not dependent on China, to insisting on more transparency from our universities over research funding. This week’s report from the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission calling for a ‘co-ordinated, comprehensive review of UK-China policy’ shows how much the mood has changed from five years ago, when George Osborne declared that Britain was China’s ‘best partner in the West’. But there is more to be done. We must never forget Hong Kong and encourage our friends to do the same. We should also speak out on China’s genocidal policies in Xinjiang; the government was right to announce this week that the UK will outlaw imports with any links to human rights abuse in response to evidence that Uyghur Muslims are being put into forced labour. We should perhaps ask those whom we still regard quite properly as friends in Brussels whether this is really a good moment for Europe to sign a trade and investment deal with China. It is delusional to think that China will keep its promises on issues such as investment rules and trade access when it has broken its word so regularly since we negotiated its entry to the World Trade Organisation earlier in the century. It is also absurd to think China will implement international labour standards, as the French and German governments claim. Our European leaders might also notice how many heads of the Jewish community have drawn attention to the similarities between the Holocaust and ethnic genocide against Uyghurs. We must also press for a full independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. When doctors in Wuhan tried to blow the whistle about what was happening, they were forced into silence. Countries were obliged by the International Health Regulations agreed after the Sars epidemic to give ‘timely, accurate and detailed evidence’ about new public health problems. But Beijing kept quiet. The world knows now that Chinese communism kills, and even today the CCP is blocking a World Health Organisation mission to investigate the origins of the pandemic in China. We do not want to contain China, but we must constrain its determined assault on international agreements and liberal democracy. Pursuing our national interest does not involve abandoning any sense of right and wrong. The thought of acting in a principled and informed way should not make us go weak at the knees. Maybe China will change. We cannot accomplish that ourselves, but we can stop China changing us. And if we do that, perhaps one day Hong Kong will be free once more as well.

” Critical mass Why I’m keeping my church open

JONATHAN BESWICK

n a beautifully sunny Maundy Thursday last year, during the first lockdown, I removed my cassock, slung my satchel over my shoulder and rode my bicycle to Lambeth Palace O and back. At the halfway point I paused briefly to slip a letter under the Archbishop of Canterbury’s front door, before heading for home and the sad prospect of a solitary evening mass. In my letter I asked the Archbishop to reconsider his request that we not pray in our churches. Communal worship was still forbidden, but the government clearly considered it lawful for the clergy to continue to go into their churches to pray on behalf of their absent congregations. Surely that is what we are here for? Of course, his request did not affect me — the Archbishop has no authority to close churches and tell clergy to stay at home — but many clergy were evidently doing what they were told. Some bishops, in other dioceses, even threatened legal action if we didn’t toe the line. Many churches have sadly now closed again, especially in London, even though, unlike in the last two lockdowns, churches are (at the time of writing) permitted by law to stay open for communal worship. Our MPs, mayors and various religious leaders have written to us directly to ask us to close. I have compassion and respect for those who have yielded to the considerable pressure, but my church is one of the few in London to resist and I believe we are right to do so. An open church, in the depths of winter, is now one of the very few places a person can come to see others (albeit masked) and to get out of their flats. If our church door being open means that just one young man, with the world at his feet, doesn’t take his own life in isolation and despair, then it’s worth it. During the first lockdown, while remaining lawful, our parish church was perhaps less ‘closed down’ than many churches. We set up an outdoor shrine with a great crucifix for prayer, where candles could be lit (-safely, of course) during the opportunity provided by daily exercise. The church bell was still rung two or three times a day to recall the people to God and to remind them that the offices of morning and evening prayer and the mass were being offered to God for them, even if they were currently prevented from joining in. People were responsive and grateful for this and in particular for the familiar sound of the bell. Church bells and priests go back a long way. We have been hanged from them in time of revolution, we have been enjoined to ring them in time of invasion or victory, and ringing them every day is one of the few duties placed upon us by the Prayer Book. The priest is to ‘cause a Bell to be tolled…that the people may come to hear God’s Word and to pray with him’. Last spring, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, via an ill-judged letter to all clergy, achieved that which even Old Nick couldn’t have dreamed of: they caused most of the church bells in England not to be tolled. Many people of course couldn’t work from home, but they suggested that clergy could. We were put under great pressure to ‘go online’. Those of us who wanted to maintain a ministry of presence, both in the street and by ringing the church bell, were accused by some of our fellow priests of ‘flashing our privilege’ by simply donning our cassocks and getting on with the job. It seemed more important to me than ever in my 25 years as a priest that we were now out and about on foot, visible and approachable among our poor, terrified flocks. Perhaps the Archbishops’ letter shouldn’t have surprised me. There is what might be called an ‘incarnational deficit’ at the heart of the Church of England today. It has been growing over recent years but has now got its hands on very many of the levers of power. The Christian faith is grounded in the central mystery of the incarnation: the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. God did not reside on Mount Sinai reissuing successive tablets of stone. Rather, he got stuck into the mess and mortality that is the lot of the human race. Our sacramental faith and worship is born of this incarnational mystery: we are embodied and creaturely and we respond to the embodied and the creaturely. Human warmth, a smile, a handshake or a hug; singing hymns, the sound of bells and the smell of incense, listening to the word of God together, receiving the body and blood of Christ: all of this and more is the stuff of our worship. It doesn’t ‘go online’ any more successfully than a visit to the pub or a children’s birthday party. The incarnational deficit in the Church is bloodless and disembodied. If it takes flesh at all, it does so in the likenesses of a dull managerialism, an aversion to risk, an obsession with statistics and restructuring, and with the pernicious encroachments of critical race theory and unconscious bias training. During the first lockdown the poor parochial clergy were reminded endlessly that our first duty was to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives — and that even though our churches were now closed for worship, it was wonderful and right that they should be open for food banks and blood donor sessions. I rubbed my eyes in dis-belief. Baked beans and nappies: good! Body of Christ: bad? Pints of human blood: good! The blood of Christ: bad? Surely we could have both? During the first lockdown, I had an encounter that I’ll never forget. As I was walking down the lane outside the church, a neighbour called Steve stopped me and asked whether or not it was true that we had been closed down for public masses. I replied that it was indeed true. Steve, with the characteristic frankness you would expect of a man who played several times for Millwall in the 1960s, shook his head sadly and said: ‘Either it matters or it don’t.’ A shot at success The vaccine has arrived at just the right time for the Israeli PM

ANSHEL PFEFFER

or Israeli critics of Benjamin Netanyahu, myself included, these are rather difficult times. It’s hard for us, or anyone, to deny that he appears to be leading the world in vaccinations F against Covid-19. In less than four weeks, two million Israelis — my parents and many friends among them — have received their inoculations. A project spearheaded by the Prime Minister himself promises a return to almost normal life. I’m under 50 and have no underlying illnesses, but am still confident of getting my own vaccine in a couple of weeks. Our world-beating jabbing speed means we have covered 20 per cent of the population. Britain, which has made far more progress than any other European country, has covered less than 5 per cent. The world’s eyes are on Israel because of what happens next: will Covid hospitalisations now start to fall as fast as the models suggest? ‘We’re literally at the moment of truth for the world,’ says Professor Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute. ‘If the vaccine acts in the way Pfizer has said it does, at the end of this week we’ll start to see in Israel the proportion of serious cases in the over-60 group begin to go down. This is the money-time.’ For Netanyahu’s diehard supporters, the ‘Bibistim’, this is just further proof — not that any was needed — of King Bibi’s magical powers. Only he could have personally phoned up the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna to secure early shipments of the vaccines to a small country in the Middle East. The numbers don’t lie, they cry, as they post the latest graphs on their social media accounts, showing Israel on track to emerge from the pandemic months ahead of the rest of the world. At this rate, most Israelis will have been inoculated from the plague by the end of March, perhaps earlier. Netanyahu’s many detractors, the small majority of Israelis who voted in the past couple of elections for the hopelessly divided parties of the opposition, see also another date around that time: 23 March, election day yet again. How convenient for the embattled Prime Minister, who is currently lagging in the polls. Typical Netanyahu. After ten months of his government’s shambolic handling of the coronavirus — for part of which Israel was the world leader in the daily infection rate — and three nationwide lockdowns (we’re still in the third) the vaccine has arrived just at the right time to revive his political fortunes. The rollout is coinciding perfectly with his election campaign. Lockdown means no election rallies — but every day he visits vaccination centres across the country. He greets the latest shipments from Pfizer at the airport. After more than a decade in power, he is eager to claim ownership over everything that has worked for Israel — especially its hi-tech economy. His opponents are quick to shoot back that the foundations were laid by Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour government, which injected massive amounts of cash to set up a venture-capital sector in the early 1990s. In a political landscape which has been polarised over one issue, with the Prime Minister clinging to power, neither side is prepared to give credit. Netanyahu’s wastrel son Yair boasts in lectures that, before his father arrived on the scene, Israel had no exports ‘besides oranges’. When critics of the Prime Minister tweet that they have been vaccinated, Yair likes to taunt them by saying they have his father to thank. The opposition has a counter-narrative. Don’t thank Bibi for buying vaccines with your tax money, as if it’s his money. Thank Israel’s public health system, the legacy of the nation’s socialist founding fathers, which geared up overnight to seamlessly deliver the vaccines in hundreds of locations across the country. There’s a great deal of truth to this narrative: but Israel isn’t Britain, with its fetishising of the NHS. Voters won’t be voting for their doctors. Besides, the socialist legacy is a bit more complex. The workers’ unions and political parties that built the Zionist enterprise didn’t bequeath Israelis one national health service, but four of them. And more than a century since they were founded, long after losing any party affiliation, they continue to compete with each other for members and for government funding. Typical Israel. It built an unwieldy yet technologically advanced system of publicly funded health services which compete as if they were in the private sector. The only business model for their survival is to hold on to members (and perhaps attract a few more) by constantly improving their customer service. At the same time, they focus on preventative medicine to keep down the heavy costs of hospitalisation. The key is homegrown medical technology. All Israelis now have the most detailed digitised doctors’ records and medical files (which go back decades) of anywhere in the world. So was it Netanyahu’s persuasive phone-calls that has put Israel on the vaccination superhighway? Or simply the prospect of having easy access to the medical data of an entire vaccinated country that convinced the pharmaceutical giants to expedite shipments to Israel? Choose the narrative that suits your political views. The same is true of another question mark looming over Israel’s vaccination success — what about the five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? When will they get their vaccinations — and isn’t Israel responsible for them? Here, again, there are two convenient narratives. Israel’s constant critics maintain that the Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation and therefore the world should not be applauding Israel’s vaccination success until they are jabbed as well. Israel’s kneejerk defenders see this an anti-Semitic harangue and insist that the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza are living under their own autonomous rule and vaccines are the Palestinian Authority’s sole responsibility. The truth of course lies somewhere in between. Under international law, Israel remains the ‘occupying power’ and is therefore responsible under the Fourth Geneva Convention for the Palestinians’ health. At the same time, health issues were ‘delegated’ by the Oslo Accords to the Palestinian Authority, with Israel retaining overall responsibility if and when needed. For his part, Netanyahu has been posing as the vaccine unifier — visiting the town of Tira to urge its Arab minority to ‘come and be vaccinated’. He said the words in Arabic. In public, the Palestinian leadership insist they don’t need Israeli help and are going to inoculate their population with the Russian Sputnik vaccine. In private, Israeli officials admit that Israel will help the Palestinians with Israel’s own surplus vaccines, as soon as they’ve finished vaccinating most Israelis. If things were different, they might even have considered passing them vaccines earlier — but there’s that election on 23 March. As Netanyahu knows, it’s quite possible that Israeli will be protected by then. Vaccinations for Palestinians, justified or not, won’t win any votes.

Brain food The questionable ethics of eating octopus

SIMON BARNES

[Getty Images]

hould the undoubted intelligence of octopuses change the way we treat them? This question has been asked a lot of late because of the documentary My Octopus Teacher. S The film is about a year-long relationship between a man and an octopus, and it takes place in a kelp bed off South Africa. It celebrates the sensitivity, awareness and intelligence of the octopus. That’s a difficult concept. Octopuses — octopi is wrong because it’s not Latin and octopodes is insufferably pedantic — are molluscs. That’s the same phylum as slugs and snails and cockles and mussels. In other words, intelligence is not restricted to our own phylum of chordates or back- boned animals. As flight independently evolved in birds, bats, insects and the extinct pterosaurs, so intelligence has evolved independently in at least two phyla. It’s not all about us. There are more than 300 species of octopus. The giant Pacific octopus has a leg-span of 14 feet while the star-sucker pygmy octopus has one of an inch. They have the highest brain-to-body ratio of all invertebrates. Their nervous system gives limited autonomy to their eight arms: in other words, they are intelligent in a way that lies beyond easy imagining. Octopuses have adapted to live in several different ways: as bottom-dwellers, free-swimmers and coral-reef lurkers. They are predators: their eight arms surround a mouth with a powerful beak and they quieten their prey with poisonous saliva. The bite of the blue-ringed octopus can be fatal to humans. They are short-lived, six years at most. The male dies a few months after mating; the female after her eggs have hatched. Octopuses are molluscs without shells. Their shell-lessness gives them mobility and flexibility, but it also makes them vulnerable. They need intelligence to make those traits work, and it has been demonstrated in controlled conditions. It was thought until about 60 years ago that tool-use defined humanity, and octopuses have been observed using coconut shells to make homes. Here is intelligence that lies not just beyond the species barrier but beyond the phylum barrier. Octopuses have passed all sorts of maze tests. They have excellent long- and short-term memories. They can engage in (though this is disputed) observational learning, i.e. see a useful task performed and then imitate it. They can recognise individual humans. In an experiment, one person made much of the octopus while the other teased it with a wire brush: the octopus flaunted itself for the one and hid from the other. Anecdotal evidence of intelligence is vivid and compelling: captive octopuses routinely leave their tanks to seek company, food and sex. They climb in and out of lobster-pots to take the trapped animals for themselves. People who work with them in aquaria say that octopuses have distinct personalities; this is not sentimentality but practical animal husbandry, as anyone who has worked in a stable knows. The evidence for octopus intelligence is so overwhelming that they are categorised as honorary vertebrates when it comes to experiments. They are the only invertebrates protected by the Animal (Scientific Procedures) Act of 1986. That has posed a question for many people. Should you treat an octopus as you would an escargot, given they are both molluscs? Is it morally acceptable to eat octopuses? This is the old cannibal question: at what point do you draw the line? What or who is acceptable as food? The idea of intelligence plays a significant part in this fraught area of personal and societal choice. In the developed nations of the West we don’t eat monkeys, still less apes. They’re too much like us. If you’re intelligent enough to have a personality, you’re quite a bit like us: that’s our rough- and-ready understanding of the world. We don’t eat dogs in this country and have a horror of those who do. It’s the same with horses: in 2013, £300 million was wiped off Tesco’s share value after it was found selling burgers that contained horse meat. Travellers to some parts of America are often disturbed to find dolphin on the menu — they don’t want to eat a mammal widely celebrated for its intelligence. But in fact it’s a local nickname for a fish otherwise known as mahi-mahi. Commercial hunting of whales was banned in 1986, though limited whaling still continues and some countries, notably Iceland, Norway and Japan, are keen to start up again. The ban came about because of the looming extinction of many species — and because of recent discoveries about whale intelligence. The ban is a rare example of humans making a decision against their own immediate interests. We make rather a point of denying the intelligence of the creatures that we do routinely eat: cows, sheep and chickens are usually portrayed as silly. Pigs are clearly intelligent, but they are contemptible and that makes their consumption OK. To call anyone a cow, sheep, pig or chicken is an insult. We need to despise what’s on the menu but we can’t despise intelligence, as that would be to despise ourselves. Jeremy Bentham nailed the issue in the 18th century: ‘The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?’ The issue of food choice is deeply personal. Emotional and ethical concerns have been changing diets over the past half–century. The octopus documentary has raised further sensibilities: can we really eat creatures that are so much like us? But the fact is that animals are not like us. They are us. We all belong to the kingdom Animalia. We have tried again and again to deny it across the millennia, but it’s unavoidable. The octopus proves that truth. Franco-Hungarian empire The unlikely alliance of Orban and Macron

FREDRIK ERIXON

Getty Images

fter Brexit, the general assumption was that France and Germany would take their place as the two rulers of Europe. But Angela Merkel’s influence has been waning and A Germany is often an absent power — preoccupied as it is by redefining its own politics after 15 years of her rule. This suits Emmanuel Macron, who was never satisfied with sharing the stage with her. He has found himself another ally, one who is far more influential than people give him credit for — Viktor Orban. Macron and Orban have a monastic attitude to power: they both rule on the basis of there being a single orthodoxy that everyone must observe. They also like to behave like monarchs, treating voters as subjects and accepting few restrictions on their personal projects. Orban has defined himself by his scornful attitude to independent judges and other checks on power. Macron isn’t in the same league, but he is taking a leaf out of Orban’s book.’ Macron is signing off deeply illiberal laws, such as the security bill — now thankfully revised — that could have made it illegal for the French media to show pictures of police brutality. Like Orban, he is no stranger to ruling by decree: early last year the French government bypassed parliament to push through a deeply unpopular pension reform. He now wants his brand of environmentalism to be written into the constitution. Good luck to those who oppose it: he is also introducing a new crime — ‘ecocide’ — with ten years in prison for offenders against his notion of what’s good for the planet. Both leaders’ battles with Islam illustrate the way in which they want to increase their control. Orban is a coarse opportunist. He rails against ‘Muslim invaders’ to appeal to the more base instincts of voters, but tones this down in other speeches. He has praised Muslims and their contribution to the world in culture, mathematics and medicine but has made it clear he thinks the best place for these Muslims is somewhere other than Europe. His belief in religious freedom seems to be limited to that of Christianity. In a way, Macron could not be more different: he is a typical advocate of French secularism. But Macron too is uneasy with Islam and has set out a route to make Muslim practice a matter for state regulation. He has asked Muslim leaders to agree to a ‘charter of republican values’ as part of a broad clampdown on radical Islam. But the charter vilifies Muslims who live by traditionalist values and have nothing to do with the country’s terrorists, who become radicalised outside France’s Muslim community. Restricting the freedom of faith of some Muslims on the grounds that they don’t preach sexual freedom and gender equality is illiberal: it’s the government taking charge of people’s souls. Macron and Orban aren’t political twins. But Macron, perhaps sensing which way the wind is blowing, has come a long way since 2017, when he was saluted as the antidote to the nationalism of Brexit and Donald Trump. Just as Orban and his Fidesz party turned their backs on their founding liberalism and identity of youthful revolt, there isn’t much liberalism left in Macron. Like Orban, who was once an enthusiast for European federalism, Macron has gradually shifted his federalist view to Charles de Gaulle’s idea of a Europe des états — a Europe of government, by the government and for the government. Orban and Macron like to pose as enemies, but in Brussels they often end up on the same side. They share a pessimistic view of the world, believing that Europe has no real friends beyond its borders. Both are pragmatists who want to defrost relations with Russia, ideally through a new ‘Ostpolitik’. The election of Joe Biden has made them feel unsafe. The exit of Trump has deprived Orban of a key member of his worldwide guild of populist-nationalist leaders. And for Macron, Trump’s disrespect for old allies became a foil for Macron’s project of disconnecting Europe from the American order. With Trump gone, he will face more opposition to his mission of cutting Europe’s dependency on the US economy and technology. Protectionism and anti-Americanism are not new in France, but Hungary’s conversion to these causes is more surprising. Orban came to power as a staunch ally of free-market economics but now leads a group of east European nations that have spotted opportunities in the rebirth of French-style economic dirigisme. It gives them an excuse to take control of companies and market forces that were not already in the pocket of the government: the rhetoric of big government serves as a convenient cover for their sleaze. In economic affairs, Paris and Budapest are now coming together in the desire to relax stringent rules on competition and state aid. Bruno Le Maire, France’s Finance Minister, wants to mandate the repatriation of car and medicine production to France. Orban’s system of economic patronage often works covertly, making sure contracts are given to firms with the right political connections. Foreign investors in Hungary can expect to have their profits raided by special taxes. Food retailers such as Tesco and Lidl are threatened with being kicked out of the country. Europe’s new power couple will make it difficult for Britain to build renewed links with Brussels. In London, it is assumed that Brexit will allow the acceleration of European federalism and that the trick now is to build a new relationship with Ursula von der Leyen and the EU she will command. But that federalising might not happen so fast — or at all. It was in fact a succession of UK governments that pushed and defended the most federal aspects of the EU — a single market under common rules that individual governments couldn’t change on a whim. With Britain out, nationalist economic policy — each European nation for itself — is reasserting itself. Macron and Orban got more than they expected out of the Brexit talks. Since they want to weaken EU rules on trade and competition, they don’t want a relationship with the UK that ties them to open markets. That instinct will guide them in future talks with Britain. The Franco- Hungarian programme for Europe has enemies, especially in the Nordics and Netherlands. Germany, as usual, hasn’t made up its mind. But this is Europe’s new direction. The old liberal vision of Europe — culturally open and free-trading — no longer has many followers. It has certainly now lost its leaders.

‘‘No thanks, I’m too tiered.’’ Blanket restrictions The stifling cult of self-care

LAURA FREEMAN

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aby, it’s cold outside. It’s dark. It’s January. It’s Lockdown III. There’s only one thing for it: stay home, snuggle up, save lives. Cocoon yourself in cashmere, treat yourself to silk B pyjamas, invest in a lambswool throw. Lay the fire, warm the cocoa, watch Love Actually for the 30th time. Practise self-care. Be sure to put you first. You’ve heard of safe spaces and The Coddling of the American Mind. Well, this is the safe space as interiors trend, coddling as lifestyle choice. Call it the blanket cult. If the message of wellness was ‘My body is a temple and I shall make it strong with avocado, green juice and yoga’, then the message of self-care is ‘My body is a china doll, and must be wrapped in cotton wool and sheepskin slippers’. I don’t blame embattled retailers for wanting to capitalise on the cosy pound, but I do mind the idea that self-medicating with hygge and fingerless mittens is any sort of substitute for being allowed to get up, get out and get on with your life. We’ve heard a lot in the past year about ‘gaslighting’, a form of manipulation that takes its name from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light in which a husband unsettles his wife’s mental balance by, among other tricks, tampering with the gas lamps. It is, however, another story of control that now comes to mind. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s sinister story ‘The Yellow Wall- paper’ (1892), a husband and brother — both physicians — connive to keep the narrator confined to her room. She must lie down, keep quiet, and is ‘absolutely forbidden’ to work until she is well. ‘I disagree with their ideas,’ says the patient. ‘Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?’ You said it, sister. Gilman had herself suffered such a ‘rest-cure’. At the end of the 19th century, apparently hysteric or neurasthenic women were treated with bed rest and pint after pint of full-fat milk. Swap the bed for a sofa and milk for caramel chai and you have something like the set-up on offer to women self-isolating in single rooms and small flats today. Don’t leave your digs, but do order Oreo cheesecake on Deliveroo. Lockdown isn’t wholly to blame. Self-care was in the air already, but being endlessly confined to barracks has made its message seem more timely and necessary. When crawling the walls — yellow-papered or otherwise — many have understandably embraced essential oils, herbal teas and other swaddling whatnot. Batten the hatches and bring on the lavender pillows. In moments of despair, it’s (probably) better to reach for the bubble bath than the gin, but the next time I read an article telling me to light a candle and curl up with a box set I fear I’ll burn the house down. I say this not as someone who is gung-ho and unfeeling. Precisely the opposite. My headstone will read: ‘Tomb of the Unknown Worrier.’ When I was a teenager, I was given a notebook with a cover quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Do one thing every day that scares you.’ The virtue of being scared of dogs, heights, dirt, crowds, confined spaces, open spaces, your own shadow and, on a bad day, everything is that there is always a convenient terror nearby. Some of us are born brave; some achieve braveness by daily facing our fears. I worry (there I go again) that for every month that passes without boarding a plane, train, bus or Tube, I become that bit more out of practice, that bit more apprehensive. I know I’m not alone. I further worry that the more that we are told we are vulnerable, that we’ve never had it so NOTES ON... Presidential dogs By Lara King

Born in the White House: Spot. Credit: Getty Images.

rom the moment Donald Trump’s presidency began, he was lacking something. But Joe Biden is about to make up for it — twice over. F Trump was the first president in more than a century not to have a dog in the White House. Biden’s German shepherds Champ, 12, and two-year-old Major will be filling the vacancy left by Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and continuing a tradition of First Dogs that can trace its pedigree back to George Washington. Far from being mere political poodles, many First Dogs have made history in their own right. Calvin Coolidge’s collie Rob Roy was the first dog to feature in an official First Family portrait, which still hangs in the China Room, while George W. Bush’s Scottie, Barney, gave a dog’s-eye view of Washington life with ‘Barneycam’, a series of videos so popular they crashed the White House website. Barney wasn’t the only First Dog with a taste for the media (sometimes too literally — he had a reputation for biting reporters). George H.W. Bush’s springer spaniel reached the bestseller lists with Millie’s Book: As Dictated to Barbara Bush, outselling the president’s own autobiography. She also became a magazine cover star, posing for Life with the puppies she gave birth to in the White House — including Spot, who later returned to live there with George W. Bush. But some presidential dogs become a little too high-profile for their own good. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Scottie, Fala, who had a secretary to manage his fan mail, earned the Secret Service code name ‘Informer’ because he drew so much attention that officials feared he’d put the president’s life in danger. And First Dogs have no diplomatic immunity from the doghouse. Another of FDR’s dogs, Major, reportedly tore the seat from Ramsay MacDonald’s trousers during a state visit. The irony of a German shepherd attacking a British prime minister amid the tensions of 1933 was not lost on reporters. Other presidential pets have helped boost international relations, though. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent John F. Kennedy a gift — Pushinka (‘fluffy’), the puppy of the Russian space dog Strelka. After a CIA inspection for listening devices, Pushinka settled in so well that she had puppies of her own with another of JFK’s dogs, Charlie the Welsh terrier. More than 5,000 letters arrived requesting one of the four resulting ‘pupniks’. But perhaps the most useful trick First Dogs have pulled off is fetching votes. In 1928, Herbert Hoover’s Belgian shepherd King Tut appeared in a campaign photo that was credited with softening Hoover’s stiff image and getting him elected. In 1944, FDR defended Fala against a Republican political attack in a speech that many believed turned the election in his favour.

Lead book review The girl from Tennessee Dolly Parton is the living embodiment of America’s best values, says Philip Hensher

She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh

Pushkin Press, pp.208, 9.99

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After the storming of Congress last week, numerous American commentators looked at the Proud Boys, the QAnon Shaman and Trump himself and said, in so many words: ‘This is not who we are.’ Undoubtedly true. It raises, however, an interesting supplementary question: who, in fact, are you? Looking through the ranks of those who might represent the best values of America, we arrive quite quickly at Dolly Parton. She came from a family in rural Tennessee of both grinding poverty and honest, decent aspiration. Sacrifices on their part, and a 30-hour bus journey to Louisiana, let her make her first recording in 1959, at 13. Her first LP, in 1967, opened with the still classic song ‘Dumb Blonde’, Dolly both acknowledging and dismissing the initial impression of her appearance. In the past 53 years she has released 64 studio albums, including 18 with other artists. She has recorded more than 1,000 songs. Early in her career, she successfully shed the usual high degree of control and emerged as a talented songwriter — she is said to have written more than 5,000 songs. A dabbling with Hollywood gave us a small number of classic roles, and I recommend another view of 9 to 5 and the otherwise gruelling tearjerker Steel Magnolias. Everyone else in each movie seems to be acting, rather elaborately; Dolly is wonderfully authentic and truthful without making the slightest apparent effort, and quite irresistible. The immense riches this has brought have been used by Dolly selflessly and benevolently. In 1986, she bought a struggling theme park in Tennessee and set about developing it as Dollywood. It is a festival of Americana. By all accounts, it is enchanting: ten pleasant minutes on YouTube will convince you that the nine rollercoasters pull off a difficult combination in being both thrilling and charming, wooden tracks plunging and rattling through the Tennessee woods. It is the most successful visitor attraction in the state, and provides employment for thousands — not just as security staff and ticket-punchers, but giving craftsmen an outlet for their work. I long to go there. Old-fashioned quiet philanthropy finds a place too. When the Smoky Mountains were hit by wildfires and hundreds lost their homes, Dolly set up a fund to give $1,000 dollars a month to those affected for six months. It showed how empathetic she is. It was minimally bureaucratic, understanding how much of a barrier that can be to ordinary people in trouble; it provided a steady series of payments rather than a harder-to-manage lump sum; and it was for a limited period, rather than being an indefinite source that might come to be relied on. She has, for 25 years, run a literacy programme for children, sending books to different parts of the world without fanfare. The daughter of an illiterate but intelligent father, she set up the Imagination Library, rather than, more obviously, a support for the performing arts. She understands that few people are going to have her route out of grinding poverty but that many who learn to love to read will make a success of their lives. She has been a supporter of gay, lesbian and trans rights for decades; she stays out of party politics, very wisely not condemning what much of her audience will passionately believe. She is, in short, a living embodiment of the American trust in the transformative effect of hard work and talent. She has done it without losing an iota of her good humour or charm, and never giving the slightest hint of the usual American sanctimoniousness; she is, as everyone agrees, a very good thing indeed. Dolly has never complained much about the barriers she had to overcome, preferring to bring out some well-worn jokes on the subject. On her villainous collaborator in the early years, Porter Wagoner, she has said: ‘I knew he had balls when he sued me for a million dollars. He was only paying me $30 a week.’ There is no question, however, that these barriers were substantial, and defeated many others. Bobbie Gentry, a similarly determined and intelligent singer of the time, withdrew from public appearances altogether by the end of the 1970s. Dolly has often put these problems down to her sex, and the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world. I’m not so sure. That is part of it, but the worst humiliations she faced sprang, surely, from something Americans find very hard to discuss: class. Dolly was, from the start, perfectly sincere in her spectacular look — hair on a scale not glimpsed since Mme de Pompadour, rhinestones, glitter and an unforgettable silhouette which surgery may have contributed to. When the scientists in 1996 succeeded in cloning a sheep with cells taken from the mammary gland, the result was always going to be called ‘Dolly’. We love all these things about her now, of course, but they threw a lot of commentators into a class-driven frenzy that had little to do with her sex. In a television interview in 1977, Barbara Walters thought herself entitled to ask Dolly when she experienced puberty, whether her husband felt obliged to be faithful, and whether her breasts were real. She even submitted her guest to the indignity of standing up and inviting the audience to inspect her body. Would Walters have ever done this to Meryl Streep or Meg Ryan? It was sheer class hostility, and no doubt much more of it took place in private, and in boardrooms. I have to admit, however, that Dolly is not my favourite country singer. Though there are many highlights — ‘Down from Dover’ is heartrendingly good, and the wonderfully absurd cover of ‘Mule Skinner Blues’ an infallible mood-lifter — she is a bit cautious for my taste. The startling end of ‘The Bridge’ is an oddity; the glamorous little gruppetto at the end of the chorus of ‘Jolene’ about as far as she goes in the direction of folk ornamentation. Country music has a wonderful vein of absurdity, but despite Dolly’s well-attested sense of humour, it makes its way too rarely into her songs— ‘I’ll Oil Wells Love You’ and the excellent ‘PMS Blues’ are exceptions. I wish Dolly had gone a little more down the route of Jimmy Buffett, the author of ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk (And Screw)?’, ‘My Head Hurts My Feet Stink And I Don’t Love Jesus’ and ‘Please Take Your Drunken 15-Year-Old Girlfriend Home’. She’s quite saucy enough: ‘Touch Your Woman’ could hardly be franker. More controversially, I regret the way that the plain style of Dolly’s first lyrics give way by the mid-1970s to rather faded poeticisms, even in her best-loved songs. Country music had always excelled in plain speaking, as in Bobbie Gentry’s deathless ‘And papa said to mama, as he passed around the blackeyed peas/Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please.’ Dolly goes quite quickly from ‘Well here it is, it’s two o’clock and you’re still not at home/I think there’s something fishy goin’ on’ (‘Something Fishy’) to ‘Your beauty is beyond compare/With flaming locks of auburn hair’ (‘Jolene’). Nevertheless, she is one of the glories of the age, and, for my money, beyond all criticism. Sarah Smarsh is a fan, and She Come By It Natural sends one off very pleasantly to some Dolly arcana on YouTube, such as the horrifying Barbara Walters interview. I would question its description of itself as a ‘deeply researched work’; almost all its sources are available with a few online searches; there is no interview with its subject or with anyone who knows her; Smarsh has (surprisingly) only very infrequently seen Dolly perform, and there is no discussion of the carefully crafted songwriting. There is a fair amount on Dolly being a strong woman in a man’s world, much piety about some currently fashionable concerns, and a little about the author’s own less than privileged background. (Smarsh’s family had a car and a house, but she took her books to school in a paper bag — that sort of thing.) No matter. It leaves us thinking none the worse of Dolly, and directs one toa treasure house of joy. The time I spent catching up on Dolly’s films and albums, in concert and being interviewed, before writing this review, was a delight. If the present Pope wants to stretch a rule or two and declare her Saint Dolly tomorrow it would be quite all right with most of us.

” Nature fights back Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn

William Collins, pp.272, 16.99

Paradise regained: since 1954, one of the planet’s most impressive coral reefs has grown up in Bikini Atoll’s toxic waters. Credit: Getty Images.

Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed into the mesh of undergrowth. This was the site of Ducker, the open-air swimming pool that once belonged to Harrow School. Here the young Winston Churchill romped (naked, since trunks were for prefects), as, in his day, did my dad. When I arrived at Harrow in the 1980s, the pool — far bigger than Tooting Bec Lido, which is now the UK’s largest — had just been abandoned. It was covered with graffiti, the haunt of skateboarders. Returning in 2021, I looked for changes wrought by three decades of neglect. Google Maps showed a J-shaped artificial lake, 30m by 150m. But when I switched to ‘satellite view’, the photo was not of a lake but of a dark-green copse. The old pool was hard to find beneath the tangle of vegetation. It was filled with silt and swamp, out of which stretched thick trees, whose tops were home to the murmur and clatter of pigeons. Nicholas, who was sporting an eyepatch and carrying a plastic hook (which we later managed to lose among the brambles) wanted to play pirates. We did that. But the real reason we were there was because I had been inspired by Cal Flyn’s extraordinary Islands of Abandonment. Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain — not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone. There is a special quality of loneliness in these fresh ruins. As well as an explorer, Flyn, who writes for Granta and the Guardian, is a psycho-geographer, attuned to the spirit of hopeless places — an ecologist, too, her theme being that these desolate spots are not, in fact, as hopeless as they seem. As she travels from California to Tanzania to Ukraine and home again, her message is that, however much of a mess we’ve made, nature stages a comeback. In 1954, at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the American military detonated a nuclear bomb 7,000 times as powerful as the one that flattened Hiroshima. The result was so shocking that atmospheric testing was banned. Yet a half-century later, scientists visited the atoll to find that in the toxic waters had grown up one of the most impressive coral reefs on the planet. In the 1980s, a strip of land between Iran and Iraq was planted with mines. A no-go area for men, this impromptu nature reserve has since become a sanctuary for the endangered Persian leopard. These graceful creatures are the size of humans, but because their weight is distributed over four feet, they fail to trigger the devices. For reasons of safety or budget or both, Flyn doesn’t visit all the places she writes about. But the dozen sites she sees, each of which forms a chapter, she describes with dazzling flair. Just occasionally, she gets pretentious. ‘Impossible not to think of T.S. Eliot,’ she declares while clambering over a slag heap in Scotland. But in general her prose is as pragmatic as it is poetic. On Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, she notes the ‘shags bedding down on the spray-spattered rocks’ and ‘grey seals heaving themselves up concrete slipways’. On Swona, off the northernmost point of Scotland, she writes: ‘Rain lashes the windows to one side, salt sprays the other. Days pass. Weeks pass. Months. Years.’ By the ecological process of succession, an abandoned landscape is reclaimed by weeds, then shrubs, then softwood trees, then hardwood. That’s what has been happening to Harrow’s open- air pool over the past three decades — the same time period during which, as Flyn reveals, 155 Rag-tag heroes Allan Mallinson

At Close Range: Life and Death in the Artillery Regiment 1939-45 by Peter Hart

Profile Book, pp.575, 25

British artillery in action at Tobruk. Credit: Alamy

‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter Hart quotes the St Crispin’s Day speech aptly, for as an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, he’s done his bit over the years to record memories. By the 1980s the IWM’s sound archive had amassed an impressive collection of interviews with veterans of the first world war, and so began on those of the second. At Close Rangeweaves the recollections of 50 veterans (an unusually high number for a single unit) from what, as Hart puts it, some might consider a relatively obscure regiment, into a continuous narrative of five years’ campaigning — ‘from the traumatic excitement of action to the banalities of life as a soldier at war’. That was the 107th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery (South Nottinghamshire Hussars), former Yeomanry cavalry who’d been converted to artillery in 1922. As territorials, ‘weekend soldiers’, the yeomen-gunners were local men who knew each other and their families, but with the passing of Leslie Hore-Belisha’s (universal) Military Training Act in April 1939, they were suddenly joined, says Hart, by men who knew that if they didn’t become territorials they’d ultimately be conscripted and probably end up in the infantry. Coming from families who’d perhaps lost men in the Sherwood Foresters in profligate Great War offensives, who could blame them? The South Notts Hussars were embodied (the equivalent of ‘mobilised’ in the regular army) in September 1939 and sent the following year with the 1st Cavalry Division, who were still mounted, to Palestine. Equipped with the first world war 18-pounder, modified with pneumatic tyres and hauled by mechanical- rather than horse-power, but facing no German threat, they spent the Phoney War in relative comfort. But when Mussolini threw in with Hitler in June 1940 they moved to the Western Desert and converted to the new 25-pounder howitzer. Now things got serious. Hart is at pains to stress that what matters in the book is ‘the men who fought the battles: not the grand strategy, the operational theories, the tactical minutiae’. In fact, for those with an interest in tactical minutiae, the book is a treasure trove. We learn, for example, from Bombardier (Corporal) Ray Ellis, evidently a keen artillerist, that besides being far more accurate (‘you could almost drop two shells in the same hole’), the 25-pounder was pleasingly more lethal:

When the shell landed the fragmentation was very tiny. A big shell may shatter into no more than 20 splinters which could hit or miss —but the 25-pounder fragmented into tiny little pieces, which never got much above knee high as it spread. It was a great killer and — as an artilleryman looking for something that will kill — it was a far more efficient projectile.

But disaster befell the regiment at Tobruk in 1942 when the Germans came on the scene. The besieged garrison was ordered to fight to the last round. The accounts of casualties overwhelming the medical resources are harrowing in the extreme. What remained of the regiment was able to break out just before the fortress fell, to be almost annihilated a month later in a rearguard action covering the withdrawal of Eighth Army to the Egyptian border. The remnants were cobbled together as a single sub-unit and incorporated in the 7th Medium Regiment RA. One of the sergeants recalled:

The battery was formed out of a lot of rag-tags: cooks, office clerks, quartermaster stores blokes, quite a few had prison service for desertion! The number of Nottingham people was probably about 10 per cent. All sorts of people were being flung together to try and make this battery with a bunch of new officers.

As a medium rather than a field battery, they were re-equipped with the brand new 5.5” calibre gun, which could hurl four times the 25-pounder’s weight of shell nearly a mile. Their war would now be at longer range and more ‘industrial’, but, as a high priority for German counter- battery fire, just as dangerous. El Alamein, Tunis and Sicily followed, before they returned to England to be reconstituted in regimental strength to take part in the Normandy landings, and then on to the Rhine. Besides death, there is much life in these pages, though even the humorous interludes can be tinged with pathos. An officer went to a café in liberated France in the hope of finding Giselle, the owner’s daughter, more receptive than in 1940:

I said ‘Would you like to come down to Lille for the evening?’ ‘Yes.’ We got to this hotel in Lille, not a very expensive hotel, had a meal and went to bed.

Waking next morning, he found that Giselle ‘had her hair shaved off and her hairpiece was lying by the side of the bed! She was in tears that I’d found out.’ The regiment fired their last salvo on 24 April 1945, just a fortnight before the surrender; but Hart goes on to record the experiences of occupation, the frustration of waiting to go home, and then the difficulties — social, mental and economic — of discharge. Some of it makes for uncomfortable reading. Portrait of the artist as a young woman Madeleine Feeny

Luster by Raven Leilani

Picador, pp.240, 14.99

Raven Leilani. Credit: Nina Subin

One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2020, Raven Leilani’s debut comes acclaimed by a literary Who’s Who that includes Zadie Smith, the author’s teacher at New York University. Five months after Luster became an instant New York Times bestseller, it hits British shores on a tsunami of hype that might grate if the novel weren’t so blindingly good. A feat of narrative voice and supple, rhythmic prose, Luster plunges us into the acerbic psyche of Edie, a millennial New Yorker wading through the early-twenties quagmire: student debt, primitive flatshare, artistic ambitions on hold. At the publishing house that pays her meagre wage, grateful diligence is expected of a ‘token’ black hire, yet Edie’s has worn thin. Instead, she’s ironic, defiant and sexually voracious. Escape comes in the form of Eric, whose fortysomething allure is intensified by the gaps between them, despite his white presumption and oblivion. After Edie is fired from her job, she is drawn into his open marriage, driven by his wife Rebecca’s notion that shared skin colour will grant Edie access to their adopted black daughter Akila’s lonely, private soul. An uneasy cohabitation becomes a tentative dance of intimacy and withdrawal. As the lovers’ ardour cools, Edie’s relationship with Rebecca evolves. A complex, conflicted blend of jealous wife and white saviour, Rebecca — a medical examiner — facilitates Edie’s art, taking her to paint cadavers. Leilani, whose ‘first love’ was painting, depicts Edie’s process with the linguistic specificity that makes all her sentences so potent and surprising. Luster (sheen; one who desires) pulses with death and sex, the latter framed in terms alternately clinical, tender, violent and voyeuristic. Edie’s experience is shaped by her physicality. She’s alert to her body’s erotic capital, its betrayals (IBS, an ‘ugly’ laugh) and mortality: ‘There will always be a part of me that is ready to die.’ In the shifting bonds between Edie, Rebecca and Akila, and a lost pregnancy, Lusterconsiders different modes of motherhood. When she looks in the mirror, Edie finds the face of her mother, who killed herself. In Akila she perceives her adolescent self, ‘hypervisible and invisible: black and alone’. Unable to see herself clearly without the affirmation of other eyes, Edie cannot complete a self-portrait — until, finally, she does, subsequently reclaiming her artistic identity and agency. Flight from reality Alice Peake-Tomkinson

The Autumn of the Ace by Louis De Bernières

Harvill Secker, pp.336, 17.99

Louis de Bernières. Credit: Getty Images

The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and his protagonist Daniel Pitt appear reluctant to leave warfare behind. Pitt is a flying ace, but so nervous about returning to civilian life that he argues against handing back his service weapon. Eventually he capitulates. During the war, he lost two toes after being tortured by the Gestapo but he nonetheless appears to prefer physical peril to the prosaic dysfunctionality of his family life. His mother and one of his daughters are dead, his marriage has disintegrated and he has fathered two children by his wife’s bohemian sister. His son Bertie (by his wife) refuses to speak to him, and this conflict forms one of the central dramas of the book. Lists explaining how all the characters are related are included at the beginning, but these seem deliberately to echo the mind-bending experience of looking at the family tree of the Bloomsbury group. It is somehow easier to navigate the different connections by just plunging into the story. De Bernières has written two previous novels with the same cast of characters: The Dust that Falls from Dreams (2016) and So Much Life Left Over (2018). This structure is loosely based on John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, but I also felt at times that de Bernières was reaching for some of the emotional engagement of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles and sadly falling short. A river runs through it Matthew Janney

The Volga by Janet Hartley

Yale, pp.352, 25

‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’ by Ilya Repin (1870-73). Credit: Getty Images

‘Without this river the Russians could not live,’ remarked Robert Bremner in his work, Excursions in the Interior of Russia. The year is 1840. The river in question, the Volga, the 2,000 mile-long meandering waterway stretching from the forests of north-west Russia to the steppes by the Caspian. At the time of Bremner’s survey, half of the Russian empire’s fish was caught in the single stretch of river by Astrakhan, the Volga’s final pit stop before flowing out to sea. Since the earliest days of medieval Rus through to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, the Volga has not simply fed the mouths of its population but has been crucial to Russia’s commercial, cultural and imperial development. As a Vesti news report from 2019 simply stated: ‘Without the Volga, there would be no Russia.’ In her concise, lucidly written new book, the historian Janet Hartley takes this uncontroversial premise and excites it with drama. This isn’t a book about the Volga itself, but rather the river’s role — physically and symbolically — in the turbulent making of Russia. For those in search of a topographical survey from source to delta, look elsewhere. In this 1,000-year marriage — a mere blip on the river’s ancient timeline — the Volga has been both active participant and indifferent bystander to seismic moments in Russia’s history. As the Mongol empire swept westward, the Golden Horde built their cities on its banks; the Cossack revolts led by Razin and Pugachev snaked the river’s lowlands; the Volga was Russia’s line in the sand in the battle of Stalingrad, as Stalin delivered his infamous, fateful order: ‘Not a step back.’ Hartley retells these already familiar stories as miniature dioramas, resisting digressions that take us too far from the water’s edge. Her companions here are not only tsars, generals, peasants and explorers but also painters and writers, such as Ilya Repin and Vassily Grossman, historians of feeling and mood. As with her previous work, Siberia: A History of the People, Hartley is as preoccupied by how people lived in the cradle of ‘Mother Volga’ as by the headlines the river wrote. In these pages you will find as much on the interiors of a Tartar home as you will on the formation of Moscow. Passing, ornamental details such as these are the book’s most delightful moments. Easy pills to swallow Horatio Clare

The Octopus Man by Jasper Gibson

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp.368, 14.99

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Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance in the brain, long since debunked, modern psychiatry still pours pills on trauma. While their general mechanisms are hypothesised, the specific consequences of different psychotropic drugs for individual brains remain haphazard. ‘We prescribe by side-effect, by trial and error,’ one consultant psychiatrist told me. ‘But I’ve seen all these drugs working,’.The problem is that pills alleviate symptoms of mental illness while doing nothing for causes. Psychiatry’s dilemma mirrors that of Tom Tuplow, the hero of Jasper Gibson’s magnificent novel, a delightfully intelligent man from a broken home who took too much acid etc. Now anointed by Malamock, the Octopus God, whose voice he hears, Tom must choose between taking pills which will reduce him to a struggler on benefits, or eschewing them and serving Malamock, who offers clarity, purpose, self-worth — and potential catastrophe. Similarly, psychiatry has grown prestigious and powerful on the Malamock-promises of drugs. Naturally, psychiatrists long to heal the sick, but can they now reduce their — and our — dependence on pills? While the number of people taking them multiplies, and mental hospitals overflow, evidence condemns polypharmacy, the prescribing of ever more drugs. People who do not take antipsychotic medication have startlingly better long-term outcomes than those who do, according to a famous 20-year study by Professor Martin Harrow in Chicago. Tom is diagnosed schizophrenic. Treated with Open Dialogue, which favours talking therapies over medication, he would have a 74 per cent chance of being steady in two years, studies in Finland found, against 9 per cent in Britain. Britain today is seen through filters of mental anguish by up to a quarter of the populace. Tom’s eye-level East Sussex, of Morrison’s and wheezing buses, is beautifully rendered and very Life and death decisions Amanda Craig

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

Chatto & Windus, pp.282, 16.99

Richard Flanagan. Credit: Getty Images

Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard of. His reworking of the life of the Australian hero ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a doctor who became a prisoner of war on the notorious Burma Death Railway, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner of a traditional kind of literary storyteller that has recently become extinct. It seems appropriate that his eighth novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is also about extinction, both personal and environmental. Tasmania is burning, and as its cornucopia of flora and fauna is wiped out, three children gather to decide whether to let their exhausted 86-year-old mother Francie die, or demand intervention by modern medicine. Anna and her brother Terzo, who are successful professionals living in Australia, initially want to let her go, but Tommy, who has been their mother’s main carer, does not. In the course of the novel, they swap positions. Already bereaved, they carry a burden of guilt that will be familiar to many. Francie’s ‘enforced selflessness’ as wife and mother has, Anna believes, cost her ‘a terrible price in terms of a professional life, a public life, a private life realising her full possibilities’. Her ‘waking dreams’ of the past are vivid, even when cut off from the beauty of the natural world she loves, and are an embarrassment to her more sophisticated children. The only member of her family to give Francie genuine love and compassion is Tommy, her stammering, chaotic, emotionally damaged son. He is powerless to protest effectively, but the fear of being thought ‘a bad person’ makes Anna and Terzo insist that their mother be kept artificially alive. Even though she begs to be allowed to die, they choose to save her from death ‘only by infinitely prolonging her dying’. Written with Flanagan’s characteristic mix of humanism and emotional insight, this uneven novel could have been powerful and moving. Its artistic problem is that layered into it is Anna’s conviction that she herself is vanishing, losing first a finger, then a knee in an extended metaphor that, true to the tropes of magic realism, drives inexorably towards parrots: specifically, orange- bellied ones that are disappearing in Tasmania, thanks to the destruction of their habitat. Anna waits for people to notice that she is disappearing. They don’t, although it is a condition that is catching: her son Gus, obsessed by gaming, vanishes to the extent that only a pair of thumbs pressing buttons on his console are left, raising a rare smile in those of us familiar with this problem too. Flanagan’s gift is not, however, for Kafkaesque fantasy; what could have made two very different novellas is mashed into one 282-page novel. When Anna finally realises that ‘they had

Ancestral voices John Self

Life Sentences by Billy O’Callaghan

Cape, pp.240, 14.99

Billy O’Callaghan. Credit: Hedwig Schwall

Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the ‘sad but nice’: tales of desperation elegantly unfolded, popularised by William Trevor and John McGahern and refined by Colm Tóibín and Mary Costello. A newcomer in this lane is Billy O’Callaghan, whose previous books have been so orgiastically praised by the Booker Prize winner and former literary editor of the Irish Times John Banville that I began to think O’Callaghan might be another of his pseudonyms. And if there’s one feature in Irish novels that shouts louder — or with more forceful quietness — than others, it’s the family and its secrets. The driving principle behind O’Callaghan’s third novel is: ‘Without knowing who and where he comes from, a man is a mystery to himself.’ And it’s a personal project: Life Sentences traces his own family back to the 19th century through the voices of three ancestors. Each person’s story centres on a decisive moment in their life. We start strongly with Jer, O’Callaghan’s great-grandfather, a violent man, former soldier, struggling with the death of his sister Mamie and his hatred of her surviving husband (‘I’d beat him into the ground. I’d butter the stones with him’). He repeatedly revisits his experiences in the first world war, but finds that memory is ‘just nourishment to pain’ (you can say that again, when his dominant mental image is a very effective scene of a fellow soldier being eaten alive by rats). Blinded by Bismarck James Hawes

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, 1871-1918 by Katja Hoyer

The History Press, pp.256, 14.99

Bismarck’s political ‘genius’ depended entirely on his backing by the Prussian Guard. Credit: Getty Images.

The reviewer’s first duty is to declare any skin he may have in the game, so here goes: I write this in a bone-chillingly old house filled with portraits of Prussian Junkers, ancestors of my third son, the oldest of them still wearing steel plate about chest and shoulders, the more recent armoured only by expressions of ineffable superiority. What a lot of them there are. Somehow their Lutheran Prussia — dirt poor by the standards of France and Britain but uniquely militarised, its spiritual heart so far east as to be now in Russia — managed, in the second half of the 19th century, to annex the entire human and industrial strength of wealthy, advanced, largely Catholic western Germany for their ancient ‘drive to the east’. The Eastern Front in the second world war, with all its attendant horrors, was merely their final throw; for the one thing which united this caste-bound bunch with the otherwise despised ‘Bohemian Corporal’ Hitler was their determination to sort out the Slav helots — as they saw them — once and for all. Few stories can bear more retelling, and though it was matchlessly covered in Christopher Clarke’s Iron Kingdom in 2007, Katja Hoyer takes the tale by the scruff of the neck and gives it a good shake for the less demanding general reader. Her thesis is bold and simple. It is also one fit for these days, when the great nations seem to be putting up the shutters again. There was an original sin at the heart of Bismarck’s empire. What enabled him to create it as he did was the ‘spirit of defensive nationalism’ which took hold of Germany in 1813-5. Born in the uprising against generations of French cultural hegemony and Napoleonic occupation, that spirit became inappropriate to the economic and military behemoth that was Prussia-Germany by 1914, and was fatally rammed home by defeat in 1918, which completed German unification, but in quite the wrong way. The consequence of this is to pretty well whitewash Otto von Bismarck. The Iron Chancellor becomes the mere agent of this allegedly irresistible national mood, a tactical genius and a responsible European diplomat after 1871, rather than the ‘demonic’ figure our ambassador, Lord Odo Russell, considered him. The German Civil War of 1866 is described (as it is in most old schoolbooks) as having been decided in a single day at the battle of Königgrätz between Prussia and Austria. It wasn’t. The other German kingdoms — all four of them — also mobilised for Vienna, against Berlin. The Hanoverians even beat the Prussians in a pitched battle, and in the south west, serious fighting Dark and twisted Scott Bradfield

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford

Bloomsbury Caravel, pp.272, 20

Highsmith’s villains are superficially normal people, all of whom mean to do well but end up doing horrible things instead. Credit: Getty Images.

Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief attraction of this third biography in 18 years (released to commemorate her 100th birthday) may be its brevity. From the time Highsmith was born (after a failed abortion attempt by her parents), her story starts off dark and then gets much, much darker. Raised in Fort Worth, Texas by the granddaughter of former slave owners, she survived the Spanish influenza to become a smart, hard-drinking student at Barnard, where she exploited, at every opportunity, her affections for pretty, well-bred girls. She wrote comics for a while (even going on a date with Stan Lee), and suffered from a lifetime addiction to gin — which she consumed from breakfast until bedtime. But her chief activity was lurching from one intensely passionate affair to another. Rarely did any of the relationships last more than a few months. ‘O the beautiful world!’ she typically enthused in her diary at the start of each affair, exalting the ‘timelessness’ and ‘oneness’ of each shiny ‘true love’. But within weeks or months, either she was distracted by someone new, or grew so obsessed that she felt ‘nearly sick… and must get hold of myself or crack up’. Never did she enjoy the sort of happy ending that made her pseudonymously published novel of a lesbian couple, The Price of Salt(1952), so unusual. (It was later reissued under Highsmith’s own name as Carolin 1990, and eventually filmed.) But then Highsmith never considered writing fiction to be about representing life; it was, rather, ‘a way of getting rid of reality’. And as far as she was concerned — good riddance. For Highsmith, each passionate attraction usually led to obsession, despair, anger, flight and, of course, more gin. Like her characters Bruno and Guy, who meet in Strangers on a Train to entangle one another in a mutually convenient murder plot, she found human relationships to be irresistible, tortuous and inescapable. (Only in fiction could she imagine ways out of them — usually through murder.) She once said in her diary that the ‘most beautiful thing in the world’ was to see ‘trust in the eyes of the girl who loves you’. Unfortunately, either the trust soon dissipated, or Highsmith did. Deeply peculiar, she was known to carry around dozens of her beloved snails feasting on a globe of lettuce in a huge handbag; on at least one occasion, she accidentally set them free at a dinner party. (For some reason, she was constantly being invited to dinner parties.) At another time, she provided a romantic hideaway for copulating snails in her bra — while she was wearing it. She was known to eat raw bloody ‘lumps’ of meat fresh from the butcher; and seems to have lied to or cheated on many, if not most, of her partners. She was called many terrible things by people who knew her — such as a ‘compulsive perennial liar’, a sadist and a pervert — and that was just by her mother. Others fondly recalled the intense interest she showed them (today some might call it stalking). From most reports, her sexual energy sounds exhausting. Then there was the obsessive travelling — she was, like her most famous creation Thomas Ripley, an American who went to Europe and never looked back. She established homes in London, the Suffolk countryside, France, Italy and finally Locarno, Switzerland, where she died in 1995. She was always fleeing one person or place while simultaneously rushing towards another. But in her final, solitary years, dying of lung cancer, her lasting companions were the glistening snails in her garden and a cat that she occasionally popped into a burlap sack and swung around over her head. Meanwhile, she wrote brilliant, disturbing novels and short stories with the same hard, unwearying intrepidity as she marched from one failed relationship to another. An admirer of Poe and Conrad, her view of human beings was similarly cruel, and she routinely put her characters through unrelenting psychological pain. In one of her best (and my favourite of the Ripliad), Ripley’s Game (1974), Ripley decides to take revenge on a small-time picture-framer for treating him rudely at a party. So he convinces him he has terminal leukemia, and tricks him into committing murders for money. A monster, obviously; but Ripley was also ‘a person who was very close to her’, one journalist recalled from interviewing her in the early 1980s. But that’s what Highsmith was looking for as she grew older — a long term relationship with someone who would never leave. Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires is succinct and brisk, and the life it describes is as irresistibly horrifying as the plot of any Highsmith thriller. Yet while previous biographies (by Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar) presented much raw new material — interviews with surviving friends and partners, letters, diaries — Richard Bradford doesn’t add much to the record. Instead, he often spends time picking small fights about how to interpret the already existing data. At one point, he argues for half a page that Highsmith might not have visited Harry’s Bar with Peggy Guggenheim in 1951, even though a previous biographer says she did. I couldn’t help wondering: who cares? At least she wasn’t putting snails in her bra. Bradford makes a good case that Highsmith used fiction to resolve the ineluctable perversities of her nature; but he ends his book too abruptly to explain adequately why her novels continue to be read, and why so many of us still enjoy reading them. My own summation might go something like this: Highsmith was one of the first American thriller writers to take crime out of the ‘urban night’ of film noir melodramas and put it in middle-class, suburban living rooms where it more properly belonged. Her villains are superficially normal husbands, wives, office workers and cops, all of whom mean to do well but end up doing horrible things instead. Even Ripley doesn’t intend to murder the handsome young Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley; those things just seem to happen and, when they do, Ripley happily rides along and gathers up Dickie’s trust-fund money. And in A Dog’s Ransom, when an earnest 24-year-old police patrolman, Clarence Duhamell, investigates a dog- napping in Manhattan, he sincerely wants to do the good things a good cop is supposed to do — such as find the lost dog and comfort In the land of the lemur Hugh Thomson

The Gardens of Mars: Madagascar, An Island Story by John Gimlette

House Of Zeus, pp.464, 30

Baobabs at sunset in Madagascar. Credit: Alamy

Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the way the ocean currents work it was mainly settled by people from Borneo, 3,700 miles away — what Jared Diamond has described as ‘the single most astonishing fact of human geography’. For similar reasons, it is a biodiversity hotspot; more than 90 per cent of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth. And as one of the world’s largest islands, the sheer size can make it hard to assimilate. If ‘the Republic of Madagascar’, its formal title, were stretched out across Europe, the country would reach from London to Algiers. The exoticism of both the name and location has always lent itself to enjoyably fanciful tales, whether in today’s animated series from DreamWorks — all too familiar for parents — or from Marco Polo in 1298, who claimed its gryphon birds were so large they could lift an elephant into the air. When Gerald Durrell stayed there in 1990, he reported that he kept lemurs in his hotel room and let them climb the curtains. Step up John Gimlette for a bracingly fresh appraisal. He is a travel writer who has distinguished himself by taking on some of the world’s more recondite places, such as Paraguay, Guiana and Newfoundland. He is also a barrister, and his tone in the past has been alternately forensic, knowledgeable and witty as he has given each country its day in court. Madagascar acquits itself well under questioning. It was a Jesuit missionary in 1613 who first noticed that the local language was curiously similar to Malay. Linguists have since pinned it down more precisely to a particular valley in Borneo, but quite why its inhabitants decided to travel right across the Indian Ocean in canoes some time around the time of the birth of Christ is unknown. In the past we have heard little about its administration by the French as a colony from 1897 onwards, not least because they often did it admirably, which does not suit our narrative expectations. They abolished slavery — it is estimated there were half a million slaves on the island, almost a quarter of the population — and built the first roads. But since independence in 1960, the company has struggled. Elections can be contested by up to 200 different political parties. And it’s not exactly as if the world is watching. At one point, Gimlette cross-examines a diplomat about the island’s current strategic importance. ‘Look,’ says the diplomat bluntly, ‘if Madagascar were simply to disappear, no one would even notice.’ Which is why we still need travel writers to bring back dispatches from such forgotten places. Gimlette is adept at mixing with both the lowlife and aristocrats of Malagasy life, from the malaso gangsters of the interior to the society ladies in the salons de thé at the capital’s venerable Hôtel Colbert, eating their heavy, dense croissants. Travelling through some of the sadly denuded forests — only 10 per cent of the original remains, so that in a nice phrase he describes it as ‘like driving through the mind of Paul Nash, a lustrous landscape of stumps and bone’ — he still sees bats that look like foxes and a wild collection of natural ‘limestone cathedrals’ clustered together at the Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, their spires reaching 100 metres into the air. This is a peculiarly handsome production. The publishers have not stinted, and it exemplifies the current trend where if a book is going to make it into hard covers it needs to try that much harder to impress. There are illustrations or full-colour photos on almost every page. The only marks off they get is for describing the book in the blurb as ‘insightful’, a dreadful neologism that is as vapid as it is unhelpful. ‘Approach the bench, publisher. What exactly do you mean by “insightful”? If you mean that it’s courageous, exploratory, humane and with a wry sense of humour, then just say so. But don’t waste the court’s time again.’ A real wild child Clinton Heylin

Weren’t Born a Man by Dana Gillespie With David Shasha

Hawksmoor Publishing, pp.400, 24.99

Dana Gillespie is at pains to point out that she was first and foremost a blues singer. Credit: Alamy

Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the first 170 pages I remained convinced she should have taken a leaf from John Cleland and called itMemoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. For hers has been an extraordinary life (or perhaps half life, as the trail of hi-jinks runs its course by the end of the 1970s). And so, despite reading at times like a cross between Terry Southern’s Candy and Confessions of a Window Cleaner’s screenplay — but with A-listers the ones shaking their sticks — as an evocation of the 1960s SW7-style, Weren’t Born a Man rings wholly true. By 13, having already lost her virginity, Dana was occupying a self-contained basement flat in South Kensington beneath a four-storey house in which both parents lived with their replacement spouses. It was an era when child care services were rarely called to places such as Thurloe Square. Dana, looking back, seems unbothered: ‘It sounds bizarre now, with everyone so uptight and politically correct, but there were no rules then.’ Said basement had its own entrance, so once the word got out (and how), it soon became the default crash pad for any would-be musician who left a club too late for the last Tube and too ‘brassic’ to get a cab home. Looking and acting far older than her years, by 14 she had been to bed with David Bowie, followed by Bob Dylan at 15, Jimmy Page at 16, Roman Polanksi at 17 and Michael Caine and Sean Connery by her majority. Not everyone shared Dana’s bed, but when she set her heart on meeting a guy — and as she says on the penultimate page ‘in those days the way you met people was that you slept with them’ — her oft-mentioned 44” bosom was better than an all-access backstage pass. When she crashed Dylan’s first UK meet’n’greet at the Savoy (not the Dorchester, as stated), the instant attraction was such that Dylan told a security guard: ‘She’s with me.’ They’d never even met. Her presence soon put Joan Baez’s nose out of joint, so much so that Dana has convinced herself she left the tour almost immediately. (Actually she was around for the duration.) Equally unaware of what was going on, and with whom, were Dana’s free-spirited parents. As Dana writes: ‘When [Bob and I] were together, I would slip out of his bed in the early hours and sneak back to my parents’ house before they woke up.’ Just in time to get ready for school, thus bringing a whole new meaning to the classic blues song ‘Good Morning Schoolgirl’, an allusion not lost on Dana herself. Because, as she is at some pains to point out repeatedly throughout this rockin’ romp of a life well lived, she remains first and foremost a ballsy, blues-lovin’ singer, even when morphing between Ma Rainey and Barbara Windsor. My own first encounter with her was typical: a hormonal 13-year-old watching her play that other great ‘tart with a heart’ (her term), Mary Magdalen, in Jesus Christ Superstar, belting out ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ to a Jesus who really must have been a saint not to want to sleep with her. It was a test the lyricist Tim Rice himself failed, though only after (Dana hastens to add) she had successfully passed the audition. Touchingly, Dana thinks Tim’s most endearing quality, then and now, is his love of cricket. One also can’t help but delight in the nuances she brings to the art of bed-hopping. Thus, she reports that, ‘somehow, the press caught on to the fact that I was seeing Dylan romantically’ — perhaps because she blabbed to NME’s Keith Althan — ‘though horizontally might be a more accurate description’. She proceeds to take issue with her dear friend Angie Bowie, who suggested ‘we were lesbian lovers’. Not so: ‘OK, we did sometimes end up in bed together, but it was always when David was there.’ The value of suffering Daniel Rey

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi

Bloomsbury Continuum, pp.256, 20

Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862, aged 41. Credit: Getty Images.

A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible manic depression. Few writers endure such dark lives or possess such bright creativity as Fyodor Dostoevsky. His incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes, from accounts of innocent suffering and crazed revolutionaries to nightmarish epileptic fits. He intended to reflect on his traumatic life by writing a memoir but, aged 59, he died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. Noting this literary vacuum, Alex Christofi challenges himself to write a sort of third-person memoir for Dostoevsky. Examining the author’s letters, notebooks, and journals — as well as the leading secondary sources — Christofi attempts a profile of the writer which interweaves his biography with his novels. When he describes Dostoevsky the political prisoner, and his last moments before facing the Tsar’s executioners, Christofi quotes Prince Myshkin’s story of the firing squad from The Idiot. His chapter on Dostoevsky’s internment in a forced-labour camp draws heavily on the semi-autobiographical Notes from the House of the Dead. Such personal tragedies help explain Dostoevsky’s singular novelistic focus on the deep recesses of the human mind. He was, said Nietzsche, ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn’. Dostoevsky’s turbulent life didn’t just provide material for his fiction; it also raised the stakes. The author, who regularly went on destructive gambling sprees, was constantly on the precipice of financial ruin. On one occasion, he had to pawn his lover’s watch so he could return to his estranged and dying first wife. Whereas Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy could write in peace, Dostoevsky was forever rushing his work so the proceeds would appease his rapacious editor, the creditor who threatened him with debtors’ prison, or the pawnbroker who had his wedding rings. In 1867, he had four months to fulfil contractual obligations to write two novels (which amounted to 752 pages). As he wrote in a letter: ‘The very thought of it would kill Turgenev.’ He was saved by a 20-year-old stenographer, Anna, whom he’d later marry. Dictating and working nocturnally, Dostoevsky submitted The Gambler with two hours to spare. Compounding his stressful existence was the sickness that surrounded and engulfed him. Epilepsy crippled his body and strained his relationships. A fit on the night of his first wedding foreshadowed a troubled marriage with the consumptive widow, Maria. His second wife, Anna, nearly died of a throat infection; their first daughter, Sonya, didn’t reach her first birthday; and three-year-old Alyosha — who would be commemorated through the hero of The Brothers Karamazov — died after a 12-hour epileptic fit. Longing to belong Chloë Ashby

Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic

Bloomsbury, pp.240, 14.99

Olivia Sudjic. Credit: Colin Thomas

Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future. It begins and ends in a car — a couple ‘side by side, in motion with a change of view’ – and all the while the reader too is in a state of flux, unsettled. That’s a state Sudjic’s protagonist, Anya, is familiar with. Along with other unaccompanied children, she was evacuated from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Sent to live with her aunt in Glasgow, she’s been searching for a sense of belonging ever since. At university she found ‘shelter and a certain amount of liberty, a veneer of cosmopolitanism’; in her stoic scientist fiancé, Luke, with his filial loyalty and fondness for repairs — ‘things which suggested reliability’. With his Cornish nationalist parents, she simply appreciates ‘any indication they did not view me as a parasite, looking for a fold in their family’. There’s a restlessness to this novel, and at the same time restraint. No sooner has Sudjic inserted her principal characters into an environment than she sends them elsewhere. They slip through the Channel Tunnel — ‘the throat that had swallowed us beneath the waves’ — to the south of France, back to London, down to Cornwall, skywards in an ‘aluminium tube’ and south east to Sarajevo, where Luke meets Anya’s parents. She herself has had little contact with them; when she left, they became, first, ‘voices in a beige receiver’, then ‘a monthly check-in as House of horrors Jenny Colgan

Girl A by Abigail Dean

HarperCollins, pp.336, 14.99

Abigail Dean in 2019. Credit: Nicola Thompson

If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and losers (in a just world, Piranesi would still be at number one), January is a less frenzied time for new writers to launch. Even so, there are often hyped and hot new books — among which this year Girl A is one. It comes with excitable reports of huge international sales and an insistence that it will be everywhere. The accompanying blurb also manages to mention repeatedly that the author got a double-first at Cambridge, which, frankly, in these days of being ruled by Oxbridge inadequates who think that being there for three years means everything must be immediately handed to them, I would probably have skipped: the novel is better than the entitlement suggests. Girl A is a lovely, precision-tooled piece of kit. It has traces of Emma Donoghue’s Room and Lisa Jewell’s The People Upstairs, two books dealing with the worst thing any of us can imagine: imprisoned, tortured children hidden in plain sight. Oddly, even though it deals in an obscenity, it’s actually easier to swallow than crime novels where women and children are casually slaughtered to prove how clever the police officer is. There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable.

Arts feature The trying game Rosie Millard dispels the myth that persistence is always rewarded

It is a standard narrative in all showbiz reporting, and one that arts hacks seem to be duty-bound to abide by. It is the fairy tale of ‘Making It’; the story of a star whose career took time to get off the ground but, thanks to perseverance and self-belief, went stratospheric. It goes like this: ‘I was a nobody, and I was turned down from everything. And I nearly didn’t go to that final audition, but whaddya know? I turned up and… Shazam! Oscars raining down and a mini-series on Netflix.’ There is an encyclopaedia of stars who toughed it out before making it big. Type ‘stars who were failures’ into Google and you will find winning tales from Oprah Winfrey, fired from her first job; Steven Spielberg, turned down from film school, and David Essex, who nearly became a lorry driver. Harrison Ford was a carpenter. Until he had to create a door for Francis Ford Coppola, of course. The rest is not silence, but very noisy superstardom and, for Essex, a leading role in Godspell. The overarching backstory beyond the hardscrabble start is always that weaker souls would have given up. Be determined and talent will out. Try, try, try again. I fell for the tale myself, finding an unfancied stand-up performer one year at Edinburgh, who went by the unlikely name of Charlie Cheese. I interviewed him on the Today programme, and then, over the following years, watched his trajectory as he got two Bafta nominations and became a Hollywood star. His real name? Mackenzie Crook. Nobody ever says how unrepresentative this is. It is called a fairy tale because it is nice to hear. It ought to be, because it is nonsense. Which is why I decided to do a series of interviews for Radio 4 about people who, unlike Crook, or Ford, or Essex, didn’t ‘make it’, but have considered that success might mean something else. It features brave voices from across the arts who have countenanced failure, and whose open clarity is extremely rare. I talk to the baritone Patrick Egersborg, an opera singer in his thirties who you will probably never have heard of. ‘The educational sector,’ says Egersborg, ‘is fuelled by mantras that tell you the story of how hard work, sacrifice, never giving up and hundreds of auditions will eventually be worthwhile. You start to identify with this struggle and relate to it.’ Egersborg did do the struggle. He applied to every single opera company in Europe. He has a great voice. He now works in an office. Sometimes he works front of house in a theatre, selling programmes. I ask him if he ever wants to grab people by the arm and tell them that a few years ago, in Oslo, he sang the role of Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte. ‘No,’ he says. Walking away from the Dream was the best thing he ever did, he tells me. Egersborg has analysed what he calls ‘the shame’ of giving up on the Dream; he even has a blog called ‘Give Up Your Dream’, to help fellow wannabe performers who find themselves walking down this dark, unfancied corridor. He’s thinking of putting a musical show on about it, which certainly has a pleasingly meta ring to it, but about which he has no illusions. Educators seem to be blithely uninterested in the notion that they are annually releasing cohorts of hopefuls for a future laced with disappointment; there are more than 30 drama schools in the UK alone. Going to drama school is not like going to medical school, where on graduation you at least have a reasonable hope of becoming a fully functional doctor. Creative writing courses have boomed worldwide. Debbie Bayne, 60, who lives in Edinburgh, has been on one such course. She’s written novels and short stories, and still isn’t published. She’s entered competitions and applied for writing grants. Not one flicker of success. Does she mind? Not particularly. ‘Quitting is not an option,’ says Bayne. ‘Stopping is a scary thing to do.’ She acknowledges that if you are not in the charmed circle of contacts, agents and famous friends who can sling a review here and a promotional comment there, it’s very tough to get an ISBN and British Library catalogue number on the endpapers of your novel. Yet everyone points to J.K. Rowling on benefits and the Edinburgh café in which she is said to have written some of the first draft of a $25 billion franchise. What you don’t want to happen is to end up in Van Gogh’s clogs, with your life story taking hold only once you are dead. T.S. Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank for eight years before jumping ship to Faber & Faber, and the modernist composer Charles Ives had a very successful career in insurance, publishing things such as Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax alongside four numbered symphonies, sonatas and more than 100 songs (one of which our non-operatic friend Patrick Egersborg sang in order to get into music college). Ives’s near-contemporary Conlon Nancarrow, who gave the player piano its proper outing as an instrument, was helped by a handy inheritance coming his way at the right time. Hugh Jackman was a PE teacher before sprouting claws. My children’s PE teacher at primary school, one Ed Skrein, turned up as a baddie in Deadpool. He is rather more famous in Islington for teaching swimming at the Cally Pool. Family money helps, which is perhaps why there are so many Old Etonians in the acting biz. If you don’t really need a steady income, you can afford to wait it out and keep on trying. This was an indulgence not available for Ben Hopwood, 32, who thought he had a lucky break when his amateur dramatics company in Leeds joined up with the RSC for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Alhambra in Bradford, and he was cast as Flute. That was as far as it went. He’s still got the day job, working in the clerical department of an aviation firm. ‘I still call myself an actor,’ says Hopwood. ‘The fact it is amateur is irrelevant. Actually, I get better parts doing plays with Leeds Arts Centre anyway.’ Telling a young person — or, frankly, anyone — that their talent depends on wild luck in order to flourish goes against the grain. So we carry on spouting that talent will out, because it gives us a sense of agency, even though it is a lie. Some people believe the media. Which is not surprising, because it goes on and on. Even the other day, the unremitting Covid bulletins were interrupted by the story of a chap who had overcome huge social disadvantage and ended up on the Olivier stage, starring in a rare mid- lockdown show at the National Theatre. ‘What is your message to others?’ said the reporter. ‘Keep on trying,’ said the actor, who knew his lines. I shouted at the TV, but nobody heard.

Rosie Millard’s three-part series The Dream of Success is on BBC Radio 4. Music ‘We knew there was greatness in these songs’ Graeme Thomson talks to Steve Diggle, front man of Buzzcocks, about orgasms, boredom and Pete Shelley Graeme Thomson

Steve Diggle hasn’t spent this long away from a stage in 40-odd years. For the Buzzcocks guitarist, like everyone else, 2020 was a year of thwarted plans. Instead of touring Britain and America, Diggle spent the year in ‘self-analysis’ and writing a new album. What else for an ageing punk to do? Except, of course, curate your legacy, grapple with the past. When Diggle joined Buzzcocks in 1976, originally as the bass player, he didn’t imagine he would still be flying the flag 45 years later. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Though his band remains a going concern, the songs that shift tickets were written half a lifetime ago. ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’, ‘What Do I Get?’, ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’, ‘Oh Shit’, ‘Promises’, ‘I Don’t Mind’. Sharp, sussed, poppy, playful, emotionally open and sexually daring, Buzzcocks made the best singles of the punk era. A new box set recycles these songs for the umpteenth time — and why not? As Diggle says: ‘They still sound like they were made last week. Ninety mph, with existential lyrics. Very direct and in your face.’ When original Buzzcocks singer Howard Devoto left the band only a few months into its existence, Diggle and guitarist Pete Shelley instantly resolved to carry on. ‘We had no choice,’ he says, Manchester accent still thick as smog. ‘We were conscientious objectors to work.’ Diggle switched to guitar, Shelley became lead vocalist, and they were off. They wrote together occasionally, but not often. ‘It’s like we knew each other too well,’ says Diggle, who was the alpha male in the partnership: gruffer, tougher, more overtly rock’n’roll. Shelley, by contrast, came over as wounded, arty, fey, frank. ‘We complemented each other. If it had all been one way it would have been too much. We realised that it worked.’ Shelley identified as bisexual, and his early songs played with fluidity of gender and sexual attraction in a way that now feels very on-trend but which at the time was rather brave. Before the New Romantics, Shelley called himself a modern romantic. His love songs were unguarded, fuelled by the self-destructive realities and banal emotional violence of workaday longings. Far more radical, really, than the chin-out sloganeering of most punk. ‘We were open to anything at the time,’ says Diggle. ‘We were 20 years old and singing about orgasms and boredom. Bring anything to the party! Bowie had said he was gay years before; it wasn’t a big deal. It did help people, I think, Pete singing about sexuality, but he was singing about being a human more than the sexual thing. We sang about the human condition, and people related to that. These songs went straight to your heart and soul. I think Pete and I both felt that. And the music was very fast and made you feel alive. It made you question yourself.’ Buzzcocks’ run of classic singles, from ‘Orgasm Addict’ in 1977 to ‘Harmony In My Head’ in 1979, came easily. The dynamic between Shelley, Diggle, bassist Steve Garvey and drummer John Maher was such, says Diggle, that ‘it didn’t need explaining. We weren’t over-analysing anything’. The music was an extension of their personalities. ‘When we went in the rehearsal room, one of us would say we had a new song and it goes like this, and by the time we’d finished it was put together. We didn’t have to struggle. We were aware we had a very distinctive sound. We knew we had good lyrics and melodies. We realised they were a lot different from most songs, that there was some greatness about them.’ Thoughts of posterity were given short shrift. The primary aim was to get a song recorded before the pubs reopened in the evenings. ‘That was the inspiration! We were on tour all the time and if we weren’t we were jumping in and doing singles in an afternoon, in the pub by 5.30 and on Top of the Pops a couple of weeks later. At the time it was moving so fast, you don’t really know what you’ve got. We surfed on the ebb and flow of the tide, really.’ Buzzcocks split up in 1981. Each member had different ambitions. A&R men were dropping like flies, accountants were taking over, and the band’s increasingly experimental tendencies confused the record label. And another cliché: the lifestyle had them by the balls. ‘We were touring all the time,’ says Diggle. ‘I thought it was fantastic. Like Turner. Tie yourself to the mast and experience all the elements. Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, you name it, it was on. But it takes its toll and the wheels start to fall off the wagon. That’s kind of what happened. We needed a break.’ Diggle embarked on a solo career. So did Shelley. ‘He sounded lonely,’ reckons the guitarist. ‘He needed a band.’ Diggle and Shelley reformed Buzzcocks in 1989 and spent another 29 years together — touring regularly and releasing six more studio albums — until Shelley’s sudden death from a heart attack on 6 December 2018. The impact, ‘of course, was devastating. We’d shared a lot together, and we learned a lot off each other. Even the arguments were intellectual fencing. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I didn’t pick up a guitar for a few months.’ The Royal Albert Hall was already booked for a Buzzcocks show in June 2019. It turned into a memorial concert for Shelley. As the sole original member, Diggle resolved to keep the band going. ‘It was a weird thing. We did a festival in Newcastle just weeks before Pete died. He came to my room and said: “I think I want to retire, you can carry on with my blessing.” He did that twice on that tour. I said: “You’re going nowhere, we’ve got a lot more to do.” When he died, which nobody expected, I remembered that. I thought, I’ll go down if I don’t keep continuing.’ Buzzcocks played nine shows in December 2019, the first ever without Shelley. ‘I said to the fans: “You know the deal. Don’t buy a ticket if you have a negative attitude, only come with a positive attitude.”’ As with any band that spans more than four decades, their history is a patchwork of many phases. ‘Like the Ming dynasty,’ says Diggle. The ‘golden era’ was long ago, perhaps, but ‘the Steve Diggle phase’ has its own impetus. ‘I can’t bring Pete Shelley back, much Classical Brendel the Dadaist Damian Thompson

Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel. Photo: Erich Auerbach / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

How many people are celebrating the fact that, last week, one of Europe’s most inspired writers about music, modern art and aesthetics celebrated his 90th birthday? The answer is relatively few, which might seem surprising. He is a world-renowned authority on the grotesque and the absurd — territory through which he darts mischievously in his poems, originally composed in his native German. But you have to turn to his essays written in English to experience his refined sarcasm, which is either delicious or mortifying, depending on whether you feel incriminated by his strictures against intellectual laziness. He is quirky and rigorous — a combination associated with his beloved Dada, a movement I’d written off as an embarrassment until I read his dazzling essay on the subject in the New York Review of Books. And yet, as I say, his writings aren’t attracting the attention they deserve as he turns 90. That’s because he is Alfred Brendel, the revered Austrian interpreter of the piano music of the Viennese masters. The media will inevitably focus on his recorded legacy. The tributes won’t be as easy to write as, say, birthday salutes to Rubinstein or Horowitz. That’s because Brendel, who retired from playing more than a decade ago, was always determined not to project his own personality from the keyboard. Ironically, his fidelity to the composer’s markings led some critics to claim that his trademark was a certain didactic fussiness. You can work out where they got this idea, if you search hard enough among the 114-CD set of Brendel’s Philips recordings. But I despair of anyone who thinks he’s defined by the occasional whiff of overthinking. I’ve met a few Brendel-haters in my time; they tend to be either tiresome evangelists of ‘period practice’ or old queens whose idea of perfect pianism is Horowitz in Liberace mode. Alfred Brendel’s central achievement has been to give us authoritative readings of almost the entire piano music of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, together with the best of Haydn and Liszt. Authority may be in the ear of the listener, but it’s surely significant that so many music lovers hear a remarkable quality in his playing: the ability to reconcile structure and spontaneity by mimicking the phrasing naturally employed by singers. That’s too subtle a skill to make his sound instantly recognisable, and I suspect Brendel would be appalled if it did. But his writing could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. Only he could have written the glorious poem in which Mozart discovers Beethoven is black. Television The weirdness of Britain present and past James Walton

Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema

BBC Four

Staged

BBC1

Peter Sellers in I'm All Right Jack (1959), the politics of which Mark Kermode takes a dim view of. Image: British Lion / Getty Images

The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode was terrific at demonstrating how persistent certain characters and ideas in his chosen genre have proved to be. He traced the theme of ‘the little man’ from George Formby and Norman Wisdom to Paddington Bear, paying due attention to its origins in Britain’s most successful early film export, Charlie Chaplin. Moving on to the subset of little men who think they’re bigger than they are, his judiciously chosen clips revealed how much Captain Mainwaring owes to Captain Waggett in 1949’s Whisky Galore! whom we even saw uttering the phrase ‘I wondered when you were going to think of that’ after an obvious mistake was pointed out to him. Hyper-awareness of class also featured prominently, and so of course did British unease about sex. As Kermode shrewdly suggested, one reason for the huge success of The Full Monty and Calendar Girls may well be that they depicted Brits achieving the ability to get naked without overwhelming embarrassment for the first time in our cinematic history. Yet — and perhaps precisely because he knows all these movies so intimately — one thing Kermode rather missed is how deeply peculiar many old-school British comedy films are when objectively viewed. I remember a few years ago showing a Carry On film to an American friend in a spirit of international cultural exchange. Faced with her growing incredulity, I suddenly realised that not everybody in the English-speaking world shares a belief in the innate hilarity of such words as ‘it’, ‘pair’ and ‘bullocks’. (In the circumstances I thought it best not to mention that in 1969 — the year of Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid— the biggest hit at the UK box office was Carry On Camping, partly on the grounds that a schoolgirl’s bra pinged off.) There’s also the fact that those of us who grew up with the Carry Ons were encouraged to think that standard ways of responding to the sight of an attractive woman included emitting a low rumbling noise, pawing the ground like a bull, repeatedly banging yourself on the back of the neck, and pulling out your shirt collar so as to let the steam escape. But if Kermode seemed oddly blind to the weirdness of Britain past, he did a neat, if inadvertent, job of displaying the weirdness of Britain present, as he solemnly denounced the presence of 1950s political attitudes in 1950s films. In particular, he took a dim view of Peter Sellers’s shop steward in I’m All Right Jack not being wholeheartedly in favour of immigration even though he’s a) a fictional character and b) not remotely intended to be any sort of moral compass. Kermode duly finished by reciting the customary position about the need ‘to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of modern Britain’ in the manner of someone taking a brave and lonely stance against a customary position. To illustrate his point, he also cited as pretty much the culmination of all British comedy film last year’s multicultural The Personal History of David Radio Englishness vs California dreaming Daisy Dunn

Archewell Audio

Spotify

Woman’s Hour

BBC Radio 4

Harry and Meghan's new podcast is full of kindness, compassion and bromides. Photo: Samir Hussein / WireImage

On Archewell Audio, Harry and Meghan’s new podcast, ‘love wins’, ‘change really is possible’, and ‘the courage and the creativity and the power and the possibility that’s been resting in our bones shakes loose and emerges as our new skin’. There’s no room for Christmas — the first episode dropped as a ‘Holiday Special’ — but there is for kindness, compassion and more than a few bromidic interjections of ‘So true!’ The podcast purports to ‘spotlight diverse perspectives and voices’ and ‘build community through shared experiences, powerful narratives, and universal values’. Turn down the volume and what you’ll actually hear is the most tremendous tussle between Englishness and California dreaming. There are no prizes for guessing which comes out on top. The contest begins in the trailer, where the Duchess of Sussex encourages her husband to introduce the series, conceding him a point for his ‘really nice’ accent. ‘What, Archewe… Archewell Audio?’ stumbles the Duke. ‘I mean,’ flirts Meghan. ‘Really?’ Harry replies, with a hesitancy worthy of Hugh Grant. Archewell, the couple’s brand name, may derive in part from the Greek for ‘beginning’ or ‘dominion’, but it more readily evokes the name of their 20-month- old son. Archie speaks his first public words at the end of the episode: ‘Happy’ (American accent) ‘New’ (English accent) ‘Year’ (who knows). The association between the baby and the brand does the couple few favours. What works for the Kardashians doesn’t necessarily sit well with English sensibilities. Curiously, too, it puts the Sussexes at the centre of a project dedicated to amplifying (a good Archewell word) more diverse voices. Other people’s stories, they say, can remind you of stories about yourself. One wonders what life memories were stirred in them by heroic José, who uses food to ‘empower communities’, or George the Poet, or tennis player Naomi Osaka, who joined Elton John and James Corden in recording audio diaries of their year. These diaries were often harrowing to hear, Corden supplying just a moment’s relief in his admission that he ‘could lose a day staring at the corner of a rug’ in contented isolation. His is just the sort of England-moved-to-California groundedness the Sussexes might emulate as they proceed. Listening to their first podcast, though, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in turning their backs on Windsor, they have given up all desire to court Merrie England. Their stars are firmly spangled from here on in. Her Majesty the Queen has sent her congratulations to Woman’s Hour, which turns 75 this year, praising it as a ‘friend, guide and advocate to women everywhere’. Her message was read out by Emma Barnett, who took the helm of the programme last week. The pressure to revitalise the morning slot and draw in younger listeners rests firmly on her shoulders. Film They wouldn’t let it lie Deborah Ross

Blithe Spirit

Sky Cinema

The realism of Scooby-Doo: Isla Fisher, Judi Dench and Dan Stevens in Blithe Spirit. Credit: © Blithe Spirit Productions 2019

The comedy Blithe Spiritwas written by Noël Coward in 1941. It is, essentially, about a séance going wrong and a deceased first wife coming back to haunt her husband and his second wife, causing mayhem. Better if she’d been left to rest in peace, and, after seeing this film adaption, you may well wish the play had been left to rest in peace too. Don’t dig it up! Leave well alone! I would even add that if Dame Judi Dench can’t save an adaptation — and I was previously of the mind that Judi Dench could save anything — then you know you are in real, real trouble. The play was famously filmed by David Lean in 1945, starring Rex Harrison as novelist Charles Condomine and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati. My initial hope was that this version, directed by Edward Hall, formerly artistic director of Hampstead Theatre, who has also worked on TV shows like Downton and The Durrells, would bring something fresh and relevant to Coward, just as Sarah Phelps has done with Agatha Christie for the BBC, but no such luck. The film stars Dan Stevens as Condomine, and he’s chewing the scenery, literally, from the word go. He has writer’s block and in frustration and desperation whips the paper from his typewriter, shoves it in his mouth, and chomps down on it. It’s that sort of film. It’s also the sort of film where two characters look away from each other, look back at each other, and scream, like they always do in Scooby-Doo. Anyway, Charles lives in a magnificent art deco mansion with his second wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher), whose father is a big-shot film producer. Charles is meant to be adapting one of his own novels into a screenplay for him, but is stuck. And Ruth keeps getting at Charles about that, as she’s horrible and mean and charmless, but then everyone in this version is. Ruth’s father was not in Coward’s play or Lean’s film. The deal there was that Charles, a crime writer, hears that Madame Arcati, a spiritualist, has moved into the village and decides to ask her to hold a séance as he is looking for inspiration for his next project. However, in this version Charles books tickets to see Madame Arcati (Dench), who is performing at a West End theatre, as he’s also searching for inspiration. But as he has already written the novel that he’s

High life Taki

Gstaad Lord Belhaven and Stenton, a wonderful man and the quintessential English gentleman, died at 93 just before the end of the crappiest of years. But Robin was lucky in a way: no tubes, no hospital beds, not another virus statistic. His widow, Lady Belhaven, gave me the bad news over the telephone, and although she was devastated after a very long and happy marriage, she is very smart and realises that it was a perfect death. He asked for a gin and tonic, went to bed, and never woke up. Acknowledging the death of others is one thing, accepting one’s own demise quite another. That’s why old men send young men to die in war, a confidence trick perfected after the Napoleonic Wars. Greek and Roman generals led from the front, as did many subsequent kings. Prince Bagration died in the Battle of Borodino, Sir Thomas Picton at Waterloo, and Field Marshal Prince von Blücher, aged 73, had two horses shot from under him while charging to save the day for Wellington. I suppose we live on in those we’ve touched, and they, in turn, live on if they’ve touched us. Death is the force that shows you what you love most and wish most to continue living. Remembering those who have died makes them immortal. Robin was of a generation that didn’t suffer from PTSD — that’s a medical word for trauma — a term invented by Big greedy Pharma so it can sell expensive medication to people convinced they’re suffering from psychological or chemical wounds. As a child I met many soldiers who had returned home having had horrendous experiences, yet all I remember are the funny things they told me, like my uncle who, having been stabbed in his backside by a panicky Italian Alpini he had captured, drew his pistol, took away the Italian’s stiletto and forced him to dress the wound he had inflicted. Trauma is now as American as apple pie, and purported to be caused by many things: betrayal, moral injury, an abuse of authority, the loss of a pet, the closing of a nightclub, or the malfunction of a television set. Actually, it’s a spiritual void that afflicts those who use social media and take celebrities seriously. Therapists and quacks are having a field day. Corny American columnists blather on about a culture that has rites of passage, communal moments which celebrate a moral transition, whatever that means. I’ll tell you what it means: more mumbo- jumbo by quacks. Second world war and Korean war veterans didn’t make a fuss about their suffering; Vietnam vets did. Ditto 1960s shipwrecks. The nihilism and cynicism that burnt-out hippies and drug addicts made commonplace back in the 1960s spelled trauma later on. In stepped charlatans, mystics and consciousness-raising gurus — for a price, of course. The great emotional therapist Taki has always called it a big con. The rising suicide and depression rates in America flow, I think, from dependency on schlock music, TV and movies that depict the world upside-down: what is good and law-abiding is presented as bad; what is vulgar, violent and rotten is presented as good. Andrew Roberts wrote a very important article in the Daily Telegraph on this subject, concentrating on how Hollywood almost unfailingly depicts evil-doers as corrupt white male members of the governing class. One family from around these parts who decided to do something about America’s spiritual void and enrich themselves in the process is the Sackler family. Its company Purdue Pharma developed OxyContin, bribed doctors to prescribe it rather vigorously, and the opioid epidemic it contributed to managed to kill more Americans than the two atom bombs dropped in Japan did Japanese. Not only that but alongside those 450,000 deaths, and as early as 2007, the Sacklers began to transfer $10 billion to their private accounts. As it now stands, they’ve got an estimated $10 billion between them — and they give me dirty looks because I dared to call them what they are, killers who belong behind bars. Some say they’ve transferred even more, but I choose to lowball on that one. There are more lawsuits against Purdue than I’ve had hangovers, but the moolah is already overseas, and the family is cutting ties with Purdue, its baby. I will badly need some OxyContin if they get away with it. One who should have taken OxyContin last week was The Donald. He handed Biden a moral victory, buried his own legacy, and ensured the media’s grotesque un-reporting of Antifa and BLM violence will become standard. The hysteria following The Donald’s stupidity in a paper like the New York Times actually made me laugh. Where was the outrage when cities and private businesses were burned to the ground, when innocent bystanders were killed, and police stations overrun and blown up in Portland? I’ll tell you where: they were turning a blind eye while Kamala Harris helped raise $35 million to defend rioters, that’s where. Throughout the summer and autumn, criminals were lionised, while rioting and looting by leftist thugs were called ‘legitimate acts of protest’ on National Public Radio. While appearing to condone violence or, in the case of the NY Times, ignoring it, the fourth estate is now shocked — shocked that Trump thugs attacked ‘our democracy’. Even Captain Renault would be ashamed of such double standards. Low life Jeremy Clarke

A new year and another round of medical treatments in the French health system. On Saturday morning, needing a blood test pronto, I drove to the local branch of a chain of commercial laboratories, arriving before daylight. I joined a queue of the worried and unwell that had already spilled out of the door and into the icy car park. Except for a old chap behind me trying to cough up a lungful of warm porridge, and someone else’s lilting accordion ringtone, we were a silent, stricken field. After shuffling forward for 20 minutes, I celebrated the achievement of reaching the outer door and passing through into the interior warmth with a double toot of hand gel from the public dispenser. Now I had only to shuffle another 15ft and I would be next in line to be called forward by one of two women administrators seated behind a Perspex screen. I had been to the laboratory four times in the past month and had dealt with both. One, a gamine, I knew to be a friendly soul with no dignity or pretension to intellect. The other, roughly double the size of the gamine, had dignity but no capacity for friendship or equality. While I waited my turn I practised the elementary French phrases — greetings, statement of intent — that would see me through the administration process, then to the seated waiting area and eventually to rolling up my sleeve for the nurse. It was the friendly gamine who called me over. Marvellous. Queuing for nearly an hour, first in cold air, then in tropical heat, while exposed to possibly the greatest concentration of airborne Covid germs within a 100-mile radius, had put me in a lonely and fatalistic frame of mind. If I had had the French, I would have now spoken to this woman from the heart. While she identified me on her screen, I would have told her that everything hung on the results of this morning’s blood test. I would have advised her that you cannot live fully without a permanent trust in something indestructible in yourself, though both the indestructible element and the trust are always hidden from you. I would have told her that since I no longer have either, I am, in snooker terms, in baulk. I would have told her that all my life I have been an undefeated jar opener. This, I would have told her, is the jar I cannot open. And if she had time, and was still interested, I would have told her about the village bells. I would have told her that I lived above two bell towers, one belonging to the church, the other to the state, which tolled the passing hours from seven in the morning till ten at night. Because the state bell is ahead of the church one by as much as two minutes, each hour is tolled twice. Handy, perhaps, if you lose count the first time round. But strewth, Madame, I would have said. To have your now finite number of hours counted off one by one by two sets of sodding bells, one church, one state, is not good for morale. And dealing all day long, as she does, with a stricken field, perhaps she would have come back with something profoundly French and comforting like: ‘Oh but sir, the butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.’ But my French is nowhere near up to bandying philosophical observations or even platitudes. In fact, my French pronunciation must have fallen off during lockdown because when I stood before her I’d said ‘Bonjour’ and she’d come back with an irritated ‘Quoi?’ as though I were a madman spouting gibberish. However once she had ascertained that I was merely English she forgave it and mustered every ounce of her powers of concentration and we got through the administration process by signalling by flag. The waiting area, smaller than a ping-pong table, seated eight facing inwards, and must have been intentionally designed so that nobody would miss out on any airborne viruses that happened to be circulating. I squeezed in between an elderly gent who looked — and was — deaf as a post and the bloke with the porridge-filled lungs. The tests were conducted in a row of three cubicle- sized rooms whose doors were constantly opening and shutting as patients were ushered inside or exited at speed. From behind one of these closed doors came the ghastly sound of somebody being ritually strangled. Then this bloke came staggering out clutching his throat and gagging horribly. Half an hour later, and worrying already that I might have lost my sense of smell, I was called to one of the cubicles and rolled up my sleeve for the teenage and tattooed tester. ‘Date de naissance?’ she said. ‘Neuf Février 1757,’ I told her. I still can’t get the hang of those high French numbers. She laughed but didn’t dispute it. Real life Melissa Kite

Never mind Clap for Carers, I’m trying to start a new weekly morale booster called Scream If You’re Going Round The Bend. The idea is you come out on to your doorstep once a week and stand there screaming until you’ve got it all out. It could be fantastically cathartic and do much to help the growing mental health problems caused by lockdown. Let’s make it every Friday at 8 p.m. I don’t want to clash with the key worker hero worship, so Thursday night is out, and doing it on Wednesday would only make it look as though I was trying to upstage Our Wonderful NHS. If we make it Friday night it could be something to look forward to, a way of starting the weekend. While wailing and crying in public may look primitive, it does help process the emotions to let them out at a set-piece occasion. Formal screaming sessions once a week might go some way to stopping people jumping off buildings and drinking themselves to death. Some of us are getting very depressed. You can sense the despondency now, the foggy- brained weariness, and above all the boredom. In my little corner of Surrey, the locals seem to be coping. But when you scratch the surface, it becomes obvious that many are struggling, and the way this manifests itself is in acts of gross pettiness. I wrote last week about the disappearance of my second parking space, as one of my near neighbours moved up on me into the communal space outside my house, leaving a good five spaces the other side of them, only one space for me and the builder boyfriend to park our two cars, and then giving us accusing looks when we parked the other side. When someone starts filming you through their living room window on their iPhone while you are trying to park the car you can’t fit outside your house because of them you know something is up. I think it may be the only thing left to fill their time. How do people fill time when there is too much of it? When they’ve finished doing everything reasonable, there is only the unreasonable left to explore. So we gave up on a second space. Let them have it, if it will cheer them up, we thought. But after going out to feed the horses one evening, I returned home to find they had moved even farther up and were occupying both our spaces. We had nowhere to park either car and were entirely displaced. As there are lots of empty spaces nearby, most of them outside the home of a neighbour who has another property and does not appear to be coming here for lockdown, it doesn’t really matter. But every time I come home, park my car in the wrong place, look at someone else’s cars parked awkwardly at a jaunty angle, spaced out across three spaces outside my house, it occurs to me that this lockdown fatigue is unsustainable, and can only lead to an ever decreasing circle of curtain twitchery as the boredom bites and communities turn in on each other. It makes me want to scream just thinking about it. The BB and I are fine. Our lives go on as before, because when you have animals there is no furlough-subsidised lounging about the house all day, drinking lemon liqueur. We have to feed and muck out. The builder b still has to clamber around on a roof, an essential hero apparently, although no one claps. I have taken over doing his horses as well as mine so he can go straight to work. Muck and mud keeps me sane. I don’t know how everyone else copes. A few months ago, a friend of mine told me of a mutual acquaintance who died in his flat. They found him days later. He had been alone, drinking. He choked to death on his dinner. His demise was not dramatic or headline-grabbing. There was no fanfare on Twitter, no YouTube video. He will barely register as a statistic, I suspect, and his death won’t be linked to lockdown. It was an accident. The kind we allow to happen. We don’t allow anyone to die of Covid without one hell of a hullabaloo. Not even if you are 98 and suffering from cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure will your death from coronavirus go down as anything other than an outrage and a crime against humanity that could and should have been prevented. But it seems we are perfectly happy to let people get drunk and choke to death. No one is making the least song and dance about that. I will be screaming about this, and other anomalies, on my doorstep on Friday night. Join me. Wild life Wild life Aidan Hartley

Indian Ocean coast ‘I love you’ became just ‘love’, and that was the last word Mum was able to say to me. Her children had been in and out for days, she had met her great-grandson from America for the first time and messages flooded in on the phone, from all around Kenya and from her grandchildren in Europe. Then one evening the two of us were alone together in her bedroom, surrounded by family photos and all her memories of India, Arabia and great-grandson. She was in my arms and it became so quiet I decided to play Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ on my phone, since it might remind her of her years of war service in Burma, when she was still a teenager. As the song ended — ‘some sunny day’ — she opened her eyes, looking so beautiful, and then Mummy died. She would have been 96 next month. Suddenly at my side were her carers, Mercy and Anne, weeping because they had loved Mum so much. I slept at her feet that night. In the morning I helped lift Mum’s body into her coffin and a van drove off, with us following, towards the Hindu crematorium in Nairobi’s old district of Kariokor. Flocks of sacred ibises wandered about the gardens and there were statues of deities and open pyres where you can have a great send-off with timber and ghee. We had chosen the modern oven method — which uses 40 litres of diesel to consume a body — though under the X-rays, Mummy’s bones had become like thin shadows, so I reckon she used up much less fuel than usual. After a respectful, short Christian service attended by several of us, off she went, the kindly Hindu priest guiding the box forwards as if directing traffic, while all of us cried. The GO button was pressed and the machine roared into life. Miraculously, the ashes appeared within a couple of hours, the top of the earthenware urn sealed shut with a red braided kavala thread. My brother Richard took charge of the urn and at dawn the next day we flew down to Malindi, on Kenya’s north coast. Lots of family had gathered here and we waded into the Indian Ocean waves to scatter Mum’s ashes. This is where we had scattered Dad’s ashes a long time ago. The dark particles sank swiftly, while the white angel dust particles of her bones sparkled as they danced in the shallows. A storm was coming in and strong Kaskazi monsoon winds and waves churned up the sea, reminding us all of Mum’s wonderful paintings of the ocean, which were rarely of calm azure seas in sunshine — but often of spring tide breakers, salty spray and deep roiling currents. We cried because we missed our mother, Doreen Sanders, but at the ebullient lunch that followed we were all able to remember the things we loved about her, telling stories about her adventurous life. As in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, my mother lost a great deal during her life because of political upheavals and dramas. She was born in India, served in a women’s unit during the war in Burma, worked in Aden, became a rancher’s wife and mother in Tanganyika and Kenya, and spent years in places like Devon and the Pyrenees. She had four children, 11 grandchildren and three great- grandchildren. She was a fiercely loyal mother, an eccentric, a fine painter and a great storyteller. She’d live on mushrooms plucked from the fields for a month because it saved money, then put us up in the finest rooms at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris while rashly spending money on Salvador Dali pictures. The Great Britain she believed in all her life gave little back to her and she lost the world she grew up in, but she still claimed she favoured roast beef over curries. Our simple house on the beach in Malindi gave her the greatest gift of all in this troubled world, a secure home in a dramatic and exciting place, where she had interesting friends, the beautiful ocean, her desert roses, gardenias, the nesting turtles, coral reefs and all the land and sea birds. She arrived on a ship in Mombasa after marrying my father in 1951 and as she looked down at the docks, she realised her future adventures would always be in East Africa. Kenya has always been a good home, among good people. It remains a good place for all of us in the family she has left behind here. Bridge Janet de Botton

’Tis better to give than to receive, the Bible teaches us. Well, not if you were me this Christmas, it isn’t. One of the local Norwegian bridge clubs organised a big (online obvs) pairs tournament to raise money to train their juniors. To do this they auctioned more than 70 A flight players from all over the world and I was given European and world champion Espen Lindqvist as my Christmas gift! Espen’s regular partner is Boye Brogeland and together they have represented Norway in every major international event for the past decade. The final count was 174 pairs, playing 30 boards at matchpoint scoring, and we came third, with 62 per cent. Of course we were lucky and were given a few gifts, but often good play and good luck go hand in hand. This 3NT, played by Espen, was a case in point. The luck came in when West decided to lead the ◆J — a more passive lead would have worked better. The good play was down to my partner. Espen won the ◆A and quickly returned one to the 6, 9 and King. East switched to the ♣J which went to the King and Ace, and the Club return ran to the 9 and South’s Queen. Declarer tested Diamonds and then ran four rounds of Spades — forcing East to discard twice; he thought he couldn’t afford to throw a Heart, so he let go first the ♣4, then the ♣7. The ending didn’t take long; Espen played a Heart to his King in hand, and then put East on lead with the ♣10 to concede a Heart trick to dummy’s Queen. Thank you, Hoffa, for finding such a terrific Christmas present. Chess Missed opportunities Luke McShane

In game 1 of his Airthings Masters Final against Radjabov, Aronian’s pawn push 21 e4-e5 (shown in the first diagram) created a tactical explosion. This was rapid chess at its best — stylish and exuberant. And yet, as thrilling as this game was, it was a pity that the players had so little time to navigate the complications. If they had, each player might have unearthed an even deeper idea.

In the first diagram, Radjabov had an improvement, as subtle as it is stunning: 21…d3!! 22 Qxd3 fxe3 23 Qg6+ reaches the same position as in the game, with one crucial difference; the missing pawn on f4 benefits Black, for reasons explained in the comment to 26…Bf5.

The second diagram shows Aronian’s missed opportunity. The immediate 29 Ng5 allows 29… Qc4+. That’s why the move he played, 29 Re6? was tempting, but Radjabov coolly rebuffed the attack. I suspect that Aronian also glanced at the alternative 29 Rxe8+ Rxe8 and then 30 Bxh7 Qxh7 31 f7 (hoping for 31…Qxh6 32 fxe8=Q+), but 31…Re1+! wrecks that idea. But instead of 30 Bxh7, the dispassionate 30 b3!! wins, though such restraint is scarcely possible with mere seconds for reflection. Then 30…Kg8 loses to 31 Ng5 Nxg5 32 Qxg5+ followed by Bf5-g6 and Qg5-h6+. Black should prefer 30…Rg8, but then 31 h4! introduces two ideas — first Nf3-g5, and second h4- h5 followed by Bf5-g6. Black would be busted, despite his extra rook.

Levon Aronian–Teimour Radjabov Airthings Masters Final, January 2021.

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 Bc5 4 c3 Nf6 5 d3 O-O 6 O-O d6 7 Bg5 h6 8 Bh4 g5 9 Bg3 a5 10 Re1 Re8 11 Nbd2 Ba7 12 Nf1 Be6 13 Bb5 Bd7 14 Ne3 Ne7 15 a4 c6 16 Bc4 Ng6 17 Qc2 Nf4 18 Rad1 Qe7 19 d4 exd4 20 Bxf4 gxf4 21 e5 (see diagram 1) dxe3 22 Qg6+ Kh8 23 Qxh6+ Nh7 24 Bd3! Sacrificing a rook with check. exf2+ 25 Kf1 fxe1=Q+ 26 Rxe1 Bf5! An ingenious deflection. Consider the alternative: 26…f5 27 exf6 Qf7 28 Rxe8+ Rxe8 29 Ng5. If Black reached this position without the f4-pawn on the board, 29…Qxf6+ would place the White king in check, which explains why 21…d3!! would have been so powerful. But here, with the pawn on f4, Black loses quickly, e.g. 29… Qg8 30 Bxh7 Qf8 31 Nf7+ Qxf7 32 Bg6+ Kg8 33 Bxf7+ Kxf7 34 Qg7+ Ke6 35 f7 wins. 27 Bxf5 f6 28 exf6 Qf7 (see diagram 2) 29 Re6? Rxe6 30 Ng5 Rxf6 31 Nxf7+ Rxf7 32 Bxh7 Rxh7 33 Qf6+ Radjabov could have avoided the perpetual check, but acceding to it must have come as a welcome relief. Kg8 34 Qg6+ Rg7 35 Qe6+ Rf7 36 Qg6+ Kf8 37 Qxd6+ Kg7 38 Qe5+ Kg6 39 Qe6+ Kg7 40 Qe5+ Kg6 41 Qe6+ Kg7 42 Qe5+ Draw agreed

Radjabov went on to win the match and the tournament — the second of ten events in the Champions Chess Tour. Chess puzzle Puzzle no. 636 Luke McShane

Gormally–Turner, Caplin Hastings Online 2021. Black looks safe, but Gormally’s next move forced a win of material. What did he play? Email answers to [email protected] by Monday 18 January. 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 Qg6+!! If 1…fxg6 2 Nxh6 mate, or 1…Nxg6 2 Nxh6 mate, or 1…Rxg6 2 Nxe7 mate. Last week’s winner Jeremy Forgan, Middlesbrough Competition Naysayers Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3181 you were invited to submit a letter by a publisher rejecting a well- known literary classic. The authors of Lolita and The Bell Jar (‘an ill-conceived, poorly written novel’) are among distinguished recipients of multiple rejections. And T.S. Eliot famously turned down George Orwell’s Animal Farm (its shortcomings included the wrong type of pig). Orwell came in for a bit of a battering in the entry, too; Barry Baldwin wasn’t wasting any ink with his take-down: ‘DOUBLEPLUS-UNGOOD’. Many entrants (though not all) wrote from the point of view of a contemporary publisher, and works were often rejected on the grounds that their world-view, lacking in inclusivity of one kind or another, clashes with prevailing cultural orthodoxies. Here’s part of Laura Freeman’s response to John of Patmos: ‘Your “Whore of Babylon” passage is necessarily problematic. Female colleagues were uncomfortable with Ms Babylon’s self-identification as “Mother of Harlots and Abominations.”’ You get the idea. Other strong performers were Amber Burke, Ian Barker and Nick Syrett, but the prize of £30 goes to those entries printed below.

My Dear Miss Greer, The provocative paradox of your title, witty though it may be, signals the governing weakness of your submission: namely, a reliance on shock tactics. That these are interwoven with the deployment of a scholarly apparatus, perhaps a little arcane for the general reader (as it often is to me), only deepens the problem with ‘confusion worse confounded’. Overall, there is a one-sided emphasis on wrongs done to the fair sex by brutes and scoundrels. Do you not feel that a more balanced approach, and a less offensive vocabulary, would be more persuasive? Lest you suspect me of ‘sexism’, let me add that my wife, though unable to finish the typescript, described its tone as ‘shrill’.

Not to be discouraging, I suggest a thoughtful revision in the light of this letter. After all, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s has already won its victories. Basil Ransome-Davies (The Female Eunuch)

Dear Mr Maugham, I regret we cannot publish Of Human Bondage. The title’s allusion to sexual fetishism caught our attention immediately; its referencing Spinoza did not. Your focus on young hero Philip Carey’s Byronic club foot proved too esoteric an obsession even for our tastes and the chapters devoted to Philip’s vicarage childhood took the Tantric postponement of pleasure too far. You are to be congratulated that many of the requisite elements for successful erotic fiction — bohemian Parisian escapades, medical romance, an interlude among the sweaty hop pickers of rural England — are present. However, such excitements are smothered beneath irrelevant social and economic details and Philip’s florid ruminations upon Life, leaving this reader decidedly flaccid. Throughout, your women are terrible; Fanny’s name is right, at least, but Mildred so entirely lacks sensual possibilities I wonder if you so much as like the gender. My advice? Try, instead, short stories. Adrian Fry (Of Human Bondage)

Dear Miss Waugh, Thank you so much for letting us look at Decline and Fall. I passed the manuscript to our reader whose report commends your comic prose style but deplores the general ‘tone’ of the book. In particular, there are passages that are undoubtedly offensive to Welsh people (not that they are noted readers of course) and you treat the serious crime of pederasty as a matter for jesting. Moreover, your hero and his fiancée sleep together before their marriage in order not ‘to make a mistake’ — an attitude that will shock ‘old guard’ readers. In short, your novel is, regretfully, too modern for our list. Nevertheless, since you are obviously a young person of progressive views, there may well be other areas that we could usefully explore together. May I suggest Quaglino’s at 8 p.m. next Thursday? And a club afterwards?

Looking forward to knowing you better.

Yours etc. J.C.H. Mounsey (Decline and Fall)

Dear Mr Carle We read your unusual book with great interest but feel it is not for us. Our legal department advises us that a work which appears to encourage overeating in children would expose us to unacceptable risk, despite the implicit warning given by the concomitant tummy ache experienced by the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Educationists would object to a caterpillar being inaccurately portrayed as consuming such items as pickles, Swiss cheese, salami, popsicles, cherry pie and cupcakes while our Diversity Consultants advise that these foodstuffs are far too culturally Eurocentric for the times. Child Psychology has raised the possibility of children being traumatised by the prospect of insect larvae infesting these familiar comestibles. Also, the technical challenge of making holes in pages would price the book out of the popular market. Finally, may we suggest employing a professional illustrator? Collages are so 1950s! Frank Upton (The Very Hungry Caterpillar)

While reluctant to decline an author’s first foray into fiction, we trust the following observations will assist your burgeoning career. You demonstrate stylistic competence and tell a good tale. Similarly, you deploy to advantage the ‘situational ethics’ intrinsic to the plot. Yet the narrative feels somehow closer to a screenplay treatment than to a novel. You deposit boys on the cusp of adolescence on an island, where they perforce configure strategies and hierarchies; they awaken from innocence to the quasi-adult regime of their own devising. Two leaders emerge, rational Ralph and loose cannon Jack. The true emblem of power is not the conch shell but underdog Piggy’s spectacles, which enable fire, hence survival. Heuristics for beginners, no less…

Our prime concern, however, is your apparent nonchalance towards potential readership. Not only middle-class lads enjoy adventures entailing conflict and resolution. In future, Mr Golding, add some girls. Mike Morrison (Lord of the Flies)

No. 3184: laughter lines

You are invited to tell a joke in verse form. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to [email protected] by midday on 27 January. Crossword 2489: Fade away Doc

Each of the unclued lights, (four of two words), individually or as a pair can be linked with an unclued name suggested by the title, all verifiable in Brewer. Across 4 Wide support for the chair, one seen on TV? (11) 13 Surgeon’s probe appears cool after operation (11) 15 Cut some of the wood (3) 18 Crude line art on its wall, maybe (7) 19 Leo, say, alternatively a married lady (7) 23 Daughter actress Jane, who travels with Santa (6) 24 Saw a team keeping two metres apart (5) 27 Tea-growing state providing a service, on reflection (5) 29 Mark includes 50, a numerical quantity (6) 31 Collie is fluttering eyes (6) 34 Animal came ’ither by boat, so it’s said (7, two words) 39 River emergency – councillor’s resigned (4) 40 Male circle is broken with female finally out in priestly system (11) 41 ‘Got your head covered, cock?’ (5) 43 Posts across the water for game school principals (11)

Down 1 Frisky roan one lost with ass, bolted – were these to too late? (11, two words) 2 The Claw when topped and tailed could become another claw (5) 3 Beast’s loved one strips, turning to bed early for this (11, two words) 5 Accomplish mixture of ale, sire (7) 6 Plant whose leaves are broad – alternatively, long! (6) 7 Most awful noise curtailed repose (6) 8 Like a gas, potentially one that’s used as a weapon of war (7) 9 Engineers leave clandestine group (4) 10 Based on experience of European member, in charge during rail’s chaos (9) 15 Male entranced by goddess revealing bust (5) 16 Lose it when one get endless criticism taking pep pill first (11, two words) 17 Material with dew, starlike, crumpled (11, two words) 21 Pop group’s eureka moment? (3, hyphened) 25 Friendliness of girl full of sex appeal (5) 28 Deviation two ways in catapult (7) 30 Eastern cedars swaying – bent double (7) 32 Pierce with pin, say (6) 33 Female – in Los Angeles? No – Australia! (6) 36 ‘Frivolous’ is fair (5) 37 Dig, putting pressure on stick (4)

Crossword solution to 2487: Birthday boys December 12th was the birthday of Gustave FLAUBERT (1D) and Frank SINATRA (15). Examples of their work are MADAME BOVARY (13) and SALAMMBÔ (20), and FLY ME TO THE MOON (1A) and STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT (45/37). Flaubert was born in ROUEN (25), and Sinatra in HOBOKEN (in the ninth column) which was to be shaded.

First prize James Woodworth, St Albans, Herts Runners-up J. Mermagen, Geneva, Switzerland Brenda Widger, Bowdon, Altrincham, Cheshire

No sacred cows My recipe for mayhem Toby Young

Caroline was pretty heroic during the first lockdown. She’s used to having no children to deal with between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., into which she crams her part-time job, food shopping, exercise classes, tennis lessons, dog walks and a hundred other things. But during our children’s three-month break from school they would appear in the kitchen at 1 p.m. and ask what was for lunch and, in spite of her other commitments, Caroline would always do her best to rustle something up. ‘I’m like Nigella Lawson on steroids,’ she said at the time. But she has drawn the line at repeating this Stakhanovite labour during the third lockdown. ‘I can handle everything, but not the cooking,’ she said on the day that Boris announced it, with an air of finality. So the kids have been instructed to fend for themselves at lunchtime, with packets of bagels, ham, salami, lettuce and cheese left on the kitchen table, and we’re all mucking in when it comes to supper. Not that we’re actually cooking anything from scratch. Rather, my three sons and I have become customers of Gousto, a company that delivers the raw ingredients for several meals in a box, complete with detailed instructions. It’s like a halfway house between a recipe book and a ready meal. You still have to cook everything, but there’s no weighing of ingredients and the fiddly bits for each meal are bundled together in a brown paper bag. It costs about £50 for four meals, which is pretty reasonable given that they can stretch to six people. The instructions are supposed to be idiot-proof, but the company clearly didn’t envisage that anyone could be quite as incompetent as me. I have yet to cook a single Gousto meal correctly. One difficulty is that the recipes aren’t always in chronological order and you start off meticulously following the first instruction, only to discover when you get to the second that you should have begun with that one. So the chicken is already frying in the pan before you realise you should have marinated it first. The solution is to read the recipe in its entirety before you start — and to be fair, it tells you to do that at the top of the instructions. But obviously the Galloping Gourmet here imagines he’s above having to do that, hence the culinary car crashes. On the plus side, I’ve discovered that if I don’t tell the kids I’ve messed up, they’re none the wiser. For instance, I cooked a lamb stew last week and squeezed all the little sachets of wine vinegar into the stew pot when it should have been combined with some chopped red onion to create a garnish. I had a sinking feeling when, after placing the pot in the oven, I read the next instruction: ‘Do not include the wine vinegar with the other ingredients as this will ruin the flavour of the meat.’ But I kept a poker face when serving it up to the three boys, and they wolfed it down in the usual fashion. My youngest, Charlie, said he didn’t think it was one of Gousto’s best, but apart from that there were no complaints. The biggest test to date was when the company delivered a box with all the recipes missing. Other customers must have complained, because we got an apologetic email from Gousto telling us how to find the recipes on its website. But trying to follow the instructions by squinting at my iPhone while pots and pans simmered on the stove proved quite difficult, particularly as I need reading glasses to see anything on a screen. My spectacles kept falling into the boiling sauces. I tied some string to them and looped them round my neck, at which point the kids, who’d been watching with amusement, told me I looked like an old-age pensioner. Such, such are the joys of Lockdown III. I realise that this sounds as if I do bugger all most of the time, but that’s not strictly true. For instance, I pay for the cleaner, and cleaners are allowed to travel to work during lockdowns. No, seriously, I do all the ‘blue jobs’ — putting out the rubbish, picking up the dog’s poo, doing the washing up. I even helped my eldest son put up a Rick and Morty triptych on his bedroom wall on Monday. I also go round the house obsessively turning out all the lights so as not to waste electricity. Funnily enough, none of the kids ever bother, even though they profess to be worried about carbon emissions. Still, at least this makes for lively dinner–table conversations when I serve up the next ruined meal. THE BATTLE FOR BRITAIN MICHAEL HEATH The Wiki Man Flights of fancy Rory Sutherland

Soon after the pandemic hit, the world’s airlines turned off their pricing algorithms and resumed pricing flights manually. Everything the software had learned from people’s past behaviour was suddenly rendered irrelevant. The software had been created for a world of discretionary travel where demand was elastic. If a plane seemed likely to leave half-empty, the software dropped prices to fill remaining seats. In March this once-efficient approach failed spectacularly. The few people who were still flying were doing so only in desperation: everyone else was unwilling to travel at any price. Far from reducing prices to respond to a drop in demand, it now made sense to hike them. It is sometimes said that insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. But doing the same thing under different circumstances while expecting similar results is no less a form of derangement. The first behaviour is a characteristic of alcoholics; the second is a hallmark of bureaucrats, ideologues, management consultants and devotees of process automation. It is most prevalent among the more educated, for whom theoretical neatness is a major status marker: the very people who design systems and software. (I changed from a Remainer to a Leaver for these very reasons. I had voted Remain, but was so alarmed by the monolithic thinking of hardcore Remainers, for whom there seemed no problem to which further integration was not the answer, that I switched sides. The problem with the EU, it seemed to me, was the same as the problem with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car: it’s very difficult to put it in reverse.) Large institutions are prone to a kind of conceptual locked-in syndrome — and the larger the organisation, the worse the effect. The book Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott, is a wonderful account of this problem. As evidence, consider the fact that we are proceeding unthinkingly with HS2 despite a once-in-a–generation change in travel habits — especially among business travellers. Now, just to be clear, I think it possible that the widespread adoption of remote-working and video-conferencing might strengthen the case for HS2. (In time, the number of people who live and work elsewhere, but who travel to London once a fortnight or so, might rise.) But shouldn’t we re-run the numbers now? Perhaps HS2 is now a good idea, but not as good as rolling out broadband and 5G to remote areas, or allowing the Cornish to make 2G calls without standing on a hill? As I have written before, the magical property of business and free markets is that it is the only sphere of human activity where you get paid to change your mind. One tech investor phrases his philosophy as follows: ‘All you need do is make a list of the assumptions in a business sector, and then find the ones which aren’t true — or which won’t be true in two years’ time. You’ve now got a business.’ It is this competing market for conflicting ideas which gives the private sector its accidental resilience. The diversity of business does not arise by top-down design but as an unintended consequence of competition: no one invested in home grocery delivery because it might prove handy in a pandemic, but because they were placing a side bet on how the future of shopping might play out. From now on, we need to build the same resilience into everything, and spend less time over- optimising on the past. It’s one thing to teach computers to play chess; the rules haven’t changed in 300 years. In real life, as airlines found, the rules often change overnight. DEAR MARY

Your problems solved

Q. My husband and I have two single friends who we believe should be introduced. In days gone by, we would have held a dinner or drinks party in order to do so. But with all the lockdowns, it is proving hard to get them in the same room. To make matters more difficult, they are both conscientious types and have moved to their respective family homes in the countryside to offer support to their parents. How should we introduce them? A Zoom call seems so unromantic. — Name and address withheld

A. Much better to ambush the couple by inviting them to attend Zoom drinks to celebrate some confected achievement of your own — e.g. ‘I’ve finally done my tax return.’ By directing the focus of attention on to your own mini-triumph, neither singleton will feel self-conscious or that their attractiveness is being judged, yet they can quietly observe each other. If you sense it went well, the next step is to start a Zoom book club with them as members, so they can get to know each other at a leisurely pace, blissfully free from any embarrassing pressure to make physical bids for intimacy. Of course the chemistry may not work when they eventually meet in real life, but if it does, they will be eternally grateful to you that the groundwork was achieved almost without their noticing it.

Q. My boyfriend is in lockdown with me. I adore him but didn’t realise, until he moved in, that he has an off-putting physical habit. This is to repeatedly attempt to clear his throat, as though he is trying to cough something up. Whenever I mention that I don’t like it, he smiles broadly and chuckles as though I am congratulating him. Apparently his mother advised him as a child that it was a very healthy thing to give your air passages a thorough clearing out like this, and I can only assume that this is why he expects I should be pleased about it. I don’t want to keep nagging so what do you suggest, Mary? — W.S., London SW1

A. YouTube hosts a whole archive of disgusting biological sound effects. Download one onto your iPhone so it is ready to play each time your boyfriend begins the coughing. Make no comment as you use this Pavlov-style technique to reprogramme him.

Q. At Christmas I received many more cards than in previous years, some from people who had never sent them before. I very much welcomed the friendly gestures, but they arrived too late for me to reciprocate and I am not quite sure what to do. Can you help, Mary? — B.A., London W8

A. Make contact with these senders by postcard, wishing them a happy new year and expressing the hope that you will be able to meet up again eventually. No need to mention your failure to return their card — cheery messages of friendship and goodwill go down well at this empty time of year. Drink Open that special bottle now Dan Keeling

Losing your sense of smell due to Covid is no joke when you make a living in food and wine. In April last year my taste buds shut down for three weeks. I began staring at my wine cellar like a recovering addict for whom the drugs no longer worked. Sure, I’d read posts from other sufferers who were concerned about whether or not their olfactory organs would ever get back to normal, but I’m fatalistic, and besides, my chances were good. But if my smell didn’t return, I’d rue having not lived in the moment more often. Pandemics, floods, wildfires, cyber-attacks, artificial intelligence, terrorism: we’re living in a boom time for disaster, so if you’re not opening your most prized bottles of wine now, when exactly do you plan on doing so? Eckhart Tolle missed a trick by not encouraging neurotic winos to do so in his self-help classic The Power of Now: surely a vital part of vinous appreciation is being able to live intensely in the present. How many times have you pondered bottles past and future while deciding what to open, then talked yourself out of anything very good? Too subtle, too simple, too young, too old, too complex, too alcoholic, too… wet. Why anyone still buys Bordeaux en primeur when killer robots are on the horizon is beyond me. Fine wine is one of the few luxuries that can cost a fortune but requires a secondary investment of something much more valuable: time. When a Pauillac with 25 years in the cellar, around the time they begin to get interesting, can be bought for a similar price to a new release, why bet you’ll be in a position to enjoy it in the future instead of living in an apocalyptic wasteland that makes The Terminator look like Mary Poppins? Did you see the lockdowns coming more than a few days before they started? Well, hurry up and pass the corkscrew. When it comes to special bottles I’ll always say ‘just do it’, although they shouldn’t be opened under just any circumstances. Never open a stinky old-school Hermitage for your aunt Mabel or garrulous friends without the inclination to pay it attention. You may as well be choking back Casillero del Diablo as savouring Haut-Brion ’89. Great wines can be complex and severe, and require effort to understand. Likewise, never pour a mighty Montrachet as an aperitif at a reunion: no one wants to geek out over Chardonnay when gossip is on the menu. And try not to drink legendary vintages when as drunk as a lord: I’ve no recollection of Armand Rousseau Mazy-Chambertin ’71, allegedly dispatched after a refreshing lunch at La Paulée de Meursault. I’ve squirrelled away many bottles from favourite domainesbut, like the wines themselves, the circumstances for opening them seem to get rarer. Meanwhile the prices of many cult estates have spiralled, so unless you’re the Duke of Westminster, even the thought of opening these bottles can have a paralysing effect. Would it be such a bad thing if some of the hugely inflated prices of authentic domaines dropped post–pandemic? Judging by the sums many are reaching, there seems little chance of that. All winos prize a fellow enthusiast with whom to drink precious bottles. As my sense of smell slowly returned I made a start on my ‘Sod it list’ of dream wines with friends, a list almost as long as the queue for Sainsbury’s. What did we drink? 2008 Freddie Mugnier Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru ‘Les Amoureuses’ was my favourite wine of the year — perhaps ever — but it wasn’t just noble or expensive bottles on the list. There’s something restorative about wholesome Beaujolais like Jules Desjourneys Fleurie that most other regions just can’t match. But no matter how mad and challenging the early part of this year is, it will never be repeated. So then, open a special bottle with a dear friend: it’s easy to take such happiness for granted.

‘‘We moved to the catchment area of an excellent private tutor…’’ MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Performative

Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles. The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers used it in a sense that I thought wrong. Of the 100 newspaper articles mentioning it, not one used performative correctly (to my mind). I must be the only person marching in step. Performative was invented by an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, who used it in lectures in 1952, then in the William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. We make performative utterances, he said, as a kind of action. Examples he gave include: I do (in the marriage ceremony), I bet, I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth, I promise, Let there be light (if you are God) and I apologise. This was a label useful in identifying a sort of utterance that is different from a statement of fact. Austin chose the word performative because it had to do with performing actions. But all the 100 newspaper articles used it to mean ‘play-acting’, with the kind of performance we see on stage (when theatres are open). Thus Andrew Rawnsley, writing about Boris Johnson in the Observer, said that ‘just below the surface of his performative face lurks an insecure character’. He didn’t mean that the Prime Minister’s face gets things done, but that it puts on a show. An article in the Independentdiscussing insincere apologies included the category ‘apologies that are merely “performative utterances” ’. For Austin, by the very fact of saying ‘I apologise’, the apology is made. The Independentmeant that the utterance was made for appearances’ sake, a different kettle of fish. The first occurrence of the new ‘wrong’ sense noted by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 2003. But now, at University College Cork, there is even a course called ‘Theatre & Performative Practices’. It does not focus on betting, swearing or dedicating songs to people. There is nothing I can do about the loss of J. L. Austin’s meaning, but I won’t be using performative to mean ‘theatrical’. I promise. Dot Wordsworth