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The Week

- Has there ever been a better time to be alive?

- Portrait of the year: resignations, wars and kangaroo courts

- Why the story of the Holocaust still needs telling

- Did the Romans handle slavery better than the Americans?

- How much do we spend at Christmas?

- Letters: pantomime dames are here to stay

Has there ever been a better time to be alive?

The Spectator   12:32PM, 14 Dec, 2023

The recent United Nations climate summit in Dubai ended up becoming a carnival of gloom. Speakers competed to paint the bleakest outlook for the world. But while it’s right to focus on the challenges that lie ahead, the doomsday narrative risks obscuring all the progress we have made. ‘Records are now being broken so often that we are perhaps becoming immune to what they are really telling us,’ said King Charles in his address to COP28. The King makes a fair point, one that it is worth elaborating on as the year draws to a close.

A few weeks ago, for example, it emerged that Britain has become the first G20 country to have halved its carbon emissions. This went entirely unreported – as is often the case with good environmental news – but it is a landmark. Technology, capitalism and competition have allowed us to extract more power from less fuel in a cleaner way. The average household uses 40 per cent less energy than in the mid-1990s. This has many benefits: the air in our cities, for example, is the cleanest since records began.

In the fight against global poverty, the good news continues. The world’s economic output this year hit an all-time high, finally recovering from the pandemic. Wealth is also shared more widely than at any time in living memory, with global inequality at a 150-year low. Just a decade ago, almost 850 million people in the world lived below the extreme poverty line; now the figure is 610 million. That is equivalent to 65,000 people being lifted out of poverty every day. Charity plays a role, but free trade is the main driver.

It’s true that carbon emissions are still rising globally, but that is mainly the result of rapid development in poorer countries. This means more of the world can now afford a better diet and the basic facilities that so many of us in the West take for granted. If we care about the people in less wealthy countries, we have to accept that global emissions will rise before they start to fall. As a response to climate change, we will develop the tools to meet new challenges that arise. That’s what humans have always done, and it’s why deaths from natural disasters are a fraction of what they were a century ago.

But the pattern of adaptation and progress is not a given. As the pandemic showed us, the trajectory can be disrupted. United Nations figures suggest that 75 million more are in poverty now than would have been if Covid had not happened, and much of this is the result of the lockdown strategy. While children were not at serious risk from Covid, the UN estimates that 228,000 under-fives died in South-East Asia alone due to their lack of access to basic healthcare services during the pandemic.

For all the doom-mongering, in most places in the world this is the best time to have ever been alive

At the time, little thought was given to the unintended consequences of lockdown. The policy was new and untried, so its full effects were impossible to guess.

But there were some results that are hard to dispute. One concerns the knock-on effects of shutting down: when trade slows, so does the money going into third-world economies. Millions are plunged into poverty. Another is more encouraging: now that the system is up and running again, the business of poverty reduction has resumed at a breakneck pace.

On a global scale, progress is incremental. The work is done by collective endeavour in science, medicine, trade. Perhaps the most important factors are competition and collaboration. From vaccines to electric cars, in an age where two-thirds of humanity have access to the internet, breakthroughs are quickly shared. The spread of knowledge is the main force behind poverty reduction.

None of this offers much comfort to those in Britain who are caught in the worst cost-of-living squeeze in modern times. But the economic ups and downs here are offset by a more encouraging longer-term global trend that has reasserted itself this year. The UK economy is caught in a high-tax, low-growth trap, with living standards badly affected. But it is a cycle that can be broken when there is the political will to do so. Stagnation, while miserable, is not recession. In the meantime, on carbon emissions this country is a success story.

Good journalism investigates wrongdoing and scandal, and exposes corruption that would otherwise become endemic. This magazine seeks to do that – but it’s important to reflect on the good news of our times too. And for all the doom-mongering, in most places in the world this is the best time to have ever been alive.

We have learned how fragile progress is – and how easy it is to suspend the freedom our antecedents fought for. But this year has also shown that the world has the ability to recover – to shake free of past restrictions and get back on track.

It’s human nature to take successes for granted and to focus on the problems that remain. In a way, this is how mankind advances: we never stop trying to innovate and improve. We live during a time when such extraordinary advances are being made so frequently that we rarely stop to remember that, for all the disasters in the world, what is going right still, even now, far outstrips what is going wrong.

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: resignations, wars and kangaroo courts

The Spectator   12:48PM, 14 Dec, 2023

January

The government stopped a Gender Recognition Bill passed by the Scottish parliament becoming law. Isla Bryson, now a transgender woman, was convicted of having raped two women; the 31-year-old was sent to a women’s prison, then transferred to one for men. A Met Police officer, David Carrick, aged 48, pleaded guilty to 24 charges of rape. Nadhim Zahawi was sacked as Conservative party chairman. Strikes by railway workers, Underground drivers, ambulance drivers, nurses and hospital doctors continued on and off all year. Ukraine struck a building in Donetsk housing Russian forces. A Russian missile destroyed a block of flats at Dnipro. Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned as prime minister of New Zealand.

February

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, announced her resignation. The Northern Ireland Protocol acquired a Windsor Framework. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the British parliament. President Joe Biden of America visited Kyiv. Fierce fighting continued at Bakhmut, where the Russian mercenary Wagner force was active. An earthquake killed more than 50,000 in Turkey and Syria. President Biden ordered a Chinese surveillance balloon to be shot down.

March

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, appointed as his chief of staff Sue Gray, whose report into Downing Street lockdown breaches had damned Boris Johnson. Peter Murrell, the husband of Nicola Sturgeon, resigned as chief executive of the SNP; Humza Yousaf was elected its leader. Britain endured a week of chatter over Gary Lineker being stopped from presenting an episode of Match of the Day. Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank in America. UBS agreed to buy the mortally wounded Credit Suisse. Russia and Ukraine suffered heavy loss of life in the ruins of Bakhmut.

April

In a week 1,056 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats. An emergency alert exercise sent every mobile phone in the country a message. Richard Sharp resigned as chairman of the BBC. China held military exercises surrounding Taiwan. Civil war raged in Sudan. Poland and Hungary banned imports of Ukrainian grain to protect their farmers. Germany closed its last nuclear power station, leaving coal to produce more than a third of its energy.

May

The King and Queen were crowned. A barge, the Bibby Stockholm, was brought from Genoa to accommodate 506 asylum seekers. Phillip Schofield resigned as a presenter on This Morning. Three commanders of Islamic Jihad were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

June

Boris Johnson called the Commons Privileges Committee report on his conduct over Covid regulations a ‘kangaroo court’ and left parliament immediately. The Covid Inquiry under Baroness Hallett began. Nicola Sturgeon was arrested by police investigating her party’s finances and released without charge. The Bank of England raised interest rates to 5 per cent. In June 3,824 people crossed the Channel in small boats. A dam was breached on the Dnipro in Ukraine. In Russia, Wagner mercenaries advanced on Moscow, then stopped; Yevgeny Prigozhin, their leader, flew to Belarus. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, was tried on new political charges. Andrew Tate, a British-American social media personality, was charged in Romania with rape. The tourist submersible Titan broke up while inspecting the wreck of the Titanic. Saudi Arabia cut oil production to keep up prices. Iran reopened its embassy in Saudi Arabia. Coutts closed the bank account of Nigel Farage whose views did ‘not align with our values’.

July

The Tories saved Boris Johnson’s old seat at Uxbridge in a by-election, thanks to unpopular ultra low emission zones. Ben Wallace said he would cease to be defence secretary. Huw Edwards, the news presenter, was in hospital with ‘serious mental health issues’, according to his wife, who said it was him against whom there were allegations, according to the Sun, of receiving photographs from a young person now aged 20; police said no criminal offence had been committed. Dame Alison Rose resigned as chief executive of the NatWest group, which owns Coutts. Labour dropped its policy of making self-identification the criterion for changing gender. In three days, 1,339 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats. France had five nights of riots after police shot dead Nahel Merzouk, aged 17, in Nanterre. Police clashed with protestors in Israel opposed to judicial reforms. Russian drones destroyed Ukrainian grain stores on the Danube. Elon Musk renamed Twitter ‘X’.

August

The 39 migrants lodged aboard the Bibby Stockholm barge at the Isle of Portland disembarked again after traces of the Legionella bacteria were found. Lucy Letby, a nurse, was given a life sentence on conviction of murdering seven babies. The Police Service of Northern Ireland mistakenly published the names and location of 10,000 personnel. Hartwig Fischer resigned as director of the British Museum, from which 1,500 objects were missing. A private jet carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin fell out of the sky between Moscow and St Petersburg. Donald Trump, the former US president, answered charges in Washington; he was also indicted by Georgia, after previous indictments in New York and Florida. Drones struck Moscow six nights running. Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft crashed into the moon.

September

More than 100 schools had to close buildings because they contained reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, appointed commissioners to run Birmingham city council, which could not meet expenditure commitments. Daniel Khalife, 21, on remand in Wandsworth, escaped, strapped under a delivery lorry, and was found after three days. Russell Brand, the television presenter, was accused of sexual assault, which he denied. The Sycamore Gap tree, beside Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down in the night. Floods hit Derna, Libya, killing 5,000. More than 8,000 migrants arrived at the Italian island of Lampedusa in three days. Azerbaijan attacked the ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and more than 100,000 Armenians living there fled.

October

Rishi Sunak cancelled the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called ‘seismic’. The Tories were heavily defeated by Labour in by-elections at Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. Hundreds of gunmen from the Islamist group Hamas attacked southern Israel by surprise while thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza; they killed more than 1,200, mostly civilians. About 240 were taken hostage. Shocking social media videos came out. ‘We are at war,’ said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. President Biden visited Israel on the eve of its invasion of the Gaza Strip. About 1.1 million people in northern Gaza were told by Israel to move to the south-western parts. After days of heavy air strikes and artillery bombardment, Israel moved in ground forces. In London at a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally there were chants of ‘Jihad’.

November

David Cameron, prime minister 2010-16, was made Foreign Secretary and sent to the Lords for the purpose. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, became Home Secretary, replacing Suella Braverman, who was sacked. The Supreme Court ruled that the government’s plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda was unlawful. The annual rate of inflation fell to 4.6 per cent. National Insurance was reduced from 12 per cent to 10 per cent. Dublin saw a riot. Global wine production fell to its lowest level since 1961.

December

After a seven-day ceasefire, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza resumed with bombardment, heavy fighting and displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, resigned when a Bill was published, intended to make the Rwandan scheme lawful. Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, died aged 100. Boris Johnson appeared before the Covid Inquiry. The Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, ruled the UK government acted lawfully in blocking the Gender Recognition Bill passed by the Scottish parliament. CSH

The Spectator

Why the story of the Holocaust still needs telling

Tom Stoppard   12:55PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

In Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr Dorn is asked which is his favourite foreign city. Genoa, he replies: in the evening the streets are full of strolling people and you became part of the crowd, body and soul. ‘You start to think there really might be a universal spirit,’ he says. I remembered Dr Dorn when I was discovering Genoa in October. Then it suddenly came to me that I had been to the city before. Genoa was where my family embarked for the Far East, when I was 18 months old, fleeing the Nazis.

I don’t know about the universal spirit, though. I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black. I had reached 1953 when at midnight a text pinged in from an old friend: ‘Who will cross the street when we pass? Who will hide us in the attic?’

Who, me? When did it come to this? I remember a hum about ‘anti-Semitism in the Labour party’ when I was writing my play about a Viennese Jewish family who perished in the Holocaust, but there was nothing ‘timely’ about Leopoldstadt when it opened in London nearly four years ago. Anti-Semitism was not a hot topic. When elderly Jews, often weeping, thanked me for ‘telling our story’, I felt a bit surprised that the story still needed telling. But they knew something I didn’t. By the time the play moved to New York in September 2022, anti-Semitism was the hook for every interviewer, and by the end of the run last July there were two extra security men patrolling the theatre.

Six months later and 3,000 miles nearer home, the security guard at shul advised my friend to hide her Star of David if she was going to the West End. At midnight in a village in Dorset there seemed nothing I could do but return to my book, where it was still 1953, and where 700,000 Arabs had been expelled from Palestine with consequences that were still to come.

Some good news for a change. According to the papers, I am now less likely to get dementia because we have a dog, our first, a mutt rescued a year ago from a Greek rubbish tip. For her this has been a spectacular reversal of fortune. She has a knitted red coat, a yellow raincoat, several soft toys and a passport with her name on it. The name, Koko, came with her. It’s not a name I would have chosen, so, not wishing to confuse her, I call her Cocoa and she is none the wiser.

‘Pedestrian on motorway’ warned an electric sign on the M4 as we drove west, and in no time at all the traffic became a solid stationary mass stretching back for who knows how many miles for an hour and a half. ‘Stop Oil,’ said my wife, but she was wrong. There had indeed been a pedestrian on the motorway. Police and ambulance vehicles squeezed through to deal with the incident. When things got moving again, we were able to see that the incident left no trace. Possibly a tragedy had occurred, but it seemed surprising that the police had been obliged to close all four lanes for the duration. One of the scouts who had been sent forward from stuck cars told us sagely: ‘They have to take measurements.’ I’m afraid I had, for the thousandth time, the selfish thought that there is no inconvenience the authorities won’t put us to for the sake of conveniencing themselves. A case of health and safety, I suppose.

What was Nigel Farage thinking of? I assumed it was the million and a half pounds, but I’m told that’s wrong: it wasn’t the money, it was the optics. Really? The idea that plummeting dignity will enhance a chap’s standing as a serious politician seems about as likely as the Rector of Stiffkey advancing to a bishopric. I’m not convinced. Who, after all, was paying whom?

But now I’m wondering if the Rector of Stiffkey (mauled to death by a lion called Freddie in a seaside attraction) has gone the way of the clerihew. I made an allusion to this pithy verse-form (‘George the Third/ Ought never to have occurred./ One can only wonder/ At so grotesque a blunder’) in a play years ago and was astonished that not a single member of the company had heard of the clerihew. The play is now in performance again at the Hampstead Theatre, and even in Hampstead I can’t find anyone who tends the flame of Edmund Clerihew Bentley. I give up. The line has been cut.

In memoriam E.C. Bentley,

Who did not go gently

Into etcetera, adieu –

The onlie begetter of the clerihew.

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll is at Hampstead Theatre until 27 January.

Did the Romans handle slavery better than the Americans?

Peter Jones   12:46PM, 14 Dec, 2023

The festival of Saturnalia. Getty Images.

At this time of year the Romans, too, enjoyed a celebration, called the Saturnalia. It was a time of licence, the one day when slaves were free to eat, drink and be merry, and be served by their owners. One wonders what part such role-reversal played in Vedius Pollio’s villa on the Bay of Naples with its pond full of man-eating lampreys.

Once when the emperor Augustus was visiting, a slave dropped an expensive crystal glass, and Pollio ordered him to be thrown into the pond. Pollio dismissed the slave’s appeal to Augustus, at which the emperor asked Pollio to bring out all his other fine glass for him to use – and smashed the lot.

A pity Pollio did not get the treatment he ordered for the slave, but a slave was legally an item of property. One could buy and sell and throw away goods. Why not humans?

Slavery has taken many forms, yet it is the American version of it that tends to dominate our thinking over that practised in Latin America, the Barbary slave trade, and even modern slavery. Here is the Roman version.

While in parts of the USA, slavery was reserved for black people, the Romans were not racist. Their slaves came from all over the empire, mostly through war and piracy; but also, in a world of great poverty, sometimes through choice, since most slaves lived in their owner’s home, with board, lodging and medical attention provided. (We even hear of Romans who preferred slavery to freedom.) Slave women bore babies who were highly valued because slavery would be normal to them. Slaves could also be publicly owned: 700 serviced Rome’s water supply.

It is important to stress here that slaves were bought for a specific purpose, filling precisely the same range of jobs as free Romans could. They were an investment: expensive to buy – an educated one very expensive – and to maintain. It was in the owner’s interests to look after them, and this included teaching them. (In the USA, instructing slaves how to read and write was often forbidden.)

But slaves could never feel themselves part of a special social grouping or class. There were no reserved slave occupations. Further, in public, they looked like everyone else, regularly working unnoticed among the free urban population. (In the USA, they worked on the plantation – as, in fact, many Roman slaves also did.) The philosopher Seneca tells of a proposal once made in the Senate that slaves should be made easily recognisable by having to wear distinctive clothing. But ‘it then became apparent what a dangerous threat we would face if our slaves began to realise how few we were’. (In big cities, slaves may have made up around 20 per cent of the population, approximately 10 per cent elsewhere.)

Their chances of an endurable life depended on their owner. It would certainly be a death sentence if they worked the gold and silver mines in southern Spain. Diodorus said of that fate: ‘They die in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure. They get no relief or pause from their efforts but, lashed by their overseers into enduring the dreadfulness of their misfortune, they surrender their lives in this wretched manner.’

Some owners inveighed against harsh treatment. Seneca argued that slaves should be treated ‘as persons somewhat below ourselves in station, who have been placed under our protection rather than assigned to us as servants. Who does not hate Vedius Pollio more even than his own slaves did? Cruel masters are pointed at with disgust in all parts of the city and are hated and despised.’

One way for slaves to keep any sense of self-worth was to try to stay on top: time-wasting, pilfering, lying, doing jobs badly or not at all. Roman literature is full of examples of such low-level resistance (so too in the USA). Running away was a desperate measure, unlikely to succeed. We do hear of slave revolts – famously, Spartacus (who failed) – but they were very rare.

There was, however, a major incentive for co-operative behaviour: the (distant) prospect of freedom. Freed, a slave became a Roman citizen – the first thing he did was to buy slaves for himself – but with restricted political rights. His descendants, by contrast, would be full citizens. (Once emancipated, ex-slaves in the USA lived segregated under many highly restrictive laws, e.g. no consorting with whites, charges of vagrancy if unemployed, no political rights. Some laws lasted till 1972. None of that, let alone the KKK, for Romans.)

But in one remarkable way, some Roman slaves could act almost as free men. Because the elite were not allowed to engage in sordid business – their job was to nurture their vast estates – the law was tweaked to allow slaves to become business tycoons on behalf of their masters. Strictly speaking, this should have been illegal but, as the jurist Ulpian said, the law ‘closed its eyes’ to the situation. The result was that slaves were able to engage in commercial enterprises from mercantile and marine business to financial transactions, tax-collecting, banking and real estate; women too could operate as doctors, accountants and traders. The walls of Pompeii testify to one Faustilla, who advanced loans secured on property, with high interest rates.

Pliny the Elder reports that one ex-slave owned 4,116 slaves, 3,600 pairs of oxen, 257,000 other animals and 60 million sesterces in cash (a soldier’s annual pay was around 900). No surprise, then, that we hear of free men volunteering to become temporary slaves to the rich. Some freed slaves even became advisers to the imperial court and honoured for their activities by the Senate  – which disgusted Pliny the Younger.

All that, thankfully, was then. While there was no consolation to those working underground in the mines, or in the villas of Vedius Pollio, we may still feel that the Romans, in a world which took slavery completely for granted, handled it far more intelligently than the Americans.

Peter Jones

How much do we spend at Christmas?

The Spectator   12:24PM, 14 Dec, 2023

iStock

Brief Labour

22 January 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Labour government, something the party might want to celebrate, even see as a good omen. Except that Ramsay MacDonald’s minority administration lasted only nine months.

– If Rishi Sunak wanted to be mischievous, he could choose 31 October as election day – the closest Thursday to 29 October, the date the Conservatives, under Stanley Baldwin, regained power with a thumping majority of 209. Labour had been brought down by a vote of confidence after the government withdrew a prosecution under the Incitement to Mutiny Act against John Ross Campbell, editor of the communist Workers’ Weekly. Campbell had written an open letter to servicemen, imploring them to: ‘Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers! Refuse to fight for profits! Turn your weapons on your oppressors!’

A century on

Some other 100th anniversaries in 2024:

– 21 January: Death of Vladimir Lenin (Petrograd was renamed Leningrad within a week).

– 25 January: First Winter Olympics opened in Chamonix.

– 23 April: George V made the first royal radio broadcast, opening the Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

– 2 June: Native Americans were granted US citizenship.

– 8 June: Mallory and Irvine’s ill-fated attempt on the summit of Everest.

– Late summer: Opening of Britain’s first nudist camp by members of the English Gymnosophical Society calling themselves the Moonella Group, reportedly after the name of the landowner. (The term mooning, however, had been in use since at least the 18th century.)

– 24 December: Air disaster at Croydon which provoked Britain’s first public inquiry into an air accident.

Christmas money

How much more do we spend at Christmas?

– According to an index of all retail activity which opened at 100 in February 2020, between July 2021 and June last year UK spending reached a maximum of 190 on 1 December, although 23 and 24 December weren’t far behind on 189.

– The Christmas season apart, we spent most on 6 April (two weeks before Easter), when the index was at 170.

– Spending reached its minimum on 12, 13 and 22 July, when the index was 119.

– Therefore, shoppers spent around 60% more on their most active day of the year than on their least active.

Source: Revolut

The Spectator

Letters: pantomime dames are here to stay

The Spectator   12:28PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

The leasehold scam

Sir: In June 2018, Rishi Sunak told me in a Bethnal Green living room that leasehold is ‘a scam’ (‘Flat broke’, 9 December). At party conference, Sunak portrayed himself as a truth-teller who would take on the vested interests who have held back this country for so long. I am therefore baffled why his government’s signature homeownership policy, the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill, is such a modest package after six years of government and Law Commission work that has cost millions and which concluded that leasehold was fundamentally flawed. England and Wales are outliers in the world for persisting with this rip-off system.

Ending leasehold is the hegemonic programme the Conservatives so badly need. Michael Gove was right to recognise that earlier this year. Freeing leaseholders from rapacious freeholder overlords would be a project in popular capitalism that we haven’t seen since Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy revolution. Indeed, Thatcher saw leasehold enfranchisement as its sequel, and on her last day as prime minister greenlit a draft bill on commonhold – leasehold’s replacement.

Five million households are affected and are desperate to ‘take back control’ of their homes, money and lives. Our campaign, Free Leaseholders, has been inundated with lifelong Conservative voters who are preparing to defect to Labour on this issue alone. Labour, styling itself as the true party of homeownership, has pledged to dismantle leasehold, bringing in the full Law Commission recommendations and making commonhold default on new flats. Do Sunak’s Tories want to lose with a positive legacy and some dignity, or be buried?

Harry Scoffin

Founder, Free Leaseholders

London E14

Damehood

Sir: I read with interest the article on the future of panto dames and the politicisation of drag (‘Dragged down’, 9 December). I thoroughly appreciate Gareth’s support for us dames, but perhaps it is a good thing that I don’t share his pessimism for the future of our art form. I have been playing the role of the pantomime dame for more than 40 years, and if I didn’t think there was a future for dames, I wouldn’t be doing it now.

When I started out in panto, the role of principal boy would be played by a girl, slapping her thighs and crying: ‘12 o’clock and still no sign of Dick!’ But those days have gone, and I can see why. Pantomime producers nowadays choose to have a male in that role as a hero for the boys in the audience, and that is perfectly understandable. If they do start giving my dame role to women, however, we are done for. The joy of the dame is that it’s a large man – or just a man – dressing up as a woman, and that is what the audience loves. If the audience aren’t happy, that’s a problem for all of us.

Having said that, I’m certainly not done for yet! Funnily enough, I’m playing the Man in the Mirror this year, as we don’t have a Dame in our pantomime (Snow White at the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton), so I think that’s acceptable. As Gareth points out, ‘fellers in frocks’ are a fine British tradition, and I have high hopes for future generations of panto dames.

Christopher Biggins

Southampton

Game of Marbles

Sir: The diplomatic spat between the British and Greek Prime Ministers (‘Can Sunak keep his Marbles?’, 2 December) was clearly a low point for relations between the two countries, but is it really going to become a dividing line between the parties? As members of the advisory board for the Parthenon Project, which is seeking a ‘win-win’ on the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, Mr Sunak’s position is clearly regrettable. But the wider reaction has given us reason for optimism. Large swaths of the British media, including conservative outlets, have reflected what we discovered through our own polling: support for reunification cuts across political divides. Conservative voters, Brexiteers and those living outside London all support reunification through a partnership agreement. The reality is that this issue simply does not fit neatly into the culture-war box that some Conservative colleagues are seeking to put it in.

This year, our campaign put forward a proposal to set up a privately funded educational foundation for scholarships and cultural exchanges to share many priceless artefacts and deliver reunification in a way that benefits both sides. We also showed how reunification is deliverable under the current legal framework, as long as both sides are willing to move beyond the debate about ownership. We are more optimistic than ever that under the chairmanship of George Osborne, and with public opinion behind it, the British Museum will make history in 2024.

Lord Vaizey and Lord Dobbs

House of Lords, London SW1

Scout’s honesty

Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed Harry’s Mount’s article (‘Paper trail’, 2 December) in which he sifted through old letters, articles, postcards and cuttings from his time at Oxford University. I carried out a similar exercise about a year ago and was amused to find a curt message from my scout, which read: ‘You drink too much. Die soon.’ She was right on the first count, but wrong on the second. I’m still here, 50 years on.

Robert Beaumont

Minskip, North Yorkshire

Digging in Bulgaria

Sir: I felt a frisson of recognition as I read of Harry Mount’s nostalgia for hard-copy records. Only the day before I had been leafing through some 50-year-old letters I had managed to file, reporting on my experiences as an archaeology student taking part in the first team from the West to dig in communist Bulgaria. Memories came flooding back of 14-hour days in the field, but also of the creamiest yoghurt and tastiest tomatoes you’ll find anywhere. The name of one cave site we dug rang a bell: Bacho Kiro. I looked it up in a book I had helped to publish: yes, this, we now know, was where the oldest modern human remains in Europe, dating back 42,000 years, have been found. What would my 19-year-old self have made of that extraordinary fact as I toiled in the cave’s dank interior?

Colin Ridler

Oxford

A desire for faith

Sir: Mary Wakefield (‘Turning away the worshippers’, 9 December) reminds us that the church can’t serve two masters in its attempt to woo young people. How right she is. The churches with thriving youth ministries do not promote ‘raves in the nave’, silent discos or rock concerts. Instead, they teach the Bible as the word of God in age-appropriate settings and encourage personal faith in Jesus Christ. Many have teams of dedicated youth leaders to help these young people to navigate a world which is often hostile to their faith. Such ministries are profoundly countercultural, but they are growing and are producing young Christian women and men of impressive character and courage.

Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis who understood more than most the danger of dumbing down the Christian faith to young people. In Prince Caspian, the second of his Narnia chronicles, when Lucy greets Aslan she remarks that he is bigger than when she last saw him. Aslan tells her that is because Lucy is now older: ‘Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’ Great children’s and youth ministry enables young people to find Jesus bigger every year they grow towards adult discipleship.

Richard Coombs

Rector of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Delicious puffin

Sir: Sean Thomas is to be commended for trying everything and almost anything for dinner (‘Dog’s dinner’, 2 December), but I have to disagree with him about puffin (‘really quite bad’). Puffin breast, smoked and then briefly grilled over hot coals at my table in a restaurant in Reykjavik when en route to the USA was one of the most delicious dishes I have eaten. It was worth the subsequent opprobrium from my American hosts, who were appalled.

George Gordon

London SE11

It is cricket

Sir: As a lifetime cricket enthusiast whose interest sadly exceeded his playing record, I enjoyed Leo McKinstry’s review of David Horspool’s How Sport Helped Shape the British Character (Books, 2 December). Cricket has indeed played a considerable role in promoting Commonwealth relations. Yet I remain somewhat mystified by the game’s traditional status as a yardstick of honourable conduct, evidenced by such phrases as ‘It’s not cricket’. Was not the great Doctor W.G. Grace famed for his occasional gamesmanship? And in the 1932/33 ‘Bodyline’ Ashes series, a combination of Harold Larwood’s fierce bowling and Douglas Jardine’s unbending captaincy almost caused a rift in Anglo-Australian relations.

John Kidd

Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia

Hungarian rhapsody

Sir: Owen Matthews (Foreign life, 2 December) reminded me of my experience of Budapest in early 1991. We had front-row seats at the opera for $3, after which my leg was nearly torn off by the masseur at Gellert baths. As we recovered at the hotel bar, the Page 3 model Samantha Fox smiled down from a poster on the wall, suggesting that the locals were starting to embrace western culture. Zsolt, a local we befriended on our Interrail journey, tried three times to call his mother across town, the call dropping each time. Whereupon my American friend Kim announced she was going to call collect to her mom in San Francisco, which she did uninterrupted for 15 minutes. Zsolt looked on in wonder, and at the end of the call exclaimed: ‘What is zis AT&T?’

Jonathan Notley

London W3

Protestor non grata

Sir: In considering the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 (No sacred cows, 2 December), Toby Young misses the clause in Section 36 saying a Section 35 order may not be issued to a participant in a lawful public procession. The wishes of the organisers are neither here nor there: if they want to maintain a guest list they must use a private venue. I too was at the march against anti-Semitism and I understand why Tommy Robinson was persona non grata, but it should not have been a police matter.

Alan Norman

Impington, Cambridge

Students loaned

Sir: In Margaret Mitchell’s article ‘The American dream’ (2 December) she mentions that international students find it hard to remain in Britain after graduation because of the high earnings requirement the government has set. As an international student myself, I’d like to point out that the government has no obligation to let us stay here upon completing our degrees: there is a need to protect job opportunities for home students. A student visa should not be a route to settle in the UK – it is for the purpose of receiving an education.

Tim Lai

Exeter, Devon

Dog definition

Sir: I read Matthew Parris’s piece (‘Laws have the power to change facts’, 2 December) with interest. He would perhaps be interested to know that the Oxford Union has, at times, taken a similar approach.

‘Rule 51: Dogs

Any Member introducing or causing to be introduced a dog into the Society’s premises shall be liable to a fine of £5 inflicted by the Treasurer. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. Any animal entering on Police business shall be deemed to be a wombat.’

David Blagborough

Ex-returning officer, Somerville College

Bermondsey, London SE1

The Spectator

Featured articles

- ‘I am working night and day’: Rishi Sunak on Jilly Cooper, immigration – and his plan for the next election

- I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

- 48 ways the Tories could win

- My advice for King Charles, my ‘twin’

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‘I am working night and day’: Rishi Sunak on Jilly Cooper, immigration – and his plan for the next election

Katy Balls   1:20PM, 14 Dec, 2023

This Christmas, Rishi Sunak will be reading Tackle!, Jilly Cooper’s new bonkbuster. Cooper sent the Prime Minister a signed copy after she discovered – through The Spectator – that he is a fan. Tackle! is about an equestrian-turned-football manager who inspires a ragtag team to unexpected victory. ‘If you want to score, you’ve got to be a player,’ declares the cover. ‘It is literally on my bedside table,’ says Sunak when we meet in his office in 10 Downing Street.

‘This is the first year in a long time that I have actually read some fiction,’ he says. ‘I read these lovely books, which is good escapism for me.’ One is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (about gaming geeks) and the other is Lessons in Chemistry (about a female chemist fighting misogyny in the 1950s).

‘I can sit here and say: “Do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress”’

Perhaps it is not surprising that he is turning to escapism. The Tories end this year in a miserable position. The party has failed to dent Labour’s 20-point lead, Sunak’s personal ratings have slumped, and his backbenchers are in a rebellious mood.

A little over a year since he became Prime Minister, and with an opinion poll deficit that no party leader has ever recovered from, is Sunak enjoying the job? ‘Yes!’ he replies enthusiastically, without pausing for breath. ‘Of course, it’s hard. I knew it was going to be. I did it because I care about service, I care about this country and I thought I could make a difference. I believe that every single day. I come down here every day and I am really lucky; I get to work with an incredible group of people. I feel that I’m making progress so I can sit here and say: “Do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress.” And that is fulfilling.’

What progress? ‘I have always said I’m a Thatcherite in the truest sense. As Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher said: cut inflation, cut taxes. That’s what we’ve done! We have delivered more tax cuts in one fiscal event than at any point since the 1980s.’ This will be his narrative for next year’s election: he took difficult decisions, they worked, and so he has been able to cut taxes.

Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty in Hiroshima, Japan (Getty Images)

The slight problem with his argument is that taxes are not just rising but are higher than any post-war government has dared push them. Some of this is due to corporation tax rises, but the biggest tax hike was to freeze the thresholds, which will trap four million more low-paid workers in income tax, with three million more being taxed at the 40p rate. Can he really fight an election talking about his National Insurance cut without admitting that it doesn’t do nearly enough to offset these rises?

‘That’s a really glass-half-empty way to look at it,’ he responds. ‘You’ve got to differentiate. Look, why is the tax burden as high as it is? It’s because we had a once-in-a-century pandemic and we had a war in Ukraine, both of which necessitated an enormous response from the government.

‘I think it’s completely fine to have said the government should not have responded to help everyone with energy bills, the government should not have responded during Covid… If one person had consistently said that throughout, totally fine.

‘[But] nobody did, not a single person said that you shouldn’t have done all those things. I was very clear at the time, we should do those things but let’s be clear that that will have consequences and we will have to pay that money back and yes, like a Thatcherite and actually just a good Conservative, if you borrow money it does have to be paid back.

‘The choice at the next election is between me and Keir Starmer. A Labour party that wants to borrow £28 billion a year is not going to control welfare or public spending. A Conservative party is going to do those things – and cut your taxes instead.’

‘I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate’

The welfare point is one he’s keen on. As chancellor, he was struck that a third of all UK households were in receipt of some kind of benefit. It was a sign, he thought, of the extraordinary expansion of the welfare state. The situation became even worse after the Covid lockdowns, when Britain was the only major country in Europe not to recover its pre-pandemic workforce. What does he think went wrong? How could 18 per cent of Manchester and 20 per cent of Liverpool and Glasgow be on out-of-work benefits in the middle of a worker-shortage crisis?

‘Because the welfare system is not working as it should,’ he says. ‘Over the last decade we haven’t reformed those rules [to qualify for welfare]. Three times as many people today are being told that they don’t have to work because of ill-health than were a decade ago. I don’t believe our country has got three times sicker.’

Plans to tighten the welfare criteria are, however, not due to be implemented until April 2025. If the problem is urgent, why are the fixes so slow in coming?

‘Again, I think that’s a glass-half-empty way to look at it, because no one was doing any reform in this area until I started it as chancellor,’ he says. Some changes ‘take time because they are very large system changes – you are dealing with a very complex system… Our priority, going forward, is to control spending and welfare so that we can cut taxes. We are in a position to be able to do all that because we have got inflation down. The economy has turned a corner and that means that there can be a gear shift in how we approach taxes.’

The trebling of net migration after Brexit has led to another gear shift in government policy. From April next year, visas will be granted only to those in the highest-paid third of earners (£38,700). Foreigners who come to the UK initially to study and hope subsequently to make their way up the salary scale will face deportation. Sunak says the government ‘will work through the transition of the people who are already here’ in a ‘fair and sensible way’, but he won’t apologise for the policy.

‘In all these areas there will be hard cases, but if you want to bring the levels of legal migration down, you have to be prepared to make some difficult decisions.’ Nevertheless, his former ally Robert Jenrick quit as Sunak’s immigration minister this month accusing him of making the wrong decision when it came to how to stop the boats. He said he believed that the government’s new illegal immigration bill did not provide the ‘best possible chance for success’. Sunak doesn’t want to go into the timeline of events that saw his former friend leave office: ‘You won’t expect me to get into all of that,’ he says, before adding: ‘We’re always sad to lose people from government.’

Rishi Sunak during a press conference at Downing Street, 7 March 2023 (Getty Images)

Yet he still talks as though his plan to ‘stop the boats’ is working. ‘If someone had said to me, “You are going to have reduced the number of small boat arrivals into this country by a third”, after they had quadrupled in the last few years… I think someone would have said, “What are you smoking?”’ (Though of course no one will be smoking anything at all if Sunak’s generational ban goes ahead.) He may regard 30,000 small-boat crossings, down from last year’s 45,000, as a success, but his pledge in January was to end illegal arrivals entirely. In retrospect, were the words ‘stop the boats’ a mistake?

‘No, I think it’s a straightforward phrase,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows what I wanted to do. I do ultimately want to stop the boats, because there isn’t an acceptable amount of illegal migration.’ If Sunak can get his Rwanda Bill through the Commons and Lords, how soon will flights take off? He won’t be drawn. ‘I’m keen to crack on with it,’ he says. Sunak has consistently refused to rule out withdrawing from the ECHR if his bill fails. But he does say that Rwanda won’t accept deportees who have no legal recourse to Strasbourg. The arguments over the Rwanda scheme are causing deep divisions within his party, and he is trying to pre-empt rebellion. ‘What the country wants is a practical government that is making a difference to their lives and changing things for the better, not a debating society,’ he says. ‘People are frustrated that the pace of change is not fast enough. I get that. I am working night and day, tirelessly, to keep making a difference.’ The demands of the job, he says, means he has cut his daily workouts ‘down to once a week’.

Sunak is keen on spin classes. When he took his summer holiday to the US, he used it as an opportunity to take many exercise classes, including a Taylor Swift-themed SoulCycle ride. (He is a self-confessed ‘Swiftie’, his favourite of her albums is ‘probably 1989’ and says he had a ‘very enjoyable time’ at her Eras concert during the trip.) One fellow rider posted a video on TikTok saying she had seen the PM’s security at the class and mistakenly thought the pop star herself was about to attend. ‘I would be quite dis-appointed as well,’ Sunak laughs.

The PM’s critics say that while he may be hard-working, he is uninspiring. He has been accused of being ‘tetchy’ – most recently during his diplomatic spat with the Greek Prime Minister over the Elgin Marbles. What does he think of the allegation? ‘I don’t understand that,’ he replies. He points to his leadership campaign. ‘That wasn’t an easy time for me, I was taking a lot of criticism and flak. But I just fought hard for what I believed in – every day, seven days a week for six weeks. I’m the same person now, I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate. When things are not working the way I want them to work, of course I’m going to be frustrated.’

A new surprise ally in government is David Cameron, now Lord Cameron. Even before he was made Foreign Secretary, Sunak consulted him over Gaza. ‘It was clear to me that the international picture is complicated and challenging. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier any time soon,’ he says. ‘At the same time, there was someone in public life who had almost unrivalled experience and relationships. He wanted to come and help me win an election.’ This is the first hint that Sunak sees Cameron as an asset on the election trail.

The assumption behind that thinking is that it will be Sunak who will lead his party into that election. David Frost, a former cabinet member, has suggested the Tories could need yet another change of leader before the campaign starts. What is Sunak’s message to any Tory MPs spending the Christmas break thinking of mutiny?

‘We are going into an election year. We have got to make this about the choice between me and Keir Starmer, about the Con-servatives and the Labour party. There is a very clear choice that we can present to the country when we are united.’

Katy Balls

Katy Balls is The Spectator’s political editor.

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

Grayson Perry   1:10PM, 14 Dec, 2023

I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in a Labour voter’s body. I also talk about the dangers of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, then I ask the audience if they would support proportional representation. Everywhere I go people are overwhelmingly in favour.

Another game I play with my audiences is to ask them to respond instantly and intuitively as to whether certain things are Tory or Labour. Hanging baskets and David Beckham, always firmly Tory, cargo bikes and further education always rock-solid Labour. One question I’m tempted to ask is: ‘Culture – Tory or Labour?’ I quite often find myself in the company of museum directors. I like to tease them by asking: ‘When is your next Tory exhibition?’ (I once made Oliver Dowden, who was then culture secretary, choke on his asparagus by putting this question to Maria Balshaw, director of Tate.) A slightly embarrassed laugh often follows. For they know as well as I do that they frequently host shows that could be interpreted as left-wing but rarely if ever stage exhibitions that are intentionally right of centre. I offer to correct this imbalance by installing a large Tracey Emin-style neon sign on the front of the museum saying: ‘Who the hell do you think pays for all this?’

An important part of my art is printmaking. Every so often I have to go to the printmaker’s studio to sign a batch of fresh etchings or woodblocks. On my most recent visit I signed a small special edition which I am donating in support of the Labour party. The edition is of a piece called ‘Vote for Me’ in multiple shades of red. It’s a self-portrait of me dressed up as Margaret Thatcher. Next to me on the table is a pile of books mainly on the subject of England and Englishness. The top one, though, is a volume I bought as a very young nascent transvestite entitled How to Be a Woman Though Male. It was written in the 1960s as a how-to book for the gender non-conforming. I found it completely useless.

After my gig at the delightful Tyne Theatre & Opera House in Newcastle there was the usual patient gaggle of fans waiting for signatures and selfies. A woman came up to me and thrust a printout of a close-up photo of one of my works in my face. It was from a large etching called ‘The American Dream’ about the culture war in the US. It was of a detail smaller than a credit card from a print the size of a dining table. It showed a jet fighter with the letters GBTQI+A written on it. I recall viewing a proof of this work at the printers and noticing the error. ‘Why have you left off the L?’ the woman spat. ‘It was a mistake,’ I replied. ‘No it wasn’t,’ she corrected me. I tried to explain that my daughter is gay so I was hardly going to leave out the lesbians deliberately, but she stormed off, still sure in her indignation. It made me wonder: ‘Has she just sat through my show and absorbed nothing?’

I’m not sure whether to feel honoured or miffed that my wife and I are included on Nicky Haslam’s 2023 list of common things, alongside ‘grieving’ and ‘the Northern Lights’. I think I’ll take it as a compliment, as whenever I’ve met him he’s been a delight and we have bonded over a shared interest in rubber fetishism.

Like Nicky, I still enjoy a posh do such as the trustees dinner at the British Museum. I’m a recently retired trustee and our current chair, George Osborne, came over to chat. It being two days after the announcement that his old mucker David Cameron was to be ennobled and become foreign secretary, he confirmed he was a bit bored of that topic. I can’t recall what else we talked about as I was at least three glasses in at that point. I have over the years chatted at parties to many of the architects of our current political situation – Farage, Gove, Johnson, Cummings, Cameron, Hancock – but don’t expect any revelatory nuggets of gossip. I can never remember.

Grayson Perry’s A Show All About You is on tour now.

Grayson Perry

48 ways the Tories could win

Quentin Letts   12:48PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Photo-illustration: Lukas Degutis (iStock/Getty)

Conservative strategists gawp at their end-of-year opinion-poll ratings like European space officials watching another Ariane rocket plop into the ocean off French Guiana. Fret not! To misquote Emperor Hirohito, electoral fortunes may have developed not necessarily to their advantage, but extinction could yet be averted by adopting the following measures:

- Be more cheerful and stop Rishi doing his ‘your cat just died’ voice.

- Scrap the government car service and tell ministers to take National Express coaches or hitchhike. Give National Express coach drivers a small pourboire as compensation for having to accept these difficult new passengers.

- Short, sharp Bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords. Bishops to be given the heave-ho, too. Tell them to concentrate on their empty churches.

- If Justin Welby retires, replace him with the Revd Marcus Walker, Rector of Great St Bart’s, possibly the last rightie in the Church of England.

- No more knighthoods for mandarins.

- But a damehood to Nadine Dorries. For services to fiction. She won’t get the joke.

- Abandon this new custom of the Prime Minister’s New Year message. Nobody listens to them. Instead say ‘you hear enough from politicians the rest of the year, so we’re leaving you in peace for once’. Immediate poll bounce.

- Grade II* listing for Dame Margaret Beckett.

- Met Office to stop naming every storm that sweeps in from the Atlantic or North Sea. This has only added to media hysteria about the weather. Met instead to give numbers to these storms. This can be done in the name of Rishi’s boring numeracy drive.

- Sponsored swearing match between James Cleverly and the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan. A soap firm to sponsor it. Proceeds to HM Treasury.

- Ask Penny ‘Brunhilde’ Mordaunt, in one of her bracing speeches, to attack the VAR system that’s ruining football and rugby.

- Turn Parliament Square into a cricket pitch for evening fixtures in summer months.

- Invite the new President of Argentina, Benny Hill-lookalike Señor Milei, to London for a state visit. He looks a blast. Might chase Lady Hussey round the Buckingham Palace gardens.

- Next time Just Stop Oil protestors climb an M25 gantry, leave them there for days.

- Drop any talk of banning protest marches/dog breeds/vaping/unhealthy foods etc. Bans are for socialists and Reform party poujadists. Tories should live and let live.

- When replacing police cars, let them be Sunderland-built Nissan Micras, not top-range BMWs.

- Repeal the ridiculous ban on household coal.

- Release schools from the requirement to give sex education classes. Instead teach pupils cooking/manners/whistling/all three verses of the national anthem.

- Any future training weekends for the judiciary to be held in Rwanda.

- Andrew Mitchell to have a haircut.

- In a commendable surrender of patronage, the next BBC chairman to be chosen not by Downing Street but by an X-Factor-style TV show.

- Instead of former RAF bases in Lincolnshire, send asylum-seekers to Canary Wharf, which has lots of empty space. Horrible place, yes. But isn’t that the point?

- Sell the office space abandoned by WFH civil servants.

- Turn the Woolsack into a Whoopee Cushion, so that it makes a sound every time that goose the Lord Speaker sits down.

- Decent tailor to measure the PM for some spacious Oxford bags rather than those budgie-crunchers.

- Arrange dinner date between Michael Gove and Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. A little bilateral come sta tuo padre? might cheer them both up and boost Anglo-Italian trade.

- Theresa May to become minister for fun.

- In an intriguing test case for equalities law, offer Harriet Harman a baronetcy.

- Rename the London Underground’s Circle line the Whitehall line – it just goes round and round, incredibly slowly.

- Cut taxes with one exception: a new levy on supermarket self-checkouts.

- Tell British Transport Police every time they play ‘See It, Say it, Sorted’ on Tannoys, £1,000 will be removed from their budget.

- Legalise heckling in the Supreme Court.

- Organise point-to-points in London’s Hyde Park, complete with bookies and a beer tent.

- Abandon focus groups. Strategy advisers instead to sit in barber shops and nail bars, listening to punters.

- When civil servants offer statistics in kilometres, instruct them to use miles.

- An hour’s free parking daily in market towns and at hospitals.

- Place solar panels all over the National Theatre building.

- Replace Whitehall lawn-mowers with goats.

- Seek refund from Lord Foster for his wonky Millennium Bridge.

- Enough Honorary Colonel nonsense. Princess Anne to be made an Honorary Sergeant-Major and encouraged to grow a moustache.

- No more ‘tsars’.

- Job swap for Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, and Nigel Phillips, governor of St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha.

- Plough up parkland at Chequers, Chevening and Dorneywood for use as public allotments.

- Send the Elgin Marbles to the Turks.

- Encourage every Whitehall department to adopt a cat.

- Departing MPs and ministers no longer to receive payoffs.

- Abandon resignation honours.

- Pass a statutory instrument saying the next Poet Laureate must be able to do rhymes.

Quentin Letts

Quentin Letts is the sketch writer for the Daily Mail.

My advice for King Charles, my ‘twin’

Paul Dacre   12:37PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Truly, Harry, who is engaged in a preposterous legal contretemps with the Mail, is his mother’s son. While the Prince is filling his boots by turning his self-pity into an industry, his mother, I would argue, invented the art of victimhood – that insidious, debilitating, very modern malaise. The irony is that, unlike Harry, whose hatred for the Mail is almost as great as that for his father and brother, Diana was rather fond of us. She assiduously read the paper and so did her friends. In the vicious post-separation propaganda wars between Charles and her (‘She’s nuts, you know, old boy’), the Mail, whose target audience has always been up-market women, unashamedly took Diana’s side. Frequently I was invited to Kensington Palace where a moist-eyed Princess would emote about the unfairness of life, the beastly Palace and the ghastly rumours being spread about her by Charles’s friends (‘Do I sound mad to you, Paul?’), before reverting to one of her favourite themes – that her husband would never become king and that the throne would jump a generation to William.

Fast-forward to that terrible day in Paris. Dame Ann Leslie, the Mail’s brilliant and combative foreign correspondent, who died this year, went on the airwaves. ‘Yes, it was a tragedy but Diana’ – and I paraphrase her loosely – ‘was a vindictive, self-pitying minx who had wreaked huge damage on the monarchy.’ For the only time in my 28 years as editor, the office switchboard crashed under the weight of enraged callers. But Ann had a point. Diana may not have been over-furnished in the attic, but she had a near genius for manipulating the media by creating unforgettable haunting images of herself as a lone victim. Whether dancing sans husband with Wayne Sleep, sitting alone, wounded doe eyes, by the Taj Mahal, giving succour to Aids victims, walking solitarily through minefields, or utterly isolated on the end of that diving board on Dodi’s boat, she was a picture editor’s dream. In this bitter War of the Poses, Charles’s camp never stood a chance.

Harry’s B-lister wife is, as an actress, not in the same league as the beatific Diana

After her death the endless tsunami of flowers, messages and mourners flooding Hyde Park – most of whom were women, many, I’ve no doubt, who felt badly treated by men – sanctified Diana, Princess of Victim-hood. It also marked a milestone in the soft-ening or, arguably, weakening of a British psyche that for aeons had disdained the showing of emotion and admired pull-up-your-socks-and-get-on-with-it fortitude and self-reliance. And, of course, such values are antipathetic to the blame-everyone-else self-pity of the ‘me, me, me’ Harry and his B-lister wife who, let me tell you, as an actress, is not in the same league as the beatific Diana.

Will it be Petroc Trelawny on Radio 3 or Times Radio? After decades as a loyal listener, I can take no more of Today. It’s not just Mishal Husain’s cold, sanctimonious superiority or the faux matiness of a gabbling Amol Rajan (surely a shoo-in as the next D.G.). Nor is it the teeth-grating arrogance of Nick Robinson who is, depressingly, brighter than most of the ministers he interviews. Nor is it the knee-jerk journalistic ideas (which would die of embarrassment if they were presented to a Mail conference). No, it’s because the programme has such weak news values that it’s been captured by a shroud-waving, existential-crisis-promoting, victimhood-pleading cacophony of charities/lobby groups/thinktanks/quangos/commissioners and tsars. Collectively they are becoming one of Britain’s fastest-growing job-creation schemes, expanding exponentially by predicting the end of civilisation if the government doesn’t hurl ever more moolah at their individual special pleadings. Never are they asked by the Daily Dirge interviewer: ‘But where, in the name of sanity, is the money going to come from?’

Thus a welfare-ist, statist, money-grows-on-trees, subsidised BBC infantilises the public into believing that government not only can but must solve all our problems. It took Mrs Thatcher the will of the gods to persuade the British that they couldn’t spend what they didn’t earn and, anyway, it’s your money government spends not theirs (and, by the way, you’ll spend it far more wisely than they will). It has taken 13 years of Tory rule to eradicate these values, bankrupt Britain and turn self-reliance into a dirty word. We are all victims now.

The occasion: the funeral this year of the great columnist Paul Johnson, who, with the Mail, helped shape the Thatcher revolution. Present is my old Islington neighbour Tony Blair, recipient of Paul’s counsel in the early New Labour years before they inevitably fell out – and architect, without electoral consent, of the mass immigration that has so transformed Britain. Over the many years I commissioned Paul, he was gloriously judgmental in our non-judgmental age, his irascibility matched only by his appreciation of Lord Rothermere’s multitudinous sovereigns. One essay he wrote in the 1990s, however, was searingly prescient. In it, he predicted that the biggest threat to social cohesion in the ensuing decades would be the mass migration of millions from impoverished nations seeking a better life in the affluent countries of northern Europe. For years, the Mail was almost a lone voice in writing about and debating this theme. We exposed the misery of human trafficking and the armies of greedy lawyers gaming the immigration system by exploiting the Human Rights Act. We were banned by the then press regulator from using the phrase ‘bogus asylum seekers’, even though a blind man could see many of those decanting from lorries and boats were economic migrants.

‘He’s right, kids, there’s nothing here that bans short selling.’

The paper’s editorials argued that our concerns had nothing to do with race (many of the migrants were white) but everything to do with the fact that Britain’s schools, hospitals and housing stock couldn’t cope with such huge numbers, many of whom were being housed in the UK’s poorer regions. The resulting strains on social and cultural cohesion could, we suggested, precipitate the rise of ugly political extremism on both the left and the right. By giving voice to the anxieties of millions of our readers under-going the biggest demographic change in their nation’s history – something they were never consulted on – the Mail earned the opprobrium of the liberal consensus, living in their chi-chi neighbourhoods, who really run Britain – particularly the BBC, which even today describes critics of immigration as ‘far right’.

I have a suggestion to make. In future, the Corporation should refer to the following bodies as ‘far left’: boards of British companies that make more profit by ruthlessly employing cheap labour than by improving the productivity of their businesses; fifth columnists in the Home Office who have done all they can to sabotage attempts to control immigration; NHS bosses who plunder Third World countries’ vital medical staff rather than reform their own moribund institution; commissars of political correctness who dictate what people can and can’t say; high priests of multiculturalism who have cowed the indigenous population into accommodating the beliefs of incomers who, in turn, are allowed to strengthen theirs; right-on police chiefs who prefer bending the knee to arresting shoplifters; civil servants operating an insane welfare system that allows millions of Britons to remain economically inactive; and, of course, the BBC itself, which for years disgracefully censored any debate on one of the most important issues of our time.

Well, they’re all talking about it now. Riots in Dublin. The ascendancy of political extremists in Holland and, potentially, France and Germany. Populations the size of Birmingham arriving in the UK every year. For the record, throughout, the Mail has always praised the virtues of these new arrivals. Their belief in strong families, hard work and aspiration is our belief. Because of these qualities, their children, we argued, would doubtless become the high-flyers of tomorrow. And so how exquisite that it’s the Patels, the Bravermans and the Sunaks who are leading a debate that has been so shamefully shirked by our own bien-pensant class.

Born on exactly the same day as Charles, I have referred before to the fact that, at the Palace, I am known as The Twin. So I hope the King will not consider it lèse-majesté if I offer my alter ego the following altruistic advice: ‘Sir, the one mistake your saintly mother made was to allow the monarchy, whose verities should be timeless, to become a celebrity institution akin to showbusiness with its ephemeral, vulgar values. This has reached its inevitable nightmare apotheosis in the monstrous self-indulgences of Princes Harry and Andrew. Cauterise them, Sir. You and William need to return the crown to institutional obscurity. It’s the media that will suffer. The Great Royal Soap Opera of the past 30 years has sold billions of papers, particularly for the Mail. The less people know about you, the more your mystique will increase. Dare to be boring. You, your family and the British constitution will be the happier for it.’

For years, as divorce and single motherhood figures soared, the Mail, under my editorship, campaigned passionately for the preservation of the family (the best welfare system ever devised) and marriage (which we argued should enjoy tax relief). Research showed that children brought up by married couples outperformed and were happier than those brought up by single mothers (many of whom, we conceded, struggled heroically in adverse circumstances). Inevitably, this was derided by the chattering classes who seemed to glory in the demise of the nuclear family. With one in five British adults on anti-depressants, mental illness among the young soaring and Britain leading Europe in drug and alcohol abuse, am I being absurdly antediluvian to ask whether these issues are linked to family breakdown? And – again, wash my mouth with Dettol! – rather than shipping in countless foreigners to prop up our collapsing care system, might it not make more sense to encourage British families to look after their own old and infirm? Just a Christmas thought.

A quiet Saturday evening at home many moons ago. The phone rings. My wife, who even today (half) jokes about Diana and me, calls out icily: ‘There’s a woman who claims to be a princess on the phone.’ I pick up the receiver. ‘You tell that Miss Lee-Potter of yours,’ a familiar voice coldly enunciates, ‘that I bet she’s got cellulite.’ The line goes dead. That week, the Mail’s star columnist, Lynda Lee-Potter, had somewhat ungenerously highlighted incipient, disobliging wrinkles on the royal thighs of a swim-suited Diana. Oh, the travails of being an editor!

Paul Dacre

‘The culture of complaint disgusts me’: Werner Herzog on walking without a backpack and the kindness of strangers

Mary Wakefield   12:30PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Credit: Alamy

When the American director Errol Morris saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana for the first time, he was heard to mutter: ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like this.’

I didn’t know anyone was allowed to live like this. Herzog’s new memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is astonishing and – whether you know his films or not – potentially life-changing, at least for me.

I made a list as I went along of all the situations in which Herzog has nearly died: in a crevasse on K2; under the hooves of a bull in Guanajuato, Mexico; in a giant wave in Peru; shortly after his own birth, when an Allied bomb hit his home in Munich. After the explosion, his mother picked tiny Werner from the pile of rubble and broken glass in his cradle and found him miraculously unscathed. (He started as he meant to go on.)

While we try to escape reality, Herzog stares into every terrible corner: ‘I’m not afraid of the abyss’

It’s morning in LA when Herzog appears on screen for our conversation. ‘I think I have lived at least five lives,’ he says, looking pleased. ‘The book could have been a thousand pages long easily but I didn’t want to overdo it.’ A door opens and then closes behind him, illuminating his white hair for a moment in the gentle West Coast sun. I think I spot his third wife, Lena.

At 81, Herzog is a myth as well as a man. François Truffaut called him the most important director alive. Even if you haven’t seen any of his 70-odd films, you’ll know of them (Grizzly Man, Nosferatu, Cave of Forgotten Dreams); you’ll recognise his distinctive Bavarian voice and perhaps the crazy fact that in the making of Fitzcarraldo, he hauled a real 320-tonne steamship over a steep hill in the Peruvian jungle.

But what’s knocked me for six is the way Herzog faces the world. While the rest of us twist and turn to escape reality, burying our heads in our phones, Herzog stares into every terrible corner: ‘I’m not afraid of the abyss.’

His vocation seems to have come to him at the age of 16. Here’s a quote from the book to give you a sense of the man. He was on a skiff late at night in Crete, he writes, catching cuttlefish.

And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me… I was completely convinced I would never see my 18th birthday because, lit up by such grace as I now was, there could never be anything like ordinary time for me again.

‘What exactly was this fate that was revealed to you?’ I ask, aware that I probably shouldn’t.

‘It’s not easy to recall it precisely,’ says Herzog, ‘but it has carried me very far, probably some sort of knowledge that I was a poet and that I would probably have a difficult life which I had to shoulder and it cannot be described easily.’

‘Is it a feeling that you are going to have to suffer pain?’

‘No, it’s not pain, it’s just a difficult life. I think if I tried to explain I would just simply talk it apart into smithereens. It is good as it’s described, you should leave it as this here.’

Herzog converted to Catholicism as a teenager and, though he doesn’t now believe in God, the man who emerges from his book seems almost Biblical. He walks and talks with the world the way Abraham and Job walked and talked with God – sometimes railing against injustice, never defeated.

There’s a striking moment in Burden of Dreams, the film about the making of Fitzcarraldo, when Herzog, who has been filming upriver, deep in the jungle for years, turns to the camera: ‘There is no harmony in the universe,’ he says. ‘There is no order. The only harmony here is the harmony of collective murder. When I say this, I don’t mean I hate the jungle. I love it against my better judgment.’

Werner Herzog during the making of Fitzcarraldo, 1982 (Jean-Louis Atlan/Getty Images)

Like an Old Testament prophet, Herzog often sets off on foot and just wanders the world. He doesn’t have a phone: ‘Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading.’ He just picks up a satchel, one given to him by the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, and walks, sometimes for hundreds of miles.

He says to me: ‘I think I have this in common with Bruce Chatwin, for whom it was one of the central ideas of his existence, that the end of travelling on foot was basically the abandoning of the nomadic life and that all the woes of the human race emerged from that transition into a sedentary life.’

‘But people still travel,’ I say.

Herzog raises his eyebrows: ‘You have backpackers but that is different, they carry their whole household, their tent, their sleeping bag, their cooking utensils, their food, everything – but travelling on foot the way Bruce Chatwin would do, I would do, is something different.’

‘Why travel without a backpack? What’s the sense?’ I feel defensive on behalf of the involuntarily desk-bound.

‘Well, the strange thing is the world starts to trust in you. Because when you are thirsty, it’s a hot summer day and you run out of water and your canteen is empty by some time in the afternoon and there is no creek or anything around, you have to knock at the door of an isolated farmhouse and the startled wife of the farmer opens the door and you ask her, “Can you fill my canteen with water, I am very thirsty?” Of course if you are polite you will stay outside the door and you bow and you have the right tone. Then comes the question, “Where do you come from?” I would say I come from Munich. “But that is 1,200km away, how did you get here?” And I said, on foot. From then on, there is an ancient reflex of hospitality and it is still enough in a way.’

‘So the walking is important both for you and for the people who give you shelter?’ I say. ‘If no one knocks on the door, people never get a chance to be hospitable?’

‘Exactly – it’s dormant, hospitality is some-thing very ancient that is dormant and I have seen it without exception, without any exception.’

It’s when he’s out walking that Herzog often comes upon the scenes that later inspire his films. As a young man, he walked the length of Crete through the mountains of the interior, and came across a wide valley full of thousands of windmills, which in the end became the central image for his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968).

‘At the time it was alarming, because what I saw was a valley of 10,000 windmills speaking. It is something that cannot be, unthinkable, it’s unheard of, so there is something not right with me and until I realised, yes, everything was right with me, only the field with 10,000 windmills had gone berserk.’

‘What does it feel like to be struck like that by something?’

‘It becomes part of your soul. It’s not a vision, it’s not just a thing that you store in the memory of your cellphone by taking a picture, it is something much deeper. I think that is what poetry is all about, something that becomes part of us in it and I return it back in a different form.’

‘So art is a sort of alchemy? You take in reality and transform it?’

Herzog shakes his head: ‘We shouldn’t speak too much about art and artists and all that because I have no real sense of art and artists. It’s strange for me that you think I’m an artist.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘I think I’m a soldier.’

Werner Herzog in Into the Inferno, 2016 (Professor Clive Oppenheimer/Netflix)

After she picked Werner from the debris of that Munich bomb, his mother fled with her two boys to the countryside. She had connections in the Sachrang Valley in remote Bavaria, so that’s where they went, and that’s where Werner and Tilman grew up, freezing, often half-starved but completely free.

How would his brother describe him? ‘Taciturn, withdrawn, thinking, brooding on simple mathematic patterns – why was 11 by 17 the same as 17 by 11? I do believe I could have become a mathematician but it’s hard to say.’

‘Hospitality is something very ancient that is dormant and I have seen it without exception’

It’s clear that from a young age, Herzog was also possessed of unusual will power. He describes a time in which he and Tilman were clutching at their mother’s skirts, whimpering with hunger, and ‘with a sudden jolt, she freed herself, spun round, and she had a face full of anger and despair I have never seen before of since. She said perfectly calmly: “Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can’t, all right?” At that moment we learnt not to wail. The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me.’

‘How old were you then?’ I ask.

‘I must have been five maybe.’

Even though he was so young, he resolved not to complain? ‘You understand. In such big moments you understand very, very clearly. When you look around, the education of children is infantilised. Children at age five know much, much better and much quicker than anybody today might think.’

There was another moment in the Sach-rang Valley when young Werner exercised his will. In a fight with his brother Tilman, he felt a murderous rage and drew a knife. He cut him, hurting him quite badly, and then, horrified by his own actions, decided never again to let his anger escape. He writes: ‘Instantly, I understood that I would have to change my ways immediately and profoundly.’

I ask about it now, interested in how much of Herzog’s character is an act of will. But I’m surprised to see how much the memory disturbs him. He looks deeply sad, as if he hurt Tilman just a few days ago.

‘Yes, it is awful to speak about it… I describe it, but it still pains me when I think about it.’ I try to console him. ‘We’re all terribly flawed,’ I say. ‘At least you made an act of will to change.’

‘It’s a question of discipline, of control, and it’s as simple as that,’ says Herzog. ‘Do you find it strange that the world is full of people without willpower? No, it’s not will – it’s a clear decision and you stick to it.’

‘Do you feel humans are more good than bad, would you say?’ I ask. I can’t think of anyone who has seen more of the world or who is better placed to judge.

‘Oh no, don’t start with that!’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t, you shouldn’t even attempt it.’

Throughout our conversation Herzog’s eyes have stayed lowered. I’ve read that he rarely looks in the mirror, but I don’t ask why, for fear of sounding like a shrink. ‘I’d rather die than go to an analyst,’ he writes in his book. ‘I am quite convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the 20th century so terrible.’

Werner Herzog and Christian Bale during the filming of Rescue Dawn, 2006 (Metro Goldwyn/Alamy)

Herzog is sure of his significance. ‘I am aware that I possess an almost absurd self-confidence, but why should I doubt my abilities when I see all these films so clearly before my eyes?’ he told Paul Cronin, author of Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. He tells me: ‘The book will live longer than my films. You can see it in my prose, the way I write.’ Is he writing another book? ‘I have just finished my next book which is going to be published, it is called The Future of Truth. It has a beautiful title.’ It’s a terrifying title too, I say. Truth is becoming such a strange thing, isn’t it? ‘Yes, I’m dealing with it.’

But the idea that Werner Herzog is an egomaniac or a narcissist seems to me wildly off-beam. He’s too alive to the world, too sympathetic.

‘I was so impressed by your book that I’ve resolved to bring up my son differently,’ I say. ‘I’ve made some notes’ (and I have).

‘No, no, no, come on!’ For the first time, Herzog looks up. ‘Please bring up your son according to the historical environment, according to your possibilities, according to the culture in which he is growing up, so don’t try to imitate anything that I describe, no, no, no. Just bring him up as well as you can in your environment.’

‘But as you say, a real man needs to know how to do things like milk a cow.’

‘It’s much easier than that. Your son doesn’t need to know how to milk a cow. I’d allow him to dig a deep hole in the ground. Just let him dig a hole in the ground.’

Herzog’s friend the physicist Lawrence Krauss has said: ‘Ultimately, the Werner Herzog I have come to know is not the wild man of his press clippings. He is a caring, thoughtful, playful and essentially gentle human being… interested in all aspects of the human experience.’

When Werner was 13 he saw images of cave paintings for the first time, in a bookshop window. He says now: ‘I felt a deep shock of awe which in a way – and I am careful to use the word but I say it anyway – awakened my soul. I say this with a pair of pliers because it sounds pretentious but it’s not. It was such a deep shock of awe, and the sense of awe has never left me in anything that’s around me. I don’t know what it is exactly but it’s very deep, it’s one of the things that make me into what I am and it has never stopped.’

Then he says suddenly; ‘Is this part of The Spectator’s Christmas edition or what-ever? That’s what I was told. Yes, well, Merry Christmas to everyone!’

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.

Christmas as a Jehovah’s Witness

Rebekah Vardy   12:17PM, 14 Dec, 2023

When I was growing up, there was no Christmas – at least, not one that was recognised in our household. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were taught that it was a dressed-up pagan festival that had nothing to do with the Bible and should be avoided. At school, I’d even be hauled out of any Christmas assemblies and made to feel alienated from the other kids. When the big day came, my family just went out knocking on doors as usual, looking for souls to save. I’d skulk behind them, praying that none of my schoolfriends were on the other side of those doors. To Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christmas is ‘worldly’. That is to say: a bad thing.

I left all this behind as a teenager and my life is now, well, more ‘worldly’. I’m married to Jamie Vardy, captain of Leicester City FC, and am mother to five children. My eldest has just left for uni and my youngest just started daycare. I never expected to lead a life so heavily documented by the tabloids, or to be invited to compete on shows like Dancing on Ice. I certainly didn’t expect what became known as the ‘Wagatha Christie’ trial. If you care, you’ll know the details. If you don’t, I’ll spare you: thinking about it is a total waste of time and energy. All I’ll say is that I know the truth, as do many others. Anyway I’ve had more than my fair share of limelight over the years. Whether you want it or not, it gives you a platform. What matters, I suppose, is what you do with it.

This year, I made a television documentary exploring what I have come to see as the controlling and often-abusive culture of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Until I was 15, my whole life was based around its beliefs. It was drilled into me that if I didn’t follow the rules, I would die. Followers are told that a violent end of the world is imminent and that when it comes, non-believers will suffer an agonising death. The nature of that death is shown in children’s books with abhorrent, terrifying images about the world’s destruction. All this instilled fear in me from a young age. Fear also stops people from leaving, including the fear of losing your community. After my parents’ divorce, for example, my mum was ‘disfellowshipped’. We ended up being rejected not only by family members but by the congregation, people who had been friends for years. This is ‘shunning’, one of the most controversial practices. For years after, I struggled to conform with how society wanted me to be. I became a bit of a rebel, until I had children.

Being a mum to kids aged four, six, nine, 13 and 18 can be quite testing, to say the least. I didn’t want my unusual childhood experience to unduly influence me as a mum – which is why I wanted to tackle my past head on by making the documentary. Doing so was always going to be difficult for me and my family. That kind of abuse, including what I suffered at an early age, can make you feel like you are beyond repair and damaged for ever. But life, for me, is very different now. I think of myself as a survivor, not a victim. Of course, you can ask: should anyone care? Does it matter about how 70,000 or so Jehovah’s Witnesses organise their lives, and is it anyone else’s business? Freedom of religion is important – but I do wonder whether we should be doing more to protect children when it comes to cultlike religious institutions. This question needs more attention

than it is getting.

One of my great loves is horse-riding – which is apparently one of the most dangerous sports you can do. I found this out earlier this year when I was thrown off my horse and my foot was caught in the stirrup. I ended up being dragged around by my ankle, broke my heel and am still recovering. I’m writing this on the train to London to see the doctor for a check-up. But the injury hasn’t put me off. We have a stable at our home and I’m not giving up on it. As the saying goes, it’s time to get back in the saddle. Story of my life.

This time last year I went to a dinner with other former Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of us enjoying what was once forbidden to us. ‘Have a happy Christmas and a free Christmas,’ the host told us, ‘And do what you like. Because you are free.’ I met a man there who told me he has no fewer than six Christmas trees at home. Ex-JWs can go a bit over the top with the festivities, making up for all the years lost.

I go big on decorations, but not really on presents. The way I see it, the most precious gift is time spent with family. That’s what I’m most looking forward to. And that’s why you don’t have to be religious to say the words that even now make me feel a bit rebellious: Merry Christmas, one and all.

Rebekah Vardy

The New Theists

Ed West   12:10PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

One of Professor Richard Dawkins’s most influential ideas was the concept of the ‘meme’, which he coined in The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea or form of behaviour that spreads by imitation from person to person. Memes can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and the wider community. The most successful have some great psychological appeal.

Memes are a form of contagion, and with 21st-century technology, the power of that contagion has grown. Yet people are not merely passive recipients of ideas. Indeed, one aspect of human psychology clearly visible on social media is the willingness of people to meme themselves into belief. Being around a community who express the same beliefs, repeating mantras and declarations of faith, regarding non-believers as a threat in order to solidify group cohesion – yes, you can fake it until you make it.

The argument is not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity made the West successful

All this might provide some thought for church leaders as they contemplate the still-falling numbers of people who identify as Christian, and perhaps wonder: can Christianity meme itself back into relevance? Can people not blessed with faith talk themselves into it? Religion comes in degrees, often differentiated by identification, practice and belief. Many who identify as ‘Christian’ don’t practise, and many who practise don’t believe (including some clergymen). But putting your foot on the first step hugely increases the probability of reaching the second. It is the same with all beliefs.

Perhaps the most obvious example of memed belief is transgenderism, the very recent idea that people are born in the wrong body and can somehow change sex. Many men have memed themselves into believing they are women, in part because where once it would have been regarded as a fetish it is now seen as a sacred identity. The idea is strengthened by the mimetic support of a community and the threat of punishment to people who oppose it. Just last month in Brighton a talk held by the ‘Skeptics’ had to be cancelled because of objections by trans activists to one of the speakers, who was ‘sceptical’ of some of their claims.

The Skeptics were part of the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. If ever an idea was pushing at an open door, it was New Atheism, in which Professor Dawkins was a leading figure. Framed as opposition to religion in public affairs, it gathered much of its energy from fear of Islam following 9/11, although it was impolite to make that explicit.

In some senses, New Atheism was hugely successful. The United States, once seen as bucking the trend of western secularisation, has been rapidly losing its faith so far this century. Today Americans under 40 are the first generation to have a Christian minority. New Atheists got what they asked for, but as with so many revolutionaries of the past, they are despairing of the results.

The atomising effect of secularism has become extreme. While America’s poor filled their God-shaped hole with drugs and alcohol, its rich did so with politics. Rather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.

Yet this period has also coincided with a proliferation of social science studies pointing to the benefits of religion – both belief and practice – on child welfare, social capital, individual happiness and most of all the suppression of anxiety, the cause of that modern-day ‘mental health epidemic’.

As religious belief plummeted in the West, so a new intellectual movement sprang up in the 2010s. Like New Atheism, it largely involved unbelievers, and argued for the same western liberal tradition. Their argument is not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful. It is not a revolutionary idea – as far back as the 18th century sceptical philosophers accepted that humans were by nature religious – but the New Theists, as you might call them, have social sciences to back them up.

One of the earliest proponents was, like the leading New Atheist Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist. In his 2011 book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argued that religion has a powerful role in promoting social cohesion. Following the line of David Hume, Haidt argued that humans are essentially irrational, and the increasingly shrill political ideology of his countrymen on both left and right comes from the same part of the brain as religion. Contrary to Christopher Hitchens’s catchy line that ‘religion poisons everything’, the demonstrable reality is that it is the glue that binds a species of ape together – what Ibn Khaldun referred to as ‘fictive kinship’.

Perhaps the most influential of the New Theists is the historian Tom Holland, whose hugely influential book Dominion drew on a tradition going back to 19th-century French historians by arguing that liberalism and individualism were not 18th-century reactions to Christianity but its products.

The New Atheist icon Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited Holland in her recent declaration of the Christian faith, which sparked a great deal of controversy, not because she had adopted irrational beliefs, but because of the almost calculating reasons for which she said she was embracing religion. Arguing that western civilisation is under threat from Putinism, the rise of radical Islam and ‘the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation’, Hirsi Ali wrote that an atheistic West lacks the tools to fight: ‘The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’

A community of belief, in other words. Indeed, the very word religio is Latin for ‘to bind’. It’s why Christianity can never really be a private matter, and nor can its secular offshoots. All religions stem from community and depend on memetic support, and with enough of that support most people can probably meme themselves into it.

The issue is not whether the social benefits of Christianity are real, but whether these can be won without genuine belief, or whether it’s even right to fake it until you make it. If millions of people were to return to churchgoing, whatever they felt inside, there would almost certainly be enormous social benefits. At the very least, the act of being involved in the community and ingesting a message of forgiveness would act as social Valium. Would some people then go on to develop genuine religious belief? Probably.

But Christianity is not some meditation method or get-happy-quick guide. It is a deeply strange idea. Which makes its triumph over the West all the more unlikely – dare one say, miraculous.

Ed West

Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack

Students annoyed their elders in the 1930s, too

Niall Ferguson   12:06PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Credit: Dominic Bugatto

Astriking generation gap in the western world has been revealed by the responses to the 7 October atrocities in Israel. Noting in these pages the surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment among young people on both sides of the Atlantic, my old friend Douglas Murray worries that ‘When it comes to Palestine, the kids aren’t all right’.

Murray is correct to say that something has changed. He is also correct that it is mainly a phenomenon in the English-speaking world. In the UK and the US, young people are far less well-disposed towards Israel than a decade ago.

The Daily Express condemned ‘the woozy-minded communists and sexual indeterminates of Oxford’

According to opinion polls, 42 per cent of Britons aged 18 to 24 say they sympathise more with the Palestinians in the current conflict, compared with just 7 per cent who support Israel. For those aged 65 and over, the proportions are roughly reversed. YouGov data from ten years ago confirms that there has been a swing towards Palestine. In 2014, 25 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds sympathised more with Palestine and 10 per cent with Israel – not radically different percentages from the 65-plus age group.

The picture is similar in the US. ‘Do you sympathise more with Israelis or Palestinians?’ Quinnipiac asked its voter sample last month. Of those aged from 18 to 34, 52 per cent said the Palestinians, and 29 per cent the Israelis. In 2013, however, 55 per cent of millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) sympathised with Israel, and just 12 per cent with Palestine.

Over the past ten years, the issue has become deeply partisan, due in part to the spread of leftist ‘decolonisation’ narratives in higher education – surreptitiously displacing ‘never again’ narratives about the Holocaust – as well as to Donald Trump’s strong support for Israel during his first term in the White House. This divide in the Anglosphere is clearly a problem for Israel itself, which has relied heavily since its birth on US backing – and sympathy, if not large-scale support, from the rest of the English-speaking world.

But it could also prove to be a problem for the US and the UK too. As the Muslim shares of their populations rise, other issues of concern to these growing minorities are bound to arise. Will the younger generation of the indigenous inhabitants be so easily mobilised on those issues? In his 2015 novel Soumission, Michel Houellebecq satirically imagined the political class in France capitulating to the Islamists and obligingly adopting sharia law. Perhaps he chose the wrong country.

‘All I want for Christmas is UHU.’

And yet isn’t it always the case that the politics of the student-age population infuriates those whose university days are decades behind them? Douglas Murray is, gallingly, a lot younger than I am – 44 to my 59 – but it is still more than 20 years since he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, and closer to 40 years since I was. Let us Oxon-ian oldies therefore remind ourselves of another occasion when the kids did not seem to be all right.

Just over 90 years ago, on 9 February 1933, the Oxford Union debated and carried by 275 votes to 153 the motion ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. The result of the debate went viral, as we would now say. In the US, any resolution to take no part in war soon came to be known as the ‘Oxford pledge’.

Then, as now, the older alumni fumed. Just days after the debate, the Daily Tele-graph carried a ferocious letter signed ‘Sixty-Four’ under the headline ‘disloyalty at oxford: gesture towards the reds’. The news of the vote, thundered Sixty-Four, ‘must have been read with feelings of shame and disgust by thousands of Oxford men’. It was ‘an outrage upon the memory of those who gave their lives in the Great War’.

Sixty-Four turned out to be a Telegraph leader-writer, J.B. Firth. Then aged – yes – 64, Firth was just as you might imagine him. In 1908 he’d edited an anthology of Oxonian verse called The Minstrelsy of Isis. His magnum opus was a life of Constantine the Great.

The even crustier sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert, 78, wrote in similar terms to the Morning Post: ‘What is England coming to, when those who may in the future become her legislators behave themselves now like unruly children in a nursery and openly preach lèse-majesté, sedition and treason?’ The Evening Standard’s ‘A.A.B.’s column’ – written by A.A. Baumann, 77 – speculated that ‘half the majority [in the Union vote] would turn out to be foreigners and half “non-ascripts” [sic]’. Employing more familiar vocabulary, the Daily Express condemned ‘the woozy-minded communists, the practical jokers and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford’.

A future prime minister also took notice. Addressing the 25th anniversary meeting of the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union on 17 February 1933, Winston Churchill, aged 58, denounced the ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’ by ‘callow, ill-tutored youths’. The vice-chancellor of the university, Francis Lys, warned the Union president, Frank Hardie, that he had besmirched the good name of Oxford.

The indignation had an edge. Hitler had become chancellor of Germany just ten days before the debate was held. A year later, Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote to Hardie: ‘I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill-starred Resolution. It is still going on sowing dragons’ teeth. If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault. The bully believes we are “decadent”.’

On 26 September 1939 – three weeks after Britain had been obliged, as Zimmern foresaw, to declare war on Germany once again – even the liberal New York Times wondered ‘to what extent Hitler’s political policies had been influenced by a conception of the British temper based on episodes like the Oxford Pledge’. After the war, Churchill expressed similar sentiments – though the evidence that the debate greatly influenced the thinking of either Hitler or Mussolini was slender to say the least.

Since 7 October, there has been comparable outrage in the United States over pro-Hamas and/or anti-Israel statements by student groups like the 34 at Harvard who sought to hold Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the terrorists’ sadistic rampage. They don’t have a student debating society at Harvard, but if they did, any motion condemning Israel over its response to the 7 October attacks would be carried easily.

The response of alumni has unconsciously echoed the indignation of older Oxford men in 1933. The hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman demanded that the Harvard students who had defended Hamas be named so that he and others could be sure not to hire them. Other CEOs mirrored Ackman’s call. Ken Griffin, who earlier this year gave $300 million to Harvard, was one of a number of big donors who urged the university’s president, Claudine Gay, to issue a stronger statement condemning the terrorists than her initial bromide.

So what is the difference bet-ween 2023 and 1933? Part of the answer is that the Oxford Union debate – which appears in almost every school and university textbook on the subject of interwar pacifism and appeasement – was not what it appeared to be.

It is true that Oxford had moved to the left since the 1920s. The onset of the Depression, the fashionable appeal of socialism and communism, and the admission of more grammar-school boys had dispelled forever the indulgent atmosphere that Evelyn Waugh later nostalgically recalled in Brideshead Revisited. Hardie, the Union president, was a typical Oxonian of the 1930s. Educated at Westminster, he was also chairman of the Labour Club. Yet his most enduring contribution to our national life was a book on the political role of Queen Victoria.

The original idea for a pacifist motion came from the Union’s librarian, David Graham. But he was no leftist. Rather, he was a member of the Oxford Group, a Christian organisation founded by the American Lutheran Frank Buchman in 1921. Graham and Buchman even travelled to Germany that summer in the hope of promoting better relations with Hitler’s government. (The Fuhrer declined to meet them, a chance he presumably would not have left slip if the King and country debate had really mattered to him.) The true leftist among the Union officers in 1933 was in fact Michael Foot, the treasurer and future Labour leader. But it does not seem that Foot spoke in the debate.

It also proved far from easy to recruit supporters of the motion. Whereas Quintin Hogg, the son of the then secretary of state for war, Viscount Hailsham, rushed to accept an invitation to oppose it, Hardie was turned down four times by people he asked to support it, including Norman Angell and Bertrand Russell, before he alighted on C.E.M. Joad, then in his forties. A popular philosopher who later became a household name on the BBC’s Brains Trust, Joad was the chairman of the philosophy department at Birkbeck College.

As for the undergraduate speakers, David Graham seconded the motion, which was proposed by Kenelm Hubert Digby (who went on to be attorney general of Sarawak). On the other side was Keith Steel-Maitland, the son of the Tory MP and former party chairman Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland.

The opponents of fighting for King and country in 1933 by and large did their bit for both after 1939

Hogg confidently expected to win and took the result ‘very badly’. Those present attributed the vote less to widespread pacifist sentiment than to Joad’s highly entertaining style at the despatch box. He made the audience laugh, telling the well-known story of Lytton Strachey’s response when asked during the first world war what he, a conscientious objector, would do if a German were raping his sister. ‘I should try and come between them,’ Strachey had archly replied. Joad made his listeners flesh creep with wildly exaggerated claims about German air power. (‘A single bomb from an aeroplane could poison every living thing within an area of three-quarters of a square mile.’) And he made them marvel, proposing Mahatma Gandhi as a role model in the event of a German invasion of England.

Yet there were plenty of undergraduates who were as indignant as Firth and Churchill. The former’s call on ‘Young Oxford… to get this offensive motion expunged from the minutes of the Union Society’ was quickly answered by a group of recent members, including Churchill’s son Randolph. On 15 February, a box containing 275 white feathers was delivered to the Union, one for each vote in favour of the motion. The following day, when the Union met for its next debate, 20 undergraduates interrupted proceedings, seized the minute book, tore out the offending minutes and left. The perpetrators were swiftly identified as rowers from St John’s and Worcester colleges, some of them professed fascists.

It’s important to note that at the Oxford Union, wit is generally preferred to sincerity. When the secretary appeared helpless to prevent the ripping out of the controversial minutes, the Russian émigré Prince Lieven piped up: ‘Although you may not have been willing to fight for King and country, I think you might have been willing to fight for the society’s minute book.’

When it came to another vote on whether or not to expunge the resolution, Hardie carried the day with an eloquent defence of the Union’s independence and an attack on the press coverage of the original debate. The margin of victory in this case was much larger – just 138 for the expunging and 750 against – suggesting that the Union members were at least ready to fight to preserve the independence of their debating society.

With the passage of time, in any case, the true seriousness of the threat posed to Britain by Hitler grew inexorably more apparent. When Joad returned to Oxford in November 1938 to oppose the motion ‘That war between nations can sometimes be justified’, he found a new constellation of political forces. Proposing the motion now were a socialist and a liberal; on Joad’s side, the university magazine Isis noted, was ‘as Tory-looking a bunch as the Union could produce’. This time, Joad was defeated by 176 votes to 145.

The opponents of fighting for King and country in 1933 by and large did their bit for both after 3 September 1939. At the outbreak of war, Michael Foot volunteered for military service, but was rejected because of his asthma. In 1940, under the pen-name ‘Cato’, he and two other journalists published Guilty Men, a polemic against the policy of appeasement. After Oxford, David Graham joined the BBC and worked for the German department during the war, broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda to those intrepid citizens of the Third Reich willing to risk listening to the BBC. He later covered the liberation of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The playwright Terence Rattigan had been one of the undergraduates who had voted for the 1933 motion. By 1940 he had joined the Royal Air Force and became a rear gunner and radio operator with the rank of flight lieutenant.

Another of the young men who attended that infamous debate was the future US secretary of state Dean Rusk. As he recalled 30 years after the event: ‘It was apparent to most of us present that the vote was a compliment to the entertaining brilliance of C.E.M. Joad rather than a verdict on the merits of the issue. Although the Union was not amused by a later effort to expunge the record, the record was set right… within a few short years by the gallantry of its members in fighting for King and country, and for freedom.’

We must ask ourselves: will the same prove to be true in our time? If push came to shove – if the terrorists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad took to butchering British men, women, and children – would their youthful apologists in the Anglosphere reconsider their position?

It is a hard question to answer with confidence. The current generation of undergraduates hold strong views with weak foundations. At least some of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators last month proved to be, when questioned, almost wholly ignorant about the situation in and around Gaza. Yet their ignorance does not make them more circumspect; rather the reverse.

Today’s students complain about not being able to speak their minds in class, yet many of them would also accept an authoritarian system of government if it could be relied upon to avert climate change. They insist on the importance of tackling global warming, yet seem strangely reluctant to criticise China and India (members of the sacrosanct ‘Global South’) for their massive contributions to CO_2 emissions. They were eager to adopt the Ukrainian cause in early 2022, but of late we hear strangely little from them about the need to send more weapons to Kyiv. I therefore have my doubts about their ability to recognise that Iranian proxy organisations are unlikely to be their generation’s most reliable allies in the years ahead.

But we shall see – just as ‘Sixty-Four’ eventually saw in 1939. I hope he was pleasantly surprised. I hope Douglas Murray and I will be too. We are getting a bit long in the tooth to fight for King and country ourselves.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist

Just how much lower can the Conservatives sink?

David Hare   11:48AM, 14 Dec, 2023

This is the year in which Michael Gambon died, so by definition a grim one for theatre. Of all the tributes, one of the most acute was by Tom Hollander, who recalled how expressive Gambon’s voice was after 30 years on stage. He could reach hundreds of people while seeming to address only one or two. That’s essential theatre acting. When Gambon turned to cinema, his voice had become supple and mellow. It set me to thinking of other great cinema voices. Simone Signoret came first to mind. Then Jeanne Moreau, James Mason, and above all, Henry Fonda. These actors have you at hello. I would have added Marlene Dietrich, but if you can be so easily parodied, can you be truly great?

A Los Angeles record producer tells me that teenagers no longer consider actors as role models. The young value authenticity, and necessarily actors pretend. Musicians don’t. Taylor Swift and Harry Styles have taken over from James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. ‘Timmy Chalamet,’ he said, ‘had a vogue for six months but it’s over now.’ I wonder if this is true. We still go principally to see actors, not plays. In 1985-87, Anthony Hopkins played more than 370 performances of three productions in the 1,200-seat Olivier Theatre without a single ticket unsold. Those of us involved in those memorable seasons never imagined there was any reason except the greatness of Tony. If he came back, it would happen again.

The French have always been better at protest than the British. Parisians are furious about the litter of directive street furniture which makes nonsense of the Rue de Rivoli. They’re doing everything to bring pressure on their mayor, Anne Hidalgo. In London, like the Kinks, I always loved viewing life from Waterloo Bridge, relishing those smoky black-and-white images of men in bowler hats forming a river on their way to work. Now the bridge has been uglified into a militarised crazy golf course, which plays havoc with its Portland design. The museum quarter in South Kensington does without traffic signs altogether and, as far as I know, nobody’s been killed. I’m all for bicycle lanes, but environmental measures which do not measure beauty  are profoundly anti-environmental.

Why are the print newspapers which are loudest about freedom of speech the ones which forbid it themselves? The paper I have taken for the past five years has, in that time, not published a single article by a socialist. If anyone from the left is quoted, they have to be mediated by a trusted house journalist, whose job is to contextualise. Well-known titles, all with falling circulations, love to condemn no-platforming in universities, but Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere both no-platform with a ruthlessness which makes student unions look permissive. How can you publish editorials condemning censorship if your own practice excludes all views which engage with your own?

Our family has always had retrievers, but we recently decided to make a change. My wife asks what can have been missing in her life that she was so fulfilled by the love of a Parson Russell terrier. When I met other Parson owners, their first question was always: ‘Is yours as mad as ours?’ Every afternoon, Otto ran round in circles growling at imaginary enemies. A few weeks ago, after a day of sustained love and closeness, he panicked at the sound of fireworks, crashed through the garden fence and drowned in a neighbour’s pond. I keep thinking of Alexander Herzen who said of the death of his young child that short-lived flowers have the brightest bloom. When Tom Stoppard included the line in The Coast of Utopia, I thought the sentiment brutal and inhumane. Now Otto is dead at ten months, I am not so sure.

A word, please, in memory of Christopher Hudson, the former literary editor of The Spectator, who died on the same day as Michael Gambon. Christopher was the kind of courteous scholar Cambridge was meant to produce, but rarely did. He invited me in to write in 1970, making me, I guess, one of your longer-standing contributors. He also asked me to lunch at the magazine with Enoch Powell, who was insufferable throughout. What Powell said was bad enough but the way he said it was worse. He affected an orotund Ciceronian rhetoric, designed to steamroll everyone else, particularly women. It occurred to me later that Margaret Thatcher developed her own over-emphatic style in order to get a word in edgeways with her friend Enoch.

A number of commentators have compared Suella Braverman’s hot jets of misanthropy to Powell’s invocation of ‘rivers of blood’. But there’s a big difference. Powell had an impact. Dockers marched, racism was licensed and life became more unpleasant for people of colour all over Britain. Braverman, boiling the bones of dead Israelis and Palestinians to make her culture-war soup, had little effect. She just left the electorate wondering how much lower any Conservative could sink. A question to which we will no doubt have a spanking fresh answer in 2024.

David Hare

David Hare is a playwright and screenwriter.

My Christmas in Bucharest as Ceausescu fell

Peter Hitchens   8:53AM, 14 Dec, 2023

(iStock)

I never intended to spend Christmas 1989 on a short break in Bucharest. I had enjoyed a long, thrilling autumn in dark, sad cities in eastern Europe, running and marching with ecstatic crowds as they overthrew communism. But this had all been in the calmer, less exotic regions of the Warsaw Pact, where dumplings were on the menu, passions were equally stodgy, and both rebels and governments would rather hold press conferences than open fire on each other. I was in lovely but dreary Dresden when news came that Nicolae Ceausescu’s baroque dictatorship was tottering, and my foreign desk urged me to head to Hungary and on into Romania as soon as the border opened, if it did.

Air travel was impossible. It had to be by land. At Szeged in Hungary I came to the edge of the known world, gazing across the closed frontier post into the dark exotic chaos so well described by Olivia Manning in her Balkan trilogy. I knew no Romanian. I knew nobody in Romania. I knew next to nothing about Romania. But the main thing was that I was there – and then the border opened. More crucially, I had the permission of Mrs Hitchens to cross it (I confess I more than half-wished she had forbidden me to go, but she never stood in the way of any adventure). I crossed into Arad, where I changed the last of my money into a wad of Romanian lei, literally the softest currency I have ever met. The notes were worn from use into limp, porous purplish rectangles whose value was hard to make out. And, despite a fair amount of Balkan wailing that the Securitate secret police would come in helicopters and machine-gun me if I did so, I bought a first-class ticket for the Bucharest Express which was expected on time and duly turned up. So much for the panic-spreaders.

As soon as the rusty train heaved itself on its way, I was in the grip of romance, reminded of Kay Harker’s journey among bleak hills in the strange low light of December, in that marvellous story ‘The Box of Delights’. Kay looks up at the hills from the train window, and thinks: ‘It was a grim winter morning, threatening a gale. Something in the light, with its hard sinister clearness, gave mystery and dread to those hills. “They look just the sort of hills,” Kay said to himself, “where you might come upon a Dark Tower, and blow a horn at the gate for something to happen.”’ I have always known what he meant.

What seemed to be a firework display began on the street outside. It was not fireworks. It was machine guns

Since my boarding school days I have loved long train journeys round about Christmas, though I prefer them to be homebound ones – what F. Scott Fitzgerald beautifully described as ‘the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow’. As the short day darkened, I saw shepherds, cloaked and hatted in thick sheepskin, actually watching their flocks.

I was in truth quite worried, but I had decided to take the risk and there really was not much to do except eat the cheese sandwich I had bought at the station. I encountered an Australian journalist in a long leather coat who seemed to be an old Romania hand. He was certainly an older Romanian hand than I was. He told me which Bucharest hotel to head for, and how to get there by underground train. Then he told me it was probably a good idea to run in a zigzag pattern from the tube station to the hotel, as there might be snipers. He may have been having me on. I do not know what happened to him and have never seen him since. I sometimes wonder if he was in fact an apparition or a hallucination. But I duly zigzagged through the falling snow, and was not sniped at. Pah, I thought, so much for all that whimpering and wailing about the Securitate.

It was by now late on Christmas Eve. My office would be empty, as Fleet Street does not publish on Christmas Day. Embarking on my first major bribe, I gave the hotel switchboard supervisor a large carton of Kent cigarettes, the country’s real currency, and asked for a call to my Oxford home. ‘Go to your room and wait,’ she said, as they always did in such places in those days.

A view of Bucharest’s central square over Christmas of 1989 (Getty Images)

I went to my room and waited. I began to tap out some sort of story that might be usable on Boxing Day, when what seemed at first to be a firework display began on the street outside. It was not a firework display. It was machine-gun fire, much of it very obviously tracer bullets, whizzing past my window. I am no hero. I did not fancy having my obituary in the 26 December 1989 issue of the Daily Express, with my name probably misspelled and an unflattering blurred picture beneath the headline EXPRESSMAN DIES IN ROMANIA. So I switched off all the lights, pulled the curtains tight, shoved the heavier furniture towards the window and slid under the bed (I was slender enough to do this in those days). There were lulls, but the gunnery continued off and on.

During one of the breaks, the telephone shuddered, rattled and tinkled. I pulled the receiver under the bed with me and answered. Mrs Hitchens was on the line. She had finished hanging up the children’s stockings and leaving out the carrots and wine for Father Christmas and his reindeer. The tree was all done. I was glad to hear it, though at that point these sweet things felt as far away, and as unreachable, as the moon. How was Bucharest, she wished to know. Oh, quiet, I replied. Nothing much to see. Whereupon the Kalashnikovs and the big heavy machine-guns started up again, so unmistakably that I had to stop lying to her.

Perhaps anxious that my possibly fatal trip should not pass unrecorded, she urged me, there and then, to dictate a report to her which she would pass on to the foreign desk. And through the noise of gunfire I began ‘This is the real-life country where it is always winter and never Christmas…’, and from then on it all flowed quite smoothly.

A Romanian soldier stands on a tank in Bucharest, 24 December 1989 (Getty Images)

The next few days passed in a succession of horrors and fret. Christmas Day was worse than most days: the desperate, stinking hospital wards full of wounded people, the judicial murder of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, their gory corpses displayed on TV, the visit to their office (during which I looted Elena’s red document holder, which I still possess, from her desk).

And then the day of release, when a colleague miraculously arrived to take my place. There were still no flights, so I went back to the great dingy North Station just in time to see an immensely long train, painted the colour of pickled cucumbers, the favourite shade of the communist world, begin to move. Not caring where it was going, as long as it was not going to Romania, I flung my bags aboard and leapt after them. As it happened, it was carrying an entire Soviet orchestra to Sofia in Bulgaria. I will never forget their kindness to me, making space for me to sit, sharing their vodka, their black bread and their sausage as the train wound through the blue mountains of the Bulgarian border country in the twilight and then down into Sofia, which after all my adventures felt like Paris. So much for short breaks in Bucharest. We had our proper Christmas late that year, and it would not be the last time that would happen.

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens lived in Moscow from June 1990 to October 1992. He is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

Ian Williams   1:18PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Noma Bar]

This should have been a busy holiday period for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery was due to open last month and others were planned in New York, Paris and Berlin. They have all now been cancelled because Ai himself has been cancelled – not by the Chinese Communist party this time, but by the ‘free’ West.

Weiwei had posted on X (formerly Twitter) his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war. However, his comments appeared to more generally attack Jewish influence and power. He wrote: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world. Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States. The annual $3 billion aid package to Israel has, for decades, been touted as one of the most valuable investments the United States has ever made. This partnership is often described as one of shared destiny.’

Soon after Ai’s comment was posted, the Lisson Gallery released a statement: ‘There is no place for debate that can be characterised as anti-Semitic or Islamophobic at a time when all efforts should be on ending the tragic suffering in Israeli and Palestinian territories, as well as in communities internationally.’

The gallery says the decision was mutual but Ai tells me this is not true. He says he simply received a notification from it and that the gallery never explained its rationale. He sees the cancellation as an attack on freedom of expression, for which he has been fighting all his life. ‘It mirrors an authoritarian culture, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China and the tragic events in Germany decades ago, to put it more solemnly,’ he said.

‘I often hear museums tell me the [Chinese] embassy called them to say you should not show this guy’s art’

I met Ai before the cancellation, at his new home in Montemor-o-Novo, around an hour’s drive from Lisbon. ‘It’s so simple – extremely simple,’ he said of his life in Portugal. ‘It gives me the possibility to say goodbye to the very extreme, intense life.’ Looking back, I realise he spoke too soon.

He showed me his new studio rising from the fields, a near replica of his old Shanghai facility, which was demolished by the Chinese authorities. He thought it might make a good store for 30 tons of buttons he obtained from a Croydon button factory, and which had been destined for landfill. ‘I have this sort of romantic thinking about buttons,’ he said, showing me the screensaver on his mobile phone, a black-and-white photo of a dark hole in the earth. For five years, this dugout was home for him and his father, a renowned poet condemned as an enemy of the state and exiled to China’s far west. ‘If we lost a button, we couldn’t replace one. We were so poor. So that was always on my mind.’ He has no real plan for the buttons, not yet. ‘Honestly, I never have a real plan. Fortunately or unfortunately there’s always something that leads my curiosity.’

The Lisson Gallery show would have been a chance to indulge his love of Lego. His plan was to recreate some of his older works in Lego blocks, together with such recent images as the explosion that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the giant spy balloon shot down over the US coastline and the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan. ‘I think it’s very convenient to use these 40 colours to make all those sophisticated images related to political arguments, aesthetic judgments or history and social commentary,’ he said. Though his relationship with Lego, the company, was not always so good. In 2015, the Danish toymaker refused his studio’s request for a bulk order, saying it ‘cannot approve the use of Legos for political works’. The Lego ban coincided with the announcement of a new Legoland park in Shanghai. The company later reversed its policy after an outcry.

Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern in 2010 (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Ai has often been scathing about what he sees as western hypocrisy and double standards – and the latest cancellations have re-kindled that anger. Before he went into exile in 2015, he was frequently given the cold shoulder by western galleries or museums which were looking to expand their businesses in China. ‘For that little money, they revoke all their integrity,’ he said. The Chinese government has pressured museums and galleries around the world not to show his work. ‘I often hear museums tell me the [Chinese] embassy called them to say you should not show this guy’s art.’ It is something he has learned to live with. ‘I just ignore it if people display my art or don’t display my art. It doesn’t matter to me.’

He’s particularly scathing about Elon Musk, who received multiple favours from the CCP to set up his Tesla factory in Shanghai and sings the praises of the Chinese government. Musk owns X, the platform that used to be Twitter, and Ai has on his phone an animation he created, the X spinning and turning into a swastika. It was deleted from X but was still available on Instagram. ‘It’s so creepy. I mean it looks so ugly,’ he said.

Ai helped to design the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which he saw as a symbol of openness, though he soon regretted doing so after the CCP turned it into a stage for crude propaganda. Still, it gave him some protection not enjoyed by other dissidents, as did his international standing and his father’s acclaimed status. His luck ran out in 2011, when he was grabbed by police as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong.

Ai was held for 81 days, mostly in solitary confinement, amid vague allegations of ‘economic crimes’. He says the experience taught him a lot about the absurdity of the CCP and the power of humour. ‘With authoritarianism, you cannot fight with it, because they love you to fight with them, they are so powerful. But if you laugh about it, they hate it, because they are so laughable. They do not know how to fight with you.’

When he was released and put under house arrest, the authorities installed 15 cameras around his house, which he decorated with red lanterns. He then installed four webcams inside his home to livestream his every movement, as a mockery of the police surveillance. The stream was viewed 5.2 million times before he was ordered to shut it down. He told the police he was only trying to help. ‘I asked them: don’t you want to know who I sleep with or who I talk with or what I am doing at my work table? I can show you 24 hours a day.’

When his passport was returned in 2015, he applied for a business visa for the UK, where he had a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. At first his application was turned down. It was at the time of Britain’s so-called ‘golden era’ of relations with China and just ahead of a visit to the UK by Xi Jinping, during which the then prime minister David Cameron hoped to drum up business. Only after a political outcry did Theresa May, then home secretary, intervene, grant the visa and apologise. ‘Unbelievable, but still believable,’ he recalled. ‘It’s bureaucracy – people don’t care.’ That year he went into exile in Berlin, where he has a studio, later moving to Cambridge before settling in Portugal.

He says his most difficult project was after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, when thousands of children died because of substandard school construction. He set about documenting the names of the children, and at one point he was detained and beaten, nearly dying from a brain haemorrhage. He collected more than 5,000 names and built an art installation out of children’s backpacks, and another from 90 tons of steel reinforcing bars recovered from the wreckage, which formed part of his Royal Academy show. ‘I was prepared to die,’ he said. ‘So many times our team was arrested, about 40 times. Beaten, threatened… They all think I was crazy, but it’s OK to be crazy for a while.’

Ai’s greatest influence, particularly on his early work, came from Marcel Duchamp, who pioneered the use of ‘ready-mades’ – repurposing everyday manufactured objects, twisting and distorting their meaning. ‘I love his attitude. He is so detached and witty. My ready-made is an authoritarian state like China. So you can easily turn it upside down.’ Often that involves the use of artefacts on an enormous scale – such as his installation ‘Spouts’, part of the MakingSense exhibition at the Design Museum this year, which consisted of a field of 250,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers, crafted by hand during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 ad). If the pot was not perfect when it was made, the spout was broken off. The work is a commentary on freedom of speech, where the spouts, or mouths, of dissidents have been removed.

‘I was prepared to die. So many times our team was arrested, about 40 times. Beaten, threatened’

As we drank tea in the shade of the veranda of his sprawling villa, a bird squawking in a nearby cage, ignored by a cat lazing on a chair beside us, it felt as if reality and politics were a world away. Yet politics underpins almost everything Ai creates, whether that is sculpture, films and documentaries, writing, or architecture. One of his most famous works, ‘Study of Perspective’, is a literal middle finger to authority: a photograph of himself flipping off Tiananmen Gate. He has made documentaries about the Hong Kong democracy movement and the refugee crisis. One of his films consisted of unedited and slightly surreal footage of the police interrogating him. He made a replica of the cell in which he was incarcerated for 81 days.

Ai has been vocal in his support for Palestinians since he travelled to Israel and Gaza in 2016 while filming Human Flow, a feature–length documentary about the global refugee crises. In a recent email, he tells me of Gaza: ‘What unfolds there falls far below ethical standards and challenges the comprehension of human behaviour that an ordinary person can accept.’ The Israel-Gaza war has deepened his pessimism about the state of a world which he says is dominated not by wisdom, but by stupidity.

An irony of the decision to axe his show is that the Lisson Gallery praised Ai’s ‘support of freedom of expression’ in its statement. This has only deepened Ai’s anger. His art has been displayed and celebrated across the western world, but ultimately he says he can live without ever exhibiting – but not without free thinking and the ability to express his opinions.

‘In western society, there is a palpable sense of fear now where individuals feel restrained from expressing their true thoughts, fearing potential consequences,’ he says. The issue at hand reflects a cultural tendency to reject differing opinions in pursuit of a presumed moral superiority: ‘I perceive this not only as an assault on free speech but as a massacre of thoughts. Those who suffer are individuals with independent thinking, and those who prevail are forces pushing human civilisation backwards.’

Ian Williams

Ian Williams is a former foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News and NBC, and author of The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War (Birlinn).

This Christmas in Bethlehem will be the saddest yet

Leila Sansour   12:31PM, 14 Dec, 2023

I am on my way to Bethlehem, which is where I come from and where I tend to spend Christmas. When I visit from London, I am given strict instructions to bring with me a generous amount of cheddar cheese, a good whisky and, as unlikely as it sounds, Yorkshire tea. I have made it into a local tradition and there is no one else but me to supply the tea in the quantities required. Normally, my biggest concern is trying to find enough space in my suitcase for all these supplies. I so wish this was my main concern this time round. Since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, life in Bethlehem has been turned upside down. The place has known sad Christmases but this one will be unlike any other.

My friends in Bethlehem tell me to get rid of any statements of solidarity with Gaza on social media if I want to avoid trouble. ‘Take it seriously,’ they say. The Israeli army is stopping people at checkpoints, examining their phones and making arrests. ‘It’s the Inquisition on steroids,’ says a friend. Four hundred and fifty people have already been arrested in Bethlehem since 7 October, the majority without charge. Fifty of them are minors. I’ve read enough about Israeli jails to know that I never want to end up in one, so I start to comb through my posts. The problem is that almost all of them are about Gaza. How could they not be? ‘More than 15,000 people slaughtered’; ‘More than 6,000 of those are kids’; ‘More than 6,500 remain under rubble’. What else is there to say, apart from to call for a ceasefire? I don’t think many of my posts are all that original. They echo what many human rights institutions, churches and even the Pope have said.

I call one of my best friends in Bethlehem, a university professor, who is midway through preparing a dish of burbara when we speak on the phone. I feel relieved that one small element of Christmas tradition is being observed. Burbara – the Arabic for St Barbara – is a creamy wheat berry pudding traditionally served on 4 December across the Middle East to kick off the Christmas season. It is delicious, made with spices, nuts and dried fruit. Our region is the original home of wild wheat, which means that our ancestors were incredibly resourceful at turning it into a myriad of dishes, the most famous being pheasant and frikkeh. For Christmas, we usually eat lamb or pork, the latter cooked in local red wine and with a staggering amount of garlic. This is the Middle East after all. The conversation with my friend becomes increasingly heavy. Her nine-year-old nephew is terrified at the sight of Israeli soldiers, who raid Bethlehem on a daily basis. The young boy knows how close Bethlehem is to Gaza. Local children, my friend says, have taken to playing ‘funerals’, and drawing pictures of dead bodies shrouded in plastic bags.

Anyone who has ever spent Christmas in Bethlehem knows about its parades. They are an unforgettable spectacle: joyous, spirited, with pipers, drums, music, you name it – a true testimony to that first Christmas, where the divine and the mundane locked arms. People from all over the world crowd the narrow streets and rub shoulders with Christian and Muslim Palestinians. But none of that is scheduled for this year. All celebrations have been cancelled. There will be no Christmas tree, no visitors, no parades. The churches and the municipality announced their decision a few weeks ago. The locals are fully in agreement. ‘How could we celebrate anything now?’ my friend asks me. ‘We are all just glued to our television screens and cannot believe our eyes. The cruelty of it all. We never thought we are so dispensable.’

I have long campaigned to try to preserve the Christian community in Bethlehem. Our numbers have dwindled greatly, due to Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine. The Israeli wall that confiscated much of the remaining lands of the town and reduced it to 13 per cent of its original territory in 2005 was the last nail in the coffin. I am almost sure we have lost this battle. There will just be a few of us left in the region. As painful as it is, I have reconciled myself to this loss. My greater concern now is not for preserving Christianity in the land of its birth but for preserving human sanity in a world that feels so unhinged.

At midnight mass in Bethlehem, you often hear the priest say: ‘Make your hearts big, you, the people of Bethlehem! Christians the world over look towards your town tonight with joy and trepidation. You are the only people on Earth who can say, “He was born here tonight!”’ I have heard this so many times, but it has never failed to move me. We always understood where we stood and how special that was. This Christmas, I know the people of Bethlehem will stand together at the Church of the Nativity with their own special prayer – a prayer for Gaza.

Leila Sansour

Leila Sansour is the director of the film Open Bethlehem and the founder of the awareness campaign of the same name.

Remembering Jeremy Clarke through his books

Catriona Olding   12:45PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Illustration: John Broadley

On a hot afternoon in October, I joined a lunch party. By the time I arrived, the company was on coffee and liqueurs. A pretty woman in her seventies mentioned an academic friend who was downsizing and how the prospect of getting rid of thousands of books had upset him so much he sought help from a counsellor. The counsellor had said: ‘But they’re only books.’

My husband, Jeremy Clarke, wrote the Low Life column in this magazine for 23 years until his death in May. In one of his columns, he wrote about how, after the sale of his mother’s house in Devon (where he’d lived for 30 years), he sent two Mercedes Sprinter van loads of stuff, mostly books, here to Provence. Seventy boxes arrived, containing around 2,500 volumes. The shelves on the few straight walls in the cave house were already full, so the new arrivals were stored in an adjacent rough cave alongside 100 years’ worth of tools and junk.

He spent so much time in bed reading that some weeks he had nothing to write about

They’ve been there for three years. The books were Jeremy’s only real possessions and he loved them. He wanted them kept together in a room where he could sit in a comfy chair to read. This room was also to be a gym (or at least have space for a mat and weights) and occasionally a nightclub, he decided. He made a start digging to level the floor but it was never completed. He was too ill for manual labour by then and we had no money to pay for it to be done.

In anticipation of writing about his books, I went next door, pushed my way into the dirty old cave, pulled out a box at random and brought it through to the kitchen. Beside me now, among others, are three books on writing, a collection of essays, a collection of African short stories, and works by Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Anton Chekhov, William Golding, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck and Ian Fleming. Hypermasculine as this list might seem, even without Ernest Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh (which are on cosy shelves in the study downstairs), these authors came second in Jeremy’s affections. The works of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield are placed lovingly on shelves in the bedroom alongside poetry anthologies, memoirs and diaries, books of letters and literary biographies.

Jeremy didn’t annotate books. He preferred to copy words, sentences and passages he liked into notebooks.

evanesce: fade out of sight

adventitious: coming from outside

accidental: casual

The couple were ‘contending amicably’ whether they were on the right path.

The novel is a kind of discourse and a frame of mind. As a frame of mind, it questions and subverts all totalising systems by the liberating power of laughter and the celebration of the body.

The food wasn’t very good but at least it was pretentious.

Jim wants me to go out with other men so that he will have something to write about.

None of the above, from a page in one of Jeremy’s notebooks, is attributed except the last, to Nora Barnacle, wife of James Joyce.

Jeremy described himself as a reader who writes. I thought of myself as a reader, but I was totally outclassed by Jeremy, who even when fit and well could, and indeed preferred, to read all day, every day and most evenings. His reading verged on addiction. He liked to read in bed, a habit developed living in his mother’s large house which, apart from the TV room and small kitchen, was cold. There was an anglepoise lamp on the bedside table and he was warm and comfortable in bed. He said that reading was ‘food’ for his brain. In Devon, he spent so much time in bed reading that some weeks he’d only ventured to the local Sainsbury’s and had nothing to write about.

By the time I was 35, I’d read most of the Brontës, Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch; the writings to date of Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt, some Woolf, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Waugh, Joyce and much else. I’d tackled Proust but, exhausted by nursing shifts and three small children, and defeated by the interminably long sentences and my ignorance (pre-internet) of the Dreyfus affair, I’d given up halfway through Sodom and Gomorrah. I’d also read lesser fiction, but uneducated, pushing 40 and short of time, I determined from then on to read only literary works.

Jeremy and I became friends after meeting at his publishing party in 2011. At first, we exchanged polite emails. Gradually we began to recommend books to each other and discuss favourite poems. As time went on, I received tales of his love life, which were often hilarious, occasionally harrowing but always beautifully written. My account of being pinned against a posh Edinburgh sofa and sung at – ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ – by the richest and drunkest man in Scotland while my then husband played Gershwin on the grand piano was laughably bourgeois compared to Jeremy’s description of his weekend with a woman he was seeing. He was one of her many sexual partners and Jeremy suggested she ask her boyfriends to use condoms. On arrival he found she’d had a visitor the night before, and the evidence was left on the kitchen counter; five items, curated in order, smallest first, by the volume contained.

Years later, living in France, literature (and writing generally) was our favourite topic. It was the mainstay of our relationship right up until the end. We read the funniest, cleverest, or most beautiful passages from books and newspapers aloud to each other. Early on, Jeremy gave me a book of criticism and essays by Martin Amis, whose novels I’d tried but found difficult. I devoured it and another, then his memoir Experience, followed by most of his novels, this time enjoying every word.

Nabokov I’d avoided. As a child I ran a gauntlet of creepy older male relatives and endured a serious sexual assault aged eight. Lolita is a book I will never read. Jeremy suggested Pnin, which was a revelation. Saul Bellow’s Augie March, Raymond Carver’s short stories and Michael Holroyd, whose biography of Augustus John inspired me to start painting, were all Jeremy’s recommendations. Because he had covertly studied English Literature at UCL while attending SOAS, Low Life was wonderful company for this literature-hungry ex-nurse.

Jeremy would have sudden enthusiasms for writers and buy whatever he could find online: novels, memoir, and biography. Some weeks I’d be trotting down the hill half a dozen times to find the delivery driver and collect books. Dismissive of most contemporary fiction, last year he was excited to discover Damon Galgut. Starting with The Good Doctor, he read three more of his books before becoming distracted by Malcolm Lowry. He’d read Lowry’s Under the Volcano several times but last year, unable to find his copy in the cave, he bought another and also Gordon Bowker’s biography of Lowry, Pursued by Furies. This was followed by a return to Paul Bowles and Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain in particular caught his imagination.

But in the end it was back to Hemingway, Waugh, Woolf – and his vast first world war collection. Plot interested Jeremy little. It was the quality of writing that mattered. His writers were masters of prose. They were outsiders; often destructive, sometimes tragic, and many struggled with mental illness or addiction. Pursued by furies they were, and, in his darkest moments, so was Jeremy.

Reading Muriel Spark’s first and last novels recently, I was trying to remember a book, perhaps one of hers, that Jeremy and I read a couple of years ago. The title was menacing, a line from a poem. Without searching online, I gave up thinking and for diversion clicked on Facebook. The second thing I saw was a poetry feed of ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats, and the phrase ‘slouches towards Bethlehem’. That was it. Later that afternoon I remembered that the book in question, Slouching towards Bethlehem, was a collection of journalism by Joan Didion. Later still, I was rereading and helping to choose Low Life columns for a third collection, and came across this from 1 July 2017:

Reading the newspapers these days is an unnerving experience. What next? The sun rising in the west? A rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem?

Coincidence perhaps, but Jeremy was momentarily with me again and I was comforted. In reply to the counsellor above, some of us would state that no – they’re not ‘only books’. And I hope one day Low Life will have his library.

Catriona Olding

Where are all the proper members’ clubs?

Ben Schott   12:52PM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘How would you like your hair cut?’ ‘In silence.’ So goes the ancient joke. My answer, however, is ‘at home’. You see, this week marks the 15th anniversary of having my hair cut in my Highgate flat by the great Jane Davies, peripatetic barber to London’s loucher gentry. (Just as Jeeves is not a butler, so Jane is not a hairdresser.) In 1970, Jane left her Cromwell Road convent and, with scissors in hand, descended to a smoke-filled basement on Sloane Street. Here Vidal Sassoon had established a speakeasy barbershop for men who wanted their locks left groovily long. Some 15 years later, Jane went freelance, but rather than open a salon or hire a chair, she visited her clients at home. Such domesticity suits a snipper-up of unconsidered trifles, and Jane is blessed with a miscellanist’s mindset and Borgesian library of books, pamphlets, clippings and photographs. It’s not uncommon to return home to a hand-delivered oddity relating to a recent mid-cut conversation; her envelopes are always labelled ‘Hair Mail’.

Like a mafia hitman, Jane acquires her clients through word of mouth. And like a Savile Row tailor, she is discretion itself – yet never so discrete as to be dull. Over the years, to facilitate an introduction or extend an invitation, names are slipped deftly into conversation. (Death permits me to disclose Robin de La Lanne-Mirrlees, Harold Evans and Jim Henson.) But the true extent of her network is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, if Jane did not exist, we would need Greene or le Carré to invent her. Lunching recently at the Garrick, I spotted three of her other clients. And those were just the names I knew.

Speaking of clubs, something is afoot in clubland. Not the lingering debate about women members, nor the cost of staffing and heating cavernous palazzi. The problem is the absurd proliferation of enterprises that walk like clubs and talk like clubs but are not clubs at all. Such sleight of brand covers everything from the sublime 5 Hertford Street (ruled by the velvet fist of Robin Birley) to the ridiculous Soho House (which boasts a global waiting list of 98,000). Hard to join but easy to use, genuine clubs are microcosms of mutual simpatico. Most significantly they are owned by – and run for – their members, who decide upon every detail from the make-up of the membership to the mark-up on the wine. By contrast, ersatz establishments like Nikita, Apollo’s Muse and Ten Trinity Square are for-profit businesses operated for the benefit of their owners. Perhaps pseudo-club members don’t realise they’re paying someone else’s mortgage, perhaps they don’t care. After all, the private club in New York’s Aman hotel costs $200,000 to join, and then $15,000 a year. But ownership is axiomatic. In 1824, when members of London’s Stratford Club had exhausted their patience with the unclubbable antics of Major General Thomas Charretie, they deployed the nuclear option. The committee met, voted to dissolve the club entirely, and instantly formed a new establishment – the Portland Club – with an identical membership, bar one. Try doing that with the 255,300 members of Soho House.

‘Doors on or off?’ This was not a question I expected as I walked to the helicopter. Of course, the only sensible answer is ‘off’ – not just to experience a cockpit blasted with ice-cold air, but to photograph Alaska’s awe-inspiring Knik Glacier without the window’s reflective glare. Alaska was but one location in a year of adventurous travel, which took in Antarctica, India, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Spain. For many years I didn’t really know how to travel. I found myself in Paris or Rome, but was unsure of how to be. And then I returned to my roots as a photographer, deploying not the omnipresent (and omnidistracting) iPhone but a clunky Nikon SLR with a heavy zoom lens. The difference was dramatic. A proper camera is an anchor and a catalyst. Whether snapping portraits of socialites at the Seville Feria, framing the epic desolation of the Drake Passage, or shooting gully cricket in Kolkata, a camera slows you down and encourages you to interact with your surroundings.

Only because I had a camera did it occur to me to chat with Süleyman Cinci, who since 1979 has been a fixture of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Born visually impaired, Süleyman has made a living selling chocolates, tissues and other useful items; in 2005 he added a digital weighing scale to his cart, to cater for locals and tourists eager to keep trim. In the pandemic, he began selling masks and increased his stock of kolonya – the Ottoman-era cologne which the pandemic transformed from symbol of hospitality to life-saving balm. Without a camera, I would never have plucked up the gumption to talk to Süleyman, nor learn his remarkable story. I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, ‘Doors off, camera up’ would be a start.

Ben Schott

Ben Schott is the author of Schott’s Miscellany and Schott’s Almanac.

‘A war for Middle East stability’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on what’s at stake in the conflict with Hamas

Andrew Roberts   12:18PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Tom Jellett]

President Isaac ‘Bougie’ Herzog is Israeli aristocracy. His father, Chaim Herzog, was the sixth president, serving between 1983 and 1993; his grandfather Yitzhak Herzog was chief rabbi; his maternal uncle was Abba Eban, the most famous of the country’s foreign ministers. After leading the Israeli Labor party and the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset between 2013 and 2017, Isaac became Israel’s 11th president in July 2021. He is the first to be born in Israel since the Declaration of Independence 75 years ago.

My first question rather asks itself: how is the war going? ‘Depends on what you mean by war,’ Herzog quickly replies, before turning the discussion away from Gaza to ‘the grand picture’. He believes worries about whether the battle against Hamas might morph into a larger regional conflict are already out of date. ‘It’s regional already,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, it is regional because elements that emanate constantly from Tehran and its proxies are carrying out this war, whether it’s attacks from Lebanon, from Iraq, from Syria and, of course, from Gaza, which was the original perpetrator of this heinous atrocity.’ He points to the recent Houthis’ piracy in capturing the Galaxy Leader, an Israeli-owned ship in the southern Red Sea, as merely the latest manifestation of the phenomenon.

‘This empire of evil… calls for the annihilation of the Jews, and the Christians in Europe will be next’

Continuing in this vein, I ask about the disturbing claim that a Hamas terrorist had been found with instructions on how to launch chemical warfare in southern Israel. ‘Yes, [it is] true, including how to create a cyanide-deploying device and how to use it,’ he says. ‘Way beyond the horrible atrocities that we have seen; atrocities that humanity hasn’t seen in generations.’

Herzog, 63, who was a lawyer before his political career, believes that everybody should watch the footage that Hamas terrorists filmed themselves of the 7 October attack. ‘It is simply inconceivable,’ he says. ‘For all of us who believe in the family of nations, and the rules of liberty, and the dignity of human beings, seeing the Gazan people, not only from Hamas, [but] Gazan civilians, celebrate in the middle of Gaza’s streets over a body – a mutilated body of a young girl who simply went to a dance festival with her friends – is horrifically shocking.’

I ask why he thinks some Ivy League universities – including his alma mater, Cornell in New York – and so many liberal western elites have turned away from supporting Israel to embrace the Palestinian cause? There is even a director of a Canadian women’s group who has denied Israeli women were raped by Hamas terrorists. What is it about western civilisation today that means people can’t accept the things we have seen?

‘Because they are afraid to look in the mirror which has shattered before their eyes,’ he replies. ‘Unfortunately, I find rust: rust in the establishment, and rust in the temples of learning that we all admired and adored. They grew sclerotic in the way they looked at things, rather than judging the truth as it is, meaning there are cruel people in this world and sometimes it is very difficult to make peace with a culture that glorifies such attacks which have been going on for years.

‘And there are those who still do not understand that there is something called a war between good and evil. It somewhat reminds me of the way the approach was [in the 1930s] until Winston Churchill took over and explained the reality to the British people and the rest of the world. It takes time. It’s difficult. People don’t like to change their views so quickly, but we have to understand this is the culture we’re faced with.

‘There are evil forces who believe in jihad, which means none of us are eligible to live in this world because there will be another empire, an empire of evil which wants the infidels out. This is the real story. You can see it when they behead a teacher in France, or kill people on the Underground in Britain, or when they carry out 9/11, or when they chop the heads off babies in Israel.’

Emmanuel Macron with Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem, 24 October 2023 (Getty Images)

So why, I ask, does he think Emmanuel Macron has refused to join a recent pro-Israel march in Paris? And why are there large weekly anti-Israel marches in London? Has there been a process of Islamisation going on in Europe? His response is instant: ‘I don’t say that it’s a war between Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism for that matter. On the contrary, I believe that when you have a dialogue, an interfaith dialogue, you see there are many common denominators between the three monotheistic religions. What we are seeing is a streak of extreme Islam that is the main challenger to the world order, which has to be met with force.’

He has no doubt about the origin of the poisonous situation. ‘It starts in Tehran with the entire culture of the return of the Mahdi [a prophesised messianic figure who will appear to lead the world’s Muslims at the End of Time] and the whole idea of the ayatollahs who consider us as the Small Satan and America the Big Satan, and who promote an entire jihadist culture.’

The reason he refers to an ‘empire of evil’ is because ‘no matter if they’re Sunni or Shia, this culture calls for the annihilation of the Jews from this region, and the Christians in Europe will be next’.

Should the United States, Britain and our allies therefore impose what are called ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran, considering that Tehran pays for around 90 per cent of Hamas’s military budget and also supports Hezbollah and the Houthis?

‘This is a major topic to be discussed between the permanent members of the Security Council and Germany,’ Herzog says, ‘because the Iranians are taking everyone for a ride. I think snapback is a very important tool to explain to the world community and to the Iranians that there are red lines that must not be crossed. Don’t forget, parallel to that, there is the Iranian rush for a nuclear weapon, something which the world’s leadership has undertaken not to allow.’

Herzog is full of praise for King Charles whom he met at COP28. ‘We had an open and frank conversation about the challenges of the day,’ he says. They also spoke about the coronation ceremony, which included, he points out, ‘quotes from the Psalms and elements from our national history, which is intertwined in biblical history, and King David and his legacy. So we had a lot to talk [about]… I’m always honoured by the opportunity to talk with him.’

There are some world leaders, however, who Herzog does not believe are treating Israel fairly. ‘Take Canada, for example, a very close friend of Israel,’ he says, with palpable irritation in his voice about the posturing and lecturing that his country has been receiving from Justin Trudeau. ‘In Canada there is a growing rise in anti-Semitism, and terrible anti-Semitic attacks that are threatening Jews all over Canada. Recently, there have been terrible attacks in Toronto. Rather than [Canada] paying attention to that, we were criticised by Prime Minister Trudeau in a very unpleasant way.

‘Why am I saying this? Because I expect our friends to be honest about the facts on the ground. If we have the right to defend ourselves – and that is what Prime Minister Trudeau told me personally – that means we have to go into the places from where these missiles are launched, from where this horror machine is operated, and simply uproot it, after alerting the civilians. Which we are doing by millions of leaflets, phone calls, text messages and the like.’

Imbalanced criticisms of Israel in the West, he says, go beyond politicians and into the wider culture. ‘There are many in Hollywood who expressed their horror and dismay [at the 7 October attacks], but there are others like Susan Sarandon who didn’t even express any sorrow or pain, and people who started speaking about proportional response, not about understanding the situation.’ Indeed, Sarandon went further, saying that American Jews ‘are getting a taste of how it feels to be Muslim in this country’, leading her to be dropped by her talent agency.

Herzog is on the centre-left of Israeli politics, yet his response when I ask a question about Hezbollah is as unequivocal as anything Benjamin Netanyahu has said about the Israeli response to rockets being fired across the northern border from Lebanon. Hezbollah, he states, are part of the ‘axis of evil’ and so ‘of course they are met by a forceful response by Israel’.

‘We are not eager to go to war with Lebanon,’ he says. ‘Lebanon will pay a heavy price if we go to an all-out war – a very heavy price. But we are trying to show restraint. I would leave it at that because I don’t want to lead the situation to a deterioration, but something is clear: if Hezbollah wants to go to war, they will meet a very strong Israeli military.’

Israeli forces on the border with Gaza in southern Israel, 5 November 2023 (Getty Images)

What would Herzog like to see happen to the territory once the Israel Defence Forces destroys Hamas as a military force? ‘I think that there will have to be a very detailed mechanism of “managing the store”,’ he replies, ‘which provides full security for Israel and the citizens on the border, so they won’t go through this hell again, and [which also] enables the development of Gaza into a fully fledged democracy, as part of the development of the Palestinian nation. That requires a lot of innovation, and, most importantly, responsibility by many, many players in the region and in the world.’

As head of state, Herzog has met President Recep Erdogan of Turkey, King Abdullah II of Jordan and many other Muslim leaders. Relations with them are obviously in the deep freeze at present, but he still believes that the trajectory of Israel’s future is towards the kind of regional inclusion and normalisation that were presaged by the Abraham Accords, which Saudi Arabia seemed close to embracing before 7 October. ‘All regional leaders understand there are two alternatives,’ he says. ‘Either caving into evil as we have seen it, or moving towards peace by eradicating evil.’ In the future he hopes Israel can be part of a ‘regional partnership, which will be a Nato-like structure, and which will enable a future of interdependence and mutual security for all.

‘The test for this war is much greater than a simple Israel-Hamas war. It’s a war for the stability of the Middle East, for the stability of many of our neighbours. The rhetoric does not always reflect the inherent interests of the parties concerned.’

Where does the West Bank stand in any such future long-term regional partnership? How worried is he about a third Intifada happening? Jewish settlers there seem presently to be acting virtually with impunity; does that make it more difficult for Israel to get to this regional partnership?

‘I think there’s a lot of distortion of the facts,’ Herzog replies, with a slight note of exasperation. ‘The situation in the West Bank is being monitored. We were operating daily to undermine terror cells and terror operations to secure stability.

‘I expect the Palestinian Authority to take their hundreds of millions of shekels that were transferred to them, and use it for the wellbeing of their own people. And I assume the Palestinian people would expect that such funds will go into the budget of the Palestinian Authority to help give them services and manage the West Bank in the areas under their control and, of course, security and the like.’

‘We expected the BBC to be much more cautious and to understand that the IDF does not lie’

Herzog insists that the accusation of uncontrolled and unpunished settler violence in the West Bank is not true. ‘The Israeli government has clamped down on violence. A lot of the stories about many, many casualties were found to be totally incorrect,’ he says. ‘There was one case of an unfortunate casualty which has been thoroughly investigated. Israel has even taken steps, extreme steps, such as administrative detentions against a few settlers, to prevent any further escalation. These steps are undermining the due process of law to secure the wellbeing of all the population in the West Bank.

‘So there’s a lot of distortion and PR which does not reflect the situation on the ground. I’ve asked any world leader who has presented me with this claim to show me which issues they are talking about. And I must tell you, I’ve personally checked stories and complaints, and those that are proven to be right are under full investigation.’

One news organisation that has provoked consternation over its Gaza coverage is the BBC, with Jeremy Bowen failing to accept that Hamas routinely uses hospitals for military cover and the Corporation refusing to describe Hamas as ‘terrorists’, though they have been proscribed as such across Europe.

‘I presented a complaint in the British media a month ago,’ Herzog tells me. ‘Since then, I have given a few interviews with the BBC. We had our ups and downs; we expected the BBC, following the last apology where they acknowledged running a manipulative report, to be much more cautious and to understand that the IDF does not lie – we adhere to strict rules of transparency and honesty in reporting. And please, I ask everybody to remember, we are a very honest, open and transparent democracy, aggressive and vibrant. Even now, amidst this war, there are debates in Israel, one has to respect that and give us some credit for that.’

It was Herzog’s father, the great soldier, author, politician and diplomat Chaim (he also wrote one of the best books published on Middle Eastern conflict, the 1982 classic The Arab-Israeli Wars), who physically ripped up the notorious ‘Zionism is Racism’ UN Resolution 3379 in the General Assembly in 1975. So I ask his son whether he believes anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism?

‘In many ways, yes,’ he says. ‘You ask yourself, why do people hate Israel? For years they’ve been brainwashed as if we are the villains. Israel went towards peace only to be rejected by terror and suicide bombings. Israel has given up land – we pulled out of every inch of Gaza in 2005, and since then we’ve had tens of thousands of missiles because our neighbours in some places do not want to accept our inherent right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people.

‘Israel’s non-Jewish minorities are united with us. Many Muslim Israeli citizens were also butchered and tortured, abducted and killed by Hamas. They showed no mercy for anybody – Jew, Muslim or Christian. Anyone. Once someone is Israeli, they kill them. That is why this is a battle which has to do with the moral conscience of the world. The entire world should be with us.’

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts sits in the House of Lords as Lord Roberts of Belgravia

The moment I realised the study of literature was over

Howard Jacobson   12:23PM, 14 Dec, 2023

I’ve run away. I’m not saying where I’ve run to because then they’d be able to find me. I’m not saying who ‘they’ are either. So far no one has noticed I’m missing. I shuffle along with my head down, my old-geezer Woody Allen bucket hat sheltering my face, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my shorts. Damn! The mention of ‘shorts’ gives away that I’m somewhere hot. You have to be careful writing a clandestine piece. Fearing I’ve been spotted, I veer off the path, clamber over rocks and find myself on a black volcanic beach. It’s like walking on a fire that everyone hopes has gone out. That’s another clue. Which volcano? Anyone would think I want to be found. In fact I won’t mind if the person who finds me doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the world. So a beach is the perfect place to be. From the promenade to the sea, beaches are news-free. Without any other care, women stand under the public showers dancing the black lava out of their bikini bottoms. This could be the last sight I will see before it all ends.

Years ago, when I was a university lecturer, I used to compete with my colleagues in imagining the silliest thing anyone would say about literature once social scientists took it over. The person who guessed that Jane Austen would be hauled over the coals for ignoring the slave trade was unanimously declared the winner. Then Edward Said, the man who made grievance an academic discipline and came up with the word ‘orientalism’ to describe the wrong sort of interest I would be taking in indigenous people on the beach were I taking any sort of interest in anyone, hauled Jane Austen over the coals for ignoring the slave trade. This was the moment I realised the study of literature was over. My best friend became a post-colonialist and I stopped understanding a word he said.

Despite this, I plough my lonely furrow of words. I have a new novel in February, What Will Survive of Us, a title I take from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’. That’s the one in which Larkin notes with ‘sharp tender shock’ that the earl has removed his gauntlet and has been holding the countess’s hand for centuries. The feelings defy the cold stone in which they’re expressed. It’s an elegant poem, similarly defying its own rigidity. If you can read it and not weep a stony tear, you have never held a lover’s hand. I can’t go for long without a hand in my mine. I’ve always been a love poet masquerading as a Rabelaisian novelist, it’s just that no one has noticed. In my new novel, I celebrate love from its first ecstatic minute to its final devotional hour and make fewer jokes, so they have no excuse. ‘They’? I’ve told you, I’m not saying who ‘they’ are. Let’s leave it at their being people who think it’s my job to write about the slave trade.

When did the academy lose its sense of humour? The campus novel, which no one under 45 will have heard of, celebrated the absurdities of academics who knew they counted for nothing in the scheme of things and were therefore heroes of existential inconsequence. The world was safe from the egos of intellectuals so long as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim Dixon and David Lodge’s Philip Swallow were the most potent forces the universities could unleash on a dozy world. But just as suddenly as they appeared, these monsters of nothing worse than redbrick ambition, ineptitude and concupiscence ceded place to post-colonialists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists and apologists for terrorism.

I am wrong about the beach. When I look again I see it is full of intellectuals, presumably in town for an International Conference of the Vanities, sitting on rocks trying to get the black sand out from between their toes. ‘In sum,’ I hear one saying to a small boy who keeps failing to build a sandcastle out of lava, ‘the resurgence of the civic-minded thinker has contributed greatly to the political re-awakening of the public sphere.’ I’m lonely here, not having held a hand in days, so I interpose. ‘You mean as in teaching your students to applaud the rape and slaughter of women and children,’ I say, unthreateningly. ‘That’s if it happened,’ one replies. ‘But then, if it didn’t,’ I persist, ‘who are those hostages whose posters you’re tearing down?’ ‘Friend – what do you think decolonising looks like?’ another asks me. I fire a question back. ‘What doth it profit a man to decolonise the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ If I were a poster he’d rip my face off. This is when I realise why the beach is smouldering. I have blundered into Hell.

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson’s Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings is out now.

I’ll never take culture for granted again

James MacMillan   12:41PM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘Has this been the happiest year of my life?’ I found myself asking recently. It has certainly been topped with the arrival of a third granddaughter last month. (My first, little Sara Maria, died a few years ago.) The birth of Rosie Elisabeth has taken our joy to cosmic levels, but 2023 has been a succession of delights, mainly connected to the concerts I’ve been able to conduct around the globe, from St Louis to Tallinn. After the evils of lockdown, many of us worried that musical life would never return. But it has. I will never, ever take cultural life for granted again.

One highlight this year was the culmination of a huge project at my festival in East Ayrshire, the Cumnock Tryst. ‘Celebration of the Coalfields’ allowed us to work with ten local groups who created their own music and songs, which were subsequently orchestrated for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The groups then joined the orchestra to perform the new music in festival concerts. The local MP Allan Dorans tabled an Early Day Motion at the House of Commons congratulating us, which was a delight.

Sometimes the arts have a more unsettled relationship with politics and ideology, however. A few weeks ago, a new organisation was formed – Freedom in the Arts – which warned that artistic free expression is under attack. Its launching letter to the press (which I signed along with more than 1,000 others) spoke of ‘a new set of moralistic and political attitudes which many institutions and activist groups have adopted as dogma’. A lot of these complex and contested issues – some of which I don’t fully understand yet – seem to revolve around race and sex, and the new body is worried that a large number of arts institutions are discriminating against artists and audiences who do not subscribe to their views.

Yet political interference in culture is not new. A few years ago, Scottish artists were chilled when the SNP’s then culture minister generously decreed: ‘Artists don’t have to be close to government. They just have to have a common understanding of what the country wants.’ Great. Tomorrow I begin work on my new composition, ‘Misfeasance in a Campervan Overture’.

For ‘what the country wants’ read ‘what the political classes and ideological activists want’. This can be different things from place to place and prejudice to prejudice. Politicians should just get out of artists’ faces and stop ‘nudging’ them into the ideologues’ own chosen direction of travel, which is usually issue-driven. Artists have their own ideas of what to express in their work. They don’t need or welcome top-down interference.

I was recently contacted by a German organisation, Artists Against Anti-Semitism, which now sends me its newsletters. There seems to be a huge groundswell around this question in Germany, Austria and France. The newsletters inform me about developments that I never see referenced in British media. Anti-Semitism is on the rise again and AAA keeps me up to speed with news on a Jew-hatred which is sometimes expressed by people in the arts. I was also able to read about the graffiti attack on the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, the cancellation of a Jewish book launch in Vienna ‘for security reasons’, an open letter by German and Austrian filmmakers speaking out against anti-Jewish prejudice in their own industry, a similar initiative undertaken in the German-speaking literary industry, a symposium in Düsseldorf on ‘Answers to Anti-Semitism in Art and Culture’ and an event planned in Esslingen for Youth Against Anti-Semitism involving a lecture, ‘Judenhass Underground’. I wonder if a similar organisation could be established in this country. I would certainly get behind it and I know that many others in the arts here are worried about the way the world’s oldest prejudice is making such an appalling return. Would it attract the same level of support from British artists that it clearly does in Germany and Austria?

A miracle happened to someone close to me earlier this year. Yes, one of those old-fashioned, improbable things one reads about in the lives of the saints or the Bible. And I’ve heard about other similar occurrences in our wider circles of associates. We think it has something to do with Blessed Carlo Acutis, whose intercession had been prayed for. He was the Italian teenager who died of leukaemia in 2006 and was beatified in 2020. His incorrupt body is placed in a glass tomb in the Sanctuary of the Spoliation in Assisi, near to St Francis and St Clare. The official cause for his canonisation is under way at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the Vatican.

This miracle has made some people deliriously happy. Is it indecent to feel that way in this year of pogrom, the beheading of children, new wars and international despair? The expression of joy at this time might be the most radical, counter-cultural thing to do, in striking a blow for Good in its eternal war against Evil.

James MacMillan

Sir James MacMillan CBE is a Scottish composer and conductor. He was Composer-Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from 2000-2009 and of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonie from 2009-2013.

The case for photo-bombing

Yascha Mounk   1:10PM, 14 Dec, 2023

(iStock)

A few months ago, I visited Angkor Wat, the majestic temple in present-day Cambodia that once stood at the centre of a vast empire. As the five towers of the palace came into view, I was, despite the intense heat, fully immersed in the beauty of the place. I imagined how excited a visitor from a faraway land in the 12th century, full of anticipation for a meeting at court, would have felt arriving at what was then the largest settlement on Earth. And like that imaginary visitor, I felt propelled forward, impatient to cross the moat that separated me from the edifice, to get a closer look.

At that moment, I heard a confident American voice. ‘Excuse me,’ the man shouted, as he crouched on the floor, phone in hand. ‘I’m taking a picture.’ I took a few steps back, joining about a dozen people waiting patiently in the scorching sun for the man to take a photo of his wife. As I stood there, I kept thinking: ‘Why are all of us doing this?’

Should everybody be able to visit beautiful sites without having to dodge the photos others are taking?

Much the same happened in other towns and temples I visited on a recent trip to Asia. Whether in Seoul, in Hanoi or in Luang Prabang: at a dozen beautiful sites, it felt as though half the visitors were focused on taking pictures, while the other half were reduced to walking around in elaborate patterns that would, if you traced them on a map, resemble the perimeter of a badly gerry-mandered electoral district.

The question of whether we should feel the need to stop what we are doing when other people are taking a photograph has become an ever-present dilemma. It is a question with admittedly low stakes but one that seems to me to have, if not exactly a moral, then a certain modicum of aesthetic significance. It goes to the heart of how each of us experiences the world and what kind of engagement with our physical surroundings we should collectively prize.

Should people be able to take a picture of their loved ones without running the danger of being ‘photo-bombed’? Or should everybody else be able to visit beautiful sites – or, if they happen to live in a city that attracts a lot of tourists, go about their daily life – without having to dodge the videos and photographs that others are taking?

‘I know how they feel.’

One approach to thinking about this is a term I have loved since first hearing it: obsolete design. It has, for instance, been decades since computers used floppy disks. And yet the button you click to save a file remains a depiction of that long-gone object. The save icon is a prime example of obsolete design.

It seems that there are also forms of obsolete behaviour. Before the advent of digital photography, film was expensive. By walking through your picture, a stranger would make you waste a precious resource. Worse, unless you happened to be using a Polaroid, it was impossible to check on the spot how a photo had come out. You might not even realise that some stranger had ruined your picture until you got the film developed – at which point it would be too late to take it again. All of that provided a strong reason for people to go out of their way to avoid inadvertently photo-bombing each other.

Today, virtually everyone uses digital photography: taking a picture on an iPhone is free. If some stranger is visible in the first picture you take, you have only to wait a few seconds until they move on and take another one.

The risk of a bad surprise has also been eliminated. It now takes minimal effort to inspect your photograph on the spot. So you can make sure you’re happy with what you’ve got well before you fly back home.

At the same time, the advent of digital photography has made it harder to avoid interfering with others’ pictures. Because it has become so much cheaper to take and share pictures, the average person takes many more videos and photographs than in the pre-digital age. Even if the number of visitors to a famous tourist spot or a particularly cute café has not grown in the past few decades, the number of people who are taking pictures at any one time has skyrocketed.

In the past, there were real reasons why we should all try to avoid interfering with each other’s photographs. Since then, the cost of being photo-bombed has fallen, and the cost of avoiding photo-bombing others has risen. The social norms which developed in the age of analogue photography have become a form of obsolete behaviour in the age of the iPhone.

What’s more, besides the practical case for photo-bombing, there is also a more aesthetic case to be made. As I felt on my recent travels, the ease of taking pictures creates a great temptation to experience any sight, no matter how awe-inspiring, mediated through the small screens of our smartphones. When I saw beautiful temples or ancient ruins, I knew full well that I would, if I ever needed a visual reminder of them, be able to call up perfectly composed, professionally taken photographs with a quick Google search. And yet I could not resist the temptation to interrupt my contemplation of their beauty to take my own mediocre snap. The ubiquity of digital photography makes it much harder for any of us to marvel at the wonders of the world.

It would be bizarre, impractical and authoritarian to forbid tourists from taking pictures at beautiful sites, just to help them have a more meaningful experience. The one thing that we can do is to shift our norms in a small way. The least we can do is to stop guilting people into prioritising others’ ability to take a photo over their own opportunity to feel in communion with a beautiful place.

The right to photo-bomb should not be misconstrued as encouragement to be an asshole. If you can easily avoid walking through someone’s photograph without disrupting your enjoyment of a place, you may as well do so.

But for the most part, it is time for a change of attitude. The next time I am rushing through the streets of London or visiting a special place like Angkor Wat, I will do my best to ignore all the people taking pictures. You should claim the same freedom for yourself.

Yascha Mounk

Political scientist, contributor to the Atlantic, and author of People vs Democracy.

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

Brian Cox   1:17PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Sam Falconer]

One thing upon which my friend Jeremy Clarke and I always agreed is the value of seeing the world from different points of view. In that sense we partially agreed on everything. This essential skill needs to be learned, and I assert that nature is a wonderful teacher. Perhaps the most surprising and bamboozling example can be found in the study of black holes.

Here are two apparently contradictory properties of black holes. When viewed from the outside, time stops on the event horizon – the boundary that marks the black hole’s edge, beyond which light cannot escape – and anyone attempting to cross into the interior would be seen frozen there forever. From the perspective of an astronaut falling into a supermassive black hole, however, nothing unusual happens as she travels across the horizon and into the interior, although she would be trapped in a flowing river of space carrying her to oblivion.

At the heart of the black hole lies the singularity. It is tempting to picture this as an infinitely dense point in space. More correctly, it should be viewed as a moment in time – the end of time, according to Einstein’s theory, because it lies inexorably in the future of all those who cross the event horizon, just as tomorrow lies inexorably in your future. This was known to physicists before anyone had ever observed a black hole. If it all sounds confusing, you are in good company. Einstein’s contemporary, Sir Arthur Eddington, commented that ‘there should be a law of nature to prevent stars from behaving in this absurd way’. Well, there isn’t, they do, and we must face the consequences.

If the countless black holes are cosmic erasers that delete information, we need a radical rethink

In the early 1970s, a series of papers, including the evocatively titled ‘Black Hole Explosions’ by Stephen Hawking, laid the foundations for a 50-year intellectual struggle known as the black hole information paradox. The paradox concerns the fate of things that cross the horizon and, according to the Einsteinian picture, meet their fate at the end of time. The problem uncovered by Hawking is that black holes do not live forever. Using the other great pillar of 20th-century physics – quantum theory – Hawking showed that black holes glow, albeit extremely faintly. So important was this discovery that Hawking’s equation for the temperature of a black hole is now chiselled on his memorial stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey. The essential point is that anything that glows must lose energy and therefore shrink, and Hawking’s calculation showed that a black hole gets hotter and hotter as it shrinks until, one day in the far future, it vanishes, leaving only Hawking radiation behind.

The paradox occurs because, according to Hawking’s calculation, the radiation that remains is devoid of all information; it is as featureless as it is possible to be. The implication is that no trace of anything that ever fell into the black hole is left when the black hole has gone. But – and here is the paradox – according to quantum theory, information is never destroyed. Leonard Susskind, one of the pioneers of black hole physics, wrote in his memoir The Black Hole War: ‘Stephen claimed that information is lost in black hole evaporation… if this was true, the foundations of our subject [physics] were destroyed.’ The reason he, and pretty much everyone else, was worried about information loss is that all the known laws of physics are deterministic. If we know everything there is to know about something – the universe, for example – then we expect to be able to calculate what that thing was doing in the past and what it will do in the future. This is what we mean by determinism. But if the countless millions of black holes that populate the universe are cosmic erasers that delete information, we need a radical rethink.

The outline of a solution to this existential challenge to physics has been discovered over the last few years, and it has (and I write this without casual hyperbole) profound consequences for our picture of reality.

Let’s return to an astronaut diving across the horizon and into the black hole. From her perspective she crosses the horizon and approaches the singularity, but before she arrives, she is ‘spaghettified’ – ripped apart and scrambled into her atomic constituents by powerful gravitational tidal forces. At this point, Einstein’s theory breaks down as space and time dissolve away in unfathomable violence. When Hawking’s quantum calculations are added to the mix, however, a different picture emerges. If a colleague watches from afar, he concludes that his intrepid friend was vaporised by highly energetic Hawking radiation before she crossed the horizon. Which picture is correct? Is the astronaut spaghettified or vaporised? We now believe that both views are valid. This wild idea is known as black hole complementarity. Let us call it a Third Way.

In 2019, two groups proved that Hawking’s 1975 calculation was incomplete, and all the information contained in everything that fell into a black hole throughout its lifetime ends up imprinted in the Hawking radiation. Key to this discovery was the realisation that the inside of the black hole is, in a sense we don’t yet understand, the same place as the outside. One speculative picture holds that the singularity can be seen as a tangled mass of quantum wormholes connecting the interior of the black hole to far-distant regions of space and time outside the event horizon. Whatever the explanation, the outcome is the same. The astronaut is spaghettified from one perspective and vaporised from another, but either way the information about the astronaut ends up imprinted in the Hawking radiation. Reality may be strange, but it is logically consistent.

This ‘dual’ picture – two radically different and yet equivalent views of reality – hints that space and time as we perceive them are not fundamental properties of the universe. It seems that they emerge from, to borrow another phrase from Einstein, something deeply hidden – a quantum theory in which there is no space and no time. And, in an intriguing twist, it appears our reality may be encoded in the underlying quantum theory using a method that computer scientists have discovered that allows for information to be encoded in the memory of quantum computers in an error-tolerant way. I do not think this is evidence we live in a simulation, but it does suggest our universe behaves like a quantum computer. In the 20th century, one might have concluded that God is a mathematician. A 21st-century understanding suggests ‘The Old One’ may be a computer geek.

Wherever this research leads, the lesson from nature is clear. Looking at a thing from different points of view is not a luxury but a necessity if we aspire to develop a deep understanding. And I assert that this is a universal truth, whether one’s interest is in understanding black holes or running a country.

Brian Cox

Professor Brian Cox’s Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe is out now.

Alexa, do you love me?

Louise Perry   1:37PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Still from Her, 2013 (Alamy)

My husband and I got a Peloton bike for the usual reasons: because we were time-poor, money-rich and feeling fat. And we kept using it for the usual reason: because we wanted to please the gorgeous ghosts in the machine.

The American fitness brand Peloton employs some of the most beautiful, athletic and charismatic people ever to have lived. Their job is not actually to teach an effective class to the viewers at home on their stationary bikes, or to make their users healthier and slimmer (I have accomplished neither). Rather, it is to give an impression of warmth and intimacy while staring at a silent camera lens in an empty room.

My favourite coaches (since you asked) are Tumi, Ally, Emma and Denis, the last of whom has a particularly passionate following among older ladies. His fan club, ‘Denis’s Menaces’, has more than 16,000 members on Facebook and sells T-shirts emblazoned with the word ‘MENACE’.

There is a perennial Mumsnet debate about whether children ought to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an Alexa

Sometimes Peloton classes are held with an audience in the room, cycling along with the viewers at home, and diehard fans will show up in the front row with T-shirts honouring their coach. I don’t like it when that happens. It reminds me that Denis and I do not in fact have a precious and unique relationship, and that really I am just a fan, like all these other crazy women.

My relationship with Denis is a parasocial one. That is, it resembles a social relationship, in that I feel a sense of affinity and familiarity when his face pops up on screen. But we are not actually friends, for the simple reason that he has no idea who I am (unless, of course, he is a Spectator reader – in which case, Denis, do get in touch).

We are living in the age of the parasocial relationship, which is not to say that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Celebrity pre-dates radio, television and even print media. But modern technology – in particular, on-demand audiovisual entertainment – is particularly effective at conjuring the impression of social intimacy.

The term ‘parasocial’ was coined in a 1956 paper by the sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who argued that television offered the potential for a new kind of relationship. ‘Often [the TV star] faces the spectator,’ they observed, ‘uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately.’ In other words, the viewer could easily get the impression that this collection of pixels was talking directly to them, and a one-sided relationship could thus develop.

The television of the 1950s had nothing on the podcast for parasocial effect, not least because headphones exaggerate the impression of intimacy due to a phenomenon called ‘in-head localisation’ – that is, they make it seem as if the voices are coming from inside your head. The point of the podcast is not to convey information, since text is a far more efficient medium for that purpose. Chris Williamson, host of the wildly successful podcast Modern Wisdom, describes his job as that of a ‘vibe architect’, a phrase I often think of, both while recording my own podcast and while consuming other people’s. Like most listeners, I turn to my favourite podcasts when I long for a specific vibe: that is, when I want to experience the pleasure of spending time with friends without any of the effort of brushing my hair, leaving my house, or being nice.

The age of the parasocial relationship has affected children just as profoundly as adults, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Research suggests that beloved TV characters can perform the same function as imaginary friends, encouraging children to practise social skills even while alone. Our two-year-old has a passionate love for the children’s media star Zog, an orange dragon who looks and behaves more like a chubby labrador than a monster. Does he believe that Zog is ‘real’? Yes, maybe. Having seen Zog walk and talk on TV, our son now pretends to feed, dress and soothe the cuddly toy version to sleep. This strikes me as a nice (and cute) example of a parasocial playmate.

But parasocial relationships can easily become weird, particularly for young children, since they are even less capable than adults of psychologically separating them from real ones. One 2021 study of families who owned an ‘artificial intelligent conversational agent’ – e.g. an Amazon Alexa or Google Echo – found that a majority of children under the age of six believed their AI servant to be alive, and would ask it questions based on that assumption. (My favourite example was ‘Alexa, are you a princess?’)

A perennial debate on the parenting forum Mumsnet concerns whether or not children ought to be taught to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an Alexa. There is definitely something displeasing about seeing a child speak rudely to an apparently anthropomorphic agent. But, then again, perhaps we should be teaching our children to maintain a healthy distrust for AI? A famous line from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be applied just as well to modern technology as it can be to magical objects: ‘Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.’

You don’t have to be a full-on millenarian about the threat from super intelligent AI to believe that parasocial relationships ought to be treated with caution. The 2013 film Her presents a particularly plausible vision of one possible AI future. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely man who falls in love with the disembodied voice of his AI personal assistant, played by Scarlett Johansson. This AI is entirely unlike HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that the only threat she presents is in her niceness – she is such pleasant company that her owner no longer feels the need to spend time with flesh-and-blood people and so becomes increasingly reclusive, along with many of his friends and neighbours who have also fallen in love with a computer program that can’t love them back.

The pleasure of the parasocial relationship lies in the fact that, unlike a real relationship, it is effortless, voluntary and uncomplicated. And therein also lies its peril.

Louise Perry

Louise Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and host of the podcast Maiden Mother Matriarch.

The dying art of thank-you letters

Ysenda Maxtone Graham   9:07AM, 14 Dec, 2023

iStock

‘Still no word of thanks. No letter, no email, no text. No acknowledgement that it even arrived. Did it arrive? Did I post it to the wrong postcode? Did I tap in the wrong account number? Of course it arrived. He just can’t be bothered to thank me. Such bad manners! I blame his mother for not bringing him up properly.’

These are the insomniac thoughts of the older generation as they try to come to terms with the younger generation’s bewildering non-thanking habit. The silence of early January, the non-landing of letters from grandchildren and godchildren on the mat, the non-pinging of affectionate emails of gratitude, really pains them, brought up as they were on the belief that writing thank-you letters is good manners, and good manners mean everything.

As soon as parental control loosens, thank-you letter writing goes the way of shoe polishing and toenail cutting

I asked a cohort of grandparents and godparents in their sixties, seventies and eighties about their experiences of the younger generation’s etiquette of thanking, and the response was overwhelmingly along the lines of: ‘I’m grateful these days if I get any written thanks from my grandchildren or godchildren in any form. It certainly doesn’t need to be a handwritten letter.’ ‘They don’t, on the whole, register thanks. This I lament,’ said one. ‘Rare to get any response at all, even for quite large 21st-birthday cheques,’ said another. ‘Astonishing how godchildren don’t thank.’ ‘I think our elder lot of grandchildren (when still under parental control) were the last children in England to write thank-you letters for Christmas presents.’ These people have learned to be pathetically grateful for any crumb of acknowledgement from the young darlings, who might have bothered to move their thumbs enough to tap the text: ‘Thanks for the lovely present, I really look forward to spending it xx.’

Gone, it seems, are the days of agonised New Year’s Day pen-sucking, when those of us brought up in the 20th century had to sit in front of a blank sheet of headed writing paper, trying to think of something nice to say about the masonry drill or the cassette case, whether we liked them or not, and remembering the rules: never begin with the words ‘thank you’ (too predictable); always go on to the second side; at the very least, express thanks and add ‘one other piece of news’; always use a first-class stamp. It was never fun, but for those half-hours we were actively thinking of the giver, forcing ourselves to dream up words and information they might be gratified to hear.

‘If you think this is dismal you should see the real world.’

Today’s under-12s are still under parental control enough to put up with this annual agony, but the habit and sense of duty clearly aren’t being drilled into them brutally enough, because as soon as parental control loosens, thank-you letter writing goes the way of shoe polishing and toenail cutting.

One respondent said to me: ‘This year I’ve decided I’m not giving presents to any godchild who didn’t thank me last year. I have six godchildren and am only sending one present this year.’ That’s the sanction the older generation has up its sleeve: withdrawal of beneficence. Does such a drastic measure serve the non-thankers right? I asked the question to The Spectator’s Dear Mary, Mary Killen, herself an assiduous writer of thank-you cards and emails. She said she’d recently met a man who’d told her that his godson had sent him a text just saying ‘Thnx’, after he’d got him a job. ‘Which effectively means he won’t be helping him again.’

‘It hasn’t sunk into the young, who are in other ways really nice people,’ said Mary, ‘that in the generation above them, who hold all the money and the power, it is a real black mark not to write and thank for things. By not thanking, they are micro-spoiling the life of the benefactor by leaving them in a void of waiting. Just as young people crave “likes” on Instagram, the older generation want feedback and endorsement if they have given a present or party, so if they hear nothing at all, it’s a bit of a micro-aggression.’

Perhaps the effect of written thanks has been so debased by the endless corporate thanks pouring into our phones (‘Thank you for being our valued customer’, ‘Thank you for choosing us. Please let us know how we did’) that people in their twenties have no craving for the word ‘thank you’, and see no reason why anyone else would. Not that some of them don’t write marvellous thank-you emails; I’ve been shown a few, by friends who have recently received them, and the best ones are brimming with liveliness and gratitude. Emails do seem to flow better than letters; one older man I asked said he actively preferred thank-you emails as they were ‘immediate and full of the life of the party’, while letters could be more stale and stilted. The downside to thank-you emails, though, is that they demand a response: a thanks for the thanks, whereas with a handwritten letter, the case is closed.

The tradition of thank-you letter writing is still very much alive among the over–sixties, some of whom write ‘by return of post’ and listen to the alarming sound of their thank-you letter falling into the bottom of the almost-empty pillar box, signalling the dying of the art. Nicholas Coleridge, one of the most punctilious thankers I know, tells me: ‘My normal practice is to write all thank-you letters the next morning and post them in the so-called priority postbox. A handwritten thank you should be one and a half to two sides, and should show evidence of paying attention by referencing actual conversation, jokes, activities or anecdotes from the evening or weekend. Sometimes we receive thank-you letters from friends of our children which begin, “Thank you for inviting me to stay for the Bank Holiday at your house Wolverton Hall near Pershore in Worcestershire”, like a police witness statement.’

The arbiter of taste Nicky Haslam agrees. ‘We storytellers want a story, or even a drawing. It’s not enough to say “thank you for a lovely evening”. An email is fine, as long as there’s something specific and funny in it.’

‘And your godchildren?’ I asked him. ‘Do they write to thank you for presents?’

‘I don’t think they know how to write,’ he said. ‘And they’re all much too busy getting divorced.’

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Cornwall’s fishermen are being drowned by bureaucracy

Tanya Gold   9:21AM, 14 Dec, 2023

[John Broadley]

Bill Johnson is the assistant harbour master in Mousehole and skipper of the pilot Jen, a small boat of the inshore fleet. I know him because in summer, when tourists fill the tiny harbour with pleasure craft, he stands on the wharf offering conversation and advice. He is, of course, regarding the wreckage of Mousehole as a centre of the pilchard industry and home to Cornish people. A century ago, the harbour was a forest of masts: now just six fishing boats sail out of here. The rest are kayaks and paddleboards. But Bill is a kindly man, and he smiles on them.

Fishermen were poster boys for Brexit, much lauded, discussed and used. It was easy to persuade them to the cause: fishermen understand freedom. They crave it, rising at dawn to chase the fish, and again at dusk, when the fish bite up again. But the promised six-mile limit hasn’t materialised yet, licences are a nightmare of bureaucracy and avarice, regulation is chaotic and expanding, and the seafood industry hasn’t recovered from the paperwork Brexit brought. Even so, the Cornish inshore fleet of small boats hasn’t suffered a blow as grievous as the one Bill wants to talk to me about: the medical certificates imposed at the end of November. Master fishermen might labour under bureaucracy, they might be poorer, they might grumble about this and that, but they never imagined a Conservative government would stop them fishing.

Regulation is expanding, and the seafood industry hasn’t recovered from the paperwork Brexit brought

I meet Bill in the Old Ship on Mousehole harbour. He grew up in Paul, the village on the hill, and moved here when he was 17. He crabbed part-time while working as a gardener, then moved to a big boat. ‘That’s what you do here. You just fish.’ Fifty years ago, his first pay packet was £250, more than seven times his gardening wage: a fortune. ‘There was a lot more freedom on what we could catch and what we could land,’ he says. ‘We could land any fish we caught.’ Now he fishes for ‘anything you can get over the rail and sell at the fish market. Pilchards, red mullet, pollock, bass, cod and hake.’ As the sea warms, Mediterranean fish are coming: red mullet, bream and octopus. Mackerel is moving north to colder water, but tuna chase them. Crayfish, crabs and lobsters are declining. Fishermen are adaptive by nature. They have to be.

Bill’s trajectory is common: older fisher-men use smaller boats. But since Brexit, which promised an end to bureaucracy, they are drowning in the same bureaucracy that big boats need. Bill must record his catch on an app when he is still at sea. ‘If it’s more than 10 per cent out, I can be prosecuted. I have to weigh it on the boat – it’s impossible. The app doesn’t work here of course.’ It’s easy on a big boat with a big catch, he says, but for him, with ‘ten species of 500g apiece, not so much’.

There are new safety codes written by people who don’t understand boats (though there are grants for upgrades). There are trackers, but implementation has been chaotic, with approval for certain suppliers being withdrawn. (Again, there is a grant, but not everyone has the money to lay out.) They are worried about cameras on boats coming next, which is absurd: these are boats that rarely fish out of sight of land.

By far the worst threat is the medical certificate: the dreaded ML5, valid for five years, or one year if you are over 65. It’s part of a 2017 international convention that Ireland, for instance, has opted out of. Without the ML5, the fisherman will not be able to sell his catch. This will consign the elder fisherman to a dystopia which I, an outsider, find extraordinary. He will be a tourist in his own land, yet deprived of means. Bill had a triple heart bypass: he fears he will not pass.

Others fear this too and are already leaving. Bill knows an elderly fisherman at Penberth who gave up because he couldn’t work the app. Another left because he feared he was going to fail the medical. He will keep his hand in by making nets. Hundreds of small boats are for sale all over Britain. Bill notes ‘the stress that it’s having on people. Such a long wait to lose their job, lose their livelihood.’ The average wage of an inshore fisherman is £20,000 a year, but fishermen are gamblers. You could net £1,000 of bass before breakfast. If it’s stormy and no one else is out, prices go up. There’s always one madman. Now he will have to work in Lidl, or not at all.

They lobbied, but were told it was unfair to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The RNLI, of course, is crewed by fishermen, who would rather be picking up fishermen than kayakers who paddle to Lamorna on a rising tide and can’t get back. Bill says there hasn’t been a shout for a fisherman with an underlying condition in a small boat as far back as he can remember. Usually it’s French trawlermen chopping their arms off, or people who buy blow-up paddleboards in Lidl: ‘Next thing they are six miles off, being brought back. There are more shouts for the lifeboat from the, er, leisure industry than from the commercial industry.’ He’s being polite. There’s a letter of commendation on the wall of the Sennen lifeboat house congratulating the coxswain on not punching a kayaker who, though his life was in danger, didn’t want to get in the lifeboat because he thought knew better than the coxswain. (That was the subtext at least. I wonder if the kayaker was a civil servant.)

Bill understands safety at sea. He served on the Solomon Browne. ‘It’s usually a commercial fisherman that sees the distress and raises the alarm to get them [paddleboarders and kayakers] saved,’ he says. ‘The more eyes out there, the safer it is for everyone.’ And, he adds: ‘It’s safer to have a heart attack on sea than land and wait for an ambulance.’ The ambulance wait times here are as notorious as the Dogs of Scilly: they are more likely to kill you.

All this makes no sense to the fishermen, who understand that a government that promised freedom is now taking the remnants of it away, and for what? Fishing, Bill says, is an avenue to well-paid, independent work. But few lads want to work in an overregulated industry. The small boats do less damage to the seabed and fish stocks. Beam trawlers are ‘raping and pillaging the seabed. Deep sea netters are hammering the grounds.’ Big crabbers have so many pots that they lose them, and lost pots are filled with ‘ghost fish’, lobsters that are never pulled upand die in the pot. Young lobsters go in to eat the dead and suffer the same fate. It’s a meta-phor for the treatment of the inshore fleet, I think: pointlessness, ruin, waste.

The fishermen understand that a government that promised freedom is now taking the remnants of it away

‘Do you eat fish?’ Bill asks me, curiously. I like white fish, I tell him. ‘I like fishing for Dover Sole,’ he says. ‘They always hold their price – £25 a kilo. Once you skin them, they are so sweet, they’re lovely. Don’t have to burn a lot of oil to get there, at most half a mile.’ He points west, towards Lamorna. The fishermen, he says, are ‘the last of the hunters. The things you see, particularly in the early morning! Fish rashing, dolphins feeding on the fish that are rashing, the sunrise, the western shore: passing the cliffs at Porthcurno Cove with the sun on them, what a commute to work. Yeah, the best – every day is different, every catch is different.’ He says he went out in a group of four boats recently. ‘All four [men] had open heart surgery and all of us chasing the mackerel towards the Lizard. There must be something about this job that keeps us going. Now they are trying to stop all that.’ Twenty years ago, there were 20 boats fishing out of Mousehole. In 20 years, he thinks there will be none.

So this is a war on small boats, a race towards generic and unhappy lives. Who will save the small boats? Not the big boats, who are pleased to lose the competition. Not government, who legislate like men who have never been in a boat. For small boat fishermen, who overwhelmingly voted for Brexit, this is the final insult. They were promised so much: a Brexit boom, and the trumpet call of freedom. Instead, they got more over-regulation than Ireland, and this.

A few weeks ago, I get a message from Bill. He failed the medical. I ring him, and he sounds resigned, but he’s a Cornishman. This is a duchy that increasingly exists for others. There’s not much left to strip away.

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.

The literary canon of P.G. Wodehouse

Charles Moore   1:19PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Illustration: Anna Trench

When T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, it was seen as a masterpiece of modernism. It was, but it was also a work steeped in cultural tradition. This was made apparent in the ‘Notes on The Waste Land’ with which Eliot supplemented his poem. In them, he glossed its literary echoes – the Upanishads, Dante, Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, etc.

Another master of the modern who came to his greatest flourishing between the world wars was P.G. Wodehouse. Though seven years older than Eliot, Wodehouse first achieved real fame at much the same time, after the publication of The Inimitable Jeeves in 1923. Like Eliot’s, his work’s modernity, making such innovative use of the main literary traditions of the West, would have been unimaginable in the 19th century. But Wodehouse produced no ‘Notes on Jeeves’, or on any of his oeuvre, to guide the potentially perplexed reader. Had he done so, he would have risked over-explaining, thus killing his main intended effect, which was to make people laugh.

Being funny requires artistry. It is a demanding craft now practised by a skilled few, like dry stonewalling

For this reason, there is a strong case for maintaining a Wodehousian silence about the Master’s references; but I have decided that two arguments point the other way.

The first is that many of his cultural allusions, wholly familiar to the English middle classes, especially English public schoolboys, from the 19th century to the 1980s, are now forgotten. They need rescuing, or rather, for scholars have ploughed this furrow, re-rescuing.

The second is that, in the 21st century, the word ‘comedy’ tends to mean a left-wing person standing up to swear and shout against fossil fuels, Boris Johnson, ‘homophobia’ and so on. In the 20th century, by contrast, comedy involved being funny. That art now requires elucidation before it is, as Wodehouse might have put it, ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre, and spats’. Being funny requires artistry. It is a demanding craft practised only by a skilled few, like dry stonewalling.

Samuel Johnson famously complained of the 17th-century Metaphysical Poets that, in their work, ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. But what Wodehouse saw, as Johnson perhaps did not, was that such yokings can be funny. For his art, the joke of the yoke lay in the contrast between the epic, romantic, scriptural or classical sublimity of the original words from great literature and the invariably farcical situations he described.

In the case of Wodehouse’s best-known creations, the idle aristocrat Bertie and his valet Jeeves, the joke has an added layer. In the great tradition of master/servant comedy, Bertie is the damned fool and Jeeves the learned sage. Thus: ‘“Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,” said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.’ That is a quotation from the fool in King Lear, and perhaps a nod to Robert Browning’s poem of that name. Bertie likes to repeat and apply such quotations, but he mangles them as he does so. He often believes that Jeeves himself invented them.

This deployment of the high style occurs in most Wodehouse, but Jeeves and Wooster display it most clearly. To illustrate this, I have used only one book, his novel, The Code of the Woosters, first published in 1938, and widely regarded as Wodehouse’s most successful full-length work. It concerns the troubles which ensue when Bertie is persuaded by his beloved Aunt Dahlia to steal a silver cow-creamer from the grim Sir Watkyn Bassett. Unusually for Wodehouse, the book also contains political satire. The vast and preposterous Roderick Spode, associate of Sir Watkyn, is the bullying leader of an extremist movement (this is the late 1930s, remember) called the Black Shorts.

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as Bertie Wooster and Reginald Jeeves in the period comedy Jeeves And Wooster, circa 1990 (Getty Images)

The opening page of The Code of the Woosters contains two literary references of the sort described.

The first immediately establishes the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Bertie is in bed with a hangover. He summons Jeeves under the impression that it is evening. Jeeves explains it is morning. ‘Are you sure?’ asks Bertie, ‘It seems very dark outside.’ ‘There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ The quotation Jeeves deploys is from Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’, unattributed.

‘Season of what?’

‘Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.’ [Note the comic effect achieved by inserting the ‘sir’ at just that point.]

‘…Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?’

Words from literature lurk in Bertie’s mind (if that is the right word for what he calls his ‘bean’)

The second reference is Biblical. Wooster needs Jeeves’s bracer because of carousing the night before: ‘I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head – not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones.’ In the Book of Judges (4:21), Jael slays Sisera who, as commander of King Jabin’s army, had been oppressing the Israelites, while he sleeps. According to chapter four, verse 21, she ‘smote the nail into his temples and fastened it to the ground… So he died.’

By my count, The Code of the Woosters contains 85 such references, including some that are repeated and varied, such as ‘quills on the fretful porpentine’ (Hamlet), or the frequent comparison of Bertie with the heroic Sydney Carton in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. (‘Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’ ‘Sidney [sic] Carton, miss.’) Such invocations are mostly classical, Biblical (or from hymns) or literary. A few are proverbial with no known original, or references to historical legends, such as Isaac Newton exclaiming ‘Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowst what thou hast done’, when his dog –with whom Bertie ruefully compares himself – ate the notes of his scientific discoveries.

There may, of course, be allusions I have failed to detect. Some words sound like literary references but I cannot source them, such as the phrase ‘hoggish slumber’, much favoured by Wodehouse. It sounds Shakespearean, but isn’t.

The actual code of the Woosters, the motto by which Bertie says his family lives, is ‘Never let a pal down’. The literary code of the Woosters is much more complicated.

Decoding Wodehouse’s quotations, echoes and allusions by author or other source, I find as follows:

The Bible (always the Authorised Version): 15 references (four Psalms, two passages from Matthew’s Gospel, one from Luke’s; two from Judges; and one from Proverbs, Job, Isaiah, Exodus, Daniel and the first Epistle of Peter); plus three hymns.

Shakespeare: 14 (from Sonnet 33, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest).

Keats: three.

Dickens: three.

Shelley: two.

Byron: two.

Tennyson: two.

Longfellow: two.

Kipling: two.

Robert Browning: two.

Matthew Arnold: two.

Troubadour poets: two.

Juvenal: two.

And one reference each to Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Goldsmith, Homer, W.E. Henley, Leigh Hunt, Marlowe, Baroness Orczy and Felicia Hemans. Then there are mentions of, rather than quotations from, Damocles, Archimedes (who comes up a lot, always in his bath), ‘Venus from the foam’, the Mona Lisa and the painting ‘The Soul’s Awakening’ by James Sant RA; plus remarks on the nature of Greek tragedy.

This range of reference and the relative numbers of mentions almost perfectly reflect the hierarchy of knowledge that would have been imparted to children, particularly boys, in all good schools.

So does Wodehouse’s choice of quotations. He almost always picks the passages which were best-known and recited young. Thus the words of Byron which appear are nothing sophisticated or sensual from Don Juan, but the most famous line from ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’: ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.’ The presence of Felicia Hemans is attributable to the only lines she wrote which everyone knew (from her poem ‘Casabianca’): ‘The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled.’ Baroness Orczy’s work is cited (not by name) because Bertie recalls a historical novel ‘about a Buck or Beau or some such cove who, when it became necessary to put people where they belonged, was in the habit of laughing down from lazy eyelids and flicking a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at his wrists’. Bertie claims he ‘had had excellent results from modelling myself on this bird’.

Most readers were sufficiently familiar with the story to work out that he was talking about The Scarlet Pimpernel. But part of the joke was also that dimmer readers would resemble Bertie in only half-remembering what they had once heard, and would enjoy laughing at themselves about that.

Bertie is, in a way, much affected by literature. Its words lurk in his mind (if that is the right word for what he calls his ‘bean’), having been put there either by his school or by Jeeves and almost never by reading the book in question (though he did win the Scripture Prize at prep school – ‘a handsomely bound copy of a devotional work whose name has escaped me’).

The words often surface, but confusedly. When Jeeves asks his master if he plans to obey Aunt Dahlia and steal the cow-creamer, Bertie answers: ‘That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can’t make up my mind. You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait on something? You know who I mean – the cat chap.’ ‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”, like the poor cat i’the adage.’ (See Macbeth, Act I, scene vii, Lady Macbeth speaking.)

Once lodged in Bertie’s bean, an image tends to recur, slightly modified. He later plucks up his courage to enter the small drawing room of Sir Watkyn’s country house and remove the silver cow from its case. ‘My frame of mind,’ he records, ‘was more or less that of a cat in an adage.’ He fishes out the cow-creamer, but is surprised by Roderick Spode, whose shotgun was ‘pointing in a negligent sort of way at my third waistcoat button’. Later still in the book, Bertie’s goofy friend Gussie Fink-Nottle is found ‘doing the old cat-in-an-adage stuff’.

Not every image needed Jeevesian elucidation, however. Thus the village policeman, Constable Oates, is ‘prowling in the rain like the troops of Midian’. Readers required no reminding that these Midianites are to be found in J.M. Neale’s Victorian version of the old hymn by St Andrew of Crete, ‘Christian, does thou see them’. Similarly, when Bertie declares, apropos of the ruthless Stiffy Byng, ‘Kipling was right. D. than the m’, he knew this was all he needed for readers to recognise the line ‘The female of her species is more deadly than the male.’

I come back to Eliot, and to the Metaphysical Poets. In an essay published in 1921, the former praised the latter as the last writers who did not suffer from the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ characteristic of more modern times. The Metaphysicals had the gift, he wrote, of ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience’. I would argue that Wodehouse had that gift, though in quite a different form and for entirely non-metaphysical purposes. That is one of the reasons why he is funny, comedy being the chief register of the disparate. A world which has now almost passed loved him for it.

I would also argue that he bestowed that gift upon Bertie Wooster. A well-equipped  ‘poet’s mind’, wrote Eliot, ‘is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences’. In Wodehouse’s hands, this is true not only of poets but of his most famous fathead.

As I said, The Code of the Woosters begins with two images drawn from great literature. It ends with two more.

Having, thanks to Jeeves, defeated Spode and Sir Watkyn, and secured the cow-creamer, Bertie retires to bed, switches off the light and reflects: ‘Jeeves was right, I felt. The snail was on the wing and the lark on the thorn – or, rather, the other way round – and God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.’ That is Bertie’s version of ‘Pippa Passes’, by Browning.

He ends with an image drowsily drawn from his memory: ‘…presently the eyes closed, the muscles relaxed, the breathing became soft and regular, and sleep, which does something which has slipped my mind to the something sleeve of care, poured over in a healing wave.’ The reference is from Macbeth, Act II, scene ii, in which sleep ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’. Thus are the successful pinching of a cow-creamer and a bloody Shakespearean murder committed out of power hunger ‘yoked by violence together’.

Charles Moore

Charles Moore is a former editor of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

How to make an Old Fashioned, by Kendall Jenner

Kendall Jenner   1:27PM, 14 Dec, 2023

This Old Fashioned is my go-to for the holiday season. The rich and complex flavour of the tequila pairs so well with bitters and orange. It’s made to be savoured and is a classic Old Fashioned with a twist. I made this cocktail with my mom over the summer for National Tequila Day. It has become one of our favourites ever since.

Ingredients

- 75 ml 818 Tequila Añejo

- 1 sugar cube

- 2 dashes of Angostura bitters

- A splash of water

- A twist of orange peel

- 1 cocktail cherry

Preparation

1. Add bitters, water and sugar to glass.

2. Muddle to make a paste.

3. Add ice cube and tequila.

4. Garnish with a cocktail cherry and orange peel.

Enjoy!

Kendall Jenner

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

Nigel Kennedy   1:08PM, 14 Dec, 2023

My dog Sonny broke my finger earlier this year. He’s a Chart Polski, which translates as ‘Polish sighthound’, and he’s one of about 700 in the world. I was trying to stop him from going after a deer. Even with a muzzle, he could’ve felled it. Chart Polskis hurl themselves in front of the deer’s legs to trip it with their impossibly strong necks. On this occasion, Sonny, who I named after the boxer Sonny Liston, pulled me down a mountain. Because of my broken finger, I came up with a new temporary playing technique. I figured that if the jazz great Django Reinhardt could play guitar with two fingers, then I could have a go on the violin with three. I played a couple of gigs in Germany and no one noticed the difference. Either that’s an indictment of my playing or their knowledge as an audience. A lot of musicians have their fingers insured, but I’ve never bothered. Why pay some monkey behind a desk to do nothing?

I live in a little village in the Pieniny mountains, in the south-east of Poland. Christmas celebrations here begin on 24 December with Wigilia, a meat-free, booze-free supper served when the first star appears in the sky, followed by Shepherd’s Mass in the village church at the end of the evening. Most years I play with a local highlander band at the mass. These guys have all got so-called real jobs, but in their spare time they play the most glorious traditional music. Sometimes kids of 12 or 13 come up to play with them, so the music is handed on to the next generation. I’m not Catholic, but I like being part of the community here because it’s so small. My Polish isn’t great, so during the sermons, when I don’t have a clue what’s being said, I look around, admiring the beauty of the church, while other band members break their abstinence by sneaking out the back for homemade vodka between songs.

There are only about 80 households in our village and now there are also 40 or so Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children who don’t know if they are going to see their husbands or fathers again. Poland has taken in more Ukrainians than any other country since the war began – one and a half million – and the new arrivals are proving to be a bit of a strain on health services, social security and education. Yet even in a small, tight-knit village like this one, I don’t sense any resentment whatsoever. A friend of mine who normally rents his spare rooms to families for holidays has decided to give up this chunk of his income while he looks after Ukrainians. A year and a half later, he doesn’t give it a second thought.

What interests me is the emotional intelligence of music, not the formal aspects, which might be why I like old film music so much. I’ve been playing Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence a lot lately. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who composed the music for the 1983 David Bowie film, is a beautifully sensitive musician and I have an affinity with his music in the same way that I have with Bach or Jimi Hendrix. I’ve not written a film score before but it’s my ambition to do so. I’m used to working with moving images. When I’m back in England I practise playing along to Judge Judy (not that there is much relationship between Bach and Judy). Cricket is also great to play to because it’s so slow-moving. I can take my eyes off it for a minute and when I look back nothing has happened, except one batsman has got a bit fatter.

That said, I don’t go back to England very often these days. During the pandemic I was so grateful I lived in the mountains among people who don’t give a toss about whatever the World Health Organisation is saying. You can’t tell a highlander what to do. Nobody wore masks or adhered to any lockdown and the police never bothered to do anything about it. While I was carrying on with my life as normal, I read with horror the stories on the BBC about people reporting each other to the authorities for going out jogging twice in a day, or for sitting too close to someone on a park bench. It’s as if some people were envious of the Poles for having lived under communism and they were desperate to become little informants themselves. I have to believe the dire picture I formed of home wasn’t the truth. People weren’t ratting on each other for going jogging, were they? Did everyone really stockpile toilet paper?

Another reason I’m avoiding England at the moment is there seems to be an attack from all directions on people enjoying themselves. You can’t say the wrong word or you’re banned from the media. You can’t drive more than 20 miles an hour in built-up areas, even though that’s actually more dangerous because you’re nervously watching your speedometer instead of the road. Oh, and if you’re young you’re never going to be allowed to smoke. In a way I love Rishi Sunak’s idea because it’s so wacky. I never thought he had a personality before but now I see he’s a comedian.

My village has a small music club in a converted sheep barn which is half the reason I moved here. It’s a completely crazy idea that it would be a success in this remote part of the world, and yet it is. It’s always full up and the crème de la crème of jazz musicians from Poland and Germany come and play. I feel so lucky that I don’t need to get on an aeroplane or drive for miles when I want to try out new music in front of a live audience. I can just trudge down the hill with my violin.

Nigel Kennedy plays Hendrix at the Palace Hall, Bucharest, on 23 December and will tour the UK next year.

Nigel Kennedy

The hell of putting on a Christmas play

Laurie Graham   1:02PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Illustration: Romy Blümel

In July, when I was asked to confect ‘another Christmas entertainment’ for my community, I viewed such a distant elephant with equanimity. Like memories of the pain of childbirth, the nightmares of amateur dramatics soon fade. Besides, I’d done this many times and survived to tell the tale. All I needed was to reassemble last year’s cast and then write something for them to perform. A piece of cake.

By October I was seeing things differently. The steepness of the gradient we had to climb was becoming all too clear.

Amateur dramatics are held together by string and paperclips. There are no understudies

Very few of this year’s cast are seasoned performers. Indeed, several members of last year’s company declined to take part, some with cast iron reasons, others who found they’d be washing their hair on all relevant dates. Can it have been such a horrible experience? Should we be offering post-production counselling?

On the other hand, I had a positive glut of backstage volunteers. What’s that about? Who, in their right mind, would rather be an unsung hero on props than out there taking a bow? Set painting or Being Generally Helpful were the most frequent offers. To date no one wants to be on sound. Too stressful, I suppose. All those cues to time.

By August I had recruited eight actors. Too few for War and Peace (abridged), but enough for a 20-minute skit performed to a captive audience of the deaf, the somnolent and those touchingly easy to delight. The question was, what should it be?

I lay awake, tormented by a Clerkenwell mosquito, considering the options. A parody of The Mousetrap? Arguably, The Mousetrap already is a parody. A Nativity play with a difference? Probably no quicker way to offend a diverse spectrum of people. Again and again, I came back to the idea of a Dickensian theme. And so was conceived Grim Prospects.

Writing a script is, hands down, the easiest part of the business. It’s just me, the blank page and my laptop, with no interruptions from bright sparks who want to tell me my job. The anxious moment comes when the actors first read what you’ve written. What if they hate it?

With just one exception, my actors are all amateurs. There’s no contract to enforce. They’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, or perhaps because of an unfulfilled itch to slap on a bit of Leichner Blend of Beige. If they choose to walk, they walk. Nothing I can do about it.

As it turned out, they didn’t hate the script, but other cracks soon began to appear. One stalwart, beset by age and health problems, returned his script to me ‘with melancholy affection’. The most elegant brushoff I have ever received.

Another, having secured a professional gig, pleaded for our rehearsal schedule to fit around the proper grown-up one. Actual paid work, rare enough for most actors, so who could deny him that?

We got to a week before rehearsals started in earnest. The Clerkenwell mozzer had retired for the season and I was sleeping a deep sleep of false security. At 7 a.m., a different kind of buzz. A text message. Our leading lady sent her sincere regrets but was retiring to spend more time with her family. I had quite failed to see this googly heading my way.

I found myself short of two vital things: time and spare women. Amateur dramatics are held together by string and paperclips. There are no understudies, no agency you can call. But as my old gran didn’t say: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ A couple of days of futile gnashing of teeth and cursing the Fates, and suddenly I knew what I had to do.

It’s not every man you could approach and ask if he might be willing to strap on a bustle in the service of theatre. I had to trust my drag radar that I wasn’t about to cause colossal outrage.

‘Me? Cross-dress? How very dare you!’

But no. ‘What’s the role?’ he asked.

Hook, line and proverbial sinker. I had him at ‘a kind of Mrs Wackford Squeers’.

I cannot exaggerate the relief a producer feels when the day is not merely saved but saved in buckets. When not only does a person say yes, but they also immediately start devising their costume. In the time it took to drink a cup of coffee, he had already arrived at Doc Marten boots and a lacy Victorian bonnet.

Beneath tweed jackets and old school ties beats many a closet show-off heart. Thank God for Englishmen.

This piece goes to print before the show opens, but I can tell you how the story ends. On the morning of 14 December, I will have a window-rattling meltdown about mislaid props and actors who have woken up believing that they’re God’s gift to the RSC. By 3.25 p.m. the performers and audience will have been plied with drink, by 4.15 the whole thing will be described as a triumph – and by 6 p.m. the only person who’ll remember much about it will be me.

Laurie Graham

Laurie Graham is a novelist and scriptwriter. Her latest book is Anyone For Seconds?

Why I’m bored of National Treasures

Julie Burchill   12:36PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Photo-illustration: Lukas Degutis (Getty)

Here they come, see them run, twinkling away like a bunch of irritatingly flashing fairy lights, the milk of human kindness curdling on their breath and dollar signs in their beady little eyes. I’m referring to the National Treasures, wheeled out every Christmas as we huddle around the television. A quick list of those who come immediately to mind – though other NTs are available, if the price is right – are Ant, Attenborough, Balding, Beard (Mary), Carr (Alan), Coles (Richard), Colman (Olivia), Church, Dec, Dench, French, Fry, Izzard, Lineker, Margolyes, Norton, Oliver (Jamie), Osman, Peake, Perry (Grayson), Robinson (Tony), Rosen (Michael), Sayle, Staunton, Thompson (Emma), Toksvig.

Sometimes it seems harder to name a British public figure who isn’t a National Treasure

Sometimes it seems harder to name a public figure who isn’t an NT. Notables in the Awkward Squad: David Bowie (refused a knighthood and even a funeral as he wanted to ‘go without any fuss’), J.K. Rowling (fearless – NTs are terrified of being unpopular), Jarvis Cocker (more interested in examining the process of fame than reaping its benefits), Alan Sugar (‘National Treasure? You wot? Nah!’) and Ricky Gervais. All have dodged induction due to their refusal to play nice, whereas NTs are needy blighters who were born to toe the line of Whatever’s The Thing This Year. Sometimes celebs desperately want NT status, but they derail themselves by mistake. Think of Cliff Richard fat-shaming dead Elvis or Saint Phillip Schofield’s fall from grace.

But you really have to blot your copybook to put yourself out of the running. Once used sparingly, the term has run riot in recent years. As with many repressive belief systems these days, the watchwords of NTism are diversity and inclusivity, but the approved views on everything from breakfast to Brexit, penises on women to Palestine, must be held. All sexualities can become NTs, which in practice works out as flamboyant gay men (Carr, Norton), dullard lesbians (Balding, Toksvig) and self-exciting gender non-conformists (Perry, Izzard). No feminists who don’t centre the fantasies of men are allowed, which basically means no feminists. Germaine Greer had a lucky escape, as her perceived ‘dottiness’ had her well on the way to NT status, only for her glinting steel-trap of a mind to reassert itself over gender and save her.

Here’s the bit the BBC (once a bona fide National Treasure – now a national disgrace) in particular doesn’t want you to know about NTs. They were once entertainers in tune with the people; the first generation of TV NTs had been mostly wartime troupers, working-class boys and girls who had worked extremely hard, with no whiff of nepotism or old school ties. Then came the northern grammar schoolboys; again, hardworking working-class people. What they had in common is that they were of the people; their political leanings were private and differing. Now the only working-class people who become NTs have to take on bourgeois beliefs.

Many NTs – because no one likes to feel neutered – believe that they are ‘outrageous’ (see Margolyes) and that they ‘dare to say the unsayable’ (but even toddlers swear now, so how?) when in reality they can’t open their cake-holes without mouthing the centrist platitudes which we’ve all heard a million times before; a consequence of progressives becoming the new establishment, and of the nepotism and promotion of class inequality that they endorse and facilitate.

‘Santa’s a deepfake.’

But are they happy? NTs, for all their twinkling, are often – not always, I must stress – unpleasant people whose patina of bonhomie overlays a viciousness often experienced by those poor souls who deal with them in a serving role (see Cilla Black, notorious for being vile to cabin crew). Still, they keep each other’s nasty little secrets well enough – the National Treasure club is like a boat full of people whose abiding mantra is ‘Don’t rock the boat’ – and they’ve worked out that if they keep agreeing with each other, they will keep being invited on to each other’s shows to plug their latest profoundly mediocre efforts.

Perhaps the problem is that a lot of people develop a sense of self-importance when they get a certain level of fame and lose sight of the fact that their opinion still isn’t worth more than anyone else’s (Gandhi Lineker springs to mind here). It’s not that people shouldn’t use their fame to highlight important causes; it’s when their perspective stops being just their perspective and becomes un-assailable wisdom that NTs make utter knobs of themselves. Even the few talented NTs can become insufferable about people who dare not to believe the same middle-class homilies as them. Think of Alan Bennett saying: ‘I went through a rather prissy period immediately after Brexit. I’d ask people if they voted in or out. And if they’d voted out, I wouldn’t give them a selfie. It started to seem rather mean, so I stopped doing it.’ At least he saw the error of his ways and admitted to his prissiness. Few NTs are self-knowing, deafened as they are by applause.

There are a few NTs I’ve got time for: Maggie Smith, Julie Walters and, of course, Michael Palin. But generally they’re a grim bunch. Though they can be anything from actors to zoologists, they will have one loathsome character trait in common; they were all massively ambitious when young, but they like to pretend that their success was somehow organic and that only other – shallow, grasping – people are driven by attention-seeking and greedy for money. Often they claim to suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’, and thick fans will find them adorbs for being so humble. NTs are really good at pulling the rope up behind them once they’ve made it (unless it’s a blood relative beneath them, of course, as many NTs like to inflict their dreary spawn on an underwhelmed world). On the other hand, most NTs would have sold their mum in order to make it. They generally tend to be hypocrites, and they generally tend to be smug. Apart from all that, they add greatly to the gaiety of nations. But by the time New Year’s Eve rocks up, I have an inkling that the only thing we’ll want to do with National Treasures is bury them.

Julie Burchill

‘Many happy returns’: an exclusive Jack Reacher story by Lee Child

Lee Child   12:31PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Illustrated by Chris King

Tony Jackson had worked 30 years for MI5. He was a grammar-school boy recruited straight out of his redbrick university, after sitting a fast-track civil service exam. His results had not impressed the civil service itself, but clearly something in his psychometric paper had caught someone’s eye. Two weeks after his formal rejection he received a plain and enigmatic letter inviting him to an appointment at a hotel near Regent Street. Just after his arrival he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Just before his departure he had become a government agent. Thirty years later he still was, now an Assistant Director, in charge of all his nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

His three decades of service had been hard and varied, played out against an endless conveyor of evolving threats. He had kept up pretty well. Better than most, in fact – hence the promotions. Now he was considered a mentor. Which he disliked, because such a notion was inevitably regressive. He knew only about the past. No one knew about the future. When asked the number one lesson his years had taught him, he would answer honestly: really the only lesson his years had taught him was never ever to leave the last of your Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. Because something always happened on Christmas Eve. Sometimes big, sometimes small. But always something. Everything else changed all the time. Christmas Eve seemed to be the only constant in the intelligence world.

And sure enough, at eight in the morning on the 24th, at home, his landline rang. Which was OK. His shopping was done. On the phone was the duty officer at Thames House. A woman. Almost certainly a shift-swap volunteer, given the calendar, earning goodwill by sending others home to family. Hence almost certainly young, single and dedicated enough to disappoint her own family by staying in town. She said her name was Ann Cassidy, and that she thought he should come in and take a look at something.

Everything else changed all the time. Christmas Eve seemed to be the only constant in the intelligence world

He asked, ‘Is the canteen open yet?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Have them send up a bacon sandwich and a pot of coffee. And a mince pie. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

His driver was waiting at the curb outside his house in a heroically polished Jaguar saloon. The drive to the office was easy. Traffic was light. Pedestrians were few. It was not long after eight. Panic shopping would start at ten.

His breakfast was waiting at the head of a long table in the middle of a long room full of screens, where any of London’s cameras could be followed in real time. Most cameras overlapped, and some could be moved remotely. Up, down, left, right. Whole damning narratives could be built.

In the room were three people. Ann Cassidy, the duty officer, maybe 30, dressed like a normal person in jeans and a sweater. A Christmas perk. Next to her was the duty analyst, who was a man a few years older, and a technical operator on a rolling chair, scooting left, scooting right, pressing buttons, nudging joysticks.

Jackson said, ‘Talk me through it.’

Cassidy said, ‘We got a routine note via British Airways from Homeland Security in the US about last night’s dinnertime departure from JFK to Heathrow. Which arrived two hours ago. They had two items of low-grade non-urgent concern. The first was an American male travelling on a passport issued directly by the State Department.’

‘A diplomat?’

‘No, a paying customer. Diplomats don’t pay. The point was this man didn’t go to the New York passport office or wherever. Or the post office in some Wild West town. He wasn’t an employee, yet the State Department opened its secret velvet-lined vault and handed him a passport.’

‘For this trip?’

‘No, the passport is eight years old.’

‘For a trip eight years ago, then. Somewhere in the world. No doubt to do the State Department a service. No doubt larded with plausible deniability and zero connections back to them. Merely a private adventure. Were there any, eight years ago?’

‘They’re looking into it, and so are we.’

‘What was Homeland Security’s second concern?’

‘An American male who boarded with absolutely no luggage. No checked bags, no cabin bag, no backpack, no man bag, absolutely nothing. TSA traced him back on their hard drive to the security line. The overhead cameras show him approach the conveyor and empty his pockets into a dog bowl. Five items only, believed to be his passport, his boarding pass folded into thirds, a bank card of some kind, a thin wad of US dollars folded once, and what we think is a travel toothbrush. Nothing else.’

‘OK,’ Jackson said. ‘I agree that’s fairly unusual.’

‘Hence their note,’ Cassidy said. ‘They ran their numbers and virtually no one flies transatlantic with absolutely nothing. It must be virtually impossible. Even the minimalist hipsters with homes in both places pack moisturiser.’

‘So on the one hand we have a long-ago and possibly sinister State Department contractor, and on the other hand we have someone who, after discarding the boarding pass, will continue his life’s journey with just four items to his name.’

‘He knew he would be a person of interest. But he’s not hiding. He’s making sure we see him’

‘Not exactly, sir, no.’

‘How so?’

‘They’re the same passenger.’

Jackson didn’t answer.

The analyst said, ‘We felt either circumstance was interesting in itself, but both together, much more so.’

‘Do we have a name?’ Jackson asked.

‘Supposed to be with us any minute. Plus a background check.’

‘Are you tracking him?’

‘Right here,’ said the operator, tapping a screen. ‘We got him at the aeroplane door, through a process of elimination. Very easy. Two hundred passengers, 14 crew, he was literally the only one carrying nothing.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Outside Paddington station. He took the train from the airport.’

‘What’s he doing?’

There was a pause.

The analyst said, ‘We think he’s following somebody.’

‘Show me,’ Jackson said.

The operator clicked a button and a still frame lit up a large screen at the end of the room, bright and clear and easy for all to see. The frame was an expanse of white.

‘Establishing shot,’ the operator said. ‘Like a chain of custody. This is the aeroplane door, about to open. Our own CCTV in the jetway, set high. An early facial recognition trial. Didn’t work, but we kept the cameras. Our man is the 60th passenger to leave. Which probably puts him in premium economy. Which he probably chose for the legroom.’

‘More than probably,’ Jackson said.

The screen was showing the plane door filled on the inside by a man taller than the opening and nearly as wide. He paused a second and turned sideways and ducked his head and stepped out of the gloom. He stopped and faced front and rolled his shoulders and clicked his neck. He lifted his face as if to the sun. His arms hung down by his sides. His hands were empty. He was a very big man. Close to two metres tall, close to 120 kilos. Arms like an ape and hands the size of the turkey Jackson had defrosting in his larder.

The man moved on. The screen changed to the first of Heathrow’s own cameras, at the jetway exit. The man stepped out and followed the crowd, walking easy. More cameras showed his progress, which slowed badly as corridors merged and one planeload of people became two, then three, then four.

The big man was no longer walking easy. He was swaying left, swaying right, sometimes slowing, sometimes speeding up, periodically stretching tall and raising his head.

‘See?’ the analyst said. ‘Subconscious movements left and right and fast and slow, because he’s mimicking the person he’s following, and he’s craning to look ahead because he’s worried about losing his target in the crowd.’

Jackson waited. Ann Cassidy was saying nothing, fairly conspicuously. He asked her, ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Not completely,’ she said.

‘Which part?’

‘I agree he’s following somebody. The behaviour stays the same all the way to the train and beyond. The subconscious movements are a classic tell, although I’ll come back to that, if I may. What I don’t agree is that he’s craning his neck to see ahead in case he loses his target. He’s two metres tall, for goodness’ sake. He doesn’t need to crane his neck. He could crouch down a bit and still see perfectly well.’

‘So what’s the craning about?’

‘We need to start again at the plane door. What does he do?’

‘He steps out and loosens up. He’s stiff. He’s a big man and he’s been in a small chair for seven hours.’

‘What else?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He tilts his face up. There was no need for that. He had just uncricked his neck another way, and it wasn’t his face that was stiff from seven hours in a chair.’

‘So why?’

‘He found our camera and looked straight into it for two whole seconds. Square on, chin up. Then he walked on, and every single camera he passed, he identified it and raised his head so it could get a good look at him.’

‘Why would he do that?’

A computer dinged before Cassidy could answer. A message coming in. The analyst ducked away to check it. He called out, ‘Here it is, chapter and verse. His name is Jack Reacher, he’s a retired US army military police investigator, he was here in London eight years ago, using the same passport, at the request of the State Department, the CIA and military intelligence collectively, because there were credible projections of a sniper attack at the G8 summit and apparently Reacher knew the likely suspect, having arrested him in the army many years before.’

Jackson made the calls. Unmarked cars, plain clothes on the street, drones, the whole nine yards

Jackson said, ‘Nothing happened at the G8 eight years ago.’

The analyst scrolled on. ‘The sniper suspect was found shot to death in a house in Romford, along with a number of local east London criminals and gangsters, all dead too, from various causes, none of them natural.’

‘So someone preempted the problem. Does it say who?’

‘The report is silent on that matter.’

Cassidy asked, ‘Do we assume this man Reacher did it?’

Jackson said, ‘Can’t rule him out, obviously.’

‘Exactly. That’s what he predicted. He knows how these things work. He knows we have cameras. He knew he would be a person of interest. But he’s not hiding. He’s not wearing a hat and looking down. Quite the opposite. He’s making sure we see him. And his movements are totally exaggerated. Because he’s signalling to us. He’s saying, you know who I am, and you need to know I’m following somebody.’

‘That’s incredibly elaborate. Why doesn’t he just give us a ring?’

‘Go back to the security line. What was in his pockets? He doesn’t have a phone.’

There was a pause.

Jackson said, ‘Who is he following?’

‘We can’t tell,’ Cassidy said. ‘Could be any one of the 59 people in front of him.’

‘Where is he now?’

The technical operator scooted left and hit a switch and the live feed came up on the big screen.

‘He’s leaning on a railing in Westbourne Terrace,’ the operator said. ‘I think he just lost his target.’

‘What happened?’ Jackson asked.

The operator split the screen, leaving the live shot on the left, with the big man motionless against black iron railings and white stucco houses. On the right the operator spooled backward in time, jumping from shot to shot, looking for clear coverage. And finding it. An HD colour camera on a streetlight had the big man’s broad back in the foreground. Over his left shoulder a thin stream of people walked ahead of him. Men, women, some young, some older, all moving at a classic urban pace, not slow, not fast, but dogged. All of them were plausible targets. Up ahead they had to filter left, around a pair of surveyors in hi-vis jackets, who were setting up a theodolite on a wide-set tripod.

The fourth to divert around them was an old man in a short brown coat. He was stooped and slender, with a briefcase in his right hand. A lit-up taxi came toward him. He threw out his left hand and the taxi stopped and he climbed in. The taxi moved off.

The big man stopped. He stood still for a moment. Then he walked on as far as the surveyors and spoke with them briefly. Then he walked back and took up his current position against the railing.

‘The old man was the target,’ the analyst said. ‘He gets away, the pursuit is terminated.’

Jackson asked, ‘What did Reacher say to the surveyors?’

‘Most likely he was asking if they heard the old man tell the cabbie an address. Which evidently they didn’t, hence the termination.’

The operator rewound to his best shot of the old man, which wasn’t great, being from behind. He zoomed in. Hunched, bony, old. Nothing more. The briefcase was an old-fashioned item.

‘Recognise him?’ the analyst asked.

‘Not from that angle,’ Jackson said.

‘Are we tracking the taxi?’ Cassidy asked.

‘Currently moving north through Maida Vale,’ the operator said. ‘Side streets, mostly. Coverage is patchy.’

He clicked back to the live feed. The big man was staring straight into the camera.

‘It’s like he’s looking at us,’ Cassidy said.

The big man crooked a finger and moved his arm. A follow-me gesture. He pushed off the railing and walked back the way he had come. He turned right into Chilworth Street, checked for cameras, found one, and sat down on a low wall, right in the middle of the camera’s field of view. He flashed his open hands, twice. Ten fingers and ten fingers.

Illustrated by Chris King

Cassidy said, ‘What does that mean?’

‘He’s going to wait there for 20 minutes,’ Jackson said. ‘I think he wants to talk.’

‘Can you get there in 20 minutes?’

‘I have lights and a siren, if I need them.’

But he didn’t. Shopping hadn’t started. From Thames House to Chilworth Street took 16 easy minutes. The big man was there, still on the wall, relaxed, just waiting. There was a wan sun low in the sky and the air was cold. Nine in the morning, on Christmas Eve.

Jackson sat on the wall a yard from the big man. He said, ‘Welcome to London, Mr Reacher.’

‘Thank you,’ the big man said. ‘Always a pleasure.’

‘My name is Jackson. Security services, counter-terrorism. What’s the purpose of your visit?’

‘Leisure and tourism. I met a flight attendant who gave me a friends-and-family ticket. She’s going to give me Christmas dinner tomorrow. More, if I’m lucky.’

‘Who was the old man who hailed the taxi?’

‘Someone you were very interested in back in the day. I was a baby lieutenant. I got roped into a joint operation with CIA and MI6. On Britain’s behalf. Didn’t work out. The guy got away.’

‘When was this?’

‘The 1980s. Something about the IRA.’

‘Before my time,’ Jackson said. ‘He must have been young then.’

‘We all were. He was a student from Tehran, I think.’

‘Name?’

‘Don’t remember. Something Iranian. Your boys called him the Pistol. He had something wrong with his hand. His forefinger didn’t work. It stuck straight out all the time, with the thumb at an angle. It was like he was miming a gun. I saw it this morning, on the plane, when he got his briefcase out of the overhead.’

Jackson took out his phone and called Cassidy. Told her to search the databases for the codename Pistol. He clicked off and asked, ‘What was the purpose of your visit eight years ago?’

‘Don’t remember,’ Reacher said again. ‘There was CIA involvement, which is always best forgotten. But I assume it worked out OK in the end.’

Jackson’s phone rang. A fast response. The databases must have lit up red. He listened for a long moment. Poker face, except his jaw clamped a little. He clicked off again and said, ‘Yes, we were very interested. We still are. Arms dealer. A lot of damage over the years. MI6 lost three people during that operation when you were a baby.’

‘Which mode will annoy the neighbours more?’

Reacher said nothing.

Jackson said, ‘The surveyors didn’t hear an address?’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘They didn’t hear an address.’ He gestured at the camera. ‘But you’re tracking the taxi.’

‘It’s headed for the wilds of north London. We won’t be able to react fast enough.’

‘Special Branch not standing by?’

‘They’re called SO15 now. They’re always standing by. But they haven’t invented teleportation yet.’

‘How long would they need?’

‘Twenty minutes, probably.’

‘Call them now. Clearly the Pistol spooked when he saw the surveyors. Street repairs on Christmas Eve? Possibly suspicious. So he took off.’

‘But where?’

‘More important is where would he think they would put cops dressed as surveyors? Not randomly along his route. I think he was nearly at his destination. I think he postponed his arrival literally at the doorstep. He spooked because it was his moment of maximum tension.’

‘Postponed, not abandoned?’

‘It’s probably an important meeting. I think he assumes undercover cops can’t plausibly block the sidewalk all day. I think he assumes they will leave pretty soon.’

‘That’s all guesswork.’

‘But educated. The surveyors didn’t hear an address. Instead they heard him say, drive me around for an hour and bring me back here.’

Jackson made the calls. Unmarked cars, plain clothes on the street, fake Amazon vans, drones, the whole nine yards. All to be ready in 15 minutes. He clicked off and asked, ‘What would you have done about this if we hadn’t responded to the cameras?’

‘I planned to stick around for an hour,’ Reacher said. ‘I planned to have a full and frank discussion with the guy. Somewhere with no cameras. We lost someone too in that operation back when I was a baby. A friend of mine. One of the few I had.’

But Jackson wasn’t listening. He was planning ahead in his mind, rehearsing, chasing the weak points. Reacher said, ‘Anyway, Merry Christmas’, and then he got up and walked away. Twelve hours later, from the warmth of the flight attendant’s bed, he saw an evening news bulletin. An arrest had been made in the Paddington area of London. A terrorist kingpin. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said Britain’s counter-terrorism expertise had given the world’s intelligence agencies an early Christmas present.

The Secret by Lee Child and Andrew Child is out now.

Lee Child

‘Sex trafficking, cannibalism and murder’: St Nicholas wasn’t always so jolly

Mary Wellesley   12:38PM, 14 Dec, 2023

For a heartwarming Christmas tale, look no further than the medieval legend of St Nicholas – a story of sex-trafficking, cannibalism and murder. The historical Nicholas is a hazy figure whose scant biography was embroidered in the Middle Ages. The 12th-century Norman poet Wace wrote a colourful account of his life. It opens with the story that has informed the modern Santa Claus. Nicholas, we are told, took pity on a man who had once been wealthy but had fallen into poverty. The man had three daughters. Things were desperate – the man concluded that the girls had to be sold into sexual slavery. Nicholas visited the man’s house on three consecutive nights and each night threw gold in through an open window.

Some of the other stories in Wace’s poem are decidedly more macabre; many involve the miraculous resurrection of children murdered or accidentally killed. One such is the Miracle of the Boiled Infant, in which a mother is so overjoyed at the news that Nicholas has been selected as the bishop that she rushes to church to hear Mass, leaving her baby in an earthen tub over a burning fire. When the service is over, she suddenly remembers her mistake and rushes home to find the baby unharmed and happily playing with the bubbles in the boiling water.

In another story, a man on a pilgrimage to St Nicholas is murdered and dismembered by an innkeeper and thrown into vats of salted meat. The man miraculously wakes the next morning and greets the innkeeper, who responds: ‘Good fellow… I killed you,/ Shattered your bones and salted your flesh./ Saint Nicholas to whom you are going/Is very powerful and full of succour.’

English versions of this miracle story are even more grisly. In the late-medieval South English Legendary the pilgrim becomes three clerks. There a butcher offers lodging to three clerks (for which read ‘students’), before murdering them in the hope of stealing their money. On discovering the clerks are broke, his wife recommends dismembering their bodies, grinding up their flesh and salting it for use in pies. Later St Nicholas appears as the couple are selling their pastries; the clerks miraculously come back to life; the butcher and his wife are moved to contrition. There are several things that are weird about this story, but probably no more weird than the story of a man travelling the world on a reindeer conveyance and sneaking into the bedrooms of sleeping children.

Modern Christmas traditions involve the wholescale deception of children. Our medieval counterparts, by contrast, saw the feast of St Nicholas as a moment to surrender power to them. In many English cathedrals, abbeys, churches and schools, the feast (6 December) was the beginning of a boy bishop’s term of office. In an atmosphere of misrule that seems to pervade when the days are short and the nights long, a young choirboy would be appointed ‘bishop’ until Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December). During his tenure he would dress in robes, preside at services, preach a sermon, and lead a procession through the streets during which a collection would be taken. The practice, like so many mad and wonderful traditions, was outlawed by Henry VIII.

Mary Wellesley

Columnists

- Brace yourselves for the Great American Election Freak-Out of 2024

- Good riddance to neoliberalism

- In search of deep England

- Is it your fault if you’re fat?

- No one wants to talk about Ukraine any more

- In search of a second epiphany

- The unfashionable truth about motherhood

- Ivy League universities must be depoliticised

- Thank goodness for the Christmas elf of York station

Brace yourselves for the Great American Election Freak-Out of 2024

Freddy Gray   1:08PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

‘If Trump wasn’t running,’ said Joe Biden last week, ‘I’m not sure I’d be running.’ That’s a curiously uninspiring remark for an American leader seeking re-election to make. Yet ever since 2019, Biden’s pitch for the presidency has been essentially negative: if you don’t support me, you’ll get him.

The trouble for Joe is that, as we approach the start of another election year, it’s beginning to look as if he can’t stop Trump. Brace yourselves, then, for the Great Election Freak-Out of 2024.

For Democrats, the numbers are alarming. Biden’s job-approval rating has just dipped below 40 per cent again; in December 2019, at the same stage in his presidency, Trump was on 43 per cent.

Voters care less about the 91 felony counts facing Trump than they do about the immigration crisis

The 77-year-old Donald may still be widely loathed and feared, but the 81-year-oldJoe has not brought the ‘normalcy’ he promised. Under Trump, there was no war in Ukraine or Israel. Biden’s most significant foreign-policy action, by contrast, has been the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

At home, Americans have experienced runaway inflation. Voters care less about the 91 felony counts facing Trump than they do about the immigration crisis on the southern border. In fact, the blatantly politicised ‘lawfare’ against the Donald appears only to have increased his rebel appeal.

The primary process hasn’t even begun, and everything could change after the Iowa caucuses on 15 January, but for now Trump appears to have the Republican nomination wrapped up. The latest polls suggest that he would go on to beat Biden in November. Bookmakers now have Trump as the favourite to be the next president – and the latest media meltdown about the return of Dictator Donald is already under way.

‘A Trump dictatorship is increasingly in-evitable,’ says Robert Kagan, the right-wing intellectual, in a long essay for the Washington Post. ‘Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality.’ America is ‘sleepwalking into dictatorship’, says the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Atlantic magazine has just produced an emergency ‘If Trump wins’ issue, full of terrifying prophecies. And the New York Times is pumping out nerve-racking reports about ‘Project 25’, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s radical agenda for the next Trump administration.

Trump, it is alleged, will pull out of Nato, use the Justice Department to exact revenge on his legal persecutors and shut down or replace the federal agencies – aka ‘the deep state’ – that have undermined him in the past.

Trump enjoys the attention, naturally. At a recent Town Hall, Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked him to promise that as president he would ‘never abuse power as retribution against anybody’. ‘Except for day one,’ Trump shot back, raising his finger and smiling: ‘I love this guy, he says: “No you’re not gonna be a dictator are ya?” I said “No no no other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling drilling drilling. After that I’m not a dictator.”’

Trump was making light of all the dark dictatorship talk in order to emphasise the policies he most wants to sign off in his first hours in the White House. Yet the Biden administration seized that quote as proof of his depravity: he’s vowed to be a dictator ‘on day one’ – the horror!

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it before. Ever since Trump emerged as a serious presidential contender in late 2015, Democrats and anti-Donald Republicans have insisted he is a would-be Mussolini and interpreted his silly remarks as sinister threats to the American constitution.

Trump’s election in 2016 produced a catalogue of emergency-on-planet-freedom books: Trumpocracy, Trumpocalypse, How Democracy Ends, How Democracies Die,Surviving Autocracy, On Tyranny and many more. Never Trumpism has never shut up. Its disciples believe evil Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on democracy and the western world order. In their mythology of the recent past, the system only just survived because of its precious checks and balances – and the heroic anti-Trump resistance. In 2020, the people saw sense and rejected Trump at the ballot. He proved his dictatorial nature by refusing to accept the result. His loyalists then attempted the 6 January ‘coup’. Liberty survived, bruised yet unbowed. Now, however, the forces of Trumpism are regrouping for a final end-times assault on American exceptionalism. ‘We cannot let him win,’ says Biden. That will again be his rallying cry.

But Trump’s supporters have their own counter-myth: Biden is the wrinkled face of a new left-wing tyranny and Trump represents the last stand for freedom. In their version, Trump overcame extraordinary odds to wrench the presidency from an increasingly authoritarian neoliberal regime in 2016. The regime sought to destroy him. They accused him of being a traitor to Russia. They impeached him twice. They winked at the radical left as it carried out street riots under the banner of Black Lives Matter and used the Covid pandemic to rig the 2020 election. Then they falsely accused him of ‘orchestrating’ the 6 January riot and went after him on every conceivable legal front. But Trump survived and now 2024 will be the final battle for a free republic.

Both Trump myths mix grains of truth with the chaff of conspiracy theories. Both speak to an even deeper sense that something must be very wrong with American democracy if Trump and Biden are on the ballot again.

Just as Kagan writes forcefully about the coming Trump tyranny, the pro-Trump historian Victor Davis Hanson argues with equal vigour that under Biden we are living in ‘Weimar America’, where anti-Semitism is re-emerging on campuses, intolerance festers under the protection of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry, and social cohesion is threatened through immigration from ‘anti-Enlightenment societies’.

The tone of this discourse becomes only more shrill as the public grows bored of arguing. But apathy can be a precursor to, rather than the antithesis of, political violence. It is not too alarmist to think that, in a nation full of guns, civil war in 2024 is a serious risk. On the eve of the last presidential election, after months of BLM rioting, many city authorities boarded up their streets, fearing a Trump victory would lead toa massive left-wing revolt. Four years later, things have only got worse.

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator

Good riddance to neoliberalism

Rod Liddle   12:57PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Photo-illustration: Lukas Degutis (iStock/Getty)

I listened to a fascinating debate on the BBC’s The World This Weekend about the ideological origins of that thing, populism. The agreeably thuggish Javier Milei had just taken the reins of Argentina and, perhaps a little late in the day, the TW2 (as it is known in BBC circles) production team had noticed that almost every election held anywhere these days – except perhaps Australia and here – tends to result in a win for a party which is either overtly populist, as in Argentina, or is called populist by its opponents and the BBC. What the hell is going on, they wondered, only ten years too late.

Who did they choose to ‘debate’ the issue? Prince Harry and Wolf from Gladiators? The suave game-show presenter Ben Shephard and Herbie the Skateboarding Duck? Both would have offered greater illumination than the two people actually roped together – a left-wing professor from the University of Cardiff and the hunky left-wing Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis.

All ideologies end up grotesquely overreaching and thus sowing the seeds of their downfall

And so we heard what populism actually was, according to them and the programme’s presenter, Jonny Dymond. Here is a list of some of the phrases I heard during this admirably consensual debate: far right-wing, neo-fascist, xenophobic, racist, anti-Islamist, Goebbels, global financial collapse, rise of Hitler, hatred of foreigners. All were agreed that populism was the redoubt of the far right, despite the fact many of those elected have been Social Democrats (Slovakia), libertarians (Argentina) or Thatcherites (Italy).

I wondered, listening to Varoufakis’s self-serving Keynesian drivel, if that production team might have thought, at any point, of perhaps engaging the services of someone who represented one of these newish and supposedly populist victors, rather than just shove together two clowns who wished only to call them fascists. I’m sure Geert Wilders, from the Netherlands, would have been up for it. But then the thought occurred that they couldn’t possibly do that. What they call populism is a dagger in the heart of many things, not least institutions such as the BBC which embodies that rapidly evaporating and discredited creed, neoliberalism.

The governments elected under a heading imposed by their opponents as populist may indeed differ on many issues. They may be technically left-wing or right-wing or even centrist. But one thing they have in common is that they all dislike the BBC, which they see, quite rightly, as the voice of a middle-class establishment which has a dog in the fight and therefore will never take seriously the aims of such governments and the aspirations of the people who elected them.

Crudely, these beliefs are: patriotism, a respect for the nation state, a yearning for strong borders, a disaffection with the middle-class liberal elite which previously ran them, usually a hefty genuflection towards religious faith, a mistrust of supranational organisations such as the EU and the UN, a further distrust of untrammelled capitalism and an adherence to the traditional cultural values of people like them, which they see – rightly – as being under threat.

‘They laughed and called you names? I’ll launch an inquiry into these bullying allegations.’

They do not wish to establish a thousand-year Reich or invade Poland or goose-step in unison, and still less to victimise impoverished incomers. The aversion is to globalisation and mass immigration, not immigrants per se – excepting those who wish to change the character and nature of the country in which they have latterly arrived and make it resemble more the violence, stupidity and tribal chaos of the countries they have left behind.

You can pick your own date as to when neoliberalism and its blithely absolutist evangelism was at its global peak and therefore about to decline. Perhaps when Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. Or ten years later when Tony Blair and George W. Bush were assuring us that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which might obliterate us all in 45 minutes. Or Blair, again, loosening the borders so we might all benefit from untrammelled mass immigration and thus rid us of our woeful xenophobia. Whatever, the past two decades have seen neoliberalism in retreat on every front.

The counter-revolution has been, in historical terms, rather swift – and 2023 has been the year when the neoliberals suddenly roused themselves from their torpor, looking quite aghast, wondering what was happening: your end-time, is what. Hell, when even Switzerland gets in on the act, as it did in its federal elections in October when the ‘populist’ Swiss People’s party topped the poll, you know that something is afoot.

Lowered income as a consequence of cheap overseas labour, the incompetence and arrogance of the banks, the migration into western countries of people who hate us, the promulgation by unelected elites of cultural programmes antithetical not only to the population but also to logic – all of these are somewhere in the mix when we talk about populism. But the main unifying factor is an epic weariness with that most illiberal of dogmas, neoliberalism.

All ideologies end up grotesquely overreaching and thus sowing the seeds of their downfall. I campaigned against racism in the 1970s because I thought it was morally foul to discriminate against an individual because of the colour of his or her skin. I did not campaign in favour of inculcating a corrosive victimhood culture among non-white people, nor to take upon myself the mantle of chief oppressor, as critical race theory insists I should. I campaigned against the discrimination faced by homosexuals, but did not sign up to giving kids puberty blockers, blokes running in women’s sprint races or, for that matter, gay marriage. I was in favour of equality between the sexes but never bought into the idea that the two genders had identical goals and aspirations and talents. All of that was overreach, the shrill signal that an ideology is devouring itself. Long may it continue – bring on 2024.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

In search of deep England

Douglas Murray   11:40AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Roundway Hill, Wiltshire (Getty Images)

I am wary of mentioning General de Gaulle in these pages, if for no other reason than remembering Auberon Waugh many years ago arguing against a statue of the leader of the Free French being erected in London. Waugh’s objections were based firstly on the fact that statues only worked with togas because statuary did not favour the trouser leg. His second objection was that this country had fought a long and costly war to get General de Gaulle and his friends out of London.

That notwithstanding, I dare to mention de Gaulle here because he has been on my mind. Or at least one aspect of him has been on my mind. That is that glorious appeal he made to ‘La France profonde’. Anyone who has spent time in France – especially rural France – will know exactly what he was talking about.

The pheasants flew high, lost in the mist. Lost in this magical kingdom that had been like this for centuries

It has seemed to me, especially on recent visits back to the UK from a range of foreign climes, that we could do with a similar phrase in the English language: ‘deep England’ or ‘deep Britain’ might do.

It was on my mind just before Christmas when I made a fleeting visit to the UK from the Middle East, and before that from the US. On arrival in the centre of London I had a feeling of horrible disassociation. It came flooding over me while walking through Berkeley Square in the evening. There certainly wasn’t a nightingale in sight or sound. Instead – thanks largely to the mercantile hooliganism of Richard Caring – it had become one of the ugliest global playgrounds I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some things.

Between the appalling new Annabel’s on one side and the grotesque Sexy Fish on the other, the square was rammed full of people who looked either like pimps or prostitutes. There was almost no one in between. In particular – and not to deliberately sound too Taki-ish, much as I love him – it seemed to have become the playground solely of Gulf Arabs, Saudis and the like, all wafting perfume (men more than the women) and paying by the wads to get through the VIP red ropes to be charged through the nose to eat glitzy, overpriced mush.

I used not to mind this overmuch. At least these people all bring money into the country, I thought. None of them is among the millions of natives and non-natives who spend their time living off what remains of the state. But it still seemed just a bit much. I never used to be in the centre of London and have the urge to get out.

Partly this was because this little enclave of obscene wealth was – I knew – so deeply unlike the rest of the country. I went to bed that night with a slight sense of sickness, as though I had indulged in too many of the overpriced cakes Mr Caring and co use to lure people to their emporia.

Fortunately, over the next couple of days I had a chance to experience that deep Britain which lies outside of London. Visiting friends in a couple of different English counties, I had the good fortune to catch the first real frost of the winter. In the counties to the east of London it had frozen onto the trees. It was a magnificent scene. A Christmas display of nature’s own invention. I had to stop the car, watch and just breathe it in deeply for a while.

The friends I saw gave me a similar deep nutrition. We talked by the fireside of all the authors we loved and were reading, or whom their children were reading for the first time. The children practised music that I had played myself at their age. A trip to the local church was a must, and as mustily enjoyable and en-deepening as ever, these being the true museums of our past – albeit sometimes on life support. There were conversations about schools, of course. Mainly about how to try to make sure that a child being brought up in Britain today can get any connection to the Britain of our past. As always, we agreed that the only way to do this is to put the education of every child in the land into the hands of Katharine Birbalsingh. But that is another matter.

Soon I was off to Wiltshire. And there, during a magnificent day’s shooting, I came across a different jewel of the English countryside. The deep valleys were covered in a great morning fog, and as we traipsed through the slight drizzle I remembered again – as I did in Scotland in my youth – that there is nothing better than a landscape you have to sometimes make a conscious effort to enter. This wasn’t Soho Farmhouse England (the countryside for people who don’t like mud). The pheasants flew high, lost in the mist. Lost in this magical kingdom that had been like this for centuries, and with a little luck and a lot of hard work could be like this for centuries more.

Wherever I am in these islands, I always try to seek out these places. But often the places seek out you. It is at such times that you find our deep country: the connection with the land; the remembrance that all is not lost. Because this is the real country. It is in these places that the people are mercifully untouched – or less touched – by the horrors of the cities. These are places where you can throw out a name and people will know who you are talking about. Where a historical question can be asked and someone will know the answer. ‘Who endowed this almshouse?’ ‘When was the church built?’ ‘Who used to live here?’

It is at such moments, in moments of answer as well as question, in moments – I might say – of connection (not least connection of the past to the present), that you sense that all is not entirely lost.

I wonder whether we could extend this realisation to our politics, as de Gaulle did, without poisoning it or cheapening it?

In any case, it is there. There is a deep England – a deep Britain – which not only breathes but breathes deeply. And it should know that it can speak of itself deeply too. Deservedly so.

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.

Is it your fault if you’re fat?

Matthew Parris   12:36PM, 14 Dec, 2023

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Sorry Santa, but there’s no sugar-coating this: you’re eating too much. And it’s nobody’s fault but your own. Human beings have agency. You have it within your power to cut down.

An excellent book written by restaurateur and policy adviser Henry Dimbleby, with his wife Jemima Lewis, sets out the figures. They’re shocking. In Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet into Shape, Dimbleby shows that in some 70 years we’ve regressed from being a nation where almost nobody was obese and less than 4 per cent of people were overweight, to today’s Britain, where some two-thirds are either overweight or obese. The UK is shamefully high on the list of fatties, but the rest of the West faces similar problems.

The consequences are dire. The cost to the nation as regards the NHS, social care and the economy is about £100 billion per annum, and rising fast. Eating has overtaken smoking in the damage it’s doing to us. So, gritting my teeth, I accept Dimbleby’s recommendations that government use the tax system to discourage the manufacture and consumption of the things that, consumed in excess, are killing us, like sugar, salt and fat; take at least some responsibility for helping feed the poorest children; regulate marketing techniques that encourage over-purchasing (like ‘buy one, get one free’); and – where definitions are easy, which they often aren’t – restrict the advertising of junk food.

My observation of seriously overweight friends is that they just won’t stop eating

Many readers will react instinctively against this nanny-state approach, but Dimbleby has persuaded me. After all, he’s not trying to ban foods, just nudging our habits by upping price and restraining marketing. I hate to say it, but he’s resoundingly right.

I have, though, one problem with this important book. I’ll stick my neck out here. Yes, these government measures would help; yes we should try them; but no, they’re unlikely to affect the public’s eating habits at more than the margins. Most of us will still be able to afford to get fat.

Yet not everyone will. So why’s that? Food is lovely. What really restrains gluttony? The reason stares us in the face – but we seem coy about admitting it. ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall…’

We don’t want to look unattractive. We know that our weight is determined by how much we eat. And almost everybody knows that however hard it may be to say no, it is within the power of most people to refuse a second helping, decline pudding, resist the chocolate at the checkout, skip the occasional meal and walk rather than drive when the journey isn’t that far. The incentive? Health will be one concern: we do want to keep fit. But face it, my friends, we think it unattractive to be overweight. We are sometimes secretly censorious of those who are. We’d hate to think others were politely ignoring mentioning our weight problem to us.

When we watch films we may warm to the cuddly people but it’s the svelte (or proportionately curvy) ones who set the pulse racing. We don’t count a double chin as a facial adornment. These criteria are woven deep in the fabric of the way we look at each other and, more importantly, at ourselves. If you doubt their power to influence behaviour, or doubt we think it possible to exercise some control over our own feeding habits, look at the trillions of words published on weight-loss diets.

The most powerful tool in the hands of those who, for reasons of health, wish to encourage people to eat less is to play on their willingness to do so for reasons of beauty. This is the motivation we all acknowledge but are becoming fearful of blurting out: we care how we look. Fat is unattractive. I dislike the phrase ‘fat-shaming’ but it touches on something that must be central to resisting the advance of obesity. ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ (Matthew 6:27). But which of us, by taking thought, cannot shed a pound or three?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves. Treat with suspicion science that struggles to define its terms while offering a simple, aha! explanation of our ills. Every journalist knows that telling our readers their difficulty is somebody else’s fault is music to their ears. ‘Thank heavens,’ they think, reading Dimbleby on ultra-processed food (UPF), ‘it’s not that I’m weak-willed. I’m a victim: the victim of unscrupulous multinational food corporations. The government must act.’

Undoubtedly big food companies have their eye first on profit. Undoubtedly some foods are more processed than others, and some of these are calorie-rich yet fail to fill you up, so you want more. Undoubtedly those who sell food take advantage of this: we eat more crisps than baked potatoes. But my observation of seriously overweight friends or obese people on trains is that they just won’t stop eating – eating anything really, ultra-processed or not. And there’s something fishy about this rather sudden unveiling of UPF as the author of their misfortune.

‘The British,’ writes Dimbleby, ‘eat more UPF than any other European country’ – in fact 57 per cent of our diet. This compares with 46 per cent for Germany, 15 per cent for France and 14 per cent for Italy. So are we four times fatter than the Italians? I looked at the tables. Across Europe there are very sharp differences in UPF consumption but none at all in rates of overweightness and obesity. We’re not much fatter than the Italians. Odd.

The oddity led me to a survey published in 2021 in the European Journal of Nutrition on ultra-processed food consumption in adults across Europe. The authors conclude that this consumption ‘was not observed to be associated with country-level burden of high [body-mass index] despite being related to a higher total sugar intake’. Crikey! It’s worth reading that again. I did. Then I looked at several related scientific publications. I found footnote references to the EJN survey but no attempted refutation. I sensed that contributors, who did offer evidence of other harm from UPFs, are ducking the obesity question.

Let’s carry out a test on two Santas. Between now and Christmas we give one of them access to limitless quantities of shop-bought mince pies, full of ultra-processed ingredients. The other Santa has unlimited access to homemade mince pies, like grandma used to make. At Christmas we’ll measure their respective weight gains. If the first is significantly fatter than the second, I’ll eat my (high-fibre) hat.

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.

No one wants to talk about Ukraine any more

Lionel Shriver   12:08PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Apologies for this seasonal downer. Had the website such a listing, this column would surely soar to number one in The Spectator’s ‘Least Popular’ roster. For just now, few topics are a bigger turn-off than Ukraine.

Following Russia’s invasion, I got caught up in the same waves of emotion that washed over most western publics, and I say that with no regret. After relentlessly battling the prevailing cultural winds these past few years, I was relieved to feel a sense of solidarity for once. Most of us were revulsed by the gratuitous aggression, allied with an underdog whose bite proved surprisingly fierce, thrilled by a former comedian’s unexpected rise to his nation’s occasion and consumed by a weirdly addictive loathing for Vladimir Putin. Kyiv’s repelling Russia’s clumsy invasion of the capital was exhilarating. Like so many of you, in those early months I read about Ukraine every day.

This is the middle bit of a novel where if nothing appreciable happens the reader is apt to put the book down

I don’t any more. I bet most of you don’t either. Why, as grotesque as 7 October was, I sensed in our collective pivot to the Middle East this autumn an odd undercurrent of gladness that now we could plunge up to the neck into a different story. Ukraine suddenly seemed yesterday’s news; background news. But for Ukrainians, their war is still roiling very much in the present and is being conducted anywhere but in the background.

I’m no foreign policy wonk but I do know something about stories, and observers of international news constitute an audience, a readership. From the off, this story had a spectacular opening chapter, a classic hero – personified by Volodymyr Zelensky, but more crucially the Ukrainian people – and as wicked a villain as Shakespeare could have contrived. To begin with, too, our tale was punctuated by riveting dramatic events: the outrageous slaughter of civilians in Bucha; the triumphant sinking in the Black Sea of Russia’s grand warship the Moskva; the gratifying liberation of Kharkiv, as the once-intimidating Russian army beat a humiliating retreat; the sly and, for Putin, infuriating bombing of his fancy bridge to Crimea.

But if we fast-forward, Ukraine’s counteroffensive last summer was a damp squib. For months on end, every centimetre of liberated territory has been gained through huge loss of life and munitions. The Russians are dug in, their confiscated eastern regions heavily fortified. The battle lines having barely moved for months, the conflict’s visuals now recollect the meat-grinding Western Front of the first world war. Our plot has stalled. This is the middle bit of a novel where if nothing appreciable happens for long enough the reader is apt to put the book down.

‘All the reviews are one star.’

For us observers, this is supposed to be a David and Goliath story. But David and Goliath is a crap story if the giant wins. The big bloke pummels the little bloke? Predictable, a bit disheartening and not really a story at all, just the way the world works. Besides, a western audience wants to see the good guy win, both to mete out justice and to enjoy victory by proxy. Sophisticated literature often resolves with more complexity – with bitterness, irony or tragedy – but that’s one reason literary fiction is less popular than the commercial kind. Most people prefer happy endings. Any bestselling thriller writer would subject the Ukrainians to plenty of nail-biting adversity, but Zelensky would finally triumph, reclaiming all his nation’s occupied territory, including Crimea.

Ukraine’s anguishing self-defence is not a novel. But we’re quietly losing interest in this conflict – I include myself – because it’s not satisfying our fictional appetites. Recall that about a year ago I worried here that our narrative expectations of this war may be taking us into the realm of fantasy. I observed glumly that the war’s probable resolution is an ugly moral compromise that sacrifices a goodly chunk of a sovereign nation to a monomaniacal bully – who will doubtless spin Ukrainian concessions as a dazzling military success, one that redeems for the Russian people his unprovoked aggression and the many deaths of their sons, brothers and fathers.

This endgame is more likely than ever. I’m not happy about that. In fact, it makes me sick. But the average age of the Ukrainian army is now 43 – a statistic that makes me even sicker. They’re running out of young men, not because the young men won’t serve but because they’re dead. Ukrainian women are being sent to the front lines. Russia had nearly four times the population of Ukraine before the war; given the reduced population in Kyiv-controlled areas, the countries are now mismatched in manpower by a factor of five. With his legacy and political future on the line, Putin is clearly all-in for the long haul. The easily manipulated Russian public have not rebelled. Putin’s inner sanctum hasn’t staged a coup. Russian GDP has increased since last year. The rouble started rising against the dollar. Western sanctions have failed.

I don’t share the view of many US Republicans that Ukraine should be thrown under a bus because the country is none of our business and America should spend taxpayers’ money on solutions to its own problems. But just because the conflict’s resolution has major geopolitical ramifications doesn’t mean we can write our own happy ending. No matter how much ordnance the US and Nato ship to Zelensky, we’re not providing the soldiers obliged to wield it. I say this with a heavy heart: if the writing is on the wall – if a negotiated settlement that cedes captured territory to Putin looks inevitable – maybe it’s time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion. Dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose. Sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.

Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.

In search of a second epiphany

Kate Andrews   1:52PM, 14 Dec, 2023

(iStock)

When I go home to America next week for Christmas, I’ll go to church – the one my family and I used to attend every Sunday, a few towns over. I visit intermittently throughout the year when I’m back home, but I always go on Christmas Eve. The routine is the same: I sit quietly in the pews, sing along to the carols, and hope to have a second epiphany.

I had my first epiphany – that God exists – when I was a child. This, I’m sure, is the result of having two religious parents who raised me in the church. When I tell my British friends that I was brought up a Methodist, they tend to flash me a nervous look. I must assume that going to a Methodist church in the UK means something different than it does in liberal Connecticut. Mine is the kind of church where people hug you longer and harder if you haven’t shown up in a while; where the pastor tells you that hell is more of an allegory than it is a place any departed soul actually ends up.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I would yell at God. ‘Why didn’t you bother to perform a miracle?’

When, as a teenager, I was confirmed, I ‘accepted Jesus into my heart’ as they asked us to do. But this was a formality. I had already accepted God’s existence years ago. Believing in a higher power has never been the hard part. It’s everything that follows as a consequence of having faith which I find difficult.

For many people in my life, their faith in God gives them strength and comfort. For other people I know, not believing in God also seems to provide some degree of assurance: there may be no light at the end of the tunnel, but they feel no pressure to reach it either. I imagine it’s trickier to be agnostic, to grapple with the doubt of it all. My late godfather, who was fairly sure there was no God, would still pray every day. ‘Just in case,’ he would say.

I envy them all. Each of these options seems better to me than where I’ve ended up. Somehow, I’ve managed to develop a belief in God that comes without the comfort.

When I was ten, six months after my mom died (she had been in and out of hospital for a year already), it finally really hit me that she was never coming home. That’s when my one-way shouting matches with God began. Looking up at the ceiling, I spared no insult.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I would yell, with all the perfectly delivered sarcasm and anger of a pre-teen. ‘Why didn’t you bother to perform a miracle?’ I knew He could hear me, that I wasn’t yelling into the abyss. That made it so much worse.

Why do we look up when talking to God? He’s supposed to be everywhere. Yet I struggle to find evidence of his interventions up, down, or anywhere else. ‘If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him,’ says Job when it’s all going pear-shaped. ‘On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.’

It probably comes as no surprise that these are the verses in the Bible I’ve turned to most over the years. Yet they provide no solace. A man sees his life fall apart and ends up with a shiny new second family. What about his ten children who get offed along the way? Job’s faith may finally reward him, but the ratio of happy to dreadful endings doesn’t exactly inspire hope.

I understand we need to suffer, that some types of trials and tribulations are necessary to grow our character and reaffirm our faith. But do we need to suffer so much? Surely broken bones, heartbreak or a life cut short by 20 years is enough to test us. There’s simply no making sense of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or children who don’t make it to their first birthday – especially if you know there’s a power out there that could stop the cruelty.

So far, my hardships have fallen on the tolerable side of the line. When I was young, grown-ups used to insist that I had had a terrible time of it. I could sense their uneasiness when I told them I was actually very blessed. Yes, I had lost my mom, but I was raised by a wonderful dad, in a supportive community. Many people experience so much worse. Looking back, I was largely correct. But I wasn’t blessed, I was just lucky.

Suffering is short, I’m reminded, and God understands what we go through, having sent his son to live, die and suffer among us. Perhaps this makes me a little less lonely, but it also deepens my frustrations. God understands our pain yet still stands aside? He sends his sympathy, not his strength?

I once found consolation in the idea that God didn’t answer my childhood prayers because he was busy performing miracles on a much greater scale. As a grown-up, I look around and see little evidence that He was up to much else.

A friend tells me I need to turn to the Serenity Prayer: to acknowledge and accept what I can and cannot change. This isn’t my problem, I explain: as a lowly little human, I am under no illusion that the world’s problems are in my control. My issue is with the Omnipotent One, who has thepower to change things. The God who can make the lame walk and raise people from the dead could surely have spared those babies in the kibbutzim. That He didn’t doesn’t make me believe any less. It makes me angry.

Every year, when I return home for Christmas, I take that anger to church. I sit in the pews I ran around as a kid, looking out the window into the garden where Mom is buried. I pray for a second epiphany – one that not only allows for faith, but for some joy and peace to creep in too.

Kate Andrews

Kate Andrews is economics editor of The Spectator

The unfashionable truth about motherhood

Lara Prendergast   12:57PM, 14 Dec, 2023

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At The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, ‘Speech of the year’ went to Theo Clarke MP for her account to the House of Commons of the birth trauma which almost killed her. Credit to her, of course, for confronting her pain. But childbirth and early motherhood has always been traumatic and difficult.

What has changed is that it is now deeply unfashionable to say anything too enthusiastic about motherhood. Discussions have shifted from the apple-pie good to the nappy-bin bad or even the fourth-degree-tear ugly.

In national newspapers, women write about losing their identity after having children. The staggering cost of childcare is well-documented, as are fears about babies being bad for the planet. Stories of understaffed, underfunded maternity wards are easy to come by. Everyone knows about the sleepless nights and the delirious tiredness. The lack of housing. The loneliness of parenthood.

I must admit I prefer the cranky honesty about motherhood to the glossy online alternatives

Lighter relief can be found in TV programmes such as Motherland, in which hapless fathers and competitive mothers wind each other up at the school gate to great comic effect. In many ways, though, the message is much the same: having children is awful.

Is it any wonder that birth rates are falling? I’ve also read plenty of articles concerned by this fact. These pieces are usually accompanied by pictures of an empty cot or a despondent-looking stork. The underlying message can seem like an accusation. What’s wrong, gals? Why aren’t you all procreating like your mothers and grand-mothers? TikTok…

Half of all women in England and Wales born in 1990 (the year I was born) had not had a baby by their 30th birthday. We are the first generation for that to be the case. But if you look at the ominous portrait being painted of modern motherhood, it might explain why many women are having second thoughts, or at least considering their options.

‘Childless’ has been rebranded ‘childfree’. The case against procreating is often made convincingly by women with bouncy hair, glamorous outfits and so much time to themselves. The charge sometimes levied at these women is that they are selfish, for being unwilling to sacrifice their freedom for children. But it could just as easily be argued that they are shrewd, too. Mother Nature isn’t really a feminist. Having children does mean sacrificing a lot of your old life.

Just ask the frazzled mothers on the forums. Nobody wants to be accused of being a bit ‘Mumsnet’, a term loaded with derision. Or ridiculed for using the dreaded phrase ‘As a mother…’. But it has become very clear to me, as a mother, why Mums-net exists: it is a space where women can vent. It is not the only support group. ‘The Motherload’ is a ‘non-judgmental, witty and smug-free parenting’ website where mothers can share the ‘mental load’. Women divulge stories of life after birth, and ask each other how best to cope, how to hang in there when you are at your wits’ end. ‘Desperate first-time mummy…’ begins one recent post. ‘I really need help’ reads another. There is lots of advice offered, mostly kind and well-meaning. Pregnant Then Screwed is a charity campaigning to end what it calls ‘the motherhood penalty’, which really does make having children sound like a prison sentence.

I must admit I prefer all the cranky honesty to the glossy online alternatives which paint a picture of motherhood that I’m not sure is more appealing. Take the rise of the Trad Wife, for instance, birthed from the depths of the internet, who, trussed up in pearls and a frilly apron, and relying on soft-porn aesthetics, lectures other women from her spotless kitchen counter about how to be a good wife and a good mother. It’s time to forget the #GirlBoss dream, honey, she purrs. Focus on the babies, the bread and keeping your bloke happy.

Or look at the influencer mummies who post stylised tableaux of their lives. Their darlings frolic in fields or snuggle up in blankets. Everything looks blissful but highly staged. And while these scenes are more enticing to look at, and in some ways, give a more positive impression of motherhood, there is something unnerving about the way children are conscripted into influencer commerce. Mothers are encouraged to use their brood to help flog products to each other, milking motherhood for all it is worth.

The ‘Motherload’ types are more honest than the glowing Instamummies. I have two young children and it can at times be challenging. It is consoling to read that others find it hard, too. Give me that over yet another algorithmic advert for a jumper or hairband hand-embroidered with my daughter’s name. When Lily arrived, the week before the lockdown in March 2020, my husband would quote Mike Tyson: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ Put that on a poster for the nursery.

Motherhood can be oppressive but the contemporary rage against it feels perplexing. So I would like, unfashionably and perhaps even a little sanctimoniously, to write briefly in favour of motherhood. Because Christmas brings with it a reminder of the utter comfort and joy that children bring to life. It is a time to mother and be mothered, as ghosts of motherhood past, present and future pay their visits.

I don’t want to sermonise too much. But the story of the nativity does put modern concerns into perspective somewhat. Christmas is a celebration of a child but also of His mother, who gave birth in difficult circumstances. Motherhood is about making a life, not making life easier. The truth is that it’s probably more straight-forward to raise a baby now than it ever has been.

That doesn’t mean everyone should have to do it. Thankfully, motherhood is usually now a journey that women can choose to go on or not. I’m pleased I have. Becoming a mother is the hardest thing I’ve done. It is also the sweetest.

Lara Prendergast

Lara Prendergast is executive editor of The Spectator. She hosts two Spectator podcasts, The Edition and Table Talk, and edits The Spectator’s food and drink coverage.

Ivy League universities must be depoliticised

Charles Moore   1:13PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

In writing about the RedBird IMI bid for the Telegraph Group and The Spectator, its opponents – your columnist very much included – emphasise the danger that the real buyers, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, could use their purchase to put political or commercial pressure on the British government. But there is also a danger the other way round. If Abu Dhabi owned the titles, I would not put it past any British government (of any party) to put pressure on the Arabs. ‘Look here,’ I can imagine some prime minister saying: ‘Of course, we’d like to sell you a stake in our power stations/electric vehicles/5G networks [or whatever], but it’s very difficult for us to help while you let your titles criticise us so unfairly.’ That would be the sort of language any Gulf state would understand.

If a future British government did frame such requests, they would probably convey them to Dr Sultan Al Jaber. Dr Sultan is IMI’s main man of business, and a man of many parts, being his country’s minister of industry and advanced technology, head of its renewable energy company and of its national oil company, and therefore perfectly placed to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds as head of the COP28 in Dubai which ended this week. He is also the country’s former chief censor (not, of course, so named) and something of a diplomat. In St Petersburg in June, Dr Sultan was among those who met President Vladimir Putin ‘to build bridges and foster positive partnerships to ensure regional and international security and stability’. He will instinctively recognise the need for any British papers which his company owns to be flexible wherever the interests of his country are seriously engaged.

To my surprise, I felt a twinge of sympathy for the three Ivy League presidents (what we would call vice-chancellors) who appeared before the House of Representatives education committee last week. All were accused of giving answers which refused to declare student calls for genocide of the Jews as an automatic breach of their universities’ codes. One has resigned. Another, Dr Claudine Gay, has since explained herself by saying: ‘Some students have confused a right to free speech with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students.’ There surely is a free speech issue here: it would be difficult and undesirable to draw up a list of things, however revolting, that students may not say. Dr Gay was not flat wrong to try to distinguish between free speech and inciting violence against or harassment of Jewish students. The trouble is, however, that these three presidents – and most elite US universities – lack credibility. They have allowed their institutions to become intensely political in the framing of ‘decolonised’ curriculums, recruitment of academic staff, student admission policies etc. Harvard even has separate graduation ceremonies for black students, Hispanic students and gay students. In a question not so widely reported, a black Republican congressman asked the President of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, whether it was all right to segregate student dormitories on grounds of colour, as MIT does. Professor Kornbluth said it was because this was ‘positive selection’ not segregation: the black students (there are, of course, no all-white dorms permitted) could share ‘common experiences and support’. The way Ivy League universities are run today is prejudiced intellectually, culturally and practically against white students and most especially against Jewish ones. So the defence of free speech offered by presidents who obsessively police ‘micro-aggressions’ was justifiably not believed. The problem is not best dealt with by punishing students for uttering repulsive views, but by purging the universities of the systemic politicisation and unfairness created by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies so they can become proper academic institutions once again.

Auberon Waugh died nearly a quarter of a century ago, aged 61. I remember reading, not long before his death, a piece in which he calculated that no matter how long he lived, he would not be able to drink all the wine in his cellar. I felt sad to read this, and I later worried that his realisation had helped him lose interest in life, rather like the tears Alexander the Great supposedly shed when he had no new worlds to conquer. Although I am now six years older than Bron ever was, my cellar has no risk of achieving such superfluity. Bron was a buff (though he scorned wine buffery, saying ‘Just drink what you enjoy’) and accumulated huge reserves, thanks to his work for the Spectator Wine Club. I am an ignorant amateur. But my drinking habits have changed with the years. I still love wine, but more than one glass makes me feel rotten. So although I could in theory drink all the wine I possess, I shan’t. Since the rest of my family – except for one element who is more interested in quantity than quality – also drinks little or nothing, should I give up on a cellar, and just get a few bottles in when guests come? No, and Christmas reminds me why. It is to do with the curious fact about good wine (reflected in the policy which treats it as a wasting asset and therefore does not charge capital gains tax on onward sale) that it improves with age yet also perishes. I like good wine’s resemblance to a life well lived – the need to exercise patience to achieve maximum pleasure. It is therefore the right thing with which to toast the people you love. An empty cellar is a life-denying thing, like a cold hearth.

In matters of health, marketing is all. So I hope by next Christmas to make available for sale tiny phials of a liquid preparation based on an ancient Celtic recipe which distils the life-giving properties of spring water. If placed on the tongue, its label will explain, its subtle taste, extracted from a mash of natural grains, boosts calm and wellbeing. I shall call it Usquebaugh.

Charles Moore

Charles Moore is a former editor of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

Thank goodness for the Christmas elf of York station

Martin Vander Weyer   12:41PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Getty Images

It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday evening in early December. My crowded northbound train departed King’s Cross two hours late and has lost two more between Newark and Retford. Overhead line trouble, we’re told; engineers on the line. I’ve read this week’s Spectator from cover to cover. I’ve exchanged emails with friends in Los Angeles, whom I picture in sunshine with pre-lunch glasses of crisp white wine. And in boredom I’ve re-read all my own Christmas columns for the past decade in search of inspiration for this one.

Some years, I see, I did short stories from the boardroom; sometimes tongue-in-cheek awards for City headline-makers or real accolades for best restaurants and books; or tributes to the recent dead. And this year? A full-length rant about the state of the UK rail network – its fractured franchise system, hellbent unions and total absence of leadership or internal co-operation – would hardly be festive. Despite all, I still like trains; so, I gather, do many of you.

And, as this one finally moves off again, a ghostly voice comes through the frozen fog outside. It’s I.K. Gricer, my predecessor Christopher Fildes’s long-retired railway correspondent. Write about great train journeys, he whispers, and what they taught you about the world. So here goes.

Partying in Mongolia

A more convivial late-night halt happened to me at Erenhot, the border-point of China and Outer Mongolia, on a train from Beijing that would reach Moscow five days later. The extended stop was for the wheel bogies to be changed to the wider gauge of Mongolian and Russian tracks – a precaution against invasion which let’s hope never becomes redundant, because no one wants Russia and China to be military friends.

In the lively station bar, I found myself going drink-for-drink with Earl Jellicoe, the former Tory minister who was en route to Ulan Bator as a salesman for British power-station turbines. Our Chinese deluxe-class carriage – amiably overseen by attendant Chang and interpreter-cum-secret-policeman Zhang – spoke of the privilege of elites in communist states, while dollar-based commerce in the dining car spoke of endemic corruption. Crossing Russia (this was the Gorbachev era), we saw the unrelenting grimness of Siberia and sensed rising depression, suspicion and vodka dependency on every platform as we travelled west; reform might come, but this was never going to be a happy country.

Partying to Venice

The Venice-Simplon Orient Express, by contrast, felt like a happy country all to itself, a pre-war cocktail party in a sealed tube, every detail of furnishing, food and service exquisite. Created by the shipping tycoon James Sherwood (who died in 2020) from old rolling stock found all over Europe and meticulously restored, it was and is a triumph of patient entrepreneurship – the same perfectionism I encounter, in very different fields, among so many entrants for our Economic Innovator of the Year Awards.

If you’ve never thought of booking, those low days between Christmas and New Year would be the perfect time to cash in your Isas and go for it. The last approach to Venice at sunset across the lagoon causeway is a lifetime moment of beauty.

Mainline misery

If space permitted, I’d wax lyrical about bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka, night rides from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok and Chiang Mai; Amtrak’s Acela express from New York to Washington; and of course French TGVs. All – in my memory, at least – courteous, comfortable, on time and uplifting for the spirits.

Or I could regale you with almost 3,000 journeys, over 34 years, on our very own East Coast mainline. Was nationalised British Rail better than the privateers that followed? No it wasn’t: the rolling stock was tired, the staff surly, the stations shabby. The first franchisee, GNER (with James Sherwood behind it), offered superior service but could not make profits; two successors failed and the current state-run service, LNER, has no character at all. Its best effort was a near-empty train on a recent Aslef strike day whose freedom-loving driver would have broken the speed record if he hadn’t been gratuitously held by signals outside York.

Generally friendlier, and preferred by discerning northern travellers, is the German-state-owned ‘open access’ competitor Grand Central. But that, unfortunately, is the one I’m on as I write…

Who’s in charge here?

It’s after midnight and we’ve all been turfed off at York, presumably because union rules forbid the crew from completing the scheduled run to Sunderland via stops in between – including mine, Thirsk, less than 20 minutes up the line. There’s a huge taxi queue and upwards of 200 people shivering in wait for promised ‘replacement bus services’. Here are empty, locked coaches but no one knows which might go where; and no visible station staff, literally no one in charge. Except, miraculously, a slight young man in a red-and-white bobble hat like a Christmas elf, who says: ‘I’m just a bus driver but I’ll see what I can sort out.’

A few minutes later he’s darting among us, organising destination groups and despatching buses. The stragglers for Thirsk are allotted an ill-tempered chauffeur who claims the main road is too foggy so takes a winding route through villages none of us recognise, shouting: ‘Ah’m followin’ mi’satnav.’ But at last we’re there, the car unfreezes in the station car park, the roads are clear of snow and I’m home at 2.30 a.m.: possibly my worst train journey ever.

Before bed I raise a large glass of red wine to the only person with managerial nous in the entire rail network tonight, the one they should make minister of transport, York station’s Christmas elf.

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.

Books

- Will the Caucasus ever be tamed?

- The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

- What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?

- Spot the Shakespeare play

- Seeing the dark in a new light

- Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

- The invisible boundaries of everyday life

- Alan Partridge has had more incarnations than Barbie

- The popularity of ‘Amazing Grace’ owes much to its melody

- Surprise package: Tackle!, by Jilly Cooper, reviewed

- Andy Warhol would have revelled in the chaos of his legacy

- The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

Will the Caucasus ever be tamed?

Its ruined fortresses, broken monasteries and deserted villages attest to centuries of conflict, and any idea of a united Caucasus remains a dream, says Christoph Baumer

Benedict Allen   10:52AM, 14 Dec, 2023

The ruined mountain village of Gamsutl in Gunibsky Rayon, Dagestan once counted almost 3,000 inhabitants. The last villager died in 2015 [Christoph Baumer]

History of the Caucasus, Volume II: In the Shadow of Great Powers

Christoph Baumer

I.B. Tauris, pp. 400, £35

How to get your head around that searingly beautiful but complicated land that lies between the Caspian and Black Seas? The early Arab historian Al Masudi called the Caucasus jabal al-alsun, the mountain of tongues, and through the centuries the place has certainly seen its fair share of peoples, many of them troublesome, many of them troubled. Indeed, for somewhere you might think would be a transcontinental backwater, its outcrops, secluded valleys and expansive plains usefully separating its formidable neighbours – Russia to the north, Turkey and Iran to the south – it’s proved remarkably busy over the centuries; also persistently relevant. The turbulence of the region is rarely far from the news. Chechnya comes to mind – its two separatist wars – and Azerbaijan (upheavals in Nagorno-Karabakh), not to mention Moscow’s determination to make good its hold over Georgia.

After the ravages of the Black Death came the bloody conqueror Timur, who invaded no fewer than eight times

Put another way, the Great Caucasus Range provides a natural divide between east Europe and west Asia – yet even this barrier has failed to keep parties of either side out. Rather the opposite; the Caucasus proved a veritable thoroughfare of jealous warlords even before 1220, when the Mongols swept through, overpowering the Armenian army and all but breaking asunder the flourishing kingdom of Georgia. This was a prelude to more devastation in the form of the Black Death. Next came the bloody conqueror Timur, who invaded no fewer than eight times. So, when asked to review a history of the Caucasus, I might have been forgiven for hoping it would turn out to be a handy explainer, a neat little guide to clarify just who brought in what or did what unspeakable deed to whom.

I have to tell you, a handy little guide Christoph Baumer’s book is not. Weighing in at a couple of kilos, this second, concluding volume is more like those gloriously illustrated family-atlas-sized publications meant to tie in with a major exhibition at the British Museum. There are appendices – population stats, tables of languages, dynasties – and various indexes (of ‘concepts’ as well as people and places). At first glance, it is not a book that will appeal to those who like to curl up with a finely spun historical narrative – I’m thinking of William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain or my cousin Charles Allen’s Duel in the Snows.

Yet, as it turns out, it zings along. It’s a splendid achievement – informed, considered and clear. Though the fieldwork activities of the Swiss author are all but absent from the narrative, we soon understand that he’s an old hand on Central Asia and a worthy successor to a longstanding tradition of questing Europeans who have excited our imaginations with their tales of desert crossings astride Bactrian camels and of cities lost to the shifting sands. Baumer brings to mind the topographer Sven Hedin, the bespectacled Swede who mapped, among other things, the Wandering Lake of Lop Nor. One also thinks of explorers such as Nikolay Przewalski, he of the stocky wild horse, Francis Younghusband and Aurel Stein, who filled in blank charts and, unwittingly or not, became protagonists or pawns in the Great Game – not to mention the indomitable missionaries Mildred Cable and Evangeline French, and adventurer-writers such as Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming (his News from Tartary). Each in their own way told of passing through the wider region, but always with the same backdrop, the ruined splendour of those who had been before – the lichen-clad fortresses, rock tombs and broken monasteries on wind-harried crags.

There’s certainly no shortage of fascinating material, beginning around two million years ago, when into these realms spilled the first humans from Africa – not so much Homo habilis, our handyman ancestor, but Homo georgicus, Georgian Man. From then on, it was all action – the Neanderthals and in due course the northern horse peoples, Assyrians, Greeks, Anatolians, you name it. Wave upon wave they came, on foot, horseback or in war chariots, leaving behind pockets of survivors, each with their particular prejudices. Baumer enthrals us – more fallen towers, more fallen heroes – right to the present, with the states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan with its huge oil revenues.

Here he takes quite a risk, casting an eye to the future in a section entitled ‘Outlook’. Given the simmering way of the Caucasus both north and south, I’d have omitted that bit, and perhaps the more fanciful illustrations. In Volume I, published two years ago, I recall a bunch of Palaeolithic characters wearing surprisingly natty suits of animal skins depicted chasing goats off a cliff. In this volume, a centurion waves his gladius, a short, stabbing sword, before the assembled ranks, as the Roman army readies itself for battle. But these renditions of the past are few and far between, and the photographs are spectacular. Once in a while there comes along a book by a fellow explorer that you wish to heaven you’d had the wherewithal and body of knowledge to write yourself. This is such a book.

Benedict Allen

The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

Elagabalus’s suffocating party tricks may have been exaggerated, but Domitian’s sinister, death-themed feasts could be seen as a dictator’s flamboyant threat

Frances Wilson   10:59AM, 14 Dec, 2023

The Roses of Heliogabalus’ by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888. The Emperor Elagabalus was said to have ended his dinner parties by suffocating his guests in a deluge of flower petals. [Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

Mary Beard

Profile, pp. 493, £30

Emperor of Rome? Is there a typo in the title? Mary Beard’s latest book is about not one but 30 Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE), so why the singular? The answer is that Emperor of Rome is a study of autocracy and one autocrat, as Marcus Aurelius put it, is much the same as another: ‘Same play, different cast.’

Beard’s subject is emperors as a category, because it was the symbol of rule rather than the ruler himself that mattered to the 50 million imperial subjects between darkest Britannia and the Saharan desert in the first three centuries of the Christian era. Added to which, she points out, most of the population outside the metropolitan elite could put neither a name nor a face to the current ruler, a man simply known as ‘the Emperor of Rome’. ‘There are people among us who assume that Agamemnon is still king,’ said a 5th-century philosopher, reporting from North Africa. So don’t worry, Beard reassures her readers, if you can’t tell your Marcus Aureliuses from your Antoninus Piuses because no one else could either.

Domitian’s guests arrived to a dining room painted black, their places marked by imitation tombstones

Rome played to the public ignorance by literally blurring the emperors into one. Every time an emperor died, the features on his marble portrait were chiselled to resemble those of his successor, suggesting the seamless continuity of power. There is not a single image, Beard says, on coins, cameos, statues or sculptures, that looks remotely like any of the descriptions of the emperors given in the biographies by Suetonius. Not only would we never know from Domitian’s abundant head of hair that he was going bald (he even wrote a book on hair loss), but every imperial head was given by artists the same number of locks. The ancient historians, telling the same stories about different emperors, made them equally indistinguishable. The result was a period of such political stability that, as Beard puts it: ‘You could have gone to sleep in 1 BCE and woken up 200 years later and still have recognised the world around you.’

The aim of the bookis to expose what Beard calls ‘emperors of the imagination’, and explore the reality, and banality, of imperial life. Digging beneath the mythical portraits of rulers seen as either ‘good’, like Trajan (‘good in whose opinion?’), or ‘bad’, like Nero (‘bad by what criteria?’), Beard asks startlingly simple questions: ‘How, and why, have we come to characterise the emperors as we do?’ How was it possible to rule a vast empire with a skeleton staff? Why were so many emperors murdered? What were the rules, if any, of succession? Her interest is primarily in facts, but spin doctors – the invention of Roman government – offered important alternative facts, while fictions, in the form of gossip, slander, urban myths, even dreams, also have a part to play in Beard’s account, suggesting how the population imagined absolute and unending power to work.

So what were the emperor’s job requirements? Augustus, the founder of the Roman empire – who died of natural causes in 14 CE (unless, as was rumoured, he was poisoned by Livia) – left a useful roll call of his achievements in a manifesto which he had posted on the pillars outside his tomb. His boasting – ‘I did this… I did that…’ – reminds me of God in the Book of Job, but Beard, always alert to the contemporary analogy, compares Augustus’s list of newly built shrines, porticoes, theatres, piazzas and temples to a ‘Make Rome Great Again’ campaign.

How should an emperor live? We must see him, Beard stresses, in his habitat. She reconstructs the royal residence on Palatine Hill, taking us through its evolution from a compound of individual houses and dark alleys (in one of which Caligula was killed), to Nero’s Golden House, with its lake the size of the sea (it was probably, Beard suggests, a rectangular pool in a stone basin), to the Palace of Domitian, described by Roman writers as a greater wonder than the pyramids.

There is no better place to observe power than the dinner table, and no better place than imperial feasts for myths and legends to take seed. Emperor of Rome begins with the dinner parties hosted by the young Elagabalus (assassinated 222 CE), who reportedly sat his guests on whoopee cushions, served them green food, blue food, fake food or camels’ heels before smothering them in a deluge of flower petals. Really? Even Elagabalus’s Roman biographer, the source of the intel on his party tricks and lifestyle, conceded that most of the stories he gathered about the emperor (such as decorating his summer gardens with ice and snow) were probably concocted by the boy’s rivals and successor.

A chapter devoted to the semiology and sociology of Roman dining opens with an evening in the company of Domitian, whose guests arrived to find a dining room painted black, their places marked by imitation tombstones. The food, served on black dishes, was the kind offered to the dead. This party, reported in detail by the historian Cassius Dio, could be seen, Beard suggests, as a dictator’s flamboyant threat, or, less dramatically, as a stylish and witty fancy dress party, or simply as a philosophical reflection on mortality. It was important, as Seneca stressed in one of his essays, to prepare oneself for death.

And what about those lavish Roman menus? Elagabalus’s colour-coded food, Beard points out, could be interpreted either as deranged self-indulgence or refined haute cuisine. The signature dish of Vitellius was reported to be peacock brains and flamingo tongues, but it is more likely that the royal kitchens served the kind of dishes which could be easily consumed with one hand while reclining on couches. The Roman banquet, Beard suggests, would consist of something closer to tapas.

Emperor of Rome is the work of a lifetime, and a book to return to. Immersive, witty, alive on every page, it clarifies the past and illuminates the present. What can we learn from the emperors about autocracy? ‘That it is fundamentally a fake, a sham, a distorting mirror.’

Frances Wilson

What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?

‘Nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry’, he says, in an anthology co-edited with Len McCluskey. But, judging by his own offering, afraid is what we should be

Don Paterson   11:06AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Jeremy Corbyn [Getty Images]

Poetry for the Many

edited by Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey

OR Books, pp. 272, £12

Much like its editors, I have no idea who Poetry for the Many is for. However, the choir it preaches to is quickly identified. It opens with a dedication to Julian Assange, the free speech martyr in no way a narcissist patsy for a hostile state. A member of UB40 summarises the book’s aim on the jacket: to ‘encourage the working classes to embrace and enjoy culture’. Elsewhere, in the course of four separate introductions, I divine some plan to make poetry both politically relevant and accessible to the lower orders.

This project apparently requires the literary advocacy of Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn. They have written personal introductions to their favourite poems and invited ‘friends’ to do the same. These friends are mostly drawn from the celebrity class of comedians, auteurs and actors traditionally first to man the barricades (Russell Brand was dropped shortly before going to print). This notably pale group, Melissa Benn improbably claims, has often been ‘sidelined, mocked or castigated for their efforts’, and may therefore read this with a sense of déjà vu. Among the contributions are, at least, a couple of thoughtful commentaries: one from the estimable Gary Younge, and another from Ken Loach – unusual here in that his strenuously professed love of poetry seems to extend to actual acquaintance with the stuff, even if he plumps for leftie self-caricature in his choice of ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’.

Len’s taste runs mostly to Victorian schoolbag classics – ‘Invictus’, ‘If’, and so on. He is a clever man but writes like a child. An Emily Dickinson poem is ‘so beautifully written and speaks to all of us about the greatest emotion, hope, and how fragile it can be’. Robert Frost’s nihilist masterpiece ‘The Road Not Taken’ makes him think ‘what my life would have been like had I chosen another direction’. It is supposed to make you think precisely the opposite. Jez and Len are not natural literary scholars. ‘Blake was frequently stressed,’ writes Jeremy. This is true, but needs context. ‘Who knows what he would have produced had his life not been prematurely cut short?’, Len writes of Robert Burns. I can tell you: nothing, as he’d long quit writing poetry for song-gathering. Elsewhere, we get the usual virtuous glommings of someone else’s decent pang of conscience. What do ‘the Many’ get of Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Not for them an immortal sonnet or some sublime passage from Book Five of Aurora Leigh. No: they have to chew through ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Other choices seem whimsical. The Many are invited to fill their boots with all 100-plus lines of Meredith’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, but they get only three stanzas of Shelley’s arguably more relevant ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, from which the book’s title derives.

Reviews of anthologies tend to consist in lists of omissions. If a poet is doing the reviewing, this list often starts with ‘me’, but here one would happily pay not to be included. All the same, where are the working-class poets, or poets who write of working-class lives? No John Clare, John Keats or John Davidson. No Robert Hayden. No Philip Levine. No Yusef Komunyakaa. No Ciaran Carson, Diane Seuss, Denise Riley or Douglas Dunn. No Tony Harrison, for heaven’s sake. Instead, we get a handful of exhausted anthology warhorses, ‘inspirational things that aren’t really poems’, lyrics and some random contemporary stuff.

At some point the left will have to reckon with the apparently devastating news that mediocrity, just like talent, is colour blind. As one of the most respected black voices included here once muttered to me at the bar: ‘The white liberal class has a lot to gain by promoting black mediocrity.’ It is a criticism the left will not understand, far less heed. Let me parse it for them: there is a class of gatekeeper whose dream is both to revel ecstatically in their guilt and remain fully in charge. Both states are required to indulge their main paraphilia, namely saviourist largesse. Moreover, the promotion of bad writing affords them a frisson of charity they would not derive from the good. Bad writing is not the fault of bad writers, which is why one never names names. It is the fault of those making you read it. Bad art actively undermines its cause. Had the editors bothered to consult anyone who knew anything, they could have furnished this book with fine, ‘accessible’ and politically stirring poems by many contemporary non-white poets – say, Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Natasha Trethewey, Zaffar Kunial, Kayo Chingonyi or Airea Matthews – and at least have added some actual substance to the signalling.

I mention this because, while there’s no dodging the dead, the editors clearly got the Islingtonian memo that the live white male is best avoided. They have kept their number down to a highly commendable three, one of whom is a poet new to me, one J.B. Corbyn. And so, having begun with one narcissist, we close the book neatly with another. Jez feels that ‘there is a poet in all of us and nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry’. Oh, Jeremy: be afraid. Corbyn seems to have made a late start as a poet, though to his credit he has finished almost immediately. He contributes a Thribbian effusion written ‘on a train home after a recent trip to visit the refugee camps in Calais’, making the rookie error of imagining that the intensity of a poem increases with the proximity of its occasion. Unrevised and endless, the poem is a heartfelt cry for either a far longer or far shorter journey. No refugee will be warmed or fed by its dead eye and deader ear. Pace Auden, some poems make a lot less happen than others.

The kindest thing one can say is that this book was not compiled in bad faith. The worst is that it embodies the very bourgeois presumptions it claims to challenge: proud ignorance, paternalistic saviourism and zero acquaintance with the tastes of the class to which it claims to appeal. Len wants to eliminate the stigma that poetry is only for ‘posh people’ or ‘softies’, apparently unaware that the great Kendrick Lamar won his Pulitzer years ago. Contemporary poetry has many terrible problems, but lack of popularity isn’t one of them. Indeed, some would argue its biggest problem is its failure to recruit the ‘softies’ of its natural readership – think Horace from The Broons, or indeed Denis Healey and John McDonnell: bright working-class kids on long-lost grammar school scholarships (mostly phased out before women could take advantage of them) who got to read not just Keats and Clare, but Eliot, Plath and Wallace Stevens.

More sinisterly, there is a clear line between this garbage and the post-Foucauldian assault on the humanities: both wings of the left use the tactic of cultural deletion as a shortcut to the world as they would prefer it. The bulk of the poems included here date either from before the first world war or last week, with precious little in between. Good, though, to know we can always skip the decoloniality theory and fall back on pig ignorance.

Don Paterson

Spot the Shakespeare play

Simon Drew   11:18AM, 14 Dec, 2023

For answers, click here

Simon Drew

Seeing the dark in a new light

Even in the deepest mineshaft we’re surrounded by light we can’t see, explains Jacqueline Yallop, drawing on quantum physics to help dispel ordinary night terrors

Horatio Clare   11:24AM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘Moonlit Landscape with Bridge’ by Aert van der Neer, 1648-50. A landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Van der Neer specialised in night scenes lit by the moon or distant fires [Getty Images]

Into the Dark: What Darkness is and Why it Matters

Jacqueline Yallop

Icon Books, pp. 224, £16

True darkness, it turns out, can be experienced but does not exist. If you have been down a deep mine where the guide tells you to turn off your lamp you will have seen – in not seeing – something close to it: an utter nothingness in which your body and mind seem to shrink and expand at the same time. On a school trip to Big Pit in South Wales my entire class fell into a moment of unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated silence, a gasped amazement at the disappearance and invisibility of ourselves. Just for a moment everything vanished – and then the whooping and squealing started.

This double impulse, of delight and terror, runs through Into the Dark, Jacqueline Yallop’s exploration of what she describes as ‘an anomaly… a non-existent state which most of us would claim to experience as a real thing’. Down that mine we were surrounded by light we could not see. According to quantum physics, Yallop explains, there is no true darkness. Photons exist throughout the known universe and beyond it. Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft is now four billion miles from Earth and still picking up a glow from the darkest quadrants of space – either from undiscovered galaxies or another unknown origin.

Irish Gaelic has four different terms for the transition of afternoon to nightfall

Isaac Newton identified darkness as an absence of light; before him it was believed to be a force or entity, light’s opposite, a thing. And the thingness of darkness clings on. Our language for it evolved from the physical blackness of dark. ‘Pitch-dark’ comes from the tar used to waterproof wooden ships; pitch ‘reminds us that dark is viscous, tangible, impenetrable’, Yallop writes, while ‘dark’ itself seems to descend from Old High German tarchanjan, meaning danger, mystery, concealing.

The Greek skotos captures the way we often understand darkness, meaning both night’s blackness and misery’s gloom. Yallop travels through literary engagements with darkness – Dylan Thomas’s crowblack sea is here, along with Conrad’s Congo – and she excels in its visual story. A page painted black by Robert Fludd in his 1617 history of the divine and human worlds, representing his conception of the beginnings of creation and the infinities beyond it, links with Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 ‘Black Square on a White Ground’ and Pierre Soulages’s outrenoir – ‘beyond black’ – galleries of black canvases.

Soulages’s work, Yallop says, ‘gouges, folds and sculpts the dark, which is charged, relentless’. As a viewer, you are ‘thrown in on yourself, back on yourself’. Soulages claimed that his pictures were poetic objects capable of receiving ‘what each person is ready to invest’, and it is these qualities of darkness, its powers to fill or drain us, to enfold or engulf or balm us, which inspires Yallop’s quest.

Her father is falling into dementia when the book opens, and in an overlit care home at the close. Searching for different ways to approach the void that is overcoming him leads Yallop to range beyond European ideas of darkness, founded in perceptions of the non-light and non-white as justifications for imperial, sexualising and enslaving instincts, towards much more various and valuable conceptions of the dark. She cites the Maori academic Carl Mika’s call to treat ‘obscurity, invisibility and endarkenment benevolently’.

Medieval Europe worried about the power of the dark to conceal ill deeds and erase status, requiring citizens to carry torches, households to hang out lanterns and contracts to be signed before dusk, darkness being the realm ofthe untrustworthy. But away from the spreading glare of artificial light there were, and are, richer and more sinuous relationships with dark. Irish Gaelic has four different terms for the transition of afternoon to nightfall, from idirsholas, ‘between light’, to amhdhorchacht, meaning raw, uncooked darkness, referring to the sky at dusk. Maori days begin at nightfall and the dark itself is wonderfully divided into the great night, the long night, the deep night and the intense night, through 11 distinct terms culminating in Te Po-tahuri-mai-ki-taiao, meaning ‘the night of turning towards the revealed world’.

A cultural historian and novelist, Yallop finds spaces in between the binaries of light and dark. A section on shadows has the 18th-century French scientist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat declaring them ‘holes in the light’, and the great Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki pointing out that ‘were it not for shadows there would be no beauty’. The 19th-century physicist Lord Rayleigh discovered what would be called the ‘Rayleigh scattering’ of light, which explains the colour of clear sky and blue snow shadows so luminously captured by Monet and Van Gogh. Yallop traces the 19th-century craze for silhouette portraiture (invented by Louis XV’s finance minister Étienne de Silhouette, who cut representative shapes out of black paper in his downtime) back to bronze outlines of deities distributed throughout the Roman empire. Further back, in the Pech Merle caves in France, the silhouette of a woman’s hand waves to us from her work in the darkness of a deep cavern 20,000 years ago.

In what might seem a literally dark time in a metaphorically dark year, Yallop’s book makes a welcome companion, gently and thoughtfully enquiring. In the Maori understanding of night, as in the lives of the Pech Merle caves, she finds protection, reverence, ceremony, safety and comfort.

If night and darkness sometimes become confused here, it is no wonder. The associative structure of the book suits its subjects. The fact is, we need darkness. The Milky Way, ‘the clustered, textured, shift-shimmer arch of stars, dense and deep’, is invisible to 80 per cent of the world’s population, and 99 per cent of USA’s, she reports. This is sad, if only because to gaze on a span of our galaxy’s 400 billion stars is to feel our true proportion. My screeches with my classmates at the apparently utter darkness of Big Pit were gleeful as much as alarmed. Darkness seemed to make us all wild sprites, as small and free as photons, invisible, ineffable, but resoundingly – so resoundingly – there.

Horatio Clare

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

Her ‘rebel’ life, as told by Mary Gabriel, has been a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators, vital to her for a year or two and then discarded

Lynn Barber   11:37AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Madonna in San Jose, California, during her Confessions on a Dance Floor tour, May 2006 [Getty Images]

Madonna: A Rebel Life

Mary Gabriel

Coronet, pp. 880, £35

In 1994, Norman Mailer called Madonna ‘our greatest living female artist’. She was huge in those days. I remember teenagers like my daughters constantly asking ‘What would Madonna do?’ But my grandchildren haven’t even heard of her. She seems to have faded faster than most.

Why? Perhaps it’s because, as often claimed, she’s the ‘queen of reinvention’. But people who reinvent themselves every few months, as Madonna always did, tend to leave other people behind. Her ‘rebel life’, as told here by Mary Gabriel, is a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators who were vital to her for a year or two and then discarded. Her first manager, Camille Barbone, bust a gut to launch her New York career, but when Michael Jackson’s manager took an interest, Madonna jumped ship without hesitation. Barbone said of Madonna: ‘She wasn’t intentionally malicious; just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view.’

She was born in 1958 in Pontiac, Michigan, the third of Tony and Madonna Ciccone’s six children. They were very religious – ‘swooning with it’ – and went to church every day during Lent. But her mother died of breast cancer when she was five and Tony, a widower at 32, relied on housekeepers until he married one of them and had two more children. He was a strict disciplinarian, but Madonna said: ‘I’d do anything to rebel against my father.’

‘She wasn’t intentionally malicious; just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view’

After winning a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan she went on a six-week summer programme to New York, and ‘once I got a taste of New York, I knew I had to be there’. Her father refused to finance her, and said if she went she’d no longer be his daughter. But she went anyway, and lived on a dollar a day, taking food from garbage bins and relying on ‘benefactors’. Barbone said she had an amazing effect on men: ‘She had men lending her money and musicians rehearsing and giving their time without pay – and she wasn’t sleeping with any of them.’

She made her first demo and took it round DJs and record A&R men who all expected sexual favours, which she refused. But she still managed to get a $5,000 advance from Sire Records for two singles. When she first heard one of her songs, ‘Everybody’, on the radio, she cried. Warner Bros signed her for her debut album, but she complained: ‘Warner Bros is a hierarchy of old men… I’m treated like this sexy little girl.’ So she went to see Michael Jackson’s manager Freddy DeMann, who was ‘absolutely knocked off his feet’ and got her on MTV. For her next album she asked to work with Nile Rodgers, who said he’d ‘never come across such an iron will before’. In the video for ‘Likea Virgin’ (1984), she simulated masturbation and DeMann told her: ‘Your career is over.’ In fact it shot to no. 1, and the following year her film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan, made her a star.

Her first, and probably greatest, love was the actor Sean Penn. As soon as she saw him, she says, ‘I immediately had this fantasy that we were going to fall in love and get married’ – as indeed they did, on her 27th birthday. She called him ‘my hero and my best friend’. But then they went to Hong Kong to film Shanghai Surprise and were soon having such public rows they became known as the Poison Penns. He was drinking too much and picking fights with paparazzi and spent 47 days in prison for drink driving. By the time she turned 30, the marriage was falling apart. She wanted to do the film Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty but Penn didn’t like the idea, so she divorced him, though she said afterwards that divorce was ‘like a death’. Inevitably, she had a relationship with Beatty – who would only allow himself to be filmed between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when he believed he looked his best. He disapproved of her own film Truth or Dare (known as In Bed with Madonna) and allegedly instructed his attorneys after previewing it.

Truth or Dare was shocking enough, but then came her book Sex, with all its S&M and rape fantasies, which Martin Amis called ‘the desperate confection of an ageing scandal addict’. Her Erotica album also bombed, as did her film Body of Evidence, at which audiences cheered when her character died. Then she went on David Letterman’s show and handed him some worn panties and swore repeatedly. She really did seem desperate.

Buying a house in Miami calmed her down, as did meeting a Cuban personal trainer called Carlos Leon while she was out jogging. She had already decided to reinvent herself as a mother and she chose him as the lucky father. Their affair soon petered out, but he was with her when she gave birth to Lourdes, called Lola, in October 1996, and proved a reliable parent.

When everyone fled Miami after Gianni Versace’s murder, Madonna spent time in England and went to a dinner at Sting’s where she sat next to a hot new film director called Guy Ritchie, and ‘he turned my head’. She gave birth to their son Rocco in August 2000 and married Ritchie four months later. ‘The last thing I thought I would do was marry some laddish, shooting, pub-going nature lover.’ But she threw herself into the part, insisting on being called Mrs Ritchie and hosting shooting weekends at their country estate, Ashcombe, in Wiltshire, even though she was a vegetarian.

Her reinvention as an English countrywoman was certainly dramatic, but inevitably it palled and she was soon back in London, working on her next album and her next tour, even though she knew her husband would hate it: ‘It’s hard for a guy to be traipsing round the world with a girl. No one wants to be anyone’s trailer bitch.’ After the tour she starred in Ritchie’s film Swept Away – which got the worst reviews ever seen until his next film, Revolver, which ‘made Swept Away look like Citizen Kane’. His career died while hers suddenly revived with Confessions on a Dance Floor, which grossed $200 million. But Ritchie’s friends complained that ‘it’s as if work is the only thing that interests her’.

She’d heard that there were more than a million Aids orphans in Malawi and put $5 million into a foundation called Raising Malawi. She flew out there, visited orphanages and decided to adopt a boy, David Banda. She stayed with Ritchie until David’s adoption was made official, then asked him for a divorce and reportedly paid him £60 million. Later she adopted another three Malawian orphans, and built schools and community centres all round the country.

In 2018 she moved to Portugal so that David could develop his talent for football at the Benefica Academy. At first she was Billy-no-mates because she couldn’t speak Portuguese, but then she fell in with a group of musicians in Lisbon and decided to involve them in Madame X, her next show. Rolling Stone magazine approved: ‘She’s getting weirder with age. Thank all the angels and saints for that.’

But after she turned 60 in 2018 she began to struggle physically, mainly with knee injuries. She was not the reliable workhorse she used to be and kept having to cancel appearances, once at only 45 minutes’ notice. Audiences complained about shows starting three hours late and some ticket-holders even sued. She was heckled in Las Vegas and pronounced ‘a complete waste of money’ on social media. She was probably relieved when Covid gave her a forced break, and her recent Celebration tour has been greeted with generally rapturous reviews.

Apparently several American universities offer courses in Madonna studies, and Gabriel’s book is presumably intended for them. Exhaustive and exhausting, packed with feminist history and completely devoid of humour, it runs to more than 800 pages, even though the endnotes and bibliography are consigned to an online link. I thought I had an almost limitless appetite for reading about Madonna, but this tome has just proved me wrong.

Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber is a former Sunday Times journalist and author of An Education and A Curious Career.

The invisible boundaries of everyday life

Maxim Samson investigates cultural or imaginary demarcations around the world, including the International Date Line, America’s Bible Belt and the Jewish eruvim

Simon Winchester   11:42AM, 14 Dec, 2023

A chapel in Bible Belt Mississippi [Getty Images]

Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts that Define the World

Maxim Samson

Profile Books, pp. 404, £22

Norman Shrapnel, the wise and kindly parliamentary correspondent of the Guardian back in the day when it was a readable newspaper, tried never to give a book a bad review. He liked to say that anyone who had taken the time and trouble to write about anything at length deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt, and so he generally dipped his reviewer’s pen in honey rather than vinegar.

I must say that on picking up Maxim Samson’s Invisible Lines, I felt quite otherwise. I wanted at first (an important caveat) to paint my laptop’s entire screen with vitriol. Within two pages I’d begun to loathe the author’s use of ‘foreground’ as a verb (technically he is not wholly wrong, just wanting in style). The idler in me wondered why he needed to boast that he is a long-distance runner, obsessively collects flags and is a master-student at Duolingo. But what really got my goat was not Samson’s fault but that of his publisher Profile for failing to equip his book with an index. Samson could perhaps have insisted; but he is a first-time author, and publishers can be intimidating beasts, always grumbling about money.

In America’s Bible Belt, millions still cleave to the belief that the Earth is only 4,000 years old and angels exist

This, though, was just my initial reaction, and I totally changed my mind when I stumbling across one unfamiliar small word halfway through the book. The word is eruv (its plural, being Hebrew, eruvim), and it was Samson’s explanation of it as a type-example of an unseen frontier that turned Invisible Lines for me into a triumph, a volume of great good sense and imagination which brims with fascinations.

An eruv sounds small, though is anything but. It is both an actual thing and a fiendishly clever concept. Physically, it is usually a wire, a string, a length of nylon fishing-line, a tiny, translucent tube, and in cities around the world it is strung between poles and parapets and pilasters to delineate an area within which Orthodox Jews may live and work and happily circumvent the harsh rabbinical laws relating to their Sabbath.

From sunset on Friday until the same time on Saturday the Torah specifically forbids observant Jews from carrying anything – keys, mobile phones, groceries, baby-strollers or indeed babies – between their home and the outside world. But the erection by the local rabbinate of an eruv solves the problem. It surrounds the city block on which you live – or your entire city, if you have enough string – such that its encirclement conflates both your home and the outside world into a single entity, so that you may transport anything hither and yon as long as you don’t step across the scarcely visible borderline.

Eruvim can be found anywhere, critics deriding them as build-your-own ghettoes. You come across them most particularly strung up high in those cities where black fur hats and frock coats and kosher bakeries abound. I was interested to read that all of Manhattan is surrounded by a 30-mile eruv and each Thursday afternoon battalions of rabbis can be observed checking to see if it has survived another week of typical New York punishment. If it breaks, the synagogues have contractors on standby to fix it, so that the fiction of the local community’s wholesale obedience to divine law may be maintained for a further seven days.

The section of the book that includes this discussion of eruvim has the running head ‘How Invisible Lines Allow Groups to Preserve their Cultural Distinctiveness’. And while not a few non-Jews might take issue with that as a rationale, other chapters are considerably less contentious.

There is, for instance, the unseen line that runs through the jungles of western Sumatra, north of which women must wear hijabs, miscreants are publicly flogged and the secular ways of the rest of Indonesia are officially repudiated. There is an unmarked maritime exclusion zone five miles around North Sentinel Island in India’s Andaman chain protecting its indigenous inhabitants from all contact with outsiders and within which the Indian authorities decline to prosecute any crimes the islanders may commit. (In 2018 they killed an American evangelist who mistakenly believed that Jesus would protect him from their hail of poisoned arrows.) And there is America’s ill-defined Bible Belt, roughly from Topeka to Tallahassee and Richmond to Jackson, wherein millions cleave to the belief that Planet Earth is only 4,000 years old and that angels exist.

Some boundaries are entirely conceived of by humankind – the International Date Line, London’s Green Belt and the Tordesillas Treaty Line (which famously kept Brazil Portuguese in a continent of Spanish conquistadors, and the antimeridian of which rather less notably kept East Timor for Portugal while Spain had the Philippines). Others, mainly natural divisions, have been recognised rather than conceived. Alfred Russel Wallace noted that there were no deer in Australia and no mongooses in India, and drew a curved line through Asia and the Antipodes which still eponymises him.

Cities have often been divided by lines that have either vanished (the Berlin Wall) or have evolved, as can be seen with the varying geographical influence of the street gangs of Los Angeles. And, of course, there’s Belfast, of which the British army used to publish maps (we reporters called them tribal charts) showing where Catholics lived cheek by jowl with Protestants yet were firmly separated by an uncross-able line. That division still exists, only now it is a solid wall – the Peace Wall, laughably – topped with spikes and with stout oak and iron gates which the police slam shut each night at the witching hour.

Other sections of this endlessly interesting book deal with separations between languages and dialects, between trees and tundra, within banlieues in Paris and barrios in Buenos Aires and favelas in Rio. As the author travels the world, he tells us much that is new but also reminds us of things we only dimly think of as boundaries, since naturally they are invisible.

Shrapnel would have loved this book even more than most; and though I occasionally balked at a usage that tormented my inner pedant, I commend the work entirely. But please, Profile, think of the paperback, and with so many people, places and ideas to find within 400 pages, take pity on us non-runners, flag collectors and Duolingo dunces and give us an index.

Simon Winchester

Alan Partridge has had more incarnations than Barbie

His latest persona – a weatherbeaten nostalgist restoring a lighthouse in Kent – is a genius metaphor for a national pillar beaming brightly

Joel Morris   11:49AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Partridge repeatedly reminds us how clever his lighthouse metaphor is – but the masterstroke is that it actually is

Big Beacon: A Lighthouse Rebuilt, A Broadcaster Reborn

Alan Partridge, with Neil Gibbons, Rob Gibbons and Steve Coogan

Seven Dials, pp. 320, £25

Alan Partridge is back, and this time he’s restoring a lighthouse. The third volume of the Norfolk microstar’s faux autobiography is a meticulous parody of the celebrity-in-search-of-a-televisable gimmick genre, blending fan-friendly, behind-the-scenes tales of his more recent public adventures (This Time, Scissored Isle, From the Oasthouse) with a classic midlife lurch for purpose, part Griff Rhys-Jones rescuing threatened buildings, part Clarkson’s Farm.

Though Steve Coogan’s id-slaying monster started out as a media satire, Alan Partridge has become a vital national mirror in which middle-aged, middle English, middleweight, middlebrow man (let us call him Homo Partridgensis) can watch himself weather and crumble. The act of restoring a suitably phallic landmark on the Kent coast is linked, using heavily underlined prose, to yet another Partridge-from-the-ashes resurgence. But the character’s attempts to shore up his own career alongside ‘the Abbot’s Cliff Lighthouse in association with Alan Partridge’ aren’t just a good joke; they point to one of the most remarkable things about the ever-more-fully-realised Partridge Extended Universe: that Alan endures because he himself is regularly restored.

Alan Partridge has become a mirror in which middle English man can watch himself weather and crumble

Partridge has been with us for more than 30 years, in more versions than Barbie, whether sports-casual Motson minion, blazer-clad Travelodge mini-Madeley or bootcut-jeaned post-Top Gear social crusader. For Big Beacon, he’s a weatherbeaten Coast-style nostalgist, with a Kevin McCloud property-makeover-show hardhat (and megaphone for ordering his builders about).

British comic characters don’t usually change at all. If they last decades, like Del Boy or Captain Mainwaring, they are trapped within the format of their sitcom. If they burn brightly and briefly, like Basil Fawlty or Tom Good, they are fixed in their time by the habitual short runs of British television. Uniquely, Partridge has lasted, uninterrupted, because, it turns out, Alan contains multitudes.

Maybe it’s because the character is observed and shaped by various inquisitive comic minds. When Neil and Rob Gibbons (who write the bulk of these Partridge books, and now steer HMS Partridge in all its forms) took over from Coogan’s previous collaborators, Peter Baynham and Armando Iannucci (for 2011’s I, Partridge memoir), their act of deep-dive fan fiction reinvigorated the character for a new age, shifting him away from reactionary bufferdom and towards a more sellable Cameron-era lip-service liberalism.

The Partridge of Big Beacon is a new beast again. He is no longer in thrall to the BBC, and the adventure begins when he vengefully outbids his former employers after discovering they are planning a lighthouse makeover segment for This Time. You can sense him eagerly eyeing the new Partridgesque safe havens for ‘plain-speaking’, while taking care to remain critical of his assistant Lynn’s conservative Christian certainties. Positioning his career-sensitive politics is a subtle balancing act, achieved with effortless skill.

Partridge loudly and repeatedly reminds us how clever his lighthouse metaphor is – but the masterstroke is that it actually is. The reinforcing and replastering of the Partridge character does restore him to a central pillar of our culture, comic light beaming brightly. I found myself stopping, thumb in the pages, to read aloud favourite chunks.

Reading is mainly a solitary pursuit, while laughter is communal. Despite lists of the nation’s best-loved books being regularly dominated by great comic writing (Wodehouse, Jerome, Grossmith, Townsend, Pratchett, Milne), funny books are often treated as once-a-year pile-’em-high stocking-fillers. But if you value that glorious feeling of sharing a favourite passage with a loved one, gasping, tears rolling down your cheeks, do yourself a favour and pick up another masterpiece of the art, delivered by the ever-ingenious Partridge team.

Joel Morris

The popularity of ‘Amazing Grace’ owes much to its melody

The song has evolved from Christian hymn to secular anthem for humankind. But the powerful tune we know today was not its original one

Alexandra Coghlan   12:36PM, 14 Dec, 2023

John Newton, the captain of slave ships who became an evangelical cleric and wrote the words of ‘Amazing Grace’ [Alamy]

Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn

James Walvin

University of California Press, pp. 216, £16

Type ‘Amazing Grace’ into YouTube and you can cancel any other plans you might have had for the day. Page after page serves up everything from Elvis Presley to Pavarotti, Gospel choirs and winsome Celtic lovelies, folkies in fabulous knitwear and X Factor finalists strenuously proclaiming their surgically enhanced faith; even an American president. There are arrangements for electric guitar, steelpan orchestra, bagpipes or (God help us) beginner flute ensemble.

Saved from the storm, Newton was aware of ‘a sense of the amazing grace that snatched me from ruin’

All of which suggests that James Walvin’s Amazing Grace is a book landing in fertile soil. This is a song that’s part of western cultural furniture, ‘as familiar to most people’, he reminds us, ‘as the words of the national anthem’, as inevitable as ‘thoughts and prayers’, as universal as McDonald’s, all the while being endlessly customisable – oh and, crucially, free from any copyright obligation.

In his introduction, Walvin wonders why. Of all the songs in all the world, why this one? It’s not a question he ever answers satisfactorily, though the ‘how’ is mapped out in often repetitious detail. A career academic and prolific author, Walvin is an expert on the history of slavery – the first clue to the story of a song which unfolds with plenty of built-in tensions and ironies. Do these amount to the paradox Walvin repeatedly claims? I’m not so sure.

There’s pleasure to discovering that the origins of a song one might have placed in the 19th-century American south actually lie in 18th-century Wapping, with one John Newton. An early life of ‘the most horrid impiety and profaneness’ (of which, alas, we hear too little) leads Newton to the docks – first press-ganged into the navy and later finding his métier as a crew member and later captain of Atlantic slave ships. A near-fatal shipwreck on 1 March 1748 ‘transformed his life and outlook’. Saved from the storm, Newton became aware of ‘a sense of the amazing grace that snatched me from ruin, that pardoned such enormous sins and preserved my life’.

But what Hollywood would elide into an overnight conversion was inconveniently protracted. For several years the successful Newton ‘failed to realise… that his redemption coexisted with his continuing trade in, and brutalising of, Africans’. Only after illness forced him on to land did he pursue Holy Orders, becoming the minister at the parish of Olney in Buckinghamshire and the author of the words to ‘Amazing Grace’ in its earliest form.

And this is where Walvin gets stuck. We must be ‘baffled’ and ‘perplexed’, he writes, to discover that piety and slavery could co-exist in this period, whether in individuals or systemically; that two slave-captains could meet of an evening to discuss theology; that Newton (who would later join Wilberforce in the campaign against slavery) could experience ‘divine communion’ on his voyages to Guinea while beneath the decks his human cargo suffered unimaginable horrors. While there’s a piquant tension to the origins of a hymn which would later become an anthem of the civil rights movement that ‘seems to belong to’ African-American culture and experience, the historical values of its birth are hardly news.

Walvin is on home turf when the hymn crosses the Atlantic in 1789. He exposes the curious difference between England, where the hymn was for centuries ‘sniffily dismissed’, and America, where it found not only its most famous tune but also its audience. He traces the interconnected history of American political activism, Christianity and the recording industry in promoting ‘Amazing Grace’, charting its growing momentum from the 1970s onwards, its various incarnations from Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin to Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins.

He pauses on flashpoints in the song’s cultural evolution from Christian hymn to a secular ‘anthem for humankind’, including 9/11, Covid (when an Anglican vicar cycled around west London broadcasting it on loudspeakers), the 2021 Capitol riot (when protestors used it as a ‘musical fig leaf’), and of course Barack Obama’s much publicised but far from spontaneous performance of it during his speech after the Charleston church shooting.

But Walvin is surprisingly uninterested in the song’s melody. We’re almost a third of the way through the book before he mentions it, acknowledging that the tune we know today was not that originally associated with Newton’s verse at Olney. The origins of ‘New Britain’ (as the melody is known) are ‘elusive’, with possible claims on Irish or Scottish folk roots. Walvin leaves it at that.

What explains the ‘gravitational pull’ of ‘Amazing Grace’? For Walvin it’s Newton’s words, ‘a human quality that cuts across [a] religious divide’, a universal hope of ‘something better ahead’. That may be true, but hundreds of instrumental accounts, and instinct itself, argue that it’s not the entire story. If I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has taught us anything, it’s that one song to the tune of another can instantly turn pathos into farce and beauty into disorder. A rose by any other name is one thing,but a song to any other melody just doesn’t sound as sweet.

Alexandra Coghlan

Surprise package: Tackle!, by Jilly Cooper, reviewed

Rupert Campbell-Black (‘still Nirvana to most women’) decides to buy a football club – to the amazement of Rutshire, and no doubt Cooper’s devoted readers

Alex Peake-Tomkinson   12:40PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Jilly Cooper [Getty Images]

Tackle!

Jilly Cooper

Bantam Press, pp. 448, £22

Jilly Cooper, queen of the British bonkbuster, has turned her attention to football for her 18th novel. She was inspired after sitting next to Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch one day. She also thanks Kenny Dalglish, Alan Curbishley and ‘my wonderful neighbour’ Tony Adams in her acknowledgements. Her friend, the former home secretary Michael Howard, even took her to a Liverpool match, where she met Steven Gerrard.

Her legions of fans need not worry, however. We are still in Rutshire, the village Cooper created for her earlier novels; Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Riders, Rivals and Mount!, who was allegedly partly modelled on Andrew Parker Bowles, still lives in Penscombe Court, ‘his beautiful, gold Queen Anne house’; and he is still ‘Nirvana to most women’, but now in his sixties and distraught over his wife Taggie’s breast cancer. Cooper should be commended for the poignancy of her portrayal of Taggie’s treatment and recovery, which – given the cartoonish nature of her novels – gratifyingly goes beyond the clichés of nausea and hair loss.

It is somewhat of a stretch that Rupert, former showjumping champion of the world and massively successful horse trainer, now decides to buy a football club, Searston Rovers, but he does so for Taggie. Their adopted daughter Bianca is living in Australia with her star striker boyfriend, Feral Jackson, and Rupert hopes to sign him for Searston Rovers so that he and Bianca will return home and be closer to Taggie. If the depiction of Feral, who is black and dyslexic with a heroin addict for a mother, troubles you, it’s worth remembering that all of Cooper’s characters are caricatures.

When Cooper mentioned earlier this year at the Cheltenham Festival (the jump-racing rather than the literary one) that the publication of Tackle! had been held up, some assumed this was because of the strictures of sensitivity readers. She clarified that it was in fact because of demands from her editors for more sex. It is true that there is not a sniff of sex for almost the first hundred pages. Cooper is now 86 and says she finds it harder to write these scenes, but she is terribly game of course and even invents for this novel ‘Glittoris, a sweet-tasting silver liquid which a girl painted over her clitoris to enable her suitor to locate it’.

In any case, I’m not sure that her devotees (who include Rishi Sunak) come to her novels for the sex any more now that Pornhub exists. The appeal of Rutshire, which is full of gorgeous Labradors, beautiful horses and lashings of champagne and where left-wing women have hairy legs and bad manners, seems to be more about class than sex. Cooper’s writing is also undeniably great fun, and even as I sighed over a female character announcing ‘I can’t cope with all this #MeToo business’ before ‘undoing another top button’, I admit that I enjoyed Tackle! more than I’d expected to.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Andy Warhol would have revelled in the chaos of his legacy

Having signed fake screenprints as his own, Warhol left his work open to questionable rulings by an authentication board, causing collectors much frustration and expense

James Cahill   12:46PM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘Red Self-Portrait’ – fake or fortune? [Courtesy of the publisher]

Warhol After Warhol: Power and Money in the Modern Art World

Richard Dorment

Picador, pp. 288, £18

Andy Warhol’s legacy has been dogged by rows over authenticity more than that of any other modern artist. Warhol might well have predicted the chaos and even delighted in it. He once signed a fake painting at Christie’s – four silkscreened Jackie Kennedys – for the hell of it. ‘I don’t know why I ever did,’ he wrote in his diary – and yet the confession makes clear that he maintained a distinction, in the end, between what was fraudulent and what was his. You can’t sign a fake if everything is real.

The task of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board – established in 1995 by the foundation which handles the artist’s vast legacy – was to uphold that distinction, preserving the integrity of his corpus. But by the time of its dissolution in 2012, the committee of supposed experts had become shrouded in the very kind of murk it was set up to dispel. Stories circulated of questionable attributions, including a group of 44 ‘fake’ Warhols reassessed as genuine and of major paintings dismissed as fakes.

Warhol had so much work that even Agusto, the security man, was doing the painting

The queasy pleasure of Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol is in learning just how much ineptitude can lie behind a bureaucratic facade. Twisting and tightly paced, the story centres on a charismatic (if highly obsessive) American collector, Joe Simon, who submitted two works to the board in 2002, only to have them stamped DENIED in indelible ink – rendered valueless. Simon was advised by Vincent Fremont, the salesman for the Andy Warhol Foundation, not to sue: ‘Don’t even think about it. They’ll drag you through the courts until you bleed – they never lose.’

The words were prophetic, but Simon’s – and Dorment’s – story is bigger than that of a legal wrangle, and more fascinating. In lucid prose, Dorment distils ideas that have dominated art theory for decades – those of authorship, reproduction and originality. Through the particulars of Simon’s case, he traces the changing techniques of Warhol’s various silkscreen series – from the Marilyns to the Maos; from the serial electric chairs to the gleefully banal society portraits of the 1970s and 1980s. And he draws on the testimony of people who worked at Warhol’s studio, the Factory, as it evolved from a drug-hazed, silver-sprayed hangout – peopled by a mixture of ‘uptown social types… speed freaks and hustlers, drug fiends and drag queens’ – to a corporate operation in which the artist was forced to work on the floor of the lobby, hemmed in by offices.

If only, one comes to realise, the members of the authentication board had been half as meticulous. The first of Simon’s contested works, a dollar-bill collage, proved after all to be a replica – although the board’s refusal to share its evidence, and its continued invitations to Simon to resubmit the piece, bordered on the sadistic. ‘Red Self-Portrait’ was another matter. The silkscreened painting belonged to a series of 11 that Warhol allowed the magazine publisher Richard Ekstract to print at his own expense in 1965. Although Ekstract was paying production costs, it was an exchange of art for services: Warhol wanted to keep hold of a ‘video recording machine’, the loan of which Ekstract – who had connections with Phillips Electronics – had facilitated.

For Warhol, it was an act of authorial displacement worthy of Duchamp, or, as Dorment suggests, ‘like taking his hands off the wheel to see where the car would end up’. It was expedient, too: ‘In the words of a printer who worked closely with Warhol but wishes to remain anonymous, “he was cheap and lazy”.’ From the 1970s, ‘Art by Telephone’ was his default mode – he had made an art form of delegation. His chief printer at the time recalled: ‘He had so much work that even Agusto [the security man] was doing the painting.’

The portraits printed by Ekstract were less ‘authentic’ in appearance than a series which Warhol had made using the same acetates (akin to stencils) the previous year. The tonal contrasts were fewer, the finish smoother. But the fact that Warhol considered the works his was attested by the fact that he signed one for his long-term dealer Bruno Bischofberger (a sincere testament, as opposed to his whim at Christie’s), and allowed the same work to serve as the cover image for the first catalogue raisonné of his art. This and other evidence did nothing to change the board’s mind. In 2006, ‘Red Self-Portrait’ was denied for the second time.

As the story intensifies, even with the awareness that it is written from an angle, the wilful opacity of the board baffles and infuriates. The reader experiences a modicum of the blazing sense of injustice that has plagued Simon for 20 years. The tale could easily have been arcane and legalistic in the telling, but Dorment disentangles the thicket of names, emails, off-the-cuff remarks, snatches of gossip and deposition transcripts with mastery.

Sleuth-like in its plotting and with chapter headings which sometimes recall those of a Victorian thriller (‘A Cold-Blooded Murder’, ‘A Brazen Swindle’), Dorment’s book is at heart a morality tale, a story of egos, hubris and folly. He can be damning in his verdicts: ‘Corruption in the art world takes many forms, and silence is among the most corroding.’ Warhol After Warhol is a warning against silence – a cool, lucid rebuke of art-world inscrutability. One longs for a poetic justice that is ultimately elusive – but then the book is its own small form of retribution.

James Cahill

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

The actor best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain Picard comes across as pompous, chippy and point-scoring as he reminisces about directors and fellow stars

Roger Lewis   12:53PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Picard, 2020 [CBS Television/Album/Alamy]

Making It So: A Memoir

Patrick Stewart

Gallery Books, pp. 469, £25

When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West?

Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in which he commanded an interplanetary spacecraft. There have also been Beckett plays with Ian McKellen, a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and for 14 years he was a ‘reliable supporting player’ in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He appeared in the classic Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Tom Snout, the tinker who plays the wall. Stewart clapped together a pair of house bricks.

A lot of the memoir is taken up with point-scoring, as Stewart is highly attuned to insults

Deeply attached to Yorkshire’s West Riding, he has ‘recently moved to a house in a lovely section of Los Angeles… with a swimming pool, citrus trees and a wood-panelled study with a fireplace’. In these surroundings he has written what is a zestful, detailed and nostalgic account of his career. His early days sound as gloomy and deprived as anything in J.B. Priestley: the textile mills, lamplighters, coal chutes, outside privy, blacking t’grate, pie-and-pea shops and seeing corpses on display in front parlours.

He was born in 1940, and his childhood was full of people frowning and sighing and being unhappy on purpose. His father was permanently angry and violent, ‘a fierce, formidable man’, a sergeant major in the Paras who never adjusted to a world not at war. Every night after he returned from the pub he beat his wife:

Sometimes it was with an open hand, other times with a closed fist. Always, he aimed for her head. The police weren’t interested. ‘Mrs Stewart, you must have done something to provoke him.’

No wonder church choirs and amateur dramatics provided a refuge, as did sports. Stewart was a champion sprinter and hurdler. He was head boy at Mirfield secondary modern, where an excellent teacher, Cecil Dormand, instilled in his pupils a love of Shakespeare – ‘Heaven on a stick’, says Stewart, who won a scholarship to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. There he was drilled in text, verse, speech and movement. By the age of 19 he was also bald.

Next came weekly rep in Lincoln and Sheffield, where he swept the stage and filled the tea urn. There was a world tour with the 47-year-old Vivien Leigh, who was enfeebled by tuberculosis and mental illness. Stewart had tiny roles in three plays, and was required to deliver a grand total of 19 words. Then he was in the history plays at Stratford and the Aldwych with Ian Holm, ‘the actor I regarded as the best of the best,’ and who later had a breakdown on stage during The Iceman Cometh. Holm couldn’t remember his lines or moves and was found on the dressing-room floor ‘curled up into a foetal ball’, having become ‘increasingly insecure’. He went into films instead and received a knighthood.

Stewart is never insecure, though he can be chippy and pompous. When he tells a story against himself and adds ‘I joined in the laughter’, one doubts he did so wholeheartedly. ‘I didn’t handle it well,’ he says of one of his outbursts. ‘I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.’ He can be angry at rehearsals if there is ‘too much fooling around, too much noise and laughter’, and a lot of this memoir is taken up with point-scoring, as he is highly attuned to insults. He didn’t like Robert Helpmann: ‘I would not today tolerate a director handling his company with such condescension and coldness.’ During Julius Caesar, his fellow actor John Wood was ‘continually ill-tempered and ill-mannered toward me’, so Stewart grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head against a door. Of Peter Brook: ‘I don’t mean to make Peter sound like a rude, insensitive bugger, though I was wounded in the moment.’ Alan Howard, who played Oberon, ‘had a bit of a temper. I saw him lose it once or twice’. Tom Hardy ‘wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level’. During Dune, David Lynch was ‘hurtful and discouraging’. Billie White-law was ‘distant… She did not want to work with me’. Gene Roddenberry ‘never warmed to me… I felt as if I was being dismissed, and rather disrespectfully’.

I admire the candour. There is no darling-you-were-marvellous hypocrisy here. Nevertheless, though Stewart tries to laugh off the memory of an autograph hunter at the stage door enquiring ‘Are you anybody?’ it’s a memory that still rankles. When cast as Picard, he was described in the Hollywood press as an ‘unknown Shakespearean actor’, which hardly pleased him. He feels the need to remind us that in that role ‘I was custodian of something held dear by millions of people, probably hundreds of millions’.

The offer of the part came in 1987. ‘There has been nothing more important or financially beneficial than this in your entire career to date,’ his agent stated categorically. You’d think Stewart was embarking on playing King Lear. ‘I took the role of captain extremely seriously,’ he says, perhaps so as not to alienate the Star Trek fanatics who’ll doubtless flock to buy this book. Colleagues on the show described his demeanour as being as cold as cucumber soup. ‘I need to lighten up’, he kept telling himself when he heard of this.

His affective life has been complex. ‘This was indeed a dangerous situation,’ he says of one tryst, ‘because Lisa already had a boyfriend and I was married to Wendy’. There was an earlier wife called Sheila: ‘It wasn’t even close to an amicable split.’ The present Lady Stewart, a former waitress half his age, is younger than his two children.

If I found Making It So absorbing it was because I saw many of the RSC productions Stewart describes so well – the long-gone great days of Peter Hall, John Barton and Trevor Nunn. It’s a shame no mention is made of Smiley’s People, in which Stewart was brilliant as the enigmatic Karla. There are also a few woke tropes I could have done without. Of some harmless banter in the make-up chair Stewart suddenly tut-tuts: ‘This sort of workplace innuendo was customary in those days, but perhaps it would not happen today.’ Also, of a film called Jeffrey, about relationships during the height of the Aids epidemic, he says: ‘I am not so sure that I would play a gay man now, given current sensitivities and the fact I am heterosexual.’ Knickers to current sensitivities. Acting is not being. It is dressing up. It is about transformation, invention and becoming someone else for a little while. But the way we are going, only authenticated mass murderers will be eligible to play Macbeth.

Roger Lewis

Arts

- A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

- A short history of stained glass

- The art of walking

- Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

- You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

- The road to the final snow-gazing scene is tortuous: Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas reviewed

- David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

- Fine for the kiddies, given they’re clueless: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reviewed

- The best British Nutcracker

- In Mumbai, orchestras are playing western classics without apology

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Hieronymus Bosch allows the Antichrist – and a flasher – to gatecrash his 'Adoration of the Magi'

Laura Gascoigne   10:40AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ c.1494. Photo © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of righteousness, but they did not inspire feelings of devotion – which could explain why none of the large altarpieces he painted remained over their altars after his death. In the eyes of the church, his Last Judgments were titillating: one painting showing ‘monstrous creatures from the underworld’ was removed from a church in his native ‘s-Hertogenbosch during his lifetime by officials offended by its orgy of nudity. Even his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (c.1494) did not stay long above the Antwerp altar for which it was painted; it was snaffled by Philip II for his collection and now hangs with ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, and ‘The Haywain Triptych’, in the Prado.

This ‘fourth king’ has crashed the baby shower with dodgy-looking mates who are crowded behind him

Devotees of surrealism who make the pilgrimage to Madrid to worship before these two famous paintings don’t tend to linger over the master’s ‘Adoration’ which – with its dearth of monstrous creatures – appears disappointingly conventional. At first glance it has all the standard ingredients: dilapidated stable, splendid kings, sweet-faced Virgin and Child and, around the corner, a dutiful Joseph – in the absence of a midwife – drying the towel used at the birth over a fire.

So far, so relatively traditional. On closer inspection, though, some elements are missing – there are no angels and, mysteriously, no ox. But more disturbing than these omissions is the addition of what appears to be an extra king. Standing inside the entrance to the stable, between the black king Balthasar and the other two, is a curious figure in a bizarre headdress wearing an off-the-shoulder red cloak and very little else (detail of the central panel below). His face and neck are tanned but the rest of his body is deathly pale, and he has an oozing wound on his right leg encased like a reliquary in a crystal sheath. Between his legs a bell hangs on a ribbon embroidered with frogs, and in his left hand he holds a helmet resembling a papal tiara which seems to belong to Melchior kneeling in front of him. The tiara is decorated with a frieze of little trolls tormenting some herons – one of which bites back – while his own headdress is wreathed in a crown of thorns and topped by a crystal tube in which the thorns are blooming. Unlike the three kings who – apart from Balthasar with his page – are unattended, this ‘fourth king’ has crashed the baby shower with a gang of dodgy-looking mates who are crowded into the stable behind him, where – judging by the fire and soup bowl in the murky background – they appear to have set up camp.

Detail of the central panel of the ‘Adoration of the Magi’, c.1494, by Hieronymus Bosch. © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images

Who is this pantomime villain with his consigliere, a horrid old man with a purple face and bright red nose? He is the Antichrist, the false Messiah sent to mislead the Jews in punishment for their failure to recognise the true one, and he is indulging in a bit of Christological cosplay in his red cloak and crown of thorns mimicking the Passion. Painted over a previous figure of an elderly man leaning on a staff, it’s possible that this intruder could have been added at the request of the painting’s commissioner Peeter Scheyfve – who appears on the left wing with his patron Saint Peter, across from his wife Agneese de Gramme with her patron Saint Agnes on the right – but the note of devilry he strikes smacks of Bosch. Even when heralding the birth of the Saviour, Bosch can’t resist sending shivers down the spine.

Even when heralding the birth of the Saviour, Bosch can’t resist sending shivers down the spine

In Christian eschatology the Antichrist is a charlatan who uses magic tricks – like making dead thorns bloom – and money to deceive and corrupt the three kings of the world (rulers of the three known continents), thereby unleashing the turmoil that precedes the Second Coming. Over the head of the false prophet, a tuft of straw tied to the gable truss fans out in rays like a fake star, a shoddy knock-off of the celestial body announcing the genuine Saviour’s birth in the sky above. With his jester’s bell the Antichrist looks like a fool, but Bosch warns that we laugh at his wiles at our peril: he is as dangerous, he hints, as the unblinking owl in the shadow of the gable above his head with the lizard in its claws.

Not content with admitting this spectre to the Nativity feast, Bosch even dares to cast shreds of doubt on the three kings. Their attitudes are respectful and their gifts are scripturally on-message, but the devil is in the detail. Caspar’s gold ornament portrays the sacrifice of Isaac, prefiguring Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, but it stands on a base supported by toads. Balthasar’s pot of myrrh is decorated with an image of the peace-making Abner kneeling before David, and the phoenix perched on its lid with a pomegranate seed in its beak is a portent of the Resurrection, but the border of his page’s robe is embroidered with the demonic motif of a fish with legs – the only monster to appear in the picture. Bosch doesn’t let us forget that the kings are pagan, and they’re not the only ones under suspicion. The behaviour of the shepherds – also added as afterthoughts, like the Antichrist – seen scrambling up a tree and clambering onto the roof for a better view, is less than reverential. They haven’t come to adore the Christ Child; they’ve come to gawp. Only one, peering through a hole in the stable wall with a grave expression, seems to have grasped the momentousness of the occasion.

These disrespectful yokels aren’t even good shepherds: they’ve left a sheep at the mercy of two wolves, seen mauling a man and pursuing a woman in the background landscape on the triptych’s right wing. The miracle taking place outside this stable hasn’t permeated to the wider world. On the left wing, behind the figure of Joseph, a Hammer-Horror gothic arch topped by a hand-standing frog leads to a field where ribald peasants dance rambunctiously. From the posture of one peasant and his partner’s reaction, you’d swear he was exposing himself (if so, he must be the only flasher in an altarpiece). In the centre, behind the stable’s pitched roof, a monkey riding a mule is pulled towards an inn identified as a brothel by the swan on its banner. Christ may be born in Bethlehem, but life goes on.

On either side of the roof, meanwhile, two bands of warriors advance from opposing directions; another band rides out from the cover of a hill behind. Unlike the traditional trains of attendants attending to the three kings, these armed bands are clearly looking for a fight. Some historians have identified them as Herod’s soldiers out looking for the baby Jesus, but they could also represent the warrior hordes heading for the final showdown at the end of days: the ‘kings of the earth, and their armies’ from Revelation. On the far horizon, behind a high wall, glimmers a weird and wonderful vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem. It’s a long way there, over desert terrain roamed by wild beasts and marauding armies, but the hope is that, thanks to the miracle revealed to the three kings, humanity may eventually make it.

Bosch celebrates redemption, while reminding us that salvation is not in the bag. His ‘Adoration of the Magi’ is a morality panto with a warning message that the world is full of false prophets and tricksters – the Devil’s emissaries are present even at the Epiphany. You feel like shouting to his three kings: ‘Look out, they’re behind you!’

Copies of Bosch’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ can be found at Upton House, Warwickshire, and at Petworth House, West Sussex.

Laura Gascoigne

A short history of stained glass

How stained glass recaptured its medieval magic

Dan Hitchens   11:06AM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘Corporal Works of Mercy: Visiting the Sick’, 15th century, a window in All Saints Church, York. Credit: Michel M. Raguin

On 13 December 1643, a Puritan minister called Richard Culmer borrowed the Canterbury town ladder and carefully leaned it against the Cathedral’s Royal Window. He then ascended the ladder’s 60-odd rungs, holding a pike; according to his account, modestly written in the third person, ‘Some people wished he might break his neck.’ Culmer had in his sights the ‘wholly superstitious’ depictions of the Holy Trinity, of ‘popish saints’ such as St George, and in particular of St Thomas Becket. There Culmer perched, he recalled cheerfully, ‘rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones’.

‘Our lives are like broken bits of glass, sadly or brightly coloured, jostled about and shaken’

Culmer thus earned a place in the stained-glass hall of shame alongside Henry VIII, who set the precedent by smashing up Becket’s shrine in 1538; Edward VI, who icily decreed in 1549 that allegedly superstitious images should be ‘defaced and destroyed’; and many of Culmer’s fellow puritans, who wreaked havoc in the 1640s. But it also includes people like the architect James Wyatt who, when restoring Salisbury Cathedral in the 1790s, sold off much of the medieval glass because he didn’t see the point of it. By the 19th century, stained glass – especially in Britain – was a kind of lost art needing to be revived. Which, wonderfully enough, it was. Stained glass as a church decoration goes back to at least the 7th century, when – not for the last time – an English churchman hired continental artisans to do a proper job of glazing his windows. The turning-point, though, was the invention of the gothic style. When Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis worked out how to combine the flying buttress and the rib vault, cathedrals no longer needed to be built so solidly. They could stay standing even with huge expanses of window, which could be filled with almost absurdly elaborate creations.

In the first words of the New Testament, St Matthew opens the Christmas story with a lengthy, albeit selective, genealogy – ‘Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob …’ – all the way down to St Joseph, foster-father of Jesus. Most churchgoers find their thoughts wandering when this particular passage is read out. But the glassmakers of Canterbury Cathedral, around the year 1200, combined it with the other genealogy in the Gospel of Luke to construct an 86-window gallery of ancestors.

The south transept rose window at Chartres Cathedral: Christ surrounded by the 24 elders of the apocalypse above lancets (left to right): Jeremiah carrying Luke, Isaiah carrying Matthew, the Virgin and Child over the Dreux-Bretagne coat of arms, Ezekiel carrying John and Daniel carrying Mark. Photo: Michel M. Raguin

Stained glass likes an epic theme. At Chartres the north window displays 24 Old Testament kings and prophets; the upper chapel of Sainte-Chapelle tells the story of the Bible from the Creation to the life of Christ. The Illuminated Window, a new, exhaustively detailed and comprehensively illustrated book by Virginia Chieffo Raguin, guides the reader through these grand projects. Though of course, with stained-glass windows you don’t need to follow the story. It can be a narrative art, but it also works in the way that a Jackson Pollock does – an explosion of colour which, when the eye simply rests on it, evokes an immense peace.

If stained glass is supremely a medieval art, that is perhaps unsurprising, since the Middle Ages loved to speculate on the nature of light. Some believed it was the fundamental element of the universe. It was also a useful way of thinking about how Jesus Christ related to God the Father: ‘light from light’, as the Apostle’s Creed expressed it. Naturally, then, the modern revival took inspiration from the medieval master-craftsmen.

Typical in this regard was Louis Comfort Tiffany, who in 1865 visited the V&A’s collection and was spellbound by the medieval glass, its deeper colours and varied textures. Back in New York he started his own factory, thus initiating what became American Art Nouveau.

The Illuminated Window follows the American story, through Tiffany and Frank Lloyd Wright, who thought glass was the most effective architectural medium for introducing ‘the element of pattern’. Raguin only refers in passing to the British revival, which has been compellingly narrated elsewhere by Peter Cormack. Victorian prosperity and religiosity produced a huge demand for windows, many of them beautiful, but some with a rather kitschy feel. It became obvious that you could not recapture the medieval magic through mass-produced nostalgia. You had to channel the spirit of the Middle Ages, and at the same time be true to your own era.

Nobody exemplified this more than the incomparable Christopher Whall. As a young, struggling illustrator in the 1880s, he drew window designs, but was disappointed with what the manufacturers would make of them. So he mastered the technique of stained glass, and wrote an influential manual covering the whole process from beginning to end: how hard to press when you cut glass; what techniques of painting and staining to use on the resultant shapes; what kiln to use when you fire it; and so on.

Whall also gave out some advice on learning the language of colour. Leave the city for a few hours, he told his fellow craftsmen, and observe how the ‘dandelions and daisies against the deep, green grass’, or the pebbles on the beach come together to make an unexpected harmony.

There was a philosophy of life here, too. ‘Our lives are like the broken bits of glass,’ Whall wrote, ‘sadly or brightly coloured, jostled about and shaken hither and thither, in a seeming confusion, which yet we hope is somewhere held up to a light in which each one meets with his own, and holds his place; and, to the Eye that watches, plays his part in a universal harmony by us, as yet, unseen.’

Out of such principles Whall made masterpieces like his windows at Holy Trinity in Sloane Square: intricately symbolic, but also full of a graceful movement that no photograph can capture. Victorian stained-glass saints can look a little anaemic; his have the faces of those who have lived and suffered and come through. The colours are kaleidoscopic and seemingly illogical, until you stand back and let the whole thing overwhelm you. At the very top of the Adoration window he depicts the evening sky in shimmering blue and purple; and at the window’s centre the Star of Bethlehem pours down its light on the Virgin and her newborn child.

Window: Stories across Time is published by Reaktion Books.

Dan Hitchens

Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. He is currently co-writing a book about Dr Johnson, and writes The Pineapple Substack.

The art of walking

Stone bothies, forest brooks, holy places and wild water: the joys of making pilgrimage

Guy Hayward   11:11AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Porth Cwyfan on the Isle of Anglesey. Image: Julian Gazzard / iStock

My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much time spent in front of my computer. Stepping out and walking with intention.

It did the trick. When we arrived at the monument that commemorates those who had drowned, we were met by chance by a couple who had three ancestors who had died in the Medway tragedy but did not know the song. Thus we returned the song to its bloodline, not just its place. We also met scenes of beauty along the way, including the chapel at Tudeley, full of Marc Chagall’s stained glass masterpieces dedicated to the river’s victims.

In Pevensey’s porch I witnessed a storm filling the whole sky with lightning bolts

It wasn’t long before I felt the itch to make pilgrimage again. Within a few months, I was on the path from London to Walsingham, recording a folk or sacred song a day for two weeks. Getting out of London took a few days of walking – the urban centre stretches a long way. One highlight was a night sleeping in the Covert Way Local Nature Reserve in late spring, waking up to the loudest possible alarm clock: thousands of birds singing their dawn chorus.

Another was the Royston Cave, with its hundreds of mysterious chalk carvings underneath a busy road. Why were they there, and why did the place feel so powerful? Places like that seem to exist in order to make us aware of forces we don’t understand.

We slept by the forest-enclosed holy well at Santon Downham, just outside Thetford, awaking to the sight of Duke of Edinburgh walkers (complete with their huge backpacks), looking down at their maps and walking straight past us. As we got closer to Walsingham, the frequency of medieval churches increased, evidence of the once hugely popular pre-Reformation pilgrimage route, which is now largely unwalked. Walsingham Abbey was beautiful with its daffodils and spring flower abundance. Will and I sang the 16th-century ‘Wracks of Walsingham’ song in the crypt.

Our next pilgrimage was a winter one from Winchester to Canterbury, along the South Downs. When I co-founded the British Pilgrimage Trust in 2014, we made this our flagship route, the Old Way. We walked for just over three weeks, literally singing for our supper, spending no money of our own, either wild camping or accepting hospitality and food along the way. The old tradition of British hospitality is not dead. We also slept in churches and their porches. Firle Church, with its charismatic vicar Peter Owen Jones, was beautiful as the morning light streamed in through the window designed by John Piper.

In Pevensey’s porch I witnessed a storm filling the whole sky with lightning bolts. You don’t have these kinds of experiences sleeping under a roof with four walls. At Canterbury, Becket’s shrine of martyrdom has a depth of devotional power that makes you ask what you stand for; that single candle in the centre, marking where his bejewelled tomb once stood, speaks very deeply.

My next two pilgrimages were ‘source to sea’ quests along the Rivers Teifi and Towy starting in the Cambrian mountains in Wales. At Strata Florida Abbey, I learnt about the monks who pioneered a novel farming irrigation system. At the Teifi harp centre at Llandysul, I nosed around the last Welsh workshop to make concert harps by hand.

Another pilgrimage took us further north in Wales, to the holy isle of Anglesey, tracing the journey between Caernarfon, where the Romans set off to exterminate the last of the Druids in Britain, and Holyhead Mountain, the holiest place for Druids in western Europe at the time of the invasion around 60 ad. Here my companion Will and I composed a new song using a 3,000 year-old ancient Welsh lullaby, ‘Pais Dinogad’. The island of Llanddwyn and Porth Cwyfan made for dramatic sleeping spots, exposed to the elements and accompanied by remote holy wells, ruined chapels and a working church cut off by the tide. I also slept in a neolithic round barrow but ran out in the middle of the night, terrified by who knows what. I’d had a similar experience the year before in a prehistoric long barrow in Wiltshire.

A few years have passed since that flurry of making pilgrimage. Recently I took to the path again, along St Bega’s Way from St Bees to St Bega’s, Bassenthwaite, in the Lake District and back again, revisiting my childhood walking holidays and re-experiencing the land in a new, purposeful way. Here, the stone bothies and youth hostels for sleeping, the waterfalls, lakes and forest brooks for bathing, the sheep and remote holy places in the mountains, and the region’s abundance of wild water for drinking, made my soul sing.

Visit the British Pilgrimage Trust’s website britishpilgrimage.org to download routes and book accommodation in churches. Britain’s Pilgrim Places by Nick Mayhew-Smith and Guy Hayward contains several of the sites mentioned in this article.

Guy Hayward

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

The basic, repetitive melodies stay in the memory for about the half-life of Oganesson

Rod Liddle   10:56AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Grade: C+

Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken.

Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying an often exaggerated southern drawl somewhat at odds with his Pennsylvanian provenance – basic and repetitive melodies which stay in the memory for about the half-life of Oganesson and then vanish.

There is a pleasing twang to the guitar, bursts of scuzzy bottleneck and the occasional lap steel, but the songs go nowhere, as Kurt is generous enough to admit. It is an album which lapses into self-parody within 30 seconds of the start of each track: the dolorous drawl, the familiar lack of scansion and the over-weening introspection.

He pays homage to the late Tom Petty on ‘Tom Petty’s Gone (But Tell Him I Asked For Him)’, but seemingly either doesn’t realise, or doesn’t care, that whatever Petty’s faults as a heartland songwriter, he was, in Robert Christgau’s words, a ‘catchy sumbitch’. Kurt can’t really do catchy. And he doesn’t, er, rock out, either.

Maybe it’s all worth it, at this time of the year, for ‘Must Be Santa’, which takes self-parody to lengths hitherto unimagined. ‘Who’s got a beard that’s long and white?’ asks Kurt and the girls reply: ‘Santa’s got a beard that’s long and white.’ Still no tune.

I know where Kurt Vile is coming from. But I haven’t a clue where he wishes to end up. And I’m not sure he has, either.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Plus: a scruffy, slapdash Jack and the Beanstalk, with a Marxist prelude

Lloyd Evans   10:53AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Kristine Nielsen (Ginnie), Brenda Pressley (Elaine), Marylouise Burke (Eileen) and Mia Katigbak (Yvette) in Infinite Life at the National Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

Infinite Life

Dorfman Theatre, until 13 January 2024

Jack and the Beanstalk

Theatre Royal Stratford East, in rep until 6 January 2024

Infinite Life is about five American women, all dumpling-shaped, who sit in a hotel garden observing a hunger strike. Some of them haven’t touched food for days, some for weeks. ‘Don’t be afraid to puke,’ counsels one of the dumplings. ‘Puking is good.’ They pass their afternoons wittering inanely about nothing at all. One dumpling is an air hostess, another works in banking, a third has a job as a fast-food executive. Or so they claim. Each of the dumplings might be lying to the others but it would make no difference because nothing connects them, and they have no stake in the situation other than the desire to burn up time.

It doesn’t feel like a play but a prank staged by psychologists

After a while it transpires that the dumplings are not hunger-strikers but weight-watchers hoping to cure their many ailments by fasting. The main dumpling, Sofi, is troubled by an infected clitoris which makes her groin feel ‘like a blow-torch’. Whenever the chance arises, she treats her itchy genitals with a seven-hour sex marathon. Another dumpling tells a story about driving through a eucalyptus grove. That’s the end of the story, by the way. A third dumpling recites passages from the trash novel she’s reading. A fourth jabbers about Christian Science.

Sofi, who appears to be the best-educated dumpling, holds forthright views about sex and she announces that online porn is dominated by ‘enormous idiot rapists’. One night she leaves a hysterical message on her lover’s phone in which she describes being sodomised by a toasted Hispanic delicacy. Then she lies on her back masturbating.

After a few days a new dumpling – male, half-naked and white-haired – joins the fat farm. The other dumplings discuss the possibility that he’s a mirage generated by their calorie-starved and hallucinating minds. Sofi starts to flirt with the imaginary male and they form a bond over some photographs of a diseased colon. That’s the highlight of the show. Did their amorous conversation actually happen or was it a figment of Sofi’s fevered brain? Hard to say.

After two hours of stage-time, the dumplings pack up their belongings and leave, one by one. End of diet. End of show. None of the dumplings has shed any weight and none has acquired a suntan despite roasting for weeks in the California sunshine. Infinite Life doesn’t feel like a play but a prank staged by psychologists who want to see how much vacuous poppycock a paying audience will bear before they demand a refund. It’s rare to find a show that would be improved if the characters were to starve to death – but here it is.

The design is as drab and cursory as the script: the dumplings lie on grey loungers surrounded by concrete walls painted magnolia. Their dreary, shapeless costumes look like rejects from a jumble sale, but it’s possible that the actors were told to slob into the theatre wearing whatever tat they crashed out in the previous night. As for the dialogue, it might have been improvised on the spot.

This lazy, brain-dead anti-drama originated in America where theatre-makers seem to hold their audiences in utter contempt. The National should set an example and not sink to the worst artistic standards in the world.

The panto at Stratford Jack and the Beanstalk starts as a Brechtian allegory about the toiling masses of ‘Splatford’ who extract bilge from nearby mudflats which is then sold by capitalists as a beauty product. After this brief Marxist introduction, the panto proper begins. The setting is a shop run by Milky Linda, a cross-dressing dairy magnate, who fears that her business is about to fold. Milky Linda is terrorised by two gormless thugs, one called Flesh Creep who wears leather clothes, and the other called Bill, whose looks are marred by a missing tooth and a cheap ginger wig. Milky Linda puts her faith in her drippy son, Jack, and his best friend, Winnie the Moo, who provides milk for the shop. Given that the show is aimed at kids, the narrative set-up is very elaborate – and we haven’t even reached the magic beans, the horrible ogre and the golden eggs. Maybe kids don’t much care.

My companion, River, aged eight, seemed to enjoy this scruffy, slapdash show with its queasy colour scheme of yellows, greens, blues and purples. The designer, Lily Arnold, covers too many of the props and costumes with lettering. It’s a panto you read rather than watch. ‘Look at the foxes,’ I said to River as three actors appeared dressed as furry urban scavengers. ‘That’s a hedgehog, a badger and a wolf,’ he corrected me. The outstanding performer is Savanna Jeffrey (Winnie the Moo), who acts very well and sings beautifully. I asked River for his final verdict. ‘Brilliant, average, or rubbish?’ I suggested. ‘In the middle,’ he said. ‘I quite liked it but I might see better.’

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans is The Spectator's sketch-writer and theatre critic

The road to the final snow-gazing scene is tortuous: Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas reviewed

Plus: Mark Gatiss happily plays things dead straight in his latest Ghost Story for Christmas

James Walton   11:15AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Timothy Spall as Santa Claus and the brilliant Bamber Todd as Mikey in Sky's The Heist before Christmas. Image: Peter Marley / ©Sky UK Ltd

The Heist Before Christmas

Sky Max

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No. 249

BBC2

When it comes to one-off family dramas for Christmas, two things are pretty much guaranteed. They’ll begin with credits announcing a starry cast, and they’ll end with a redeemed character gazing at some falling snow as the music swells.

The only tricky bit, then, is what should happen in-between. Should the redemption take place against a backdrop of vaguely gritty realism? Should plausibility be a consideration, or can the writers just rely on the magic of Christmas to get them out of any plot-related trouble? If Santa’s involved – as he so often is – should the show believe in Father Christmas?

In the case of The Heist Before Christmas – set in Northern Ireland – the respective answers are ‘up to a point’, ‘I’ll get back to you on that one’ and ‘er…’. Not surprisingly, the result is a programme that feels as if it’s assembled all the necessary elements but never decided how to put them together.

Should plausibility be a concern – or can the writers rely on Christmas to get them out of plot-holes?

In one mild but rather interesting departure, the person in need of redemption here is not a grumpy old grown-up. Instead, 12-year-old Mikey (brilliantly played by non-starry newcomer Bamber Todd) immediately establishes his meanie credentials by burning down the school Christmas tree, spraying the words ‘Santa is dead’ on a wall as some Brownies walk past and unplugging the power from his town’s al fresco Christmas party. As his rampage continues – and the cries of ‘You little…’ from his victims intensify – we also see James Nesbitt in a Santa costume robbing a local bank. Finding himself cut off from his getaway car, the robber runs into the woods, seen by no one except Mikey.

At which point, we take a break for a spot of that gritty realism. Back home, Mikey has to babysit his seven-year-old brother Sean while his single mother Patricia (Laura Donnelly) works a night shift at a pound shop with a duly Scrooge-like boss.

So how will she ever be able to afford the Christmas bike that Sean is sure Santa will bring? Aware of the problem, Mikey suddenly reveals a softer side, if not a wholly practical one. He will, he decides, head to the woods and offer to show the robber an escape route in return for half of the £80,000 stolen from the bank. Except that when he gets there, the Santa he finds is one with a Norwegian accent (Timothy Spall) who explains that he’s fallen from his sleigh and that Rudolph will be back for him any time now. As Mikey ponders this, the robber turns up and proves oddly unwilling to share the loot, preferring to kidnap Mikey at gunpoint.

From there, the road to the final snow-gazing scene is a frankly tortuous one, with the characters displaying a weird ability to change their personalities to fit whatever the plot demands. Nesbitt, for instance, is sometimes kindly, sometimes socially aware and sometimes a cackling pantomime villain.

And there’s a further confusion too – as the script seeks unavailingly to reconcile the true, non-materialist meaning of Christmas with the need to make sure everybody gets lots of lovely things. (The same, mind you, is true of A Christmas Carol: discuss.)

Also on Christmas Eve, we get the latest installation of A Ghost Story for Christmas written by Mark Gatiss. Unusually, this is adapted not from M.R. James, but from an Arthur Conan Doyle tale, ‘Lot No. 249’, that marks the first appearance in fiction of a violent Egyptian mummy.

Unlike The Heist Before Christmas, this is a drama that knows exactly what it wants to do: to pay respectful and affectionate tribute not just to the original tale, but to the ghost-story adaptations that were such a feature of 1970s Christmases – and so of Gatiss’s own childhood.

Which is to say that it plays it absolutely straight, with not a trace of updating in the quest for contemporary relevance (or whatever). After a ferocious knocking is heard, the first three lines of dialogue are ‘Let me in, for pity’s sake’, ‘Great Scott, what’s the matter?’ and ‘Brandy, get me brandy!’. (Soon afterwards, there’s even a ‘You’re shaking like an aspen leaf’.)

We then flash back seven weeks, to when the chaps at an Oxford college are starting to have their doubts about their colleague Bellingham and his habit of ‘experimenting with arcane bits and bobs’. Or as one of them tells him: ‘Your filthy Egyptian tricks won’t answer in England.’

Gatiss does make a couple of tweaks to the Doyle, introducing a character who might or might not be Sherlock Holmes (but probably is) and making the ending more sinister. Both of these, though, seem like neat additions, and perhaps even improvements. Either way, this is a highly civilised way to spend half an hour – and possibly best served with mince pies and a glass or two of sherry.

James Walton

James Walton is The Spectator’s TV critic

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

The word ‘portrait’ was unknown in the early 16th century. It entered the language largely thanks to Holbein

David Starkey   10:45AM, 14 Dec, 2023

‘William Reskimer’, c.1536–9, and ‘Anne Boleyn’, 1532–6, by Hans Holbein the Younger. Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of patterns of physiognomies’ by his father’s court painter, Hans Holbein, who had died in 1543.

Edward was already familiar with his fellow European rulers from their portraits in the long gallery at St James’s, which seem to have been labelled and arranged as a teaching tool for the boy. Now, on the threshold of power, he wanted to familiarise himself with the establishment of Tudor England.

The word ‘portrait’ was unknown in the early 16th century. It entered the language thanks to Holbein

But there was a problem. It’s familiar to anyone who has opened a box of family photos and looked in bewilderment at the jumble of unknown faces: the drawings were unnamed. In similar circumstances, and at the same age as Edward, I turned to my mother; her identifications are still scribbled on the back of all too few of the photos in my childish hand. The orphaned Edward turned instead, as he so often did, to his favourite tutor, John Cheke.

By a series of extraordinary flukes, Holbein’s drawings with Cheke’s identifications are still in the Royal Collection and a selection of about half of them is on display in the Queen’s Gallery, together with a contextualising handful of Holbein’s finished portraits and a plethora of other gorgeously coloured and extravagantly formed Tudor artefacts from Hampton Court and Windsor.

The result is that the visitor can experience the same delight as Edward did on that November day almost 500 years ago: of drawings taken from life, which still seem to live and make their sitters live as well.

Kate Heard, the senior curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, who has organised the exhibition, is a subtly effective guide, nudging you to look closely at how Holbein achieves so much with so little: a licked finger wiped through black chalk to make a highlight in the glossy fabric of a ruffled sleeve; a dash of white on a cheek or a forehead to indicate the sheen of a beautiful woman’s skin; a dab or two of black ink to catch the thickening hair in the nape of a man’s neck; persistent jabs of the pen to get the cast of an eye or the profile of a nose exactly right. Thanks to Heard’s gentle prodding, I have never looked at the drawings more closely – not even when I handled them loose in their mounts back in the 1970s in the Royal Library at Windsor.

Heard is also an effective supplement to Cheke as a guide to the identity of the sitters. She summarises carefully an accurately the accumulated scholarship of generations, and pays generous tribute to her predecessor, Jane Roberts, whose near 40-year stewardship of the Print Room at Windsor did so much to facilitate access – including my own – to the drawings.

Which makes it even nicer that two of my re-identifications of the sitters from that period – Anne Boleyn and James Butler, Earl of Ormond – are accepted here. There’s also an interesting discussion of why Anne as Queen of England should have been portrayed in the process of dressing. I had suggested the reason was that Holbein had to catch some of his sitters first thing in the morning in their busy and important lives; Heard has the altogether more intriguing idea that the drawing was intended to serve as the basis for an intimate and come-hither miniature of Anne for the still-lascivious Henry.

Thus far, well and good. Even very good. But it doesn’t go half far enough – because the minute focus on the drawings effectively turns Holbein into a miniaturist. Now, he was a literal miniaturist; and of the highest quality, since his miniatures can be blown up big and still survive. But he could also, as only the greatest artists can, operate on a monumental scale – and on everything in-between.

You would scarcely know this from the exhibition. You would never grasp his astonishing originality either. Because even the title of the rather bland introductory essay to the catalogue diminishes him. It’s called ‘Portrait Artist at the Tudor Court’. But the word ‘portrait’ was unknown in the early 16th century (hence Edward’s ‘book of physiognomies’). It entered the language only under the Stuarts. And it did so largely thanks to Holbein: in other words, Holbein wasn’t any old portrait painter; he was (in England at any rate) the inventor of the portrait.

His coadjutor was the man who introduced Holbein to England: the great Dutch scholar Erasmus. This is because a principal inspiration for the new interest in the individual face came from Roman funerary sculpture. Which meant that the words usually inscribed in some form or another in the finished picture were almost as important as the image. As was the idea of memorialisation.

There was an opportunity to deal with all this though van Leemput’s copy of Holbein’s vast mural of the Tudor dynasty, that was destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1698. But it is badly fluffed. Not even the magic of Holbein’s full-length Henry VIII is explained. ‘The only king whose shape you remember’, as my mentor, Geoffrey Elton, memorably declared in his Cambridge lectures long ago.

Finally, the claim that Holbein cannot be pinned down religiously is perverse: he began in the household of Thomas More during his first visit to England, but flourished in the circle of Thomas Cromwell during his second. Because, like Henry himself, he had converted. Only the genius of his art remained the same and shaped the contrasting images of those two great opponents, More and Cromwell, for ever.

Holbein at the Tudor Court is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 April.

David Starkey

Fine for the kiddies, given they’re clueless: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reviewed

You’re probably expecting me to say that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget isn’t a patch on the original so I will: it isn’t

Deborah Ross   10:49AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Fine for the kiddies – or anyone else who doesn’t know better: Bunty, Mac, Rocky, Molly, Ginger, Fowler and Babs in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

PG, Selected cinemas; available on Netflix from 15 December

The original Chicken Run (2000), which is generally considered the best riff on The Great Escape ever made starring stop-motion poultry, did not require a sequel – but here it is anyway. Now you’ll probably expect me to say that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget isn’t a patch on the original so I will: it isn’t. It’s not bad-bad. It’s definitely something you can stick the kids in front of, given they don’t know any better. But it’s not nearly as inventive or funny or affecting and, while Aardman films have always looked and sounded like no other, this has a generic rather than a quirky, handmade feel. Chances are you’ve had bigger disappointments in life, but it is a disappointment all the same.

Chances are you’ve had bigger disappointments in life, but it is a disappointment all the same

Directed by Sam Fell with a screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard, we find our chicken pals just where we left them: happily living on an island, having escaped from the evil Mrs Tweedy and her pie-making venture. The island is a utopian paradise and brightly, cartoonishly colourful in a way that the original wasn’t. That opened darkly, with the chickens imprisoned in a second world war-style concentration camp and before we go on, might I offer you a word of advice? Don’t re-watch the first film prior to starting this. It is not a good idea.

This time, Rocky is voiced by Zachary Levi instead of Mel Gibson, understandably, while Ginger is voiced by Thandiwe Newton instead of Julia Sawalha, inexplicably. They hatch a baby, Molly (Bella Ramsey), who has pluck, you could say, and grows up wanting to explore, like Simba from The Lion King, who also needs a good telling off. Molly escapes to the mainland where she is immediately entranced by the ‘Fun-Land Farm’ lorries with their pictures of happy-seeming chickens sitting in buckets painted on the sides. ‘I want to live in a bucket!’ she squawks excitedly. Usually these chickens are wonderfully endearing but Molly may well get on your nerves. A clip round the ear and to bed with no supper, if she were mine.

Fun-Land Farm, it turns out, is a Bond-like lair run by our old enemy, Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), who now brainwashes her chickens via specially controlled collars so they go to their deaths in a blissed-out state. (It makes the meat taste better, she says in her sales pitch to a fast-food chain.) This is where Molly ends up and whereas the last film was all about breaking out, this time Ginger, Rocky and co. must break in if Molly is to be saved from becoming a bucket of nuggets. It’s intended, I think, as a spoof of films like Mission: Impossible, but it doesn’t send them up so much as emulate them, so it’s action set-piece after action set-piece after action set-piece, over and over. Surely we’ve earned a chunk of downtime, I kept thinking. But no, they were always on the move, and once you’ve witnessed them seeing off a security guard once, twice, a third time, do we need to see it for a fourth? The narrative is thin.

What we must want from Aardman is a certain Britishness – might we not have had chicken in a basket instead of a bucket? – and that human touch, right down to visible thumbprints in the clay. True, the stop-motion is immaculate but the backgrounds are now CGI and this has a flattening, Disneyfying effect. Meanwhile, the characters are so in service to the action sequences that too little attention is paid to their personalities and while there are a couple of good jokes, there aren’t nearly enough. Maybe I’m being too harsh. It’s fine for the kiddies – or anyone else who doesn’t know better.

Deborah Ross

The best British Nutcracker

Rupert Christiansen compares four productions – from the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Royal Ballet, English National Ballet and McOnie Company

Rupert Christiansen   11:19AM, 14 Dec, 2023

The Royal Ballet's staging of Nutcracker has a richness of texture that makes it more emotionally involving than Birmingham Royal Ballet's. Image: ©2022 Asya Verzhbinsky

Birmingham Royal Ballet: The Nutcracker

Birmingham Hippodrome

Royal Ballet: The Nutcracker

Royal Opera House, in rep until 13 January 2024

English National Ballet: Nutcracker

Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, and at the London Coliseum until 7 January 2024

McOnie Company: Nutcracker

Tuff Nutt Jazz Club, Southbank Centre, until 6 January 2024

The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s production became a hardy perennial at the Royal Festival Hall. The Royal Ballet embraced it only in 1968; since then, it has become globally ubiquitous and an infallible money-spinner.

‘Oh no! Racist royals!’

The enormous affection that The Nutcracker inspires is underpinned by a magnificent score that shows Tchaikovsky at his most freshly inventive (it’s bizarre that he composed it joylessly, under duress). Yet the dramatic scenario it illustrates is insolubly problematic. In the latter half of the first act lies a mysteriously powerful episode in which the cosy, domestic world of the opening scene becomes a sinister wonderland where Clara turns into an Alice figure, battling hostile forces as well as the confusing expansions of adolescence. Yet nothing in the second act develops this at all, leaving Clara as the spectator at a meaningless entertainment. It’s never clear whether the toymaker Drosselmeyer is controlling the magic, or is only an accessory to it.

And should a child be cast as Clara – thereby limiting the choreographic possibilities – or a diminutive adult ballerina required to act cute?

Nobody has addressed these conundrums more cogently than Peter Wright, who celebrated his 97th birthday by appearing at a matinée of his Birmingham Royal Ballet production. Although more than 30 years old, it remains a wonderful spectacle, brilliantly designed by John Macfarlane and offering awesome stagecraft in the way it transforms a damask-walled John Singer Sargent salon into a fantasy playground where giant rats slug it out with Napoleonic soldiers. Wright simplifies the plot by making Clara its sole focus, sacrificing some resonances by sidelining Drosselmeyer, but gaining in narrative coherence. His choreography is serviceable rather than inspired; BRB executes it with panache. But alterations to the score for the second act are clumsy and unmusical.

For his earlier production for the Royal Ballet, Wright returned to what little is known about the 1892 original and the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann that was its ultimate source. Drosselmeyer gets a nephew here, who turns out to be the nutcracker prince, trapped by a spell. I don’t feel this readily comes across in performance, but the staging has a richness of texture, compounded by the greens, golds and browns of Julia Trevelyan Oman’s Biedermeier designs, that makes it more emotionally involving than BRB’s. It is superlatively danced too, with Sae Maeda an engagingly winsome Clara and Gary Avis a flamboyant Drosselmeyer. (Casts vary throughout the run.)

English National Ballet’s version, the work of Toer van Schayk and Wayne Eagling, seems two-dimensional in comparison – a blandly Disneyish take on the story, with rather tacky and flimsy designs by Peter Farmer, that urgently need replacing. Clara is played by a child until she runs off stage halfway through the first act to be replaced by an adult, who later lands the Sugar Plum Fairy pas de deux before turning back into a child for an epilogue in which she wakes to the cliché of ‘was it all a dream?’ The performance as a whole felt lacklustre, though a full house in Southampton’s cavernous Mayflower Theatre lapped it up happily enough.

All of these productions qualify as trad, as do similar efforts by Scottish and Northern Ballet. Mark Morris and Matthew Bourne are only two of many choreographers who have reinterpreted the story more radically – Morris’s deliciously witty The Hard Nut ranking as an egregious success. This Christmas Drew McOnie joins their number with a small-scale essay for which Cassie Kinoshi has zippily reimagined the music for a jazz combo. McOnie has fashionably queered things so that Clara becomes Clive, suffering from a dad who wants his son playing with an Action Man rather than a Sugar Plum Fairy doll. This diverse and inclusive message is trumpeted so bluntly that I was left merely irritated.

Rupert Christiansen

In Mumbai, orchestras are playing western classics without apology

Plus: a panto adaptation of Homer's Odyssey

Richard Bratby   11:00AM, 14 Dec, 2023

A cracking outfit: the Symphony Orchestra of India. Image: NCPA

Symphony Orchestra of India, Kolesnikov, Farnes

Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry

Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime

Jermyn Street Theatre, until 31 December

Choosing a concert opener is an art in its own right. Fashions shift: the traditional overture has fallen from favour in recent years, and you might go seasons now without hearing such one-time favourites as The Thieving Magpie or Euryanthe. The opening slot is more likely to contain something short and contemporary, or worthy and obscure (cynics call it ‘box-ticking repertoire’). Or it might be empty, tipping you straight into a symphony or concerto the way a Michelin-starred chef presents his signature creation – unadorned, on a bare white plate.

The Symphony Orchestra of India began its latest UK tour with John Williams’s ‘Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back – and goodness alone knows why. Nothing wrong with playing film music in a symphonic concert, of course; more orchestras should do it. But such an ominous piece (it’s basically Darth Vader’s leitmotif)? Maybe it’s just something that the SOI and its guest conductor, Richard Farnes, enjoy playing together – a three-minute blast of Technicolor orchestration to get the fingers loosened up. It’s as valid a reason as any.

While we writhe in self-doubt, in Mumbai they’re playing western classics without apology

Then we were on to Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, with Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist, and a 45-minute symphonic suite of Wagner’s Parsifal, arranged by Andrew Gourlay. The following night in London, under Alpesh Chauhan, the SOI was due to play Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite and Stravinsky’s Petrushka. That’s some serious bling. But if you heard this relatively young (it was founded in 2006) orchestra on its 2019 tour, you’ll already know that it’s a cracking outfit. Farnes’s programme offered something different: a chance to hear the SOI stretch out and sing in music where brilliance is never, in itself, sufficient.

It’s safe to say that they nailed it, if that isn’t too coarse an image for playing of such concentration and beauty. The opening horn call in the Brahms felt daringly slow and Kolesnikov – who presumably specified the tempo – responded with a solo that lingered, sighed and fell away; the woodwind response seemed to melt on the tongue. That’s one quality of the SOI – a woodwind section of quite extraordinary mellowness and musicianship. The flutes make a particularly ravishing sound; later, in the third movement, the first oboe, Richard Hewitt, responded with aching tenderness to Sevak Avanesyan’s noble cello solo. Another strength is the string playing. The SOI, like most major orchestras, is a multinational body, and in 2019 the Russian-flavoured sound of its violin section (largely recruited from former Soviet states) was very audible. They seem to have bedded in a bit since then. The golden tone and taste for expressive portamenti was not new, but the way they breathed and phrased together did seem like a more recent development. Possibly working with an opera conductor as experienced as Farnes has had an effect. The Brahms was simultaneously epic and intimate (Farnes and Kolesnikov maintained very spacious tempi throughout), and as for Parsifal: well, we know from Opera North what Farnes can achieve in this otherworldly music.

Meriel Cunningham in Charles Court Opera’s panto Odyssey at Jermyn Street Theatre. Photo: Alex Brenner

Any serious Wagnerian will have misgivings about filleted concert suites, though Gourlay’s arrangement was certainly tasteful (possibly too tasteful – I missed the Flower Maidens). But there could be no misgivings about the SOI’s response: the deep, solemn weight of the brass; woodwinds that billed and cooed with surpassing tenderness in the Good Friday music and, above all, the refinement and delicacy of those glowing strings. There’s a thought for next year. While western orchestras writhe in self-doubt, over in Mumbai – a city that practically defines the term ‘diversity’ – the SOI is pushing ahead with its mission to play the western classics without apology. There’s something to be said for believing in what you do.

Meanwhile, deep below Jermyn Street, the Charles Court Opera is presenting its annual pantomime, written and directed by the company’s artistic director John Savournin, with music by David Eaton. Last year it did Rumpelstiltskin, and apparently it was a knockout. This time it’s the Odyssey, and I still can’t credit that it’s possible to get belly-laughs out of the Eumenides. There’s a candy-coloured set, a small omni-talented cast (many familiar from CCO’s G&S productions, so they can carry a tune as well as deliver a gag), and – this being Homer, after all – a talking (and singing) horse.

Critics have been asked not to spoil the punchlines, but imagine being sat in a confined space and power-hosed with pop-culture gags (‘If you know this tune you’re over 40’ they sang at one point, and they weren’t wrong), ludicrously repurposed TV themes and enough groan-inducing classical puns to fill several Trojan horses and still have enough left over to hold the pass at Thermopylae. You have to be very smart to be quite this silly. Dust off your E.V. Rieu, and see it – you’ll thank me.

Richard Bratby

Life

- Laughter is the key to surviving Christmas

- What Jesus taught us

- It took moving to Ireland to escape from the EU’s rules

- How Hannes took on a buffalo – and nearly paid the price

- ‘Truly spicy and a delight to eat’: how to make Christmas gingerbread

- Beautiful bottles from Swig Wines to enhance your Christmas drinking

- Christmas cheer at QPR is the highlight of the season

- My sporting questions for 2024

- Dear Mary, from Joanna Lumley: what do you get someone who insists they don’t want a present?

- ‘The chocolate soufflé is too good for people’: Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Hotel, reviewed

- Let’s hope for good cheer this Christmas

- Why are quotes so often misattributed?

- Umbrian Moon

- Filthie Olde Seth

- Northbound

- Thread

- The Sheer Glory of It

- Kitchen renovations are a zero-sum game

- The best books about horse racing to buy now

Laughter is the key to surviving Christmas

Susan Hill   12:56PM, 14 Dec, 2023

iStock

Joy. Family. Love. Lights. Stars. Festivity. And yes, all of those, if you’re lucky, and they are happy words, words that give you that fuzzy glow. Others come fast down the track, of course. War. Disasters. Accidents. Distress. Tears.

I am old now so my most familiar Christmas word is ‘memory’, although I live in the present and ‘fun’ is definitely a Christmas word – but ‘funny’? Yet as I have been sitting by the log fire thinking about Christmases past, funny keeps cropping up.

I said, knife poised, that I hoped it wasn’t the steak pie we were about to eat with our cream or custard

One should never laugh at another’s misfortunes, but the first Christmas after the war, I got a third-hand red tricycle, made of what seemed like cast iron. It was sent down on the train from cousins in Sheffield and was a thing of wonder. I was only three and I found it tricky to get the hang of the pedals so Dad got on to show me. He was a big man and the thing must indeed have been cast iron, but he had no idea how to ride it  and landed on his bottom on the pavement. I laughed until I got hiccups.

The next year, on leave from the RAF, he brought home a reel of tinfoil – actually radar chaff – worth a Google – to be plaited into streamers. First Dad cut himself and then the cat got the reel and tied itself up in it, before cutting itself too. Our streamers were smeared red, but neither needed stitches so it was funny.

Every A&E is full of Christmas injuries, too serious to be amusing. The year my husband stuck a fir tree branch in his eye ended in hilarity – though as he might have been blinded, we didn’t laugh. I just drove him to the local hospital minor injuries, where he was the only casualty. Duty doc administered antibiotic drops and an eyepatch and the nurse medium sherry, instead of the usual tea. Cue laughter all round. Daughter wrote ‘Merry Xmas’ in red felt tip on the eyepatch.

Television played no part in our festivities until I was an adult and even then Morecambe and Wise were only in black and white, though still rib-achingly funny. But I spent several Christmases with friends whose son worked in a TV shop during vacations and in 1968 brought home an early colour set. It wasn’t homegrown comedians that split our sides then, but an American programme called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. If you saw it you don’t need me to say ‘Beautiful Downtown Burbank’ to you, but it was funnier than anything I had ever seen. Still is.

The Christmas when the electricity went off at 11 a.m and didn’t return until the next day wasn’t funny: we were hungry. It was only much later that we noticed the lights were on and discovered the Aga had actually run out of oil. Starting over again to cook an already half-cooked turkey a day later is a recipe for salmonella poisoning. The laughter had a bitter edge.

But the incident remembered by the then-children, who now have children of their own, involved fruit pies, meat pies and the deep chest freezer. We were six adults and four children for Boxing Day lunch, and children between three and seven laugh more than any other group. It is a known fact. Pudding was fruit pie, made by me from our own apples and hedgerow blackberries a few weeks earlier and frozen at the same time as I had made a couple of steak pies. In order not to mix them up I put a pastry star on the lid of one kind. Except that when I got them out I had forgotten which kind, though being pretty sure it was the fruit, I cooked that. The five-year-old next to me had saucer eyes when I said, knife poised, that I hoped it wasn’t the steak pie we were about to eat with our cream or custard. You know the rest – and it is true about the laughter of little children, although, while wondering what was for pudding, even I joined in.

Last Christmas. Ah yes. Well, it’s funny now. We packed the car within an inch of its life, luggage, presents for our hosts – my elder daughter and family – the dog’s cage containing the dog, and set off for Brighton. It’s a long way from north Norfolk; traffic was heavy and after four-and-a-half hours we were at our last pit stop, Clacket Lane services, where my phone rang. ‘Erm… you can’t come. We’ve all tested positive for Covid.’

So a Christmas Eve of nine hours’ hard driving ended back at our own front door, car still full, dog restless in its cage, and us trying to remember if there was any food in the house.

You had to laugh.

Susan Hill

Susan Hill’s latest novel is A Change of Circumstance.

What Jesus taught us

Taki   12:50PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Getty Images]

This is the 47th year in a row that I have written a column for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. It began when I was a young 40-year-old, and is at present being written by an 87-year-old vet. The years have passed in an eye-blink. Recently I asked myself why do bad things happen to good people? (Well, not very good people, but well-intentioned.) This question has occupied thinkers throughout the ages. People who do not believe in a good God should logically have no problem with the existence of evil. In my case, I very much believe in God and it has served me well during a very long and very happy life.

Recently, however, something bad happened to me in a Swiss village court of law, which led me to suspend writing my regular column. Then something extraordinary took place. My wife Alexandra, a devout Catholic whom I married 52 years ago when she was young and didn’t know what she was doing, quoted the Bible to me: ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.’ She also reminded me of the book of Job. God must have had a reason to punish Job so cruelly, yet poor old Job was innocent. God did it to illustrate his unquestionable power and that his ways are never understood by mortals. ‘We have two beautiful children and four even more beautiful grandchildren,’ she said. ‘You’re healthy and well-off. What else do you want?’

I very much believe in God and it has served me well during a very long and very happy life

She was hard to argue with – she was not born a Serene Highness for nothing – and she has convinced me not to hate or ask why. Mind you, I’m appealing but it takes a long time.

Now let’s get back to Christmas. We live in a world where people exaggerate the value of entertainers and professional athletes while neglecting spiritual heroes. Sometimes I think anti-Christian forces take Christ more seriously than most nominal Christians do. People in the western world – including many who consider themselves Christians – have turned Christmas into a bland holiday of mere niceness. Ironically, the natural reaction to Christ is to reject him, and he said so himself. He predicted his own death and told his followers they must expect persecution too. He preached love and mercy, but also warned of eternal damnation, insulted the Pharisees, and rebuked people who adored him in words that can still make us cringe.

He was no con man. He accompanied his words with miracles, and the forces ranged against him disputed his words rather than the miracles. Now his modern enemies don’t even try to dispute whether or not the miracles happened – but simply assume that they didn’t. The fact that large crowds witnessed the blind seeing, the deaf hearing and the cripples walking convinces those of us who believe in his truth.

And yet there is a growing army of unbelievers, who say – as sceptics have done for centuries – that this is all kids’ stuff. Some go further: a benevolent God, they maintain, would never allow things like war and the premature deaths of millions. How could a loving God permit such gratuitous ruin? Surely any rational human being is bound to think that natural disasters which kill innocents are proof of the non-existence of a good God.

And yet, the miracle of birth alone proves otherwise. As does the satisfaction derived from doing something good for others, a very rare thing these days. Mindless violence is now part of western culture, as are anti-Christian beliefs.

Crusading atheism has become the banner under which many so-called thinking people march. It separates the men from foolish boys and so on. Articulate secularists, however, have a problem: the Enlightenment story does not add up. As religion gave way to science, parochialism and tribal allegiance were replaced by cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems were out, separation of church and state was in. And what did that bring us? Millions and millions of dead from wars, especially during the 20th century. And the big causes of these wars had little to do with religion and a lot to do with secularism.

Science is a blessing, but has not managed to replace religion where spirituality is concerned – and the great scientists are among the greatest of believers. Many churches are empty in Britain because of the secular teachings of the Church of England. Try getting into a Czech church on Christmas Eve, or a Greek village one. From Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Einstein, God was a reality. The West – and America in particular – is suffering from a culture of self-absorption and self-promotion.

And now it’s time. After 47 years, I am taking a break. I want to wish every Spectator reader a very happy Christmas, but I have run out of room to mention all the kind messages I’ve received. I will only mention a very few whose kindnesses I shall not soon forget: Leopold and Debbie Bismarck, Willy Shawcross, Melissa Kite, Charles Moore, Douglas Murray, Bruce Anderson, Charlie Glass, Rosie Chomondeley, Robin Birley and Rachel Johnson – thank you all and see you soon.

Taki

It took moving to Ireland to escape from the EU’s rules

Melissa Kite   12:53PM, 14 Dec, 2023

(iStock)

The skip man laughed as he took pity on me, the daft English blow-in who was taking the EU rules on rubbish disposal literally.

‘You put so much concrete in that skip that if I weighed it in properly it would cost you a thousand euros,’ he said.

I told him I really didn’t mind paying the going rate. He said he wouldn’t hear of it.

‘If you’ve got land you can always get rid of concrete blocks by filling holes with them,’ he said. ‘Don’t be putting concrete into skips.’

We ordered a skip and the company boss was appalled that we put lots of stuff in it we could have fly-tipped

The builder boyfriend, hard at work clearing the farmyard and barns, was aghast as I trotted outside to tell him his rookie mistake. ‘I don’t want to fly-tip on my own land!’ he said, making a pile of old lino he had removed from a back room, before demanding I order another skip.

It’s disorientating to have re-entered the EU to escape from its rules. But I’m delighted and not entirely surprised to find that the Irish stick their middle fingers up to most of the red tape from Brussels.

We lit a bonfire in our farmyard shortly after we got here and when someone called it in, the builder boyfriend was flagged down by a council official, not to be issued with a fine, but for the official to tell him how disgusted he was that a neighbour should do that to us.

The pair of them stood by the roadside discussing who it could have been. Most likely, the official thought, it was someone with a grudge against the council, trying to give him extra work by making him come up to the house to inspect our fire. As long as we assured him we would order a skip he would say and do no more about it.

So we ordered a skip and the skip company boss was appalled that we put lots of stuff in it we could have fly-tipped.

It’s all to do with the sort of EU membership you want, and the Brits really didn’t nail this. Nor did we nail leaving. It made no difference either way – in or out, we still obeyed the rules, which was some feat to pull off.

I have received a very polite complaint letter from a reader questioning how I, a Brexiteer, could possibly dare to go and live in the EU after everything I have complained about. But he only thinks my move is hypocrisy because he has bought into the idea that Europe is an institution, not a geographical place.

Long before the EU was unsuccessfully telling people how to dispose of their rubbish in west Cork, my forefathers were humping grapes off a mountainside in Abruzzo, thank you very much. The builder boyfriend hails on one side from the Channel Islands, on the other side from Naples.

Despite being ardent Brexiteers, we have both travelled extensively, in Europe and the wider world. Shocking, I know.

So far as I can make out, the Irish, like the French and the Italians, are only mad keen on the European Union in the sense that it provides them with farming subsidies and free tractors.

When it comes to its rules, their view seems to be that you can take them or leave them, depending on what’s in it for you.

Our neighbours keep telling us about the grants we could apply for to do up this old house. Everyone puts in for these grants. We often joke that the reason we can’t get any tradespeople like plumbers or electricians to turn up is because it’s a full-time job sitting at home filling in grant application forms.

You have to fit your trade around it. ‘Nothing is for free,’ I told the BB. ‘I don’t want to have to feel grateful to the EU. They’re not bribing me.’

A Eurosceptic friend of mine pointed out that another way to square my move, politically speaking, is that one day I can vote for Irexit. I would have said this was completely unlikely before moving here. Now I’m not so sure.

There is growing anger aimed at an establishment that has started labelling anyone who complains about anything as ‘far right’.

This hackneyed insult becomes finally and totally meaningless once you start applying it to the Irish, for obvious reasons.

When Leo Varadkar threatens to use water cannon on Dubliners for rioting after three children are stabbed in the street, you think what next, rubber bullets? Black and tan uniforms for the police?

Truly, the indiscriminate misuse of the term ‘far right’ has plumbed new depths now they’re slapping it on people whose ancestors starved in the potato famine, or fought alongside Michael Collins.

So yes, I look forward to joining this lot if they ever mount a second go at independence.

Melissa Kite

How Hannes took on a buffalo – and nearly paid the price

Aidan Hartley   12:23PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[iStock]

Kenya

Hannes became a professional hunter because, as he says in his fine book Strange Tales from the African Bush, he missed ‘the smell of cordite… the clatter of the helicopters and the memory of the blood brotherhood that few, other than soldiers under fire, are lucky enough to know’. He’s a 14th generation white African and a veteran of the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry that fought valiantly in that country’s civil war. He still loves Africa and lives in the Western Cape. When he visited our beach house on the Kenya coast, I managed to persuade him to tell me a few stories, fuelled with bottles of Tusker – a much-loved local lager which is named after the elephant that killed the original brewer.

In the burning light after noon, in a dense thicket, the bull charged while Hannes’s back was turned

After the civil war, when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, Hannes tried being a barrister. He tired of life in a courtroom and it wasn’t for him, so he picked up his rifle and headed off back into the bush where he’d grown up and seen so much action. For the next 20 years he hunted across Africa, guiding rich tycoons tracking trophies, but he met his nemesis in the flat dry scrub of northern Tanzania, deep in the heart of buffalo country. Here they came upon a 2,000lb bull at 150 yards. His American client fired his .375 rifle prematurely, as the creature faced him head on, wounding but not killing it. The injured beast took off into a ravine thick with wait-a-bit thorn and combretum scrub.

Hannes and I poured another beer.

Leaving the apologetic American behind, Hannes went in after the buffalo, tracking him until dusk. He broke at nightfall and slept on the tracks, then resumed at dawn. The sun got hotter and in the intense burning light after noon, in a dense thicket, the bull charged out of the thorn while Hannes’s back was turned. It scooped him up with its huge horns and tossed him high into the air. Hannes crashed to the ground and the rifle flew out of his hand. The buffalo gored him into the dirt and then tossed him again, the right horn ripping through his groin, his bladder and up through his entrails towards his liver.

The creature then flicked him over its head so that Hannes found himself astride its back, wondering if he should grab its tail and cling on rodeo-style. It bucked him off on to the ground and came at him again, this time driving towards his skull. Hannes raised his hands up in defence, only to see the buffalo’s horn rip through his left arm, separating the bicep from the bone as it tossed him yet again. Hannes’s nemesis strode off snorting, turned and was coming back for the coup de grâce when the American client, just arriving on the scene, fired two bullets into the animal – at which point it collapsed with its full weight on to the spreadeagled and bloodied Hannes.

We poured another beer.

The American and two trackers pulled the carcass off Hannes, who reached down to his groin – and to his horror his testicles had disappeared.

Another beer.

Waiting for death, Hannes gave his client some messages for his loved ones, then the American said a prayer. Hannes waited for death, and waited, and after a while felt embarrassed he hadn’t died. He asked his Tanzanian tracker to run off and bring back the car. An hour later he came back to say the keys were still in his top pocket. Off he went again and then, after a path was hacked with machetes through the thicket towards him, the vehicle got a puncture.

Following many more dramas, during which Hannes suffered his injuries without morphine, they got to an airstrip. Here a crowd gathered and Hannes had to fight off a man wielding a rusty syringe with which he wanted to inject the wounded man – this being the height of the Aids pandemic. The hunting party had a VHF radio and by a stroke of luck, a series of mayday calls were picked up by a pilot transporting a cargo of cattle drugs, who then landed in his Cessna to evacuate Hannes to Nairobi.

Two more beers.

On arrival in Kenya’s capital, for some reason the hospital staff all thought Hannes was Mel Gibson, so he received royal treatment. In a six-hour operation the surgeons restored his shredded bladder, sowed up his arm, his leg and his guts. The buffalo had missed his femoral artery and by a miracle his liver was unscathed. His belly was full of sand and thorns and had to be scrubbed out with a brush and soapy water. After much digging around, the doctors found his testicles, which had been bashed right up inside his pelvis by the buffalo’s horns. These were yanked back out into the scrotum, which the medics then sewed up.

Hannes waited for death, and waited, and after a while felt embarrassed he hadn’t died

A few gasps from me and another round of beers.

One of Hannes’s Zimbabwean friends, a comrade from the war days, happened to be in town and he dropped by at the hospital. Full of soldier’s banter, the friend proceeded to lambast the wounded man for making such a big fuss about his wounds. After going on like this for days on several visits, the friend came to the hospital and stood at the end of Hannes’s bed, chiding him for being such a malingerer. ‘Hold on, John,’ said Hannes. ‘Have a look at these.’ Hannes drew back the sheet to reveal two purple and black testicles the size of cricket balls. The man looked horrified and then he disappeared from view as he fainted, passing out cold.

Another beer. Cheers Hannes – and Merry Christmas.

Aidan Hartley

Aidan Hartley is the Spectator's Wild Life columnist.

‘Truly spicy and a delight to eat’: how to make Christmas gingerbread

Olivia Potts   11:47AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Illustration: Natasha Lawson

The flavours of Christmas have changed a bit lately, haven’t they? If you wander around supermarkets right now, you’ll find peach bellini panettone, tiramisu mince pies, turkey gravy-flavoured crisps and Black Forest stollen. Even the classic Terry’s Chocolate Orange comes in a mint version this year. You could argue that Walkers crisps are standing up for tradition by selling a Christmas pudding flavour, but that might be pushing it.

I’m all for innovation, but it does rather make me long for the traditional tastes of Christmas. I love peach bellini, tiramisu, and Black Forest gâteau – but I can enjoy these flavours at any time. The spice and warmth and booze that are prerequisites for our usual Christmas fare are really reserved for December. That’s not to say that you can’t get hold of them all year round, but it wouldn’t feel right eating a mince pie in July, or stollen in September. And while I’d happily have a ginger nut at any time, traditional gingerbread is a Christmas-only treat.

Simplicity is part of their charm: I have a soft spot for gingerbread men with Smarties down their fronts

Gingerbread is one of our oldest biscuits, dating back to at least the 1500s, but we were still relative latecomers in the gingerbread game. The very first recipe for gingerbread is from Ancient Greece in 2400 bc; the Chinese started making it in the 10th century ad, and we finally caught up by the late medieval period.

Spices were expensive then, so using them, especially in combination, was a way of demonstrating wealth – although, as food historian Sam Bilton points out, early gingerbread recipes didn’t actually contain any ginger at all. Saffron, pepper, cinnamon and clove, sure – but no ginger. Ginger came later, accompanied by treacle rather than honey, and the breadcrumbs found in the early recipes were replaced with flour, which meant that they baked up firmer.

The biscuits were often made in moulds, the designs changing with the seasons; sometimes animals, sometimes flowers, sometimes monarchs – and were a mainstay of European fairs, becoming such an integral part of them that they became known as ‘gingerbread fairs’ and the biscuits ‘fairings’.

Baking them in human form goes back nearly as far as the biscuits themselves: the first documented gingerbread man was at the court of Elizabeth I. Her gingerbread men were designed to look like specific courtiers, which is rather more skilful than those we make today (or certainly than the ones that come out of my kitchen).

It was gingerbread houses – popular in Germany between the 16th and 18th centuries – which made gingerbread synonymous with Christmas, rather than an all-year-round treat. Now, like fir trees, bells and reindeer, the silhouette of a gingerbread man has become a shorthand for the festive season – and if you see a stubby little Morph-style, man-shaped biscuit, you are in no doubt as to the flavour. Their lack of distinctive features is their distinctive feature. And that simplicity is part of their charm: I have a soft spot for gingerbread men with Smarties dotted down their fronts or along their skirtlines.

If you’re looking for a more elegant solution than a stout little man without fingers or toes, then boiled sweets are your friend. Sprinkling smashed-up boiled sweets into the gaps and recesses in your gingerbread means that, when the biscuits bake, the sweets melt and form smooth, multi-coloured panes that harden as the biscuits cool. While raw or just baked, you can pierce a hole through the top of the biscuit and, when cold, thread ribbon or string through to create edible ornaments, which will catch the light as they dangle.

My gingerbread is truly spicy – this is Christmas after all – baking flat, and with very little spreading. It’s robust enough to survive the festive season, whether you use it to decorate your tree or erect a gingerbread palace, but sufficiently toothsome that it’s also (crucially) a delight to eat.

Makes 20-40, depending on size

Takes 20 minutes, plus chilling

Bakes 8-10 minutes

Gingerbread

- 450g plain flour, plus extra for dusting

- 1 tsp salt

- 1 tbsp ground ginger

- 2 tsp ground cinnamon

- ¼ tsp ground mixed spice

- 150g dark brown sugar

- 80g butter

- 180g golden syrup

- 1 egg

- 1 tbsp treacle

Optional decoration

- Icing sugar

- Boiled sweets

- Smarties or Jelly Tots

1. Whisk the flour, salt and spices together in a large mixing bowl.

2. In a separate bowl, rub the brown sugar through your fingers to remove lumps (this prevents brown sticky spots in the finished biscuits). Cream together the butter and sugar until they are notably paler than before. Add the egg, and mix it thoroughly into the creamed butter and sugar.

3. Fold the syrup and treacle through the mix, followed by the dry ingredients, until it all comes together as a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least an hour.

4. Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan. Dust a work surface, unwrap the dough and roll it out to the thickness of a pound coin. Stamp out using cutters, and transfer gently to a lined baking tray. If you’re using boiled sweets, smash them up in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar and sprinkle them into the negative spaces of your design.

5. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until the biscuits are slightly coloured but not browned, and still a little soft. Allow to cool completely before trying to move them.

6. If you’re decorating with icing or making gingerbread men: stir together icing sugar with a small splash of water until you have a pipeable consistency. Use it to decorate or to stick sweets to your heart’s content.

To sign up for Olivia Potts’s bimonthly newsletter, which brings together the best of The Spectator’s food and drink writing, go to www.spectator.co.uk/oliviapotts

Olivia Potts

Olivia Potts is a former criminal barrister who retrained as a pastry chef. She co-hosts The Spectator’s Table Talk podcast and writes Spectator Life's The Vintage Chef column. A chef and food writer, she was winner of the Fortnum and Mason's debut food book award in 2020 for her memoir A Half Baked Idea.

Beautiful bottles from Swig Wines to enhance your Christmas drinking

Jonathan Ray   12:24PM, 14 Dec, 2023

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So, this is it, the final offer of the year. Mrs Ray says I can drink whatever I need in whatever quantity just as long as I stop banging on about how miserable a month December is. Thanks to these beauties from Swig Wines, I’ve been silence personified, if a little squiffy, and should just about make it through. I trust they’ll help you too.

The 2022 Sauvignon À Peu Près (1) with its jaunty label and immaculate winemaking looks and tastes far better than a lowly Val de Loire IGP should. Produced by David and Shirley Maudry in the heart of the Loire Valley from 100 per cent Sauvignon Blanc, it would be a far grander Pouilly Fumé if only its vineyards were mere yards in one direction or another. Balanced and rounded with typical gooseberry, cut grass and zingy citrus fruit, it’s an absolute delight and would fool many a PF or Sancerre lover. Mrs Ray said she would happily drink the whole bottle and, dear reader, jolly nearly did. £12.50 per down from £15.50.

It’s delicate and ethereal and the more you swirl the glass the more you get out of it

The 2022 Stéphane Ogier ‘Le Temps est Venu’ (2) is another crowd-pleaser, this time a white Côtes du Rhône from one of the great names of the region. A blend of Grenache Blanc, Roussanne, Marsanne, Viognier, Bourboulenc and Clairette, it’s wonderfully appealing, with fresh fruit on the nose, the faintest prickle on the tongue and plenty of creamy apricotty, almondy flavours on the finish. £15.35 per down from £18.35.

I love the 2022 AA Badenhorst Secateurs Chenin Blanc (3) from Swartland, South Africa. Adi Badenhorst is an eccentric genius whose fabulous Family White Blend is a bonkers mix of some 12 different grape varieties which would never be made anywhere else in the world. This, though, is made solely from old vine Chenin Blanc and is bang on song – soft, rounded and with delicate hints of apricots, pineapple, baked apples and cream and a long smile-inducing finish. £13.50 down from £16.50.

The 2020 Mas Brunet Cuvée du Mazet (4) from Terrasses du Larzac in the Languedoc is a blend of the region’s five grapes – Carignan, Cinsault, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah – that delights in its complexity and intensity. With ripe dark fruit, herbs and spice, it hints at a mighty Châteauneuf-du-Pape (and accompanying price tag) and is deeply rewarding. £12.50 down from £15.50.

The 2020 Langhe Nebbiolo Garesio (5) comes from 100 per cent Barolo vineyards in Piedmont, north-west Italy and good ones too. As Swig’s Robin Davis says, it’s delicate and ethereal and the more you swirl the glass the more you get out of it – fruit, spice, herbs and the sense of it being a fine, five times as pricey, Barolo. £21 down from £24.

I thought that the 2022 Domaine Maratray-Dubreuil Chorey-les-Beaune ‘Les Bons Ores’ (6) from Ladoix, just north of Beaune, would be too young but my burgundy barometer (aka Mrs R) suggested otherwise, managing to down a whole glass while my back was turned opening the next bottle. It’s in great shape, being full of rich, concentrated ripe fruit and what Robin rightly describes as joy. £24 down from £27.

Finally, as a festive treat, we’ve the Champagne Moutardier Carte d’Or NV (7) a stunning grower champagne full of baked apples, toast, brioche, citrus and cream thanks to six years on the lees. This is how fine champagne should be and how chic and in-the-know to serve it rather than one of the ubiquitous Grandes Marques or dull supermarket fare. £27 down from £30.

The wines are offered in unmixed half-dozens with free delivery on orders over £120. The mixed case contains two bottles each of wines 1-6 and there’s a half bottle of 2013 Digby Reserve Brut (Wine GB Awards Supreme Champion 2023 and Sparkling Wine of the Year 2022 and 2023) for every mixed case and any order of £150 plus.

Order online today or download an order form.

Jonathan Ray

Jonathan Ray is the Spectator's wine editor.

Christmas cheer at QPR is the highlight of the season

Toby Young   12:51PM, 14 Dec, 2023

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One of the things I look forward to most about Christmas is the football, something that’s particularly true if you’re a fan of a team in one of the lower tiers. Premier League clubs play 38 games per season, not counting the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and any European competitions they happen to be in. Championship clubs, by contrast, play 46 league games every season and try to cram in as many as they can over the holidays. But even allowing for that, QPR has an unusually crowded fixture list this year – no fewer than eight matches between 1 December and 1 January.

The last time I went to see Millwall, with all four kids in tow, we were locked in a metal cage at the exit. This was for our own safety, the stewards explained

This would normally have me purring with pleasure. I remember racing to Loftus Road after a Christmas lunch in 2014 to rendezvous with my wife and six-year-old son to see the Rs play West Brom. I was so worried about keeping Caroline waiting that I ran straight into a lamppost, smashing my glasses. As I squinted into the floodlights, trying to figure out what was going on, Charlie gave me a running commentary, which turned out to be more exciting than watching the game. We were near the bottom of the Premier League at the time, having been promoted at the end of the previous season, and destined for relegation. The Baggies went two up in the first 20 minutes and another defeat looked certain. Then Charlie Austin, our 25-year-old striker, scored a hat trick in the second half, with the winner coming in the 86th minute. That was probably the best Christmas present I’ve ever had.

This year, I’m even more nervous than I was going into that match. At the beginning of this month, the Hoops were languishing in the relegation zone, only at the bottom of the second tier rather than the first. In the past 13 months we’ve had four different managers – never a good sign – and we’re currently without a director of football. The CEO is doubling up as QPR’s chairman, keeping the seat warm until we can persuade some Gulf potentate to pour money into the club. Going into our last game of November, we’d only chalked up one home victory in the previous year, a club record. Somewhat miraculously, we won that game but with a great deal of help from our opponents, Stoke City, who guided us to victory with an own goal in the 89th minute.

Actually, that may be slightly uncharitable. After a succession of journey-man managers, we’ve just recruited a 41-year-old Spaniard called Martí Cifuentes who looks like he could be the real deal. He’s never managed an English team before, having cut his teeth in Scandinavia, but last season he steered Hammarby to a third-place finish in the Swedish first division and got them into a cup final.

For his first game in charge, QPR were away to fellow stragglers Rotherham, a brutal introduction to Championship football, and I was expecting another defeat. Cifuentes likes his teams to play what’s known as ‘tiki-taka’ football, with the emphasis on short passes and keeping possession, probing for an opportunity to mount a swift surprise attack.

That’s not a style QPR’s players are cut out for, to put it mildly. Cifuentes’s predecessor, Gareth Ainsworth, was an English manager from the old school, believing our best hope of winning games was to sit back and defend, then try to catch opponents off-guard with long balls over the top. This is disparagingly referred to as ‘Brexit football’ in contrast to the European approach favoured by brainy tacticians like Cifuentes. Expecting our ragbag of Premier League rejects and injury-prone war horses to play like Barcelona was a bit unrealistic, surely?

In fact, we managed a 1-1 draw, which was a big improvement on the previous six games, all of which we’d lost. Some of our defenders were clearly struggling to adapt to Cifuentes’s ‘progressive’ style – it was like watching the hippos trying to perform ballet in Fantasia. But others who’d bridled under Ainsworth’s head-banging approach began to show signs of life. Our most technically gifted player is probably Ilias Chair, a 26-year-old Moroccan international, and he’d been languishing under the old regime, like a racehorse being harnessed to a cart. But he scored a wonder goal against Rotherham, his first of the season. We won another draw the following week, then lost to Norwich, then chalked up our first victory in 13 games against Stoke. We also won again on 1 December. Things are looking up at Loftus Road!

Needless to say, the fans adore their Spanish manager and have honoured him with his very own chant: ‘Martí Cifuentes/Martí Cifuentes/He eats paella and drinks Estrella/He hates effing Chelsea…’ Of course, there’s no evidence he does any of those things and he’s probably a big admirer of Mauricio Pochettino, Chelsea’s Argentinian manager. But hating the Blues, our most detested west London rivals, is considered to be essential for a good QPR manager. Almost half the songs our supporters sing are about how much they loathe Chelski. I don’t suppose any of their fans bother to chant about disliking us, QPR having long disappeared in their rear-view mirror.

The highlight of the Christmas period promises to be an away match against Millwall on Boxing Day. The Den is always an intimidating place to go, not least because their fans are so terrifying. I remember hearing them break out into a quiet, lowing sound a few years back, only for it to gradually increase in volume until it became a deafening, bloodcurdling howl. The last time I went, with all four kids in tow, we were locked in a metal cage at the exit. This was for our own safety, the stewards explained, pointing to a group of tattooed thugs a few yards away making throat-cutting gestures. I may ask Rod Liddle to accompany me, on the assumption that those guys are probably his drinking buddies.

In truth, I’ll probably enjoy myself whether QPR win or lose. One of the best things about going to all these games over Christmas is the good cheer among the fans, some of whom wear Santa hats. Above all, it’s a chance to spend time with my children, who are gradually fleeing the nest. Supporting QPR and going to games has been a constant throughout their childhood, and our intense, tribal loyalty to the club feels like a proxy for our love for each other, as I’m sure it does for other families who follow their teams round the country. We’re English, so far too embarrassed to talk about our feelings. But on those rare occasions when QPR score and we jump up and down and embrace each other, it means more than anything else in the world.

Toby Young

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

My sporting questions for 2024

Roger Alton   8:56AM, 14 Dec, 2023

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Could this be the year when England’s men win their first international football trophy for 58 years? After all, they have the best striker in Europe in Harry Kane and the best attacking midfielder in Jude Bellingham, both of whom are being treated like Wellington and Nelson at their respective clubs BayernMunich and Real Madrid. This should be about time too that pundits admit that the way Bellingham lit up the European Championships in Germany makes him, at the very least, Bobby Charlton’s equal. If he is not Sports Personality of the Year in 2024, something very odd must have happened in the space-time continuum.

If Bellingham is not Sports Personality of the Year in 2024, something very odd must have happened

England also have the best right winger in Europe in Bukayo Saka; a superb holding midfielder in Declan Rice; and the fastest full back on the planet in Kyle Walker. So can anything stop England? Well yes, and his name is Harry Maguire.

The Championships will be superbly organised, as the man in charge is Philipp Lahm, one of the smartest, most creative players ever to grace a football field. But might the game come to its senses and stop awarding career-ending penalties because, after six minutes studying the videotape, the VAR decides that the ball has brushed someone’s fingernail? Goals should be hard to score and we should be able to celebrate them.

In tennis, 2024 could be the year when we finally learn whether Emma Raducanu has buckled under the weight of expectation she piled on herself by winning the US Open as a teenager – and wringing out of it as much publicity and moolah as she could – and will be forever remembered as a one-hit wonder. Or could she start winning again?

And can anyone stop Novak Djokovic? Rivals come and then mostly go again. Nole won three out of four Grand Slams this year, and next year he has got the Olympics as well, so he seems unlikely to be dialling anything down. Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz pop up occasionally to give him a scare, as do Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Andrey Rublev. Even so, their only real hope will be that the hardened Serb boycotts all tournaments because of a ‘lack of respect’.

At the risk of tempting fate, will the 2024 Paris Olympics be a triumph of French chic? Or will the staging of the Games in a city with a rich history of street unrest become a focus for those who want to spoil our fun? The signs aren’t good, but then Parisians like to bellyache about everything. Fares will be doubling, there are unfathomably complex security arrangements at the venues, and most of the city’s citizens now disapprove of the whole shebang. My guess, though, is that it will almost certainly be a triumph, just like London 2012 – remember that?

As for cricket, will Jimmy Anderson finally retire? Or, when England announce their Test squad for Afghanistan in 2038, will we find out he’s being ‘rested’? This could also be the year when either Ben Stokes admits defeat in his battle against injury or English cricket gives thanks to a knee surgeon for resurrecting the Test career of a man whose style of inspirational leadership was so lacking in the 2023 World Cup.

As English rugby labours in a morass of largely self-inflicted problems, the big question is whether captain Owen Farrell’s sabbatical will make much difference. In 2024’s Six Nations, England should beat Italy and Wales, have a tight match with Scotland, and get stuffed by France and Ireland. And yet… Ireland might be going over the hill, and France will lack Antoine Dupont. The important thing for England will be to make sure Marcus Smith and Henry Arundell are on the pitch as much as possible. At 5-1, they feel quite a tasty bet.

Meanwhile, could Formula 1 get any more dislikeable? Its insistence that it is first and foremost a ‘lifestyle brand’ will doubtless lead to an announcement that it is hosting a Grand Prix which doesn’t involve any actual motor racing. Max Verstappen is declared the winner. No one notices.

For lovers of American football, there’s only one big question, and that’s whether the Kelce brothers will face off again in the Super Bowl, as they did in February when Travis and his Kansas City Chiefs pipped brother Jason and the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35. Will it happen again? Well, it certainly could. I am sure readers of this journal don’t need to be told that Travis Kelce is dating Taylor Swift – and the Chiefs’ performance shoots up when she’s at the game, as do Kelce’s running stats. Maybe this is something Manchester United could bear in mind whenever one of their star players gets a new girlfriend?

Roger Alton

Roger Alton is a former editor of the Observer and the Independent. He writes the Spectator Sport column.

Dear Mary, from Joanna Lumley: what do you get someone who insists they don’t want a present?

Mary Killen   12:55PM, 14 Dec, 2023

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From Henry Blofeld

Q. The other day I went to an all-male dinner party of about 20 people in a highly respectable club. I spent the first few minutes shaking hands with most of the other people there and was horrified to find that quite a number of them kept their left hands in their trouser pockets while I did so. I was brought up to believe that this is extremely discourteous and I think it looks so sloppy. I have no idea what the official etiquette is, but I am delighted to have been given the chance to find out. What do you think, Mary?

A. The official etiquette? It is extremely bad manners to keep one hand in a pocket during an introduction – the atavistic reason being fear of a concealed weapon. Younger men may well have been influenced by images of the American actor George Clooney, who routinely keeps his left hand in his pocket during red-carpet Hollywood events.

From Joanna Lumley

Q. What would you consider an acceptably tiny present for people who have everything and say they want nothing for Christmas? I can’t bear not giving anything; but maybe a paperback or a bar of soap might be too small. I am useless at baking so shall not attempt any home-baked goods, and my embroidery skills are pretty shabby so I shall not be able to initial a handkerchief. You always supply such wonderful solutions to problems, so please help me, Mary, in my hour of need. I suppose helium balloons are out of the question.

A. Helium balloons are a charming idea but can terrify dogs. Instead give an exquisitely wrapped mini-package of a sheet of first-class stamps – perhaps the special edition called River Wildlife? You can buy 25 of these for £31.25. Every civilised person needs stamps and yet they are so difficult to remember to buy.

From Nigel Havers

Q. I would be grateful for advice on how to avoid screaming at cyclists in Hyde Park who ignore the no-cycling lanes as they run down innocents enjoying a stroll, playing with their dogs and children, or just generally trying to stay alive. If I continue to hurl abuse at these thoughtless people my voice will disappear and I will be unable to remain in my present profession.

A. You will have seen the occasional hobby cyclist with hi-vis, folding ‘lollipop safety flags’ projecting from their wheels to aggress motorists who might invade their space. Play the offenders at their own game by customising a walking gilet to accommodate a pair of these flags to be attached to your own waist while walking. They will give you a buffer zone of approximately 12in on either side.

From Adrian Chiles

Q. I used to be on television a lot, now not so much. This is something friends and strangers alike tend to remark upon. Not in a nasty way, rather out of concern for me – which is, of course, worse. The question I really dread is: ‘Have you got anything in the pipeline?’ Always this notional pipeline. And all too often there’s nothing in my wretched pipeline. ‘Bits and bobs’, ‘irons in the fire’ and ‘sod all’, while honest, feel like unsatisfactory responses. Can you suggest anything better?

A. As a popular Radio 5 presenter you have nothing to skulk about. Instead, smile and confide: ‘This has become a problem for TV producers. Once a presenter gets a radio show they never want to do telly again. No changing location, faffing with make-up every ten minutes, standing around outside in the cold, endless reshoots. Radio wins the toss every time.’

From Cressida Bonas

Q. I’m nosey and like to eavesdrop. I have the ability to engage in a conversation while subtly listening to someone else close by. I’m skilled at this in restaurants, parties and on the no. 19 bus. While it’s a risky game, I often hear intriguing and extraordinary things. Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time before I get caught. What do you advise to curb this dangerous habit?

A. No need to curb it if you find it rewarding. If caught, claim that you are preparing an update of Andrew Barrow’s 1987 collection of anonymous overheard snippets. The Great Book of Small Talk is a fascinating piece of social anthropology and the genre is well due for an update.

From Gyles Brandreth

Q. I am lucky enough to know a number of people in public life. Some of them sadly appear to suffer from bouts of lalochezia. This is distressing to me and not good for them. To avoid embarrassment, should I avoid these people in future, or are there ways in which I could help them?

A. Begin carrying a clearly marked swear box. Grin benignly as you ask: ‘Would you be interested in contributing to the so-and-so charity? They are trying to raise funds this year via swear boxes. I promised I would try to help. Would £1 a word be OK?’

From Edwina Currie

Q. How can I stop people arguing with me about who I am or who I may be? So many otherwise obviously well-bred souls (usually gentlemen) approach with ‘No! You can’t be’, or even ‘What are you doing here?’ To which accurate replies might be, ‘Yes I can’ and ‘Probably the same as you’ (purchasing vegetables or buying a G&T at the theatre bar). But both responses sound rather rude. Please advise.

A. Better to act daft. Reply: ‘How lovely to see you again. What have you been up to since we last met?’ Stay silent while they answer. In this way you transfer the embarrassment.

From Sharron Davies

Q. I have a beautiful granddaughter called Ariya who I look after every week. It’s my favourite day of the week without question. Come January, a beautiful grandson is due to make an arrival. I still have a rugby-playing 6ft 2in 16-year-old son at home and a 30- and 25-year-old, though they have flown the nest. I have now done nearly 31 years with hungry children in the house. Any advice for a weary cook who gets tempted to open a ready meal after decades of preparing hearty suppers, and now seems to be starting all over again with no break in canteen services?

A. Humans are programmed to take for granted the provider of kitchen comforts. They only appreciate it retrospectively when it stops. Announce that everyone is still more than welcome but every Monday, for example, they can cook for themselves. The contrast will startle them into gratitude, which will enhance your own attitude towards the drudgery.

Mary Killen

‘The chocolate soufflé is too good for people’: Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Hotel, reviewed

Tanya Gold   6:46AM, 14 Dec, 2023

(Four Seasons)

One in, one out, as Rick says in Casablanca. Le Gavroche, which was the first restaurant in Britain to win three Michelin stars – and this was before Michelin stars indicated poor mental health in gifted chefs – closes in January, which is serious news in the land of London restaurants: a kind of Congress of Vienna with Michel Roux bowing out with the blood of infinite chickens on his knife. I don’t love Le Gavroche the way other critics do but I admire it, even if it means ‘urchin’, which is not witty when you consider its prices. There was a scandal involving staff’s tips going to management – an ongoing obscenity, though this one was resolved – and I also think that if you desire French food you could just go to France. It’s not far, at least in miles.

There is a Pavyllon in Paris, and Alléno brought 70 staff to London, like a travelling circus

You could also go to Pavyllon. French food can be irritating because it considers itself a pinnacle. It isn’t, of course. Food is subjective – I won’t go on about haute-cuisine crème eggs (I found them somewhere on the Aldwych long ago) just now. But it can be spectacular.

Pavyllon lives in the Four Seasons Hotel on Hamilton Place, next to the Playboy (Bunny) Club, which endured a ghoulish return ten years ago but is now thankfully dead again, though its Twitter account thinks it isn’t, and is offering a zombie Bunny feed as an act of hope and maybe resurrection. As ever when almost nude women are offered for money, I think: why can’t you just be charming?

The Four Seasons is an odd building built in 1970 for the international rich: a pale rectangle with vast windows to suck in the remnants of Hyde Park, which is again prostrate under its annual Winter Wonderland. (See previous review of chorizo pretzel, Dalek cashpoint and Nazi-themed leisure village.) I’m aware that an explicit nadir of civilisation is a great review. A few nadirs are charming; wall-to-wall nadirs are something else.

‘Your flight to Egypt has been cancelled. Have you considered Rwanda?’

From afar, the Four Seasons looks like it wants to be a national flag. It is not on a promontory – the London bowl is flat – so it has made its own. In its defence, it isn’t as dirty as the Dorchester or as hideous as the Peninsula: its interiors feel just manifested and unreal. I get lost and walk through an underground car park to reach Pavyllon and I enjoy this more than I should. You can’t spin a semi-public car park – or, rather, no one has yet.

The Four Seasons is also decorated as a Winter Wonderland, and because it is owned by the ruling family of Bahrain and its flagship restaurant is French, this doesn’t mean the Brexity yet weirdly German-style Nutcracker Edwardian middle-class childhood written by Frances Hodgson Burnett and boxed by Fortnum & Mason. Though if you must have that, it is only steps away.

There is, as is the fashion, no Baby Jesus, no manger (not really appropriate in a bright golden hotel) and, above all, no God. (Likewise inappropriate. Christianity has mellowed lately but the rich never will.) It is, rather, white, silver and icy blue: a shivering northern Christmas with a plastic Christmas tree because plants are non-compliant. I think the designer is groping for Finland and its nothingness. Who isn’t?

And in a long gold room is Pavyllon. It isn’t really gold, this slender restaurant – it’s neutrals, the self-denying aesthetic of the age – but it feels like it. It must be soothing to live in a world where everything looks the same: restful. It is as finely made as anywhere I have been in London, though it feels nothing like the London I grew up in: the softest carpets; the finest tableware; the kindest chairs. There isn’t a full-sized tree or a champagne trolley of ice that looks like a petrified hedgehog: that was Monte Carlo, and that’s a different land.

I come first on 7 October, of all nights, for dinner. I assume Jews ate out on other evenings of disaster. I hope they did. I hope they chomped red meat and stared mutely at broken glass. Perhaps this is why I respond so well to Pavyllon. May all sanctuaries be like this. It feels, at first, like any common cavern of gold, but there is warmth here and I expand into it. A long bright kitchen meets the dining-room, and inside this kitchen are normal, smiling, gifted people.

This is the 16th restaurant of Yannick Alléno, a man who fully inhabits the character of handsome, clever Frenchman. He seems to relish it, and I do too. He worships Escoffier, and has 15 Michelin stars, just one behind Alain Ducasse. I admire Ducasse but I’ve never loved a meal at a Ducasse restaurant. They are too theatrical, too self-conscious, too alienating. I don’t want to be awed, I am hungry.

There is a Pavyllon in Paris, and Alléno brought 70 staff to London, like a travelling circus. Perhaps this is the thrill of the beginning (and Alléno is here, he shows us round, as if presenting a beloved child) but the meal is exquisite. It’s almost a shame it is inside the Four Seasons, which, being an expensive hotel, is beyond London: a flag ready to take flight. The beef stroganoff is tidy, immaculate; the lamb chops well cooked, which is rare; the mashed potato as I would make it but more dedicated, and perfect; the chocolate soufflé too good for people, as art should be and ever is. This is French food for people who do not seek to be patronised or alarmed by it, and it is delivered kindly. I hope they keep their tips.

I’ve reviewed a lot of London’s hotel restaurants lately, and this is the only one in which I don’t feel like a victim of larceny, or cold. The portions are, as in great French restaurants, not large enough to make the common person overfull. This is food as delight, not anaesthetic, and although – because? – it has none of the self-conscious masochism of Le Gavroche, it is the obvious successor to Michel Roux and his over-bloodied knife. (The zombie Bunny club never had a chance. It was a different kind of food.) The prices are mad at dinner, but I can’t fix that, and there’s a festive lunch for £55.50. It has a glut of menus, as if it is not yet sure who it is for. Perhaps no one is deserving. Merry Christmas, and all that.

Pavyllon, Four Seasons Hotel, Hamilton Place, London W1J 7DR; tel: 020 7319 5200.

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.

Let’s hope for good cheer this Christmas

Bruce Anderson   4:03AM, 14 Dec, 2023

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A couple of years ago, I saw a charming cartoon. A boy and a girl aged about seven were in an earnest conversation. ‘Of course I don’t believe in Father Christmas,’ said the boy. ‘But we’ve got to keep up the pretence for the sake of the parents.’ This Christmas, all over the world, many parents will be especially keen to dwell on the great festival’s innocent joys. Innocence: in many places the fear is that the glory of birth will give way to the massacre of the innocents. Like the shepherds, a large number of people are sore afraid. Unlike the shepherds, their fear has no relief at hand from the Heavenly Host.

A lot of friends have been converging on London, not all of them with glad tidings. A Lebanese family are especially happy to be here and they are still deciding whether to return home. For 50 years, they have had to endure intermittent strife. No close relatives have been killed – yet. But a way of life has been steadily destroyed. At the end of the 1960s, Beirut’s architecture was still predominantly Turkish. Under Nasser, Alexandria had lost much of its joie de vivre so Beirut had taken over as the discreet playground of the Middle Eastern rich. You could find every vice known to man, plus the ones the locals had invented. Those were the days. In recent years there has been plenty to remind us that vice and vicious are close linguistic kin.

In Beirut, you could find every vice known to man, plus the ones the locals invented. Those were the days

The family, set on remaining anonymous, have a wine cellar in London. We drank Musar from a range of years: miraculous that the vineyards had been able to produce so much, most of it excellent. The 1998 was especially good, but the old jokes had lost their savour. ’98: a hint of cordite, don’t you think? That is no longer funny. Vintages of Château Musar are a chronicle of a death unfolding.

With another boon companion, there was no shadow over the merriment. For some years, Eric Bush was an outstandingly successful public servant in the Cayman Islands. Cayman is often sniped at, for there are many who resent its success. Western liberals frequently seem happier dealing with poor countries that they can patronise. Cayman has no need of condescension and has long since broken free from poverty. It has demonstrated the ability to bounce back from a severe hurricane, to promote sustainable development and to attract investors.

Eric wanted to introduce me to an entrepreneur who has been building businesses in several countries, including Cayman Frank Schilling. He is an impressive fellow who knows how to combine success in commerce with the enjoyment of life. He recently decided to become a vigneron, in Greece, north of Salonika. We were to taste his Aphrodise, a sparkling rosé.

Frank is a brave man. Before he unleashed the Aphrodise, we had a tasting, concentrating on claret. A 2003 Léoville Poyferré gave way to a 2009 Léoville Barton. As one would have expected from a finer year, the Barton was the better, yet both were everything a serious claret should be expected to deliver. Even so, they were both outgunned. Two battle-cruisers, but a battleship inevitably took precedence. Although 1999 may not have been a great year, the paladins who preside over Château Latour do not deal in ordinary vintages. Their ’99 is superb.

After a strenuous evening’s drinking, champagne can work well as a bonne bouche. But to judge it after such a tasting seemed hardly fair. Nonetheless, it earned its place. At present, Aphrodise would be perfect for a beach or poolside picnic and not ideal for a filthy day in late November. But it is promising. Frank is used to success and he will not be disappointed.

I am writing this surrounded by success, in Dubai for COP28. I had not been here for more than 30 years: all changed, changed utterly. This doesn’t mean that a terrible beauty is born. But it is impossible not to salute a remarkable transformation.

Not far from the city, there are still sand dunes, camels and Bedouin. But Dubai itself has a forest of cranes and a dramatic skyline. At moments, it can seem like a futuristic version of Manhattan: breathtaking.

So this might seem a strange place to summon the world’s environmentalists. A fair number of the delegates believe mankind should return to living without fossil fuels. There will be visitors here who would prefer Dubai to return to the desert.

But mankind needs to keep the lights on, the factories working and the costs down. There is only one way to make that work. Science will have to be mobilised to solve the problems which science has created. From my first impressions, that is a widely held view among sensible environmentalists. There will be plenty of pieties and platitudes, but practicality will prevail. The tree-huggers will make a great deal of noise, and they have a point when it comes to preserving forests. But their desire to reduce the human race to the living standard of a primitive Amazonian tribe? No.

It may be that we are in the final phase of the internal combustion engine. Electric cars, the hydrogen fuel cell, nuclear power, including nuclear fusion – some of that may prove too difficult; but in general, I suspect that we are roughly in the equivalent place to Messrs Daimler and Benz in 1895. Henry Ford is round the corner.

No one is suggesting that the human race is safe. But the threat does not come from carbon. It comes from war. The danger is not from internal combustion. Military combustion is the menace, abetted perhaps by a dreadful pandemic created as a weapon, and then escaping to become the most appalling weapon of all.

Christmas is the season for ghost stories. The BBC used to televise a classic one every year in the 1970s, and have happily revived the habit in the 21st century. Let us hope such dark happenings remain at the level of fiction and do not force their way into the headlines.

Let us also hope for wassail, good cheer and feasting to accompany the great feast of the Nativity that was meant to bring hope and redemption. As there is still a way to go 2,000 years later, we might as well make do with carpe diem. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Bruce Anderson

Bruce Anderson is The Spectator's drink critic, and was the magazine's political editor

Why are quotes so often misattributed?

Dot Wordsworth   8:58AM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Getty Images]

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed with my husband, as in moments of weakness I do. But what is the source of the quotation?

The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it: a few big names – Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde – attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings.

So, talking of iron, Churchill’s phrase the iron curtain had been used before him. It secured attention, though, when he used it in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’

Someone found that the phrase had been used by Vasily Rozanov in 1918 in his book The Apocalypse of Our Times: ‘An iron curtain is being lowered, creaking and squeaking, at the end of Russian history.’ I can’t say I knew anything about Rozanov and I have no intention of reading that book.

His metaphor came from the theatre. In 1794, the Morning Post had reported that the new Drury Lane Theatre had ‘an iron curtain, which extends to the walls, and is so calculated as completely to prevent the flames spreading to the front of the House, though the scenes were to catch fire’. The theatre burnt down on 24 February 1809.

It was then that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the owner of the theatre, as he sat in the Piazza Coffee House near the burning building, was reputed to have responded to remarks about his philosophical calmness: ‘A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’

Or did he say that? Thomas Moore reported it in his Memoirs of Sheridan but ‘without vouching for the authenticity’ of the anecdote, which, he conceded, might have been ‘attendant upon all fires, since the time of Hierocles’, a philosopher of Alexandria, who could have been expected to know about the fire that destroyed the library there, although revisionist history doubts even that happened.

Rozanov brought the iron curtain down on ‘the end of history’, itself a phrase incorporated by Francis Fukuyama into the title of a book in 1992. In 1920, Ethel Snowden had seen the curtain differently in her Through Bolshevik Russia: ‘We were behind the “iron curtain” at last!’ The outspoken wife of Philip Snowden, later a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, she had called for state control of marriage, believing that the mentally ill and anyone under 26 should not be able to marry. Yet she was not an utter idiot, observing: ‘I know everybody I met in Russia outside the Communist party goes in terror of his liberty or his life.’

In 1945, a year before Churchill, Sir Thomas St Vincent Troubridge (from a line of naval baronets, though he spent his last decade as Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office) declared that ‘an iron curtain of silence has descended, cutting off the Russian zone from the western Allies’. Even Goebbels used the phrase, for heaven’s sake, in 1945, in the magazine Das Reich. But when we hear the words iron curtain, we do not, fortunately, think of Goebbels. Iron curtain is consciously associated with Churchill and not wrongly.

And as almost every writer of letters to the newspapers knows, Voltaire said: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ He did not say it, though.

The words were first published in 1907 in a book by S.G. Tallentyre, or so the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says. But there was no such person as S.G. Tallentyre, for that was a mere pen-name of a writer called Evelyn Beatrice Hall. In a letter in 1939 to Modern Language Notes, she made it clear that the words were hers, and she wasn’t pretending they were Voltaire’s. It did no good. No one ever writes: ‘In the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, “I disapprove of what you say…”.’

As for Macmillan, no definite source has been found. No one knows to whom he said it or when. ‘Events, dear boy’ sounds like him. More than 20 years ago Robert Harris called the phrase ‘infuriatingly ubiquitous’ and there has been no let-up since. The infuriation persists, everywhere.

Dot Wordsworth

Umbrian Moon

Ancaiano

At the end of August

the moon fixed itself in the sky

as if a pope were about to die.

It got into the olive trees.

It got into the porcupine.

It got into the stone. Into the guts.

Held its position till morning.

Owl-tremour, dog-bark, cock-crow.

My window my lover.

The blue had gone

and the house was washed in sun.

A cherry tree rattling in the breeze.

A redstart perched on the house.

I saw an eagle soaring upwards,

with a long snake in its mouth.

Filthie Olde Seth

Seth, Seth, the servile serf

Earned his cruste by plowing earthe.

Thick filthe lay on his every limbe.

The stynke of Seth was foule and grimme.

When summer came with azure skye

And barleycorne was ripe and drye,

Seth leapt at dawne, uncleane from bedde,

To shake the dandruffe from his hedde.

He scythed ’til noon  then founde some shade

To kisse a pungent dairie maide.

His wife Griselda came with lunche,

Saw what he didde and threwe a punche.

Seth fybbed, ‘I kissed her not. Thou art a fool.

It’s time to use the ducking stool!’

‘I’ll fecche,’ yelled wife, ‘the village prieste.

Thou heartless manne, thou nastie beaste.’

The priest was eating mutton pie.

He wiped his chinne and breathed a sigh.

‘You two agene! O, by Sainte Garthe,

Methynkes I’ll make you take a bath.’

At this, swarte Seth beganne to sweat.

His skinne hadde never yette been wette.

Soap between his stinking toes?

His armpittes scrubbed and up his nose?

‘NAY, SIRE,’ cried he, a casten downe,

‘I cannot spoil my goodwye’s gowne,

And we would bresten, faced with soap.

Holie father, give us hope.’

He clasped Griselda in his armes

Inhaled her smelle of grease and farmes.

‘For lyfe, I’ll love thee,’ so he swore,

Then kissed her once and twice and more.

The priest went home, and so did she,

A goodly wyfe, to mekke his tea.

Seth watched her fondly out of sight,

Waddling through the evening light.

Then, as the sunne beganne to sink,

He gave the dairie maide a wink.

That night, he crossed himself and grinned.

‘Forgive me, Father. I have sinned.’

Northbound

i.m. Mick Imlah

There is a brief respite

while our lives are held suspended.

We’ll laugh when this is over,

wiser for this glimpse of the abyss.

For now, we go to work as usual,

a zigzag route through the estates,

our own private shortcut,

till they close the gates at night.

We leave behind the Florence, the Alhambra,

their dreams of domes in amber light.

The way home is due north,

King’s Cross by way of Scotland,

streets alive with her familiars:

the Angus house, the Flora, the Loch Lomond,

emblems of proud Caledonia

flaunting their two stars.

Argyle Walk, tarmac breaking into cobbles

shiny with night and rain,

a murky sodium glow, a kind of false dawn,

where we come to a halt.

‘They think I may have it’ you tell me,

London’s rivers rushing below our feet.

Thread

The rustle of coarse,

carded yarn,

through fine taut cotton,

pulled to a point:

tense, hoarse,

a wordless

whisper, saying

something sexual.

The Sheer Glory of It

All this – of course – was heaven when I smoked.

Standing under the trees,

my sweet asylum,

resourceful and joyful, and dry.

Once – when I smoked that is –

the people coming up the pavement –

people with great lives ahead,

cheered as I stood there.

A Bohemian, they said. Truly.

Notwithstanding the rain

we observe a man with a cigarette.

Like Baudelaire in the suburbs.

Reeking of nicotine.

Awaiting his horse-pulled limousine.

Kitchen renovations are a zero-sum game

Rory Sutherland   8:37AM, 14 Dec, 2023

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Writing a few weeks ago in The Spectator, Toby Young slightly begrudged his wife’s decision to install a new kitchen in the Acton home they have shared for 15 years. As Toby explained, the original kitchen ‘had been done to quite a high standard in the style known as “Victoriana”, which meant William Morris wallpaper, antique-glass light shades and a small, dimly lit kitchen… This was the height of fashion in the late 1980s and will probably be bang-on trend again when we put the house back on the market in ten years’ time. But my efforts to persuade Caroline to wait out the fashion cycle came to nought.’

There’s nowt wrong with improving your home, and 30 years seems a reasonable lifespan for a kitchen, but Toby is being naively optimistic if he believes his expenses will be over once the kitchen is completed. They are just beginning. To misquote Walter in The Big Lebowski: ‘He is entering a world of pain. This is not ’Nam, this is home improvement. There are rules.’

Toby Young and his wife would be better off cancelling their kitchen restoration and taking up opioids or crack instead

Soon after the shiny new kitchen is installed, the rest of Toby’s home will look slightly dated by comparison. Hence the new kitchen will only act as a spur to further expenditure elsewhere, meaning Toby’s valiant attempts to pay down the mortgage will be endlessly thwarted by the acquisition of new carpets and sofas, a fancy shower-room and curtains. This will lead the family to depreciate their existing bedrooms, which are now noticeably dowdier than downstairs, meaning whole weekends will be lost to the discussion of thread counts and the endless comparison of barely distinguishable fabric samples. Toby and his wife would be better off cancelling their kitchen restoration and taking up opioids or crack instead. In the long term, they’ll find this no more addictive, far cheaper and considerably less frustrating: unlike decorators, drug dealers turn up on time.

For those interested in behavioural science, this compulsion to engage in endless home improvements has a name. It is called ‘the Diderot effect’, a coinage by the anthropologist Grant McCracken in honour of a 1772 essay by the eponymous French philosopher titled Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre – ‘Regrets over my old dressing gown’. This explains how a single act of extravagance – acquiring a scarlet silk robe to replace his old dressing gown – led its author into a never-ending spiral of consumption, since the sumptuous new robe put the shabbiness of his existing possessions into sharp relief. Out went his old straw chair, to be replaced with a Moroccan leather armchair; his desk was upgraded to a writing table; artworks were replaced with costlier prints and brass sculptures – all to restore a kind of equilibrium of bling within his home. ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,’ Diderot writes, ‘but I have become a slave to my new one… Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth. The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich are always under a strain.’

The Diderot effect is, I think, exacerbated by other compounding forces. One is the insane increase in property prices, which has meant spending £40,000 on a kitchen can be reframed not as an indulgence but as ‘an investment in your house’. When houses were residences rather than bank accounts, this did not apply. The most extreme form of this absurdity occurs in the upper reaches of the London property market, where fitters are hired to install a £120,000 kitchen to a perfect level of finish to help sell a house at its £7.5 million asking price, a practice known as ‘staging’. Once the sale is made, the new owners often decide they need a kitchen in a slightly different style. The original fitters are then told to hack out their handiwork of the previous month, which often ends up in a skip. Someone really needs to invent the Potemkin kitchen to solve this.

A second problem is the imposition of modernism and minimalism as a benchmark of taste, coupled with the never-ending elevation of standards in interior decor. I have been rewatching early 1980s episodes of Tales of the Unexpected on Sky and was fascinated to see peeling plasterwork and worn armchairs even in the homes of rich characters. We are simply much fussier than we were.

One tip: wherever possible buy a, say, Tudor or Edwardian house, which will still look good if piled full of crap. Do not buy a modernist house unless you are anally retentive. The minimalist aesthetic is a huge imposition on those who aspire to it, since a single book on a table is the most you are allowed, and even this must be carefully positioned to preserve the effect. When I was a child, people’s homes were interesting, since there was stuff all over the place; now they mostly look like identikit show homes. Since it is almost impossible to combine a minimalist aesthetic with having children, modern design also acts as a form of aesthetic contraception.

This illusion of perfection is magnified by property-porn television and magazines, which have a more pernicious role in creating unrealistic expectations than any other advertising form. I once asked a House and Garden journo: ‘Why do you always feature the homes of complete Luddites? You have kitchens with no microwaves, drawing rooms with no televisions or hi-fi equipment, bedrooms with no radios?’ ‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘We take all those things out before we do the shoot.’ This staging leaves readers with a wholly fanciful, Marie Antoinette-ish view of what desirable homes look like.

William Morris, whose wallpaper is being stripped off the Young family’s walls as you read this, famously said: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ What he failed to spot is many things are not enduringly beautiful – they are merely fashionable. Are Belfast sinks OK? What’s the verdict on mock Victorian taps? Many industries exist not because they are useful but because they create markets where tastes change so rapidly that we must continually spend money and resources to maintain the homeostasis of status.

Such expenditure does not advance human progress: it is mostly positional and performative. Such signalling is hence a zero-sum game at best. Whole sectors of the economy have fallen victim to this peacock’s tail effect. Women’s clothing, home furnishings, weddings, decorating and something called ‘male grooming’. Oh, and Christmas. To be honest, I’ve always thought Scrooge was ahead of his time. But have a good one, anyway.

Rory Sutherland

The best books about horse racing to buy now

Robin Oakley   12:31PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Getty Images]

‘There are just not enough horses’ heads looking out of the boxes,’ said William Jarvis as he ended a 140-year-old family dynasty training in Newmarket. We are losing too many like him. But racing has surmounted previous downturns as a remarkable new book reminds us. George Stubbs is credited as the first great equestrian artist to present galloping horses correctly, with all four feet off the ground rather than splayed out like rocking horses, but James Seymour – to my eye an equally talented artist – had at least experimented with the idea. After a decade of painstaking research, Richard Wills has produced in the sumptuously illustrated James Seymour (Pallas Athene, £170), a comprehensive guide to the output of this comparatively neglected and self-taught artist, and the illustrations assembled in his labour of love have enabled those two wise owls of horseracing art and history, David Oldrey and Tim Cox, to shed light on the racing scene in his lifetime, from 1701 to 1752.

Seymour was doubly unlucky. In the only fragment of contemporary biography available, diarist George Vertue called him a dissolute spendthrift who ruined his banker parent: ‘The darling of his father run thro some thousands – lived gay, high and loosely – horse racing, gaming, women and country houses.’ Art chroniclers since have run with that, although the South Sea Bubble probably did as much to ruin Seymour père.

‘You don’t see many bookmakers on bicycles,’ the cynics in racing circles have always insisted

The artist’s other misfortune was that he sought to live off his work in Newmarket at a time when racing was in severe decline, a decline which reversed rapidly soon after his death. Wills argues convincingly that the prodigious volume of work Seymour produced – from deft immediate sketches of grooms, dogs and huntsmen to classical portraits of the great Flying Childers – clears him of any accusation of idleness. Sadly most paintings show horses with tails cruelly docked – the fashion of the time – but this is a volume to treasure, even if you’ll need a profitable day at the races to afford it.

Another draught-stopping volume which the racing world relishes annually is Milo Corbett’s Bloodstock Notebook (Amazon, £20), an idiosyncratic compendium of the odd, the elegant and the heartwarming. This year’s foreword was to have been penned by Dame Edna Everage but alas Barry Humphries died too soon. We do though have a rumbunctious interview with Mick Channon and sons, expletives not deleted, some vintage Jeffrey Bernard and visionary photographs of horses – and famous chefs – from John Reardon. A gem is (Lord) Teddy Grimthorpe’s verse tribute to Henry Cecil: ‘You can photograph his wardrobe, but not his style. His smile but not his humour. His eyes but not his insight or foresight. His mummy peas but not their taste. His tilted head, but not his charm. His face but not his demons. His look but not his desire. His winners, but not his genius.’

‘You don’t see many bookmakers on bicycles,’ the cynics in racing circles have always insisted, but Stephen Little, one of the last of the truly independent bookmakers, always had an answer to that. A vicar’s son who ran his first book on the Lincoln Handicap aged 12 at school, he had his own vocation. In From Bicycle to Bentley – a Bookmaker’s Story (Pen and Sword, £20) he tells us he could not legally work in the betting industry until he was 18 so he took a gap year cycling around the country on a Raleigh tourer. He stayed mostly in youth hostels at 3s 6d a night, often covering 100 miles in a day. Dressed for racing rather than rambling, and despite his mode of transport, he was often suspected of being ineligible to stay.

Then he pressed button B in phone boxes for forgotten refunds and returned discarded bottles to shops for cash. Later in his signature musquash coat he accommodated racecourse high rollers, taking £280,500 (in modern money) to win £140,250 on Double Trigger to win the Gold Cup at Ascot or risking a potential loss of £433,400 had Gimme Five won a Cheltenham Handicap Hurdle in 1994. Little reached every British racecourse, and some in France and Ireland, by bike and when Ffos Las opened he cycled there too, aged 63, to keep the set complete.

Little was a figures man seeking ‘a small percentage on a large turnover’. He didn’t frame his odds on hunches or supposed information and he is sharp about some of the competition. When Cyril Stein was running Ladbrokes, he says: ‘There was a saying that if you could get a bet on with Ladbrokes you didn’t want to be on.’ As for another bookmaking titan: ‘When I read in his biography about jockeys and brown envelopes I was glad I never became another William Hill as I can hold my head up and say I never got involved in such doings in spite of a few approaches.’ It is always good to get a glimpse behind enemy lines, but there is too much detail about bookmaker pitches and politics, and it would have been much more fun to have some names attached to those big wagers.

Robin Oakley

Cartoons

- The Battle for Britain | 16 December 2023

- One star

- With hindsight

- They laughed and called you names

- He’s right, kids

- Ctrl, Alt and Delete

- UHU

- Feedback

- See the real world

- Nice opinion poll

- Chat GPT

- Spring election

- How they feel

- Deepfake

- Another way

- Which mode?

- Lifestyle choice

- What’s happening?

- Delivery experience

- Winter Wonderland

- It’s ridiculous!

- Oh no!

- Cancelled flight

- E-cig store

- Bag check

- Christmas truce

- Helping from home

- Can we trust this source?

The Battle for Britain | 16 December 2023

Michael Heath   8:53AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Michael Heath

One star

Matt Percival

‘All the reviews are one star.’

With hindsight

Robert Thompson

They laughed and called you names

Wilbur

‘They laughed and called you names? I’ll launch an inquiry into these bullying allegations.’

He’s right, kids

Paul Wood

‘He’s right, kids, there’s nothing here that bans short selling.’

Ctrl, Alt and Delete

Len

‘OK, I’ve pressed Ctrl, Alt and Delete but it hasn’t made any difference.’

UHU

Nick Newman

‘All I want for Christmas is UHU.’

Feedback

KJ Lamb

‘And were your troubled minds seized by a) mighty dread; b) mild concern; c) neither?’

See the real world

Nick Newman

‘If you think this is dismal you should see the real world.’

Nice opinion poll

Grizelda

‘I’d like a nice opinion poll for Christmas.’

Chat GPT

Royston

Spring election

Robert Thompson

How they feel

Kipper Williams

‘I know how they feel.’

Deepfake

Wilbur

‘Santa’s a deepfake.’

Another way

Bernie

‘The wise men departed unto their own country another way.’

Which mode?

Stokoe

‘Which mode will annoy the neighbours more?’

Lifestyle choice

Robert Thompson

What’s happening?

Grizelda

‘Oh no! What’s happening in the Middle East now?!’

Delivery experience

Mark Wood

Winter Wonderland

Len

It’s ridiculous!

Robert Thompson

Oh no!

RGJ

‘Oh no! Racist royals!’

Cancelled flight

RGJ

‘Your flight to Egypt has been cancelled. Have you considered Rwanda?’

E-cig store

A J Singleton

Bag check

KJ Lamb

Christmas truce

Robert Thompson

Helping from home

Kipper Williams

Can we trust this source?

Wilbur

Puzzles & games

- Bridge | 16 December 2023

- Twelve questions for Christmas

- No. 781

- Festive villanelle

- Christmas crossword: Double celebration

- 2632: Troublesome situation – solution

- The Spectator’s 2023 Christmas quiz

Bridge | 16 December 2023

Janet de Botton   12:36PM, 14 Dec, 2023

This is my last column for 2023 and I thought I would give you the highs and lows of my bridge team over the past year. The high was definitely winning the Gold Cup and almost as good was being one of two teams winning the Camrose for England. The low, by a big margin, was coming in the bottom two in the Premier League and being relegated. I still don’t really know how we managed it.

Today’s hand is a partscore, played by moi, which I like to think I played rather well. True the defence didn’t shine, but it’s Christmas and Santa came early.

West started with the ♥️J to the King and Ace, and East found the switch of the King of Diamonds and a second diamond. I tried the old trick of dropping my ♦️Q and 10 on the two rounds of Diamonds, not at all guessing what would happen. West cashed the ♠️A before leading a third Diamond. East wasn’t sure I had any more of those, and since she was looking at a ‘certain’ trump trick, she elected not to ruff but discarded a Spade.

This was the gift I was hoping for; East must be clutching onto Jxxx in trumps when she didn’t ruff. I trumped a Heart in hand, went back with the King of Clubs and ruffed another Heart. The Ace of trumps was cashed to get rid of the last Club from West, then dummy was re-entered with a Spade and the red winners were led to eat up East’s trump trick.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Spectator playing cards are available to order now at spectator.co.uk/deck.

Janet de Botton

Twelve questions for Christmas

Luke McShane   12:27PM, 14 Dec, 2023

1 One top player, besides admiring his trainer’s creativity, noted that they had a shared appreciation of 1980s music. Who was the player and his trainer?

2 How to Win at Chess is a new book for novice players, which became a New York Times bestseller. Which popular YouTuber wrote it?

3 One episode of the TV spy drama series Slow Horses made reference to a chess game played in 1851. Who were the original players?

4 ‘In chess, like tennis, you get lost for a moment and the game has already turned. In this aspect they are two quite similar disciplines.’ Which tennis player described how chess helps him train?

5 ‘Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move…’ Which author, who died in 2023, wrote those words?

6 The diagram above left resembles the outline of a Christmas tree. Mate in two, composed by Pal Benko. Chess Life and Review, 1975.

7 The ludicrous notion that a sex toy might be used as a means to cheat at chess originated as an outlandish joke, before taking on a life of its own. Two mischievous YouTubers rigged up a proof of concept and used it to defeat an English grandmaster in a casual game. Who was their ‘victim’? (He must have guessed that something was up when his position went downhill, but gamely played along.)

8 In protest at ‘close links between Fide (the International Chess Federation) and the Russian authorities, seven major chess publishers decided not to take part in which event?

9 The video for the song ‘First Person Shooter’, referenced the photo from last year’s Louis Vuitton ad campaign with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo playing chess. Who were the two rappers seated at the board?

10 ‘This is the worst chessplayer in the world calling the best chessplayer in the world.’ Which person, who died in 2023, is said to have used those words to address Bobby Fischer?

11 The Italian town of Marostica has a chess-themed biennial tradition which was the subject of a short documentary film released in 2023. What do they do there?

12 The position in the diagram above right is from the game Szabo-Stepanencu, Romanian Championship 2023, widely praised as one of the most thrilling games of the year. Which move did White play to continue the attack? (The full game can be found online; Black resigned 17 moves later.)

Answers:

1 Ding Liren and Richard Rapport; 2 Levy Rozman, aka ‘GothamChess’;  3 Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky (The Immortal 4 Game, played in London); 5 Carlos Alcaraz; 6 Martin Amis; 7 1 Qc5; Daniel Fernandez; 8 Fide’s Book of the Year competition; 9 Drake & J. Cole; 10 Henry Kissinger; 11 Actors play a game of ‘living chess’ in the main square; 12 1 Nh6+ Kxh4 2 Bxf2+ Kg5 3 Be3+ Kg6 4 Ne7+ and White went on to win.

Luke McShane

Luke McShane is chess columnist for The Spectator.

No. 781

Luke McShane   12:47PM, 14 Dec, 2023

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Edith Baird, Illustrated Sporting and DramaticNews, 1890. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Wednesday 27 December. There is a prizeof £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

King on e5: a) 1 Kf5 Kf7 2 Qf8#

b) 1 Bh6 Kf7 2 Qe6#

King on g8: a) 1 Qc6+ Kd8 (or 1…Ke7) 2 Bf6#

b) 1 Kh7 Kf7 2 Qd7#

Luke McShane

Luke McShane is chess columnist for The Spectator.

Festive villanelle

Lucy Vickery   12:59PM, 14 Dec, 2023

[Photo: borchee]

In Competition No. 3329 you were invited to submit a villanelle on a festive theme.

Artistry and variety abounded in a most enjoyable entry. Hats off, everyone, and thank you for your brilliance and versatility over the year. The winners below earn £30. Happy Christmas, one and all.

It seems it was a century ago

That we had dreams of Christmas being white,

When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow.

Magic there was that childhood could bestow

When wonder closed our eyes on Christmas night.

It seems it was a century ago.

Peace and goodwill for everyone would flow

With midnight presents sent for our delight,

When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow.

If Santa laughed a hearty ho, ho, ho

It banished fears and put the world to right.

It seems it was a century ago.

Now when unfriendly breezes coldly blow

We long for times when Christmas stars were bright,

When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow.

To ancient dreamers Father Time says: ‘No’

Removing past surprises from our sight.

It seems it was a century ago

When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow.

Frank McDonald

To welcome in the season of good cheer

we heave a sigh, we’ve seen it all before,

there’s no escape, it happens every year.

Soon cards with robins, snow and red-nosed deer,

from folks that you forgot, drop through the door

to welcome in the season of good cheer.

Outdated Christmas hits assault the ear

in every overcrowded superstore,

there’s no escape, it happens every year.

The annual pantomimes get into gear

with hairy dames and risqué jokes galore

to welcome in the season of good cheer.

Around the baubled Christmas tree appear

the relatives you vowed you would ignore,

there’s no escape, it happens every year.

The goose is getting fat, it’s very clear

we’ll overdose on victuals, booze and more

to welcome in the season of good cheer,

there’s no escape, it happens every year.

Sylvia Fairley

Please help, Nigella, I’ve no egg for nog,

My third bread sauce attempt is down the drain,

I’ve overbaked and charred my chocolate log.

The basted turkey’s not fit for the dog,

My pudding’s flour-paste, boiled for hours in vain,

Please help, Nigella, I’ve no egg for nog.

The kitchen’s thick with smoke, my brain’s a fog,

My hopes have snapped like one last candy cane.

I’ve overbaked and charred my chocolate log.

Why did I start this full-on festive slog?

I’m facedown in a puddle of champagne,

Please help, Nigella, I’ve no egg for nog,

These effing rum balls should go down the bog.

Is it too late for takeout chips, chow mein?

I’ve overbaked and charred my chocolate log.

My goose would make Charles Dickens hit the grog,

You’re my last hope, my saviour from the strain.

Please help, Nigella, I’ve no egg for nog,

I’ve overbaked and charred my chocolate log. Janine Beacham

Street choirs pipe up, the sound of Christmas swells

the profits in the jittery-glittery shops.

The busking bagpipes playing ‘Jingle Bells’

although we smile, teeth gritted, are like knells

rung for the End of Days. The spirit drops.

Street choirs pipe up, the sound of Christmas swells

and ‘Santa Claus is Coming’ … casts its spells

on fraying tempers, and it briefly tops

the busking bagpipes playing ‘Jingle Bells’

until the brass of ‘Hark the Herald’ … tells

its story and each human eardrum pops.

Street choirs pipe up, the sound of Christmas swells

while on a loop the too-familiar gels.

Our brains are drenched with soap, like sodden mops.

The busking bagpipes playing ‘Jingle Bells’

have brought us to this Hell where Christmas dwells

in one reprise, the floppiest of the flops.

Street choirs pipe up, the sound of Christmas swells,

the busking bagpipes play – yes! – ‘Jingle Bells’.

D.A. Prince

John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

He’s not synoptic and it’s rather dry.

At Christmas, Luke’s account is much preferred.

Pure ‘logos’ is the start point of a nerd:

the snuffling congregations wonder why

John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

Mary and Gabriel have just conferred,

and now she shouts, ‘My soul doth magnify!’

At Christmas, Luke’s account is much preferred.

Of course, all the begattery’s absurd:

from snake to manger see them multiply!

John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

Matthew, well-gilded, frankincensed and myrrhed,

has wise men, but no shepherds to draw nigh.

At Christmas, Luke’s account is much preferred.

The bloody straw, and what the oxen heard:

her final yell; his incarnated cry.

John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

At Christmas, Luke’s account is much preferred.

Nick MacKinnon

No. 3332: Into reverse

You are invited to supply, in verse form, a retraction of beliefs previously believed in passionately. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 10 January.

Lucy Vickery

Christmas crossword: Double celebration

Fieldfare   12:35PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Unclued lights have something in common, nine of two words, five pairs, and one singleton.

Across

10  Always hard to keep a maid (4)

13  Only covering one’s losing bid (6)

15  Put down women’s medieval instrument (5)

16  Follow the game secretly from chimney (5)

21  Indian wasting minutes in queue (4)

22  In recess, they are on the phone to reporters (4)

24  Yank pokes right inside basket (4)

25  Sort of breakfast originally eaten day after day (5)

27  Observe baseball player striking woman (3-7)

28  Not altogether keen about lecturer’s lectern (5)

37  Helps receive salmon, about a stone (2-5)

38  Alastair’s extended half of speech (4)

40  Fish, swimming back from the bottom of the world? (5)

41  Capital vehicle grabbed by drivers at hotel (6)

42  Animal slept briefly, dropping head and curling round (5)

46  Britain’s holding advance energy order (5)

52  Spy who didn’t mince his words? (5)

54  Lover abandoning ancient city in high Andean plain (6)

55  Bore troubled us instead (9)

58  Developer’s spine finally fails with no bracing (6)

61  American power absorbs Europe: finish! (3,2)

63  Thinking of briefly helping people on islands (13)

64  I’m a Yankee, preserving American language (5)

65  Seaweed’s very strange reach (6)

66  Painful activity, to smooth a bit of masonry (1,3,1)

68  It hurt to call round wielding a blade (6)

70  Charlotte over there say coming back (5)

71  Arrogance of team (4)

72  Ponder spending time intervening (7)

77  Roll that’s big for Taki in New York (5)

82  Kick off in the style of an Aussie native (5)

83  A-team, I note, failing in turn (3,2,1,4)

87  An aged relative in Scottish town (5)

88  Informal friend is to be quiet (4)

90  Keep worrying a snake (4)

91  Sounds like an antelope again (4)

92  Contrive to move to and fro (5)

93  Gypsy is a giant of a sort (6)

94  Stop that butterfly! (5)

95  Poet barely deletes a line (5)

96  Having got up, is near falling (6)

97  Austere girl leaving region (6)

98  Drink: take a little drop (4)

Down

1  Rides so awkwardly in single file (7)

2  Titus shows energy, tucking into porridge (5)

3  Bribe to get African tree? (3,4)

4  In hospital turning up to anoint old woman (6)

5  Travel with purpose (4)

6  Wild journey between Brazil and America? (7)

7   Lie sprawled at first across earth floors (7)

8   Old king’s daughter returning by ass (6)

9   Graft as a quarrel breaks out in public space (9,6)

10   Room is a dry one, and cold (5)

11   A president, reversing direction at last, stays (6)

18   Unacceptable to retain one idea (6)

20   Why husband removed chestnut tree (4)

23   Submariner’s warning: surfacing (4)

29   Chap commonly seen in good light (3)

30   Anglo-Saxon slave seen trembling (4)

31   Tea within range (5)

32   Safe from the start, thanks to quiet hiding place (5)

33   Redeployed legion to move away (6)

34   In extremely stable wet earth raised rock plant (5)

35   Only eating melon rind? Seriously? (8)

36   Select a street restaurant (4-4)

44   Late Dame hosting women’s group, and her? (6)

45   Wood rotting among hay (8)

47   Ventilating a poor energy certificate (8)

50   As far as university, keep reading (2,2)

51   Duet with me performing hymn (2,4)

56   Made money for broadcast, potted (5)

59   Mean home to be place near Brighton, and large (5)

60   More learned how I serialise parts (5)

64   Sneer at exam (4)

67   Best family crime novel initially taken up (6)

69   Where one may save lives? Ace! (3)

72   Some breakfast choices may make us smile (7)

73   Low, about to get into dire trouble, then lower (7)

74   Fall heavily, fitting getting up (4)

75   Trout travel through burn (7)

76   Made haste with bag for plunder (7)

78   Necessity to be left out of a low joint (6)

79   Where did Zeno teach? Seconds to answer (4)

80   Brief opportunity to secure a job? (3,3)

81   A clueless type, I almost colour up (6)

86   Dealing with smell that’s universal but not constant (5)

89        Approve conjuror’s move (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Vintage) will be awarded for the first correct solutions opened. The first four winners will each also receive a bottle of champagne. Email entries by 15 January to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, with ‘Christmas Crossword’ in the subject field, or post to: Christmas Crossword, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.Please include a phone number. This is to arrange delivery if you win champagne.

Fieldfare

2632: Troublesome situation – solution

The Spectator   12:02PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Unclued lights were all kinds of STEW (highlighted).

First prize Pam Dunn, Sevenoaks, Kent

Runners-up David Morris, Birchington, Kent; R.A. Towle, Ilkeston, Derbyshire

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2023 Christmas quiz

Christopher Howse   9:15AM, 14 Dec, 2023

Fairly odd

1. What had for 50 years been the name for Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit before it was changed this year?

2. Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, have to pay £510 in fines and costs?

3. Which country overtook France as the biggest buyer of Scotch whisky, despite imposing an 150 per cent import tariff?

4. For whose visit did Papua New Guinea declare a public holiday, only to find he decided instead to fly straight home from the G7 summit in Japan?

5. Which parents named their new son Frank Alfred Odysseus?

6. In which country were six children and two adults rescued by helicopter and zipwire after hours stuck in a cable car dangling 900ft in the air?

7. Opposition leader Patrick Herminie was charged with witchcraft in which country?

8. Name the founder of the Inkatha Freedom party, who died this year aged 95 and had played the role of his great-grandfather Cetshwayo in the film Zulu.

9. A factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, was fined $14,500 after two workers had to be rescued from a vat of what?

10. President Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay changed his mind about recasting as a dove of peace the seven hundredweight bronze eagle figurehead from which ship?

You don’t say

In 2023 who said:

1. ‘I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.’

2. ‘The documents, the whole thing is a witch hunt. It’s a disgrace.’

3. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist.’

4. On the death of Silvio Berlusconi: ‘I have always sincerely admired his wisdom, his ability to make balanced, far-sighted decisions.’

5. ‘I had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the start of the 1990s. He was a man with a difficult fate, and he made serious mistakes in life.’

6. ‘The bonfire of EU legislation, swerved. The Windsor framework agreement, a dead duck, brought into existence by shady promises.’

7. ‘I suspect that the new member for Mid Beds may actually support me a little more than the last one.’

8. ‘There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers.’

9. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’

10. ‘I’d like to apologise for my choice language. That was unnecessary.’

Royal icing

1. At what outdoor event did the King wear a kilt of a new tartan, registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans?

2. Name the book published in 2023 in which the Duke of Sussex said that his brother ‘grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me’.

3. Who was made Duke of Edinburgh?

4. The crown with which Queen Camilla was crowned had been used for the coronation of which previous queen consort?

5. At the coronation procession from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace, which member of the royal family rode in the capacity of Gold Stick in Waiting in the uniform of a colonel of the Blues and Royals, with the Garter sash and a bicorn hat with red plume?

6. Bees feature on the new £1 coin of Charles III. What fish is depicted on the 50p?

7. In the white drawing room at Windsor Castle in July, to whom did the King show a letter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1960 to President Eisenhower, including a recipe for the drop scones he had enjoyed at Balmoral?

8. The Prince and Princes of Wales visited Moray and Inverness in November under what ducal titles?

9. During a state visit to which country did the King say: ‘Ni furaha yangu kuwa na nyinyi jioni ya leo’ (‘It is my great privilege to be with you this evening’)?

10. To which country was the state visit of the King and Queen postponed because of violent protests against the raising of the pension age from 62 to 64?

Call me al

Translate these abbreviations and give the full Latin versions:

1. Et al

2. e.g.

3. i.e.

4. AD

5. p.m.

6. Viz

7. Ibid

8. Op cit

9. Q.E.D.

10. q.v.

Farewells

1. What name did Ronald Blythe, who died in 2023 aged 100, give to the Suffolk village of which he published a portrait in 1969?

2. Who died aged 93, having served from 1992 to 2000 as the only woman Speaker of the House of Commons so far?

3. Name the Downing Street press secretary, 1979-90, under Margaret Thatcher’s administrations, who died aged 90.

4. What was the name of the jazz clarinettist and cartoonist ‘Trog’, creator of the Flook strip, who died aged 98?

5. Who was known for the Private Eye comic strip Barry McKenzie (with Nicholas Garland) and for his stage character Dame Edna Everage, and died aged 89?

6. Which cartoonist produced the strips called The Cloggies and The Fosdyke Saga and died aged 89?

7. Which Harlem-born singer won fame with ‘The Banana Boat Song’ in 1956 and died aged 96?

8. Name the singer who had a hit with ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ and died aged 96.

9. Who died in 2023 aged 94, after editing the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and writing a column in The Spectator from 1981 to 2009?

10. Name the Low Life columnist of The Spectator since 2001, who died aged 66, and wrote in 2005: ‘My friends told me thathalfway through the ball they’d gone to look for me and found me unconscious outside, flat on my face on the lawn, next to the naked girl. Someone had taken off my shoes, arranged them neatly side by side and set fire to them.’

’Tis the season

Match the writers to the passages below: Jane Austen, Henry James, E.F. Benson, Anthony Trollope, Evelyn Waugh, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, E.Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross, Saki, Thomas Love Peacock.

1. Christmas Day dawned, a stormy morning with a strong gale from the south-west, and on Elizabeth’s breakfast-table was a pile of letters, which she tore open. Most of them were threepenny Christmas cards, a sixpenny from Susan, smelling of musk, and none from Lucia or Georgie. She had anticipated that, and it was pleasant to think that she had put back into the threepenny tray the one she had selected for him.

2. ‘At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather. I was snowed up at a friend’s house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter.’

3. ‘Mummy, do look at Rex’s Christmas present.’ It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.

4. ‘You can’t have the carriage to go about here. Indeed, I never have a pair of horses till after Christmas. I hope you know that I’m as poor as Job.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘I am, then. You’ll get nothing beyond wholesome food with me. And I’m not sure it is wholesome always. The butchers are scoundrels, and the bakers are worse.’

5. Mrs Knox’s donkey-chair had been placed in a commanding position at the top of the room, and she made her way slowly to it, shaking hands with all varieties of tenants and saying right things without showing any symptom of that flustered boredom that I have myself exhibited when I went round the men’s messes on Christmas Day.

6. He had no natural avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before Christmas.

7. Four of the chosen guests had, from different parts of the metropolis, ensconced themselves in the four corners of the Holyhead mail. These four persons were, Mr Foster, the perfectibilian; Mr Escot, the deteriorationist; Mr Jenkison, the statu-quo-ite; and the Reverend Doctor Gaster, who, though of course neither a philosopher nor a man of taste, had so won on the Squire’s fancy, by a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, that he concluded no Christmas party would be complete without him.

8. The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled trees, where there was a barn and barley.

9. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited.

10. The distance from the station was considerable; the messenger had been ‘keeping Christmas’ in more than one beer-shop on his way to the house; and the delivery of the telegram had been delayed for some hours. It was addressed to Natalie. She opened it – looked at it – dropped it – and stood speechless; her lips parted in horror.

Click here for the answers

Christopher Howse

Christopher Howse writes for the Daily Telegraph

Miscellaneous

- 2023 Christmas quiz – the answers

- Answers to Spot the Shakespeare Play

2023 Christmas quiz – the answers

The Spectator   12:19PM, 14 Dec, 2023

Fairly odd

1. Lilt

2. For driving at 25mph in a 20mph zone

3. India

4. President Joe Biden

5. Boris and Carrie Johnson

6. Pakistan

7. The Seychelles

8. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi

9. Chocolate

10. The Graf Spee, scuttled in 1939

You don’t say

1. Boris Johnson

2. Donald Trump, on appearing in court in Miami

3. Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England

4. President Vladimir Putin of Russia

5. Also President Vladimir Putin of Russia

6. Nadine Dorries, in an open letter to Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, on leaving Parliament

7. Rishi Sunak

8. Suella Braverman, when Home Secretary, saying why immigration should come down

9. The Prince of Wales, of his grandmother.

10. Gillian Keegan after an ‘off the cuff’ remark following an interview by ITV News

Royal icing

1. The Braemar Gathering

2. Spare

3. Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex

4. Queen Mary, consort of King George V

5. The Princess Royal

6. A salmon

7. President Joe Biden

8. The Duke and Duchess of Rothesay

9. Kenya

10. France

Call me al

1. And others (et alii, et aliae, et alia)

2. For example (exempli gratia)

3. That is [to say] (id est)

4. In the year of the Lord; in the specified year of the Christian era (Anno Domini)

5. After midday (post meridiem)

6. That is to say; namely; to wit (videlicet)

7. In the same place (ibidem)

8. In the work previously mentioned or quoted (opere citato)

9. Which was to be demonstrated (quod erat demonstrandum)

10. Which see (quod vide)

Farewells

1. Akenfield

2. Lady Boothroyd, Betty Boothroyd

3. Sir Bernard Ingham

4. Wally Fawkes

5. Barry Humphries

6. Bill Tidy

7. Harry Belafonte

8. Tony Bennett

9. Paul Johnson

10. Jeremy Clarke

’Tis the season

1. E.F. Benson (Mapp and Lucia)

2. Jane Austen (Mr Elton in Emma)

3. Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

4. Anthony Trollope (Lucy Morris and Lady Linlithgow in The Eustace Diamonds)

5. E.Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross (Some Experiences of an Irish RM)

6. Henry James (The Spoils of Poynton)

7. Thomas Love Peacock (Headlong Hall)

8. Charles Dickens (Bleak House)

9. Saki (The Unbearable Bassington)

10. Wilkie Collins (Miss or Mrs?)

The Spectator

Answers to Spot the Shakespeare Play

Simon Drew   12:26PM, 14 Dec, 2023

1. Romeo and Juliet

2. Much Ado About Nothing

3. All’s Well That Ends Well

4. Hamlet

5. Twelfth Night

6. A Comedy of Errors

7. The Winter’s Tale

8. Coriolanus

9. Measure for Measure

10. As You Like It

11. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

12. Timon of Athens

Simon Drew

Table of Contents

The Spectator: 16 Dec 2023

The Week

Has there ever been a better time to be alive?

Portrait of the year: resignations, wars and kangaroo courts

Why the story of the Holocaust still needs telling

Did the Romans handle slavery better than the Americans?

How much do we spend at Christmas?

Letters: pantomime dames are here to stay

Featured articles

‘I am working night and day’: Rishi Sunak on Jilly Cooper, immigration – and his plan for the next election

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

48 ways the Tories could win

My advice for King Charles, my ‘twin’

‘The culture of complaint disgusts me’: Werner Herzog on walking without a backpack and the kindness of strangers

Christmas as a Jehovah’s Witness

The New Theists

Students annoyed their elders in the 1930s, too

Just how much lower can the Conservatives sink?

My Christmas in Bucharest as Ceausescu fell

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

This Christmas in Bethlehem will be the saddest yet

Remembering Jeremy Clarke through his books

Where are all the proper members’ clubs?

‘A war for Middle East stability’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on what’s at stake in the conflict with Hamas

The moment I realised the study of literature was over

I’ll never take culture for granted again

The case for photo-bombing

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

Alexa, do you love me?

The dying art of thank-you letters

Cornwall’s fishermen are being drowned by bureaucracy

The literary canon of P.G. Wodehouse

How to make an Old Fashioned, by Kendall Jenner

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

The hell of putting on a Christmas play

Why I’m bored of National Treasures

‘Many happy returns’: an exclusive Jack Reacher story by Lee Child

‘Sex trafficking, cannibalism and murder’: St Nicholas wasn’t always so jolly

Columnists

Brace yourselves for the Great American Election Freak-Out of 2024

Good riddance to neoliberalism

In search of deep England

Is it your fault if you’re fat?

No one wants to talk about Ukraine any more

In search of a second epiphany

The unfashionable truth about motherhood

Ivy League universities must be depoliticised

Thank goodness for the Christmas elf of York station

Books

Will the Caucasus ever be tamed?

The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?

Spot the Shakespeare play

Seeing the dark in a new light

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

The invisible boundaries of everyday life

Alan Partridge has had more incarnations than Barbie

The popularity of ‘Amazing Grace’ owes much to its melody

Surprise package: Tackle!, by Jilly Cooper, reviewed

Andy Warhol would have revelled in the chaos of his legacy

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

Arts

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

A short history of stained glass

The art of walking

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

The road to the final snow-gazing scene is tortuous: Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas reviewed

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

Fine for the kiddies, given they’re clueless: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reviewed

The best British Nutcracker

In Mumbai, orchestras are playing western classics without apology

Life

Laughter is the key to surviving Christmas

What Jesus taught us

It took moving to Ireland to escape from the EU’s rules

How Hannes took on a buffalo – and nearly paid the price

‘Truly spicy and a delight to eat’: how to make Christmas gingerbread

Beautiful bottles from Swig Wines to enhance your Christmas drinking

Christmas cheer at QPR is the highlight of the season

My sporting questions for 2024

Dear Mary, from Joanna Lumley: what do you get someone who insists they don’t want a present?

‘The chocolate soufflé is too good for people’: Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Hotel, reviewed

Let’s hope for good cheer this Christmas

Why are quotes so often misattributed?

Umbrian Moon

Filthie Olde Seth

Northbound

Thread

The Sheer Glory of It

Kitchen renovations are a zero-sum game

The best books about horse racing to buy now

Cartoons

The Battle for Britain | 16 December 2023

One star

With hindsight

They laughed and called you names

He’s right, kids

Ctrl, Alt and Delete

UHU

Feedback

See the real world

Nice opinion poll

Chat GPT

Spring election

How they feel

Deepfake

Another way

Which mode?

Lifestyle choice

What’s happening?

Delivery experience

Winter Wonderland

It’s ridiculous!

Oh no!

Cancelled flight

E-cig store

Bag check

Christmas truce

Helping from home

Can we trust this source?

Puzzles & games

Bridge | 16 December 2023

Twelve questions for Christmas

No. 781

Festive villanelle

Christmas crossword: Double celebration

2632: Troublesome situation – solution

The Spectator’s 2023 Christmas quiz

Miscellaneous

2023 Christmas quiz – the answers

Answers to Spot the Shakespeare Play