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Class clowns

Lara Brown on the triumph of inanity over academia

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The Hurlingham Club, London 15 September 2026

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THE SPECTATOR

ESTABLISHED 1828

Nigel's choice

Nigel Farage's likely victory in the Clacton by-election will be a hollow one. The major parties boycotted the contest: of the Reform leader's 33 opponents, the most prominent was a screenwriter with a bin on his head. This by-election was not forced on Farage by the parliamentary investigation into undeclared donations – this can resume as soon as he returns to the Commons – but called as an attempt to regain momentum after a difficult patch for Reform. That gambit has failed.

In August last year, Reform was riding high. Opposing an unpopular Labour government and a Conservative party in disarray, Farage capitalised on historic victories in the local elections and deep public anger at 'uni-party' failures over small boats and living standards. Reform polled above 30 per cent; Farage seemed set for No. 10. A year on, this looks far less certain. The poll lead has disintegrated; scandals are accumulating; progress has stalled.

Reform is far from exhausted. This week's arrival of a 'mega-dinghy' of migrants underlines the continued salience of immigration – Reform's leading issue – as a major voter concern. But events have not proceeded to Farage's advantage. Donald Trump's impetuosity over tariffs, Ukraine and the Middle East has turned Farage's closeness to the US President into a negative. Labour's swapping of Keir Starmer for Andy Burnham means Reform faces an opponent more comfortable before a camera and with a clearer – if uncosted – idea of what he wishes to do with power.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, political leaders make their own history – but not under circumstances of their choosing. Reform is struggling because it has failed in its central mission: to destroy the Tories and become

the main party on the right. As a man who likes a flutter, Farage may have noticed that Kemi Badenoch last week became the 3/1 favourite to be the next prime minister.

Badenoch's improved personal standing has come from an increasing confidence and a command over her party. This was made easier by Robert Jenrick's defection – a move which provided Farage with frontbench experience but alienated those in Reform who despise the Tories. Clear positions on the European Court of Human Rights and net zero illustrate that Badenoch's party is under new management.

But Reform has also been squeezed by Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain. Farage seems unsure whether he wishes to outflank Lowe,

Reform has failed in its central mission: to destroy the Tories and become the main party on the right

with pledges to deploy the Royal Navy in the Channel and to deport criminals to El Salvador, or to take up his disgruntled ex-MP's offer of a truce. Rightly, he has said such a deal would not be possible while Lowe dabbles with darkness, allying himself with a coterie of young ethnonationalists strident enough to deny the King's Britishness and suggest Farage has been 'bought' by Jewish interests.

But while Restore nibbles at Reform's support, Farage's party will struggle to overhaul the Tories. That will trigger the same frustration that led Farage to snap at journalists asking questions about finances and personnel and call a by-election which became more Hi-de-Hi! than the 'People vs the Establishment' battle he hoped for.

When Farage returns to Westminster, he

will find himself at a crossroads. Whether or not he faces another post-investigation by-election in Clacton, Farage must decide whether he is serious about government, or whether leading Reform has become too much like hard work.

Dominic Cummings has speculated that Farage may return to his lucrative media career before long. Even if he did make it to Downing Street, is there more to Farage's ambition than standing outside No. 10, declaring 'you're not laughing now' to his critics, and decamping to the Westminster Arms when Sir Humphrey makes clear just how difficult reforming Britain will be?

Farage often points to Canada, where a Reform party overhauled and absorbed a Conservative one. But he also knows that doing so took three elections at which the left triumphed over a divided right. If Farage sees his historic role as frustrating the Tories, then his personal vendetta is getting in the way of delivering the transformative government this country so desperately needs. Britain does not have three elections to wait; the right, in whatever permutation, must be ready to govern in 2029 – or sooner, if Burnham gambles on a snap election.

Away from the Farage soap opera, Reform is doing vital work. James Orr and Danny Kruger have quietly assembled a team of leading young minds to work on a programme for government, to understand the hurdles that frustrated both the Tories and Labour and surpass them. Reform is a national force, with a substantial presence across English councils, regional mayoralities and the Scottish and Welsh 'parliaments'. But the party exists in the shadow of its leader. And Farage needs to decide if he wants to govern – or just campaign and commentate.

THE SPECTATOR | 15 AUGUST 2026 | WWW.SPECTATOR.COM

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Lip service, p33

Heroically awful, p40

Elf care, p17

THE WEEK

3 Leading article 6 Portrait of the Week 7 Diary A work-life balance is horribly overrated Gyles Brandreth 8 Politics Press ganged Tim Shipman 11 The Spectator's Notes I got Rod Liddle sacked Charles Moore 15 Barometer Solar eclipses, 'small' boat crossings and droughts 17 Douglas Murray Britain is falling into a mawkish fantasy 19 Lionel Shriver Let them eat celery 23 Julie Burchill How I learnt to stop worrying and love pessimism 26 Letters The Arday farce, hay shortages and remembering Rod 28 Any other business Farming today: field fires and food price hikes Martin Vander Weyer

12 Class clowns The triumph of inanity over academia Lara Brown 14 Trump's new axis There's a logic to the President's incendiary diplomacy Blake Neff 16 Point scoring Why Nigel Farage's 'Australia-style' border policy won't work George Brandis 18 Wrinkles in time Do you have Old Money Face? Arabella Byrne 21 War of the words Who decides what's racist? Nigel Biggar 22 Pen pals Nothing is as calming or rewarding as writing by hand James Dixon 24 Licence to kill When does targeting the enemy become murder? Owen Matthews

BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS 31 Alex Burghart Harold, by Tom Licence 32 Andrey Kurkov Ukrainian Lessons, by Charlotte Higgins Lee Langley How to Make a Woman, by Marie Darrieussecq 33 Bryan Appleyard The Kiss, by Katie Barclay Richard Walker Age of Security, by Ruben Andersson 34 Peter Parker Passage, by Colin Thubron 35 Dennis Duncan Hot Type, by Jeff Jarvis 36 Edward Platt Eva and the Island, by Tim Ecott Maurice Riordan 'Horseplay 1966': a poem Alexander Larman The Millionaire Waltz, by Anthony Quinn 37 David Isaacson The Jewish March of Folly, by Amotz Asa-El

Cover by Harvey Rothman. Drawings by Michael Heath, John Broadley, Morten Morland, Tim Bales, Mark Wood, Kippre Williams, Grizelda, K.J. Lamb, RGJ, Robert Thompson, Wilbur. www.spectator.com Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Email: letters@spectator.co.uk (for publication); Advertising enquiries: advertising@spectator.co.uk, Tel: 020 7961 0128 Customer services, subscription and delivery queries Tel: 020 4572 7556 Email: spectator@oqs.media; Rates for an annual subscription in the UK: £129; Europe: £229; and £229 in all other countries. To order, go to www.spectator.com/subscribe or call 020 4572 7556; Newsagent queries Tel: 020 7961 0200, Email: spectator@oqs.media Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP, Tel: 020 3787 9001, www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 361; no 10,329 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd, part of Old Queen Street Ventures Ltd.

Editor: Michael Gove

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THE SPECTATOR | 15 AUGUST 2016 | WWW.SPECTATOR.COM

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Triumph of Will, p31

Clean cut, p47

Lightning Rod, p26

LIFE

ARTS

38 Richard Bratby The RSC's adaptation of Game of Thrones is a triumph 40 Exhibitions Ai Weiwei; Jasper Marsalis Digby Warde-Aldam Paul Deaton 'Goldfinch': a poem 41 Classical music Guide my listening, Apple! Damian Thompson 41 The listener John McCabe Richard Bratby 42 Cinema Tony Deborah Ross 43 Pop All Rise; Belle & Sebastian Graeme Thomson Television The Shards James Delingpole 45 Theatre Edinburgh Fringe round-up Lloyd Evans 46 Dance Marianela Nunez; Carlos Acosta Rupert Christiansen

LIFE

53 No life Lloyd Evans Dog's life Sophia Money-Coutts 54 Still life Catriona Olding 55 Fast life Tanya Gold

AND FINALLY...

47 Notes on... Shaving Nigel Jones 56 Chess Luke McShane Competition Victoria Lane 57 Crossword Fieldfare 58 Food Angus Colwell Your problems solved Mary Killen 59 Wine club Jonathan Ray 60 No sacred cows Toby Young Battle for Britain Michael Heath 61 The Wiki Man Rory Sutherland Ancient and modern Peter Jones 62 Seen elsewhere Helen D'Vorcee Mind your language Dot Wordsworth

I'm honestly not sure I can remember seeing an art show quite so objectively, impressively wretched. Digby Warde-Aldam, p40

I was always very disappointed with my parents' 'what it was really like in the 1960s' anecdotes because basically they didn't have any. James Delingpole, p43

'Do you like animals?' asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. 'No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,' I said. Lloyd Evans, p53

CONTRIBUTORS

Blake Neff profiles Donald Trump's strange new axis on p14. He is a former producer on The Charlie Kirk Show.

George Brandis helped Australia end its migrant boat crisis – but he details on p16 why Reform's plans to do the same in the Channel are doomed to fail.

James Dixon is a children's author who can't be rushed. On p22 he explains why he eschews a laptop for the pure joy of writing on a fresh notepad.

Alex Burghart reviews a biography of Harold on p31. He is a former history tutor at King's College London and a member of Kemi Badenoch's shadow cabinet.

Lee Langley reviews Marie Darrieussecq's How to Make a Woman on p32. She is the author of ten novels, and a travel writer. She was born in Calcutta in the late 1930s.

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PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK

PUTIN ASKED ME, IF I KNEW OF A GOOD BUILDER AND DECORATOR

Home

Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, began a tour of the United Kingdom, making small announcements. But on the matter of the early release of the killers of PC Andrew Harper, he said he was 'increasingly confident' that work to increase space in prisons would 'prevent their early release altogether'. All 50 chief constables in the United Kingdom urged him to prevent it. Probation officers voted in favour of strike action over the early release scheme. Trains in the north-west of England were disrupted for two days after a 90-second power failure in Manchester affected a Network Rail operations centre and signalling. More regions were declared to be in drought, encompassing 45 million people, of whom 27 million are restricted in their use of water. In the seven days to 10 August, 911 migrants crossed the Channel, 230 of them in one dinghy. Asylum seekers were removed by police from properties in Thetford for their own safety after crowds attempted to storm their homes and a policewoman was bitten. Counter Terror Police investigating the murder of Ann Widdecombe reopened an inquiry into a firebombing incident in April 2025 at the home of Nigel Farage, which he said was 'directly linked' to the murder.

Cambridge University announced that it would review its process for appointing senior staff, after Dr Jason Arday resigned his professorship in Sociology of Education, thus also ending his fellowship at Jesus College. His decision came after media scrutiny of his strange professional

and biographical claims. Cambridge council installed squatting lavatories in Silver Street because they are 'preferred by some international visitors'. Sir Anthony Kenny, the philosopher who was Master of Balliol 1978-89, died aged 95.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct investigated two Metropolitan Police officers after the conviction of Simon Levy, 40, for the murder of two women and the rape of another while he was on bail. Royal Navy K3 Scout surface surveillance drones were found to be sending data to China from cameras supplied by a third party. The sun was eclipsed.

Abroad

Ukrainian drones hit an oil refinery at Nizhnekamsk, a city in Tatarstan 600 miles east of Moscow, with 13 reported dead; drones also hit an oil refinery in Orsk. Russia said it had hit the Kyiv plant of Fire Point, the Ukrainian defence company developing long-range weapons. President Volodymyr Zelensky made a fresh call for more US-made Patriot interceptor missiles as Russian missiles hit Kyiv. He said that North Korean missiles were being used and that North Korea had decided to deploy between 30,000 and 50,000 troops in Russian territory. A bus driver at Leipzig airport kicked a drone aside as it approached a Ukrainian cargo plane; the drone was carrying Semtex which failed to explode. A flight from Victoria to Toronto in Canada was cancelled because a little child refused to wear a seat belt.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, rejected the plan for Gaza put forward by President Donald Trump of America, and said that no military withdrawal would happen until Hamas is 'genuinely' disarmed. Iran warned that any agreement with Oman would see no immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a defence agreement, saying an attack on one would be an attack on all. Mr Trump secretly changed planes, hidden in an airport catering lorry, it emerged, as he left a Nato summit in Turkey last month, to escape the risk of an Iranian missile attack. A federal appeals court ordered a stop to construction of Mr Trump's $400 million ballroom at the White House. RWE, a German energy company, abandoned its offshore wind projects in the United States after a $1.2 billion payout from the Department of the Interior; it would transfer efforts to gas production. In France 420 people, including 166 minors, were arrested for starting wildfires.

Spain imposed border controls on air and sea travel from Italy in response to similar provisions by Italy over the sudden arrival of 78,000 Moroccans in Ceuta. After meeting senior executives in Morocco, Gianni Infantino remained president of Fifa, to which Uefa became increasingly hostile. A boat carrying 95 people sank on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. All 255 passengers aboard a boat on the river Congo 40 miles from Kinshasa were being monitored for Ebola after travelling 1,000 miles downstream.

CSH

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DIARY

Gyles Brandreth

Greetings from Edinburgh, where the air is full of love and seagulls. Mostly seagulls. They soar, they sweep, they swoop above the Old Town, the New Town, the castle and the cathedral. They are everywhere. They strut down the Royal Mile, tourists and rickshaws scattering to make way for them. They descend from on high to attack your bag of chips as you sit at your lunch table in the Assembly Gardens. They are fearless and fabulous and huge. They are herring gulls mostly, with wingspans of up to 5ft (seriously) and lifespans of up to 20 or 30 years (oh yes). I love them, with their beady-eyed authority and mocking squawk that asserts with every piercing cry: 'I have been around for 30 million years or more and belong here quite as much as you do.' There are Edinburgh city councillors who take a different view, regarding the scavenging birds as a predatory nuisance and an economic threat, but happily calls to cull the gulls are getting nowhere. The birds are protected by law and while the Edinburgh gull population is booming, elsewhere in the UK numbers have fallen sharply over the past two decades, dropping from just under four million to 2.55 million – exactly the same number, incidentally, as belong to China's People's Liberation Army. Let's get our threats in perspective.

Never mind the birds, Edinburgh's human population is booming too. The Scottish capital's regular base of about 530,000 residents is swamped in August with a million and more visitors arriving this month for a raft of arts festivals, most notably the Edinburgh Fringe, which this year features 4,206 shows playing in 299 venues across the city. There are some 30,000 participating performers and crew up here. I am one of them. Every day this month at 4 p.m. I take to the stage (a converted university lecture theatre) and, with my co-star Harriet Jaine (a generation my junior and also the producer of my podcast, Rosebud), we strut our stuff, singing, dancing, telling stories and, we hope, raising a few laughs. We don't take a

day off, which most other Fringe shows do. When Harriet found out about this, she was not amused. She belongs to the generation that talks about work-life balance – a concept much overrated in my opinion. I belong to the generation that remembers Noël Coward and his line: 'Work is much more fun than fun.' That's only true if you are lucky enough to do fun work and the work I do – performing, podcasting, playing Just A Minute, writing books – is interesting and varied. I love my wife and children

(naturally), but I love my work just as much, if not more. When I die, I will certainly wish I had spent less time at the beach and more time at the desk.

In Edinburgh I am unique. I am the only performer here not walking around holding a bottle of water. The young have become hydration obsessives. I am not sure this non-stop water consumption is as healthy as it is cracked up to be. The other day I was with Dame Mary Berry, 91, and she was telling me about her mother, who drank a small glass of water at lunch and another small glass (alongside a larger glass of wine) at dinner. Mary's mum lived to be 105.

My Edinburgh show is inspired by my podcast, Rosebud, in which I talk to famous people about their first and formative memories. Dame Mary has been one of the most popular guests. We seem to specialise in great dames. We have had them all, from actress Dame Judi Dench to engineer Dame Maggie Aderin. Dame Elaine Paige was on the other day and, when I quizzed her about her relationships, she said: 'Work, not love, is the great affair.'

Almost every one of our guests to date has attributed their success or achievement to hard work. And keeping at it. Sir James Dyson was emphatic that it is failure that leads to success. Persistence, resilience, endeavour – that's what you need. Our podcast's third birthday falls on 1 September and, without fail and without break, we have produced two to three episodes a week since we began. Now I come to think about it, despite her work-life balance protestations, Harriet hasn't had a week off in three years. She had planned a brief summer break with her family, but now she is here in Edinburgh with me, every day, on stage at 4 p.m. Yes, work is much more fun than fun.

Gyles Brandreth and Harriet Jaine are in Up Memory Lane! at the Gordon Aikman Theatre, George Square, Edinburgh until 31 August.

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POLITICS | TIM SHIPMAN

Press ganged

I was hacked by the Chinese a few years ago. Security at News UK, where I was employed on the Sunday Times, told around 20 journalists that our emails had been compromised. An agency of the Chinese state was searching for information on our coverage of Chinese issues, including Beijing's crushing of Hong Kong and the decision to sanction members of parliament. To be honest, I'd have been pretty offended if I hadn't been on the list.

Frankly, if the Chinese want to know what I know, they can take out a subscription to The Spectator, just as they could have bought a copy of the Sunday Times. But this is what you expect from the Chinese, isn't it? The same regime that put a honey trap on one of Gordon Brown's advisers and stole his phone on a prime ministerial trip to Shanghai a few years ago.

Or the Russians, who handed out power packs and dongles riddled with spyware at summits to the press and Downing Street staff in the hope that anyone was stupid enough to plug it into their computer. On one such trip, everyone in No. 10 duly handed this kit to security, except a former director of communications, who had merrily given it to his kids to use in his home computer.

Or Qatari intelligence, who were so ham-fisted when I covered the 2003 Iraq War for Central Command in Doha that you could hear clicks and voices on the line when I phoned the Express newsdesk each day.

So contempt for the media is what you associate with autocratic regimes. It is disappointing then to see the way disregard for journalists going about their business now grips the UK government, police, security officials and several of those who want to rule over us.

It should not need stating, but apparently it does, that media freedom to expose things which the powerful would prefer to remain hidden is a bulwark of a free society. Scrutiny is good for politics but also for politicians. It makes them better. 'If you don't want to read it on the front page of the Daily Mail, don't do it,' a former Tory spad used to advise his ministers.

It should not be a huge surprise, given its utterly dire track record in recent years, that the Metropolitan Police does not understand any of this. Which may explain why they spent four months investigating claims of harassment against Jack Grove of Times Higher Education, who had had the temer-

ity to politely ask Jason Arday, Cambridge University's professor of Walter Mitty studies, to answer a few questions about claims of plagiarism. 'We dropped the ball on that one,' Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner admitted.

Then consider the recent behaviour of some of those on the right who are prominent defenders of freedom of speech when it comes to saying things which upset the left. It was reported last week that Arron Banks, a close associate of Nigel Farage and his deputy Richard Tice, hired a private investigator to look into Gabriel Pogrand of the Sunday Times, arguably the best investigative reporter in the country (and, full dis-

Contempt for the media is ultimately contempt for the public's right to know

closure, my friend). Since it emerged that Farage accepted a £5 million 'gift' from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, Pogrand has exposed donations from Farage's close associate 'Posh George' Cottrell. Pogrand showed, inter alia, that Farage was openly contemplating a return to politics when the money was handed over, which suggests it should have been declared when he became an MP.

Farage was asked about his approach to the media at a press conference on Monday. He said: 'The relationship between people in politics and the press is potentially a fractious one. I have always taken the view that you shouldn't mean too much because it's like a sailor complaining about bad weather, and you take the rough with the smooth.'

He went on to complain about his family being 'put through hell by irresponsible

journalism'. Fair enough. All politicians hate their families being asked questions, but those questions wouldn't even have arisen if he had heeded the advice of that former spad.

Contempt for the press is a virus not confined to wannabe leaders. Andy Burnham seems to prefer communing with the public through TikTok than by doing media interviews. He does this well, but it is worth saying that we have had a succession of prime ministers selected by their parties without much public scrutiny and we might have had more success picking a random person out of a bus queue.

The virus is also infecting Whitehall. Another reporter I know, who wrote something embarrassing about a former prime minister, was warned that his phone had been hacked – and not by the Chinese. Security sources say British intelligence doesn't generally target British journalists, just as the spooks aren't supposed to target MPs. But a source confides that if the powers that be want to go after you 'they get a friendly agency to do it instead'. This is code for getting America's NSA to do what GCHQ should not. Is this really how we want to proceed? The Cabinet Office, of course, does not comment on security issues.

It is not just journalists who are treated like this. MI5 told former employee James Wolff, one of Britain's best new spy writers, that he could not 'reveal' that GCHQ is located in Cheltenham in his latest novel – a fact present in every report ever written about the listening station.

I realise a lot of the public hate the media, particularly those of us who are judged to be 'mainstream' (which broadly translates as 'experienced'). Nevertheless, pretty much every scandal to engulf our last five premiers has come from old-fashioned reporting – mostly by the print press. Contempt for the media is ultimately contempt for the public's right to know.

Richard Hermer, the former attorney general, is hardly most Spectator readers' favourite political figure. But at last year's Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, where he was crowned peer of the year for his outsize influence over the Starmer government, he said that one of the planks of human rights he most cherished was 'freedom of the press' and The Spectator's ability to write 'disobliging' things about him. If he gets it, is it really too much to ask that the police and politicians get on board too?

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THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES

Charles Moore

The organised hard left has moved fast after the fall of Jason Arday at Cambridge. They are furious with the Good Law Project for its open letter which still proclaims that 'entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday'. Instead of this absurd position, they are trying to control the narrative by quietly dumping those who appointed Arday. They want to save DEI by rebadging it. Hence their letter from 90 dons, publicly spoken for by Professors Nicholas Guyatt and Priyamvada Gopal. They know the Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice, is vulnerable because an employment tribunal has just rejected her 'ghosted' evidence against a whistleblower in a university bullying case. They demand she reject what Professor Guyatt calls the 'incredibly racist wave of commentary' and back an 'agenda of representation' – in effect, racial quotas which, if so named, would be illegal. Professor Guyatt, like his fellow signatory, the Extinction Rebellion activist Professor Mary Laven and, until last week, Arday himself, are Fellows of Jesus College. Such people say Cambridge should 'look like the society it serves'. If Jesus College is any guide, the society they mean is China.

Arday's professorship had victims – those better qualified for the job who were discriminated against and research students whom he did not teach properly. They suffered from unprofessional behaviour by the relevant Cambridge authorities. Questions about Cambridge's professionalism arise in other areas too. Take donations, and the strange case of a friend of mine, Benedict Westenra, a graduate of Trinity College. In 2021, his father died, leaving money for charitable purposes. Benedict set up a scholarship, named after his cat Tigris, to pay for students from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do a one-year Cambridge Master's degree in the hard sciences. The Cambridge Trust approved the scheme, the university did its customary donor background check and accepted his donation. All went well: Benedict raised further pledges and recruited senior practitioners

from SpaceX and DeepMind to mentor successful applicants. But then the trust terminated the scholarship and forbade Benedict from contacting the first recipient. The trust's minutes, which Benedict obtained under a Subject Access Request, said 'he posted a series of racist and misogynist tweets inciting sexual violence', an accusation of criminal behaviour. The Cambridge University Head of Media then drafted press lines repeating similar accusations. Benedict was never invited to put his case against this cancellation. He is pursuing legal action against the Cambridge Trust for libel.

I have seen the documentation. The sole thing described by the trust as 'racist' is a tweet commenting on another tweet about Islam and political ideologies. Benedict wrote, in full: 'The left are cheering on Islam.' The Cambridge Trust admitted internally that it could not locate the 'misogynist' content it itself condemned. As for inciting sexual violence, there is no such tweet. Westenra had satirised, online, a post in which someone speculated that a woman, not a victim of rape, had a rape fantasy. All, to use the current phrase, very meta – but not misogynistic and not incitement. So what prompted the scholarship's cancellation? An ex-partner of Benedict, with whom he broke up 12 years previously, had denounced him to the trust. I do not know all the details of this quarrel, but nor did the trust; they did not ask Benedict. He did warn them that she was harassing him and had stolen Tigris, the famous cat, who was recovered by the police: he now has a five-year non-molestation order against her. So the sequence is this. You donate money for educational purposes and encourage others to do the same. The Cambridge Trust accepts the donation. Someone later tries to ruin you. Cambridge capitulates.

In the process, it libels you. Cambridge conceals from you what is going on, writing internally: 'I suggest we don't tell him.' It then stonewalls when you protest. Potential donors to Cambridge beware: it needs only a couple of university bureaucrats to misconstrue a few of your social media posts for you to be cast into outer darkness. You might think twice before you give.

Away last week, I was not able to contribute to the appreciations of poor Rod Liddle. I can belatedly fill out the story of how he switched to become the columnar genius we all recognise. It was September 2002. Rod was editing the BBC Today programme. The 400,000-strong Countryside March had just taken place, and Rod splenetically denounced the marchers (toffs with 'a forelock-tugging menagerie of their better-paid servants') in the Guardian, under the headline 'Marching Back to Labour'. As the editor of the Daily Telegraph, I counter-denounced Rod in our leader columns for his gross breach of BBC impartiality rules which displayed 'blatant bias, animus and even party allegiance'. Today, I complained, had failed to cover the huge march at all in its news bulletin. In a contemporary private note, I called him 'stinking Rod Liddle'.

And then, incredibly, the BBC did what I demanded and sacked Rod. Almost immediately, I felt the assassin's remorse. Friends convinced me he had been the only independent-minded editor in the corporation. I asked him to write for us and invited him for a conciliatory lunch in the 'fusty, belch-filled' club (Rod's description) of which I am a member. He arrived very late and looked, I recorded, 'magnificently out of place'. He confided in me that his Guardian editors, his new masters, had already banned, on politically correct grounds, his use of the words 'jackanapes' and 'wolverine' and the expression, 'Oh, golly'. 'We buried the hatchet,' I wrote, 'He is a free spirit.' He was and, by accident, I had given that freedom wings. His release from the captivity of Broadcasting House was the best thing that ever happened to him.

THE SPECTATOR | 15 AUGUST 2020 | WWW.SPECTATOR.COM

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Alma madder

The burgeoning craziness in British universities

LARA BROWN

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims 'never perceiv'd that they were infected' until they discovered the 'tokens' on their skin. By that point, 'nothing could follow but certain Death'.

Something similar might be said of Britain's universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world's attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo.

At one level, Arday's fall reveals how, even in our most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness. Yet a deeper examination reveals poor Jason to be merely a poster boy for the increasingly fetid system that is British higher education.

Take the London School of Economics (LSE), which has produced 21 Nobel Prize winners, was ranked number one in the UK by the Times Good University Guide last year and is internationally acclaimed for its teaching on economics, finance and politics. However, all first-year students must now take LSE100, the university's 'flagship interdisciplinary course'. Students may choose to study one of three modest questions: 'How can we transform our climate futures?'; 'How can we control AI?'; or 'How can we create a fair society?'. One student described the course as 'famous for being a massive waste of time'. What is lost in academic discipline is made up for in ideological indoctrination.

LSE students who opt to study 'How can we create a fair society?' discover a course description asserting: 'As the expanding billionaire class increasingly dominates political systems, while gender and ethnicity gaps widen, the question of how to reach a fairer world is both urgent and contentious.' Even stranger than the courses are the people who teach them. Among them is Dr Alex Frankovitch, whose PhD thesis was entitled 'Fucking and Being Fucked: Towards a Sexual Ethics of Sex on Drugs'. One student recalls asking Frankovitch about Warren Buffett,

only to discover that they (to use Dr Frankovitch's preferred pronoun) had never heard of him.

Dr Carolina Are is, according to LSE's website, a 'digital criminologist... researcher-activist and content creator' who won a Sexual Freedom Award in 2019. She gives lectures on reducing 'online harms' and 'how we can control AI'. When not contemplating man's struggle against machine, she is a pole-dancer and instructor. The website linked to her university profile contains her showreel and invites visitors to 'learn a pole dance choreography, pole tricks, floorwork or twerk with me via Zoom!' Sadly, Frie-

Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out of Lego as metaphors for racism

drich Hayek, the father of modern free-market economics, did not offer similar services when he taught at LSE.

Are is entitled to do what she wants in her free time. But what sets alarm bells ringing about her academic standing is that pole-dancing seems to be not just an outlet for relaxation, but the focal point of her research.

One of her most recent papers is called 'Sexy jail' and performative transparency: Evaluating shadowbanning notifications and appeals in Instagram's Account Status amongst pole dancing content creators'. It examines the treatment of pole dancers, 'a demographic greatly affected by algorithmic precarity in the creator economy', and

concludes that Instagram's system has been 'ineffective and discriminatory'. An important finding, no doubt, but is such material what LSE students signed up for? One student complains of having to be careful not to use any technical language in submitted work due to Dr Are's lack of expertise.

When asked how students should put together a presentation for the course, to be assessed for their final grade, Dr Are allegedly answered: 'I really hate when a white man gives the presentation... It's just so boring.' An LSE spokesperson said Dr Are 'has a relevant PhD and is qualified to teach on the course' and that she denies making the 'boring' comment.

It would be comforting to dismiss all this as an eccentricity peculiar to the LSE. But so many universities across the country are wasting student time in much the same way. At Exeter, you can study for an MA and PhD in magic and occult science. At Liverpool, you can pay £6,850 a year to do an MA in 'The Beatles, heritage and culture'. At Falmouth, students can undertake a BA in 'Esports & Livestreaming' at the university's 'renowned Games Academy'.

Students of global sustainable development have previously had the chance to enrol in a 'surviving the apocalypse' module at Warwick. Given the growing instability of the world, that may sound potentially useful. Yet the syllabus suggests projects on 'mushrooms and zombies' and insists the course has a 'subtle (?) but unmasked convenor neurodiversity (ADHD) guiding its set-up and delivery'. I'm not sure I'm sufficiently neurodiverse to understand what that means.

Students on all these courses are eligible for undergraduate or postgraduate loans. It's impossible to know what percentage of that financial support will ever be repaid to the taxpayer.

And it's not as if prudent students can escape the madness by pursuing more conventional subjects. Those studying English and comparative literary studies at Warwick, for instance, can pick up 15 credits by studying a module on 'Queering the Lit-

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erary Landscape: LGBTQ+ Literature and Culture in the Contemporary World'. Even a maths degree offers no refuge. Students at Edinburgh might be surprised to learn that the school of mathematics is committed to 'decolonising'. The faculty claims that 'the history of mathematics typically centres cisgendered, straight, white European men' and recommends that students should take implicit bias tests.

Madness in the lecture theatre is just the more visible by-product of a much longer production line. Before students can study zombies, pole dancing and astrology, academics must first turn these subjects into recognised fields of research.

Earlier this year, a team of five researchers published a paper on 'Decolonising the sciences: Enhancing the experience of staff

Students complain it is impossible to find a normal supervisor, so preoccupied is everyone with queering

and students from racially minoritised ethnic groups using LEGO® Serious Play®. This work was the culmination of a study across three northern English universities in which 50 adult students, researchers, academics and professional staff were asked to build Lego models representing their experiences of racial inequality, institutional barriers and decolonisation. Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out of Lego as metaphors for racism. Somehow this childish activity now constitutes academic research.

There's more. A researcher at Rose Bruford College, in south-east London, is investigating 'the lack of career development support for established drag performers'. The project is intended to contribute 'to drag studies as a growing academic field, addressing a current lack of attention about how to sustain this historically working class and popular performance form'.

Meanwhile, at Bath Spa, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour and leadership has received a grant to investigate 'cognitive and emotional costs of identity regulation among ethnically diverse early career professionals'. The project bemoans that 'professions in the UK often promote values like competence, meritocracy and individual achievement, reflecting white and western norms'.

At least that's privately funded. The government's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has just shelled out for a project at the University of Essex entitled 'Towards a queer communism: Past, present and future horizons of liberation'.

None of this is new, of course. Frivolous and absurd studies have been pouring out of higher education institutions since at least the 1970s. In 2012, Robert J. Wallis of Richmond University published a paper analysing peo-

people's experiences jumping on a life-size inflatable Stonehenge, concluding that 'bouncing on the artwork-cum-plaything provided an immediate sensory and visceral experience which was meaningful in relation to the real Stonehenge'. This somehow gazumped Spinal Tap for Stonehenge silliness.

The difference today is that the rot appears to have spread throughout academia, from top to bottom. Even respected journals aren't safe. I was surprised to find an article in Shakespeare Quarterly 'refusing to celebrate' the quatercentenary of the publication of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. The author reasoned that we should not be 'dedicating our energies, at a time of international emergency, to the production of ever more scholarship on a 400-year-old book'. If this is really his view, we have to wonder what he is doing in the English department of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

The author goes on to blame the Folio for climate change, arguing that Henry and Emily's Folger Shakespeare Library collection 'was built from the money he made working for the Standard Oil Company and its later derivatives, which became the progenitors of ExxonMobil'. He then asks us to reflect 'on the extent to which modern cultural dispensations float on an often unacknowledged reservoir of fossil fuels'. Drill, baby, drill.

Professor Jason Scott-Warren, who wrote the article, is the director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. He supervises graduates on English and European Renaissance literature and has been arrested several times for his environmental protest actions.

Sane students complain that, even in more prestigious universities, it is nigh-on impossible to find a normal supervisor for a dissertation, so preoccupied is everyone with queering, decolonising or sticking themselves to motorway bridges. It's a lot easier to condemn Shakespeare for causing climate change than it is to properly analyse his work.

We will never really know what is going on in lecture theatres and supervisions. The University and College Union has long objected to unannounced lesson observation to assess an academic's competence and most students don't complain. But in the pointless courses, the insane modules and the absurd journal articles, we can see the symptoms of

a morbid university disease in this country.

Faculties and academics have all broadly been left to their own devices for decades. The Office for Students doesn't regularly inspect what is happening inside university classes. Even after the introduction of the revised Teaching Excellence Framework, starting next year, no one will ask if academia is providing any valuable insight or skills.

Student finance has guaranteed cash flow for many institutions which, judging by the quality of their offering, should have gone under. But the sickness is terminal for some. This month, after years of difficulty, the University of Kent completed its merger with Greenwich. Greenwich's vice-chancellor is CEO of the new 'super university' – a triumph for the former polytechnic.

It would be easy to rue the decline of a formerly prestigious institution. But a brief glance at how academics at Kent have spent their time and resources tells a different story. Why did they fund a study into 'what drives sex toy popularity' in 2023? Why is one of the senior lecturers in 18th century studies currently supervising a project on queer readings of fan fiction and the 'omegaverse'?

It's not all decay. Many universities still have healthy organs, uncorrupted by ideological inanity. Researchers at Kent, for instance, were responsible for developing the retinal-imaging technology now used in many hospitals, as well as genome sequencing parrots to understand beak and feather disease. Yet while scientists slave away, their peers in Kent's Durrell Institute of Conser-

It's a lot easier to condemn Shakespeare for climate change than to analyse his work

vation and Ecology are busy publishing research about 'racial and economic disparities in coastal access and engagement'.

Academia lacks a proper incentive structure. There is no higher authority to differentiate the value of curing cancer compared with producing yet another autoethnography. Trusts like Wellcome, and our own government, are happy to hand out grants for the latter without pausing to ask what it's all for.

If your life's great passion is the study of bouncy castles, pole dancing or writing essays on autoethnography, there ought to be nothing to stop you from working at Toys R Us, a gentleman's club or the Guardian. But these people have all chosen to pursue academia. They are attracted to the status it confers. This was the world in which Jason Arday thrived. His colleagues at Cambridge were carrying out research on how fairy tales can break the gender binary in playgrounds or writing 'a self-portrait of an artist who teaches'. Is it really surprising that his error-ridden thesis didn't stand out against this backdrop?

'It has come to our attention that you have not been captured.'

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Trump's new axis

There's a logic to the President's incendiary diplomacy

BLAKE NEFF

On his very first day as Colombia's new President, Abelardo de la Espriella received a dramatic house-warming gift: a billion dollars, courtesy of Donald Trump. Three days later, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the country – but correlation is not causation.

The President's ten-figure donative arrived as aid for the militarised crackdown de la Espriella has promised against Colombia's fearsome drug cartels and jungle guerillas. And de la Espriella quickly showed himself eager to align with President Trump by adding Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, Trump's signature new venture in Latin America.

With this old-fashioned exchange of gifts, de la Espriella became the newest member of the eclectic global club of Trump allies. This is not a stable alliance. It is an ever-changing club of men, some of them well-known (Javier Milei, Mohammed bin Salman); some more obscure (Ecuador's Daniel Noboa) and some freshly departed (farewell, Viktor Orban).

Every American president conducts foreign policy, and plenty of presidents have had famous friendships with foreign counterparts. But no American chief executive has ever brought such a personal dimension to all his international forays: Trump allies himself with individual leaders.

He gets along well with so many Latin American leaders in no small part because his brash, aggressive, 'big man' personality perfectly aligns with Latin America's caudillo tradition. In the Middle East, the gaudy splendour of the Gulf monarchies matches the President's own tastes, as does their enthusiasm for making (or at least promising) big investments into the American economy. And it is worth wondering if Trump's genial relationship with Japan derives as much from its leaders' unfailing politeness towards him as it does from their readiness to expand their military to contain China.

What stands out most, though, is the frankness of Trumpian diplomacy. For decades America favoured the bland language

of global leadership, superficial fairness, democracy promotion, rhetoric for a Cold War victor whose global power looked absolute if not permanent. The New York tycoon is more straightforward: America is a powerful country, but not an invincible one, with interests it feels no shame in pursuing, and an agile readiness to befriend leaders who are amenable – or turn on those who are not.

The result has been a diplomatic cascade. Leaders who play ball with Trump's priorities and pay him an adequate amount

No American leader has ever brought such a personal dimension to his international forays

of respect can expect both his support and eventual rewards (or averted punishments) for their countries. One member of the club, Honduran President Nasry Asfura, won a narrow election victory after Trump not only endorsed him, but denounced his opponent as a communist and explicitly warned of an aid cut-off if he won.

In Argentina, Milei received $20 billion in currency swaps to support the Argentine peso just before a critical midterm election, with Trump bluntly saying his support was for Milei more than anything else: 'If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.' (Milei won and the swaps were promptly repaid.)

In Asia, Trump has had the US Treas-

ury sell off billions of euros to buy the Japanese yen, bolstering its value in the face of a long-term slide. If America had made such a move in the past, it would have relied on rhetoric about altruistically acting to contain a broader contagion and provide stability for global markets. This rhetoric would have been believed by exactly no one outside of the Beltway, but dutifully supplied anyway.

But Trump has no patience for such palaver. America was backing up Japan, he said, because it had been a reliable ally and being friendly with America brings rewards. Or,

in the President's more memorable phrasing: 'Japan's been very good to us, with the exception of Pearl Harbor.'

America has long picked sides in foreign elections and favoured some parties over others. What Trump brings is greater transparency and honesty about doing so – fewer think-tanks promoting 'freedom and democracy' with a wink and a nudge, and more transactional salesmanship. Telling a smaller country it will lose US aid if it votes the wrong way might get blasted as 'election interference' but is it worse than staying silent, then following the same policy?

The reverse of a president who races to help his friends, of course, is one who can quickly sour on everyone else, especially older allies he feels have let him down. Twice Trump has floated the idea of a total trade and travel embargo on Spain over its lack of enthusiasm for the Iran campaign. Quips about potentially quitting Nato have become an almost monthly tic.

His sour treatment of Europe has been a boon to others. America's past collaboration with the Arab gulf monarchies was coloured by discomfort over their old-fashioned authoritarian governments. Trump, on the other hand, has made it clear that what matters to him is assisting America's military, stabilising its energy markets, and making big investments. Do that, and you're an excellent ally – and can be spared annoying lectures about representative government.

The President, then, is happy to shake up

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©SHEPHERIS

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America's friendships like no leader since the second world war but to do what? Trump's enemies will say his actions are nearly random or motivated solely by personal vanity. Look at his quips about annexing Canada or his long-shot bids to seize Greenland. But these headline items obscure what is actually a sharply realist agenda. Despite his grandiose rhetoric, Trump has the most limited goals of any American president in recent history.

Because even if he dreams of absorbing Canada, what sets him apart from his predecessors is his sharp pivot away from preserving America's shaky pretension of being a global hegemon. Gone are bold aspirations of bringing down Vladimir Putin or China democratising through western influence. Instead, Trump wants to get specific, line-item achievements closer to home. He wants hostile regimes in Venezuela and Cuba gone. He wants a Middle East whose long-

For all the grandiose rhetoric, Trump has the most limited goals of any US president in recent history

term problems are finally resolved so that America can escape its endless samsara-like cycle of interventions, and he wants economic rebalancing sufficient that America is not vulnerable to trade-based attacks from China or anyone else. All of them are major challenges. And yet, they are also genuinely limited goals.

The President's national security strategy (NSS) de-emphasised dramatic great power rivalry as a core feature of American diplomacy. It disavowed aspirations of 'global domination' in favour of balance of power, dialled back prior anti-Russian rhetoric and placed a strong emphasis on America's western hemisphere backyard. When it speaks of Europe, the NSS frets about a continent losing its 'civilisational self-confidence and western identity' rather than one endangered by Russian aggression.

Such an approach is not so much a novelty as a 21st century reversion to America as it existed before the first world war – when the US was immensely powerful, but neither possessed nor aspired to the status of global hegemon. Both the NSS, and Trump's own actions, reflect an awareness that American power is not what it once was. The old America was eager to present itself as almost everyone's ally, and happy to involve itself in almost anyone's business, because US dominance was so overwhelming that it could afford illusions of omnipotence.

Despite his boastfulness, Trump does not share such illusions. His conduct reveals an awareness that while America remains a great power, it is also vulnerable. It can no longer ignore nations free-riding under its military umbrella, or pretend that every

region is equally worthy of its attention. Trump's aggressive deal-making and rough treatment of Europe all flows from this logic.

With American hyperpower no longer a sure thing, it makes the most sense to focus on achieving and preserving total mastery of its natural western hemisphere backyard. If America is going to be drawn into commitments further afield, then it only makes sense to be far more demanding of its allies: they should pay more and contribute more for the privilege of getting US support.

From there, the President's own personality does the rest. Trump wants a legacy and he wants things done fast. Latin American strongmen ready to bomb cartels are ready friends. Europeans who get offended by Truth Social posts will not be treated lightly simply because Nato is about to turn 80.

This new approach to foreign policy carries dangers. The old Euro-American bloc, whatever its shortcomings, was durable enough to survive partisan political swings – a sudden win by Labour or a European socialist party didn't mean a rapid collapse in relations. There could also be surprising alignments – Tony Blair and George W. Bush (tragically) had no trouble collaborating on foreign interventions.

Will Trump's new alliance network prove similarly durable? It's unlikely. His goals are rational but his personal style always inspires irrational responses. European leaders might recognise that their best long-term interest is to ignore Truth Social outbursts, cater to Trump's style, and pony up a bit to keep Nato going. But when their voters fume not just about the Iran war but Trump's incendiary style, it can be difficult to negotiate.

Meanwhile, in the Latin American countries Trump is cultivating, political instability isn't just a possibility but a near certainty. From Chile and Argentina, to Peru and Brazil, elections are becoming razor-thin contests between ever-more radical leftists and increasingly bold rightists. The President can put his weight on the scale in those races, but that can go only so far, as was revealed when Trump ally Orban went down to defeat in Hungary despite Vice-President J.D. Vance campaigning for him. Any bad election result for Trump means losing an ally – which helps explain his affinity with monarchies where that isn't a problem.

But long-term stability is a little besides the point. The President is not trying to build Francis Fukuyama's mythical end of history. He is quite aggressively living in history, as it is made. There are communists to be toppled, cartels to be bombed, factories to be reshorred. He is determined to leave his mark on the world, and that isn't done by simply preserving what was handed to him.

If Trump's goal of becoming a fifth face on Mount Rushmore remains a long-shot, then he is happy to dare greatly trying to pull it off.

BAROMETER

Star turn

Britain experienced a solar eclipse but not the total eclipse visible in Iceland and Spain. How often do eclipses occur? – During the decade 2021-30 there have been, or will be, 22 eclipses visible somewhere on Earth. Of these, 6 were or will be total eclipses in some locations. – The average location on Earth could expect to experience a partial eclipse every 2.6 years and a total eclipse every 374 years. – However, eclipses are more common above the Arctic Circle (once every 2.2 years) than at the Equator (2.8 years). – Total eclipses are a little more common in the northern hemisphere than in the southern because the Earth is further away from the sun in the northern summer, and therefore the sun appears smaller in the sky at the time of maximum daylight.

Sized up

A boat carrying a record 230 migrants crossed the Channel. At what point do we stop calling them 'small' boats? (Average number of migrants per boat)
August 2018	3
July 2019	11
July 2020	11
July 2021	27
July 2022	41
July 2023	52
July 2024	59
July 2025	62
July 2026	72

Source: Home Office

Dry run

Has the south-east of England become more prone to drought over recent decades? (Average rainfall in mm)

	1991-2020	1961-1990
June	53.68	54.48
July	53.66	48.32
August	63.07	58.53

Source: Met Office

Poor houses

Some 2.36 million households in England, 9.4% of the total, are defined as living in 'fuel poverty'. Where, and in what sort of housing, do they live?

– 17.2% of privately rented homes are in fuel poverty, compared with 6.5% of owner-occupied homes.

– The highest proportion of fuel-poor households are found in converted flats (15.8%) and the lowest proportion in detached houses (6.6%).

– The most fuel-poor regions are the West Midlands (10.9%) and London (10.3%). The least are the south-east (7.8%) and the north-east (8.2%).

Source: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

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Point scoring

Why Nigel Farage's 'Australia-style' border policy is doomed to fail

GEORGE BRANDIS

When I served as Australia's High Commissioner in London, I was naturally flattered by how often British politicians and officials invoked Australian precedents as examples of successful policy. Nowhere was that more evident than with immigration and border control.

The 'Australian-style points system' became a cliché for describing best-practice migration policy. I remember a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, who frankly – and not a little ruefully – told me: 'Whenever we want to get the public to think something is a good policy, all we have to do is put the prefix "Australian-style" in front of it.' So it came as no surprise that when Nigel Farage recently announced Reform's new border protection policy, he invoked the Australian experience as proof of concept. As political rhetoric, it sounded great: Britons are well aware that Australia has solved the problem of illegal boat arrivals.

The policy – Operation Sovereign Borders – introduced in 2013 by the then prime minister Tony Abbott, was initially controversial. Predictably, it was denounced by the left. But it proved so successful that the opposition was forced to accept it, and ultimately adopt it as its own. Today, the Labor government of Anthony Albanese enforces Operation Sovereign Borders with the zeal of the converted.

Its architect was Scott Morrison, then the minister for immigration and border protection. The legal advice underpinning the policy was provided by me, as attorney-general. Some years later, as high commissioner, I was invited to brief the Cabinet Office here on how the Australian policy worked.

The problem with Reform's attempt to adapt the Australian policy is that, while Farage and Zia Yusuf emphasised the superficial similarities – in particular, boat turnbacks – they conveniently ignored the very significant differences between our two countries' circumstances.

The Australian policy is not just about turning back refugee vessels on the water. It is a three-legged stool, no one element of which is sufficient for success. Those three elements are boat turnbacks, interdiction at source and offshore processing. None of them would work in Britain.

The geographical differences between the UK and Australia are the most obvious

impediments for Reform's policy. The closest distance between mainland Australia and the southern shores of Java (from which the people-smugglers' boats once embarked) is 1,600 miles. The distance across the English Channel is little more than 20 miles.

Australian boat interceptions took place in international waters in the Timor Sea, just outside Indonesian territorial waters. There are no international waters in the Channel in which boat turnbacks could occur.

The Indonesian people-smugglers used old wooden fishing boats, unmanoeuvreable and slow, which were easily intercepted by Australian naval vessels. The

It's one thing to intercept dilapidated boats on the high seas, quite another to halt swift dinghies in the Channel

interception of the swift motorised dinghies used to cross the Channel would present operational challenges and hazards unknown to the Australian operations.

It is one thing to intercept dilapidated old boats on the high seas in a vast, empty maritime domain; it is quite a different thing – operationally and legally – to do so within a narrow stretch of water, defined by adjacent territorial waters, comprising the world's busiest seaway.

The second necessary element of the successful Australian policy was interdiction at source, carried out by Australian agencies in cooperation with local Indonesian law enforcement counterparts.

In a recent history of the period, Paul Kelly, the éminence grise of Australian jour-

nalism, wrote of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS): 'It was involved in the OSB mission through covert operations in Indonesia against the people-smugglers. A senior official said: "I believe the disruption achieved by ASIS was as important a factor as the turning of the boats. I think about half the boats planning to make the voyage were interrupted by ASIS working with Indonesian authorities."'

(ASIS is the Australian equivalent of MI6. According to Kelly, Abbott relied heavily upon the advice of director-general Nick Warner, the Australian 'C', in executing that aspect of Operation Sovereign Borders.)

There may have been occasions when local Indonesian authorities turned a blind eye to Australian agencies' more robust disruption measures. It is unimaginable that the French government would cooperate in enabling British disruption activities on French soil. It has shown, at best, lukewarm interest in enforcing its own laws with its own agencies. ASIS making life difficult for people-smugglers in obscure ports in southern Java? Maybe. MI6 doing the same in Calais and Boulogne? Hardly.

The third element of Australia's policy is offshore processing. This is the one area where neither geography, nor the need for French cooperation, pose impediments. All that is necessary is to find a third-party country willing to accept asylum-seekers. This was the genesis of 'the Rwanda solution' – a direct copy of Australia's 'Pacific solution', whereby asylum seekers were transferred to the South Pacific island nation Nauru.

The 'Pacific solution' was upheld by Australia's High Court, our equivalent of the Supreme Court. Offshore processing was found to be valid under Australian law and not to be in breach of international human rights instruments to which Australia is a party. But Australia is not, of course, a party to the ECHR, which creates a legal barrier to British policy.

So, Australia's successful policy depended on three things: the feasibility of boat turnbacks on vast, uncluttered international waters; a high level of cooperation from authorities in the source country; and the validity under domestic law of offshore processing. The effective execution of all three policies solved Australia's problem. None of them is available to the United Kingdom.

'We'll have to start considering early release.'

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DOUGLAS MURRAY

Britain is falling into a mawkish fantasy

I don't know how many readers have visited the grave of Dobby the house-elf, but any who have should immediately be sectioned and have their subscriptions to The Spectator cancelled.

This strong course of action occurs to me after reading one of those stories that can make you laugh, cry and smack your head into your hands all at once. It relates to a 'memorial' which apparently sits on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The area is run by the National Trust – a charity which used to look after our nation's heritage sites.

The beach in question was where filming took place for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Since then, fans of the film – which spawned a new generation of mewling, ungrateful actors – have been laying stones and pebbles at the spot at which Dobby died, many of them with messages on ('Here lies Dobby, a free elf'). The National Trust has already asked fans not to leave socks on the pile (don't ask), but stones to form a kind of cairn appear perfectly acceptable.

At this stage it might be worth noting that 'Dobby' is a fictional character. No such house-elf ever existed. Therefore you might think this rather whimsy-infused 'memorial' should not detain us much longer.

Except that this is one of those increasingly typical moments in modern Britain when a fantasy world and the real world come into conflict – and the real world loses the encounter. A £430 million undersea cable linking the UK and Ireland had been due to pass through the area but – thanks to Harry Potter fans complaining in their hundreds – was rerouted. Indeed, the cable now passes nearer to some Bronze Age human burial remains in order not to disrupt the non-existent grave of the never-existent Dobby.

The project manager of this farragh told the media that the hundreds of complaints the company had received had ensured that it took the issue very, very seriously. Simon Ludlam said that, in the end, the cable 'went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby's grave'. This solution made 'a lot of people very happy', he added, 'and Dobby's happy'.

At this point I would be happy to pull my head out of my own hands and smack Mr

Ludlam around the face with a sock, a stone or anything else that came to hand.

Firstly, due to matters of taste. Of all the sentimental attitudes which are most painful, surely the worst is this sort of modern British 'whimsy'. It is as one with the sort of people who, after the death of Elizabeth II, chose to leave Paddington Bear toys among the flowers, or pass around memes online of Paddington leading the late Queen towards the gates of St Peter.

The Queen Mother's favourite poem – 'The Gate of the Year' – includes the line that on treading into the unknown you should 'put your hand into the Hand of God'. It seemed telling that by the time her sovereign daughter died the country had ditched

The Dobby's grave phenomenon is indicative of a country where the adults have taken leave of their senses

the hand of God as hard to put faith in and replaced it with a theology in which the departed should instead place their hand into the hand of Paddington Bear before being received into glory.

Until the past few years, I would have dismissed such sentimental claptrap as being distinctly un-British. Further, I would have said that while such mawkish sentimentality might still thrive among the Irish, the British would surely keep it at bay. I mention the Irish with justification. Some years ago, a motorway bypass in County Clare had to be altered in order to protect a 'sacred' fairy bush. Local 'experts' had claimed that if the fairy bush was destroyed to make room for

'Ron prefers horizontal drinking.'

the £100 million bypass then the new roadway might suffer a 'curse'. More recently a new housing scheme in County Wicklow found itself at the centre of a similar row after a 'fairy tree' was put at risk. Fortunately the fairy tree survived as the builders built around it.

In relating these stories I do not intend to plant in the minds of readers any idea that the Irish are a superstitious and backwards people. I do not say that at all. But it does seem slightly regrettable that protecting the sacred fairy bush of County Clare, or the fairy tree of County Wicklow, seems like perfectly sensible propositions beside diverting an undersea cable in order to avoid disturbing the site of a fantasy character's burial place.

Which brings me to the second problem in all this: that such a story seems awfully telling about a country and its priorities. Over recent years Britain has found it impossible to complete almost any major infrastructure projects. Most of the time this is due to the discovery of a rare earthworm or – as anyone who has tried to restore a property in the countryside will know – that there is evidence of bats. You do not have to have seen a bat, merely have evidence that bats may once have eyed up your property, and you'll discover that your house is no longer your own but has fallen into the joint custodianship of Dave from the local council and any passing bat.

Even this is merely a good-ish intention taken to a typically bureaucratic extreme. No such excuse can be made for the Dobby's grave phenomenon. It is simply indicative of a country where the adults have all taken leave of their senses and handed over the decision-making to children who were never told 'no'.

I suppose that if these are the new rules of the game there is an argument for playing along. I would be happy to start by claiming there is a horcrux to be found somewhere in the oil reserves in the North Sea and that unless we start extracting all that oil we risk not finding it and therefore failing to defeat the Dark Lord. Which is not the maddest energy policy I've heard lately.

SPECTATOR.COM/DOUGLASMURRAY The debate continues online.

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Wrinkles in time

Do you have 'Old Money Face'?

ARABELLA BYRNE

Recently, I have started to worry about my face. Early in the morning, before the children wake up, I'm sure I can see ghosts in the downstairs loo mirror. My 20-year-old self's face flashes before me but soon vanishes reproachfully into the crow's feet around my eyes; I didn't like her anyway. My long-deceased father lingers over my cheekbones and draws the smoking lines around my mouth in ash. I frown back. My grandmother, anxious, appears in the split second between posing and relaxing. I squint as she used to when playing bridge. If the past is an inscrutable face, I am reduced to reading, not between the lines but between the wrinkles.

I never thought I would get old – I'm 43 – but it's happening. Admittedly, my lizard-like love of the sun and devotion to fags hasn't helped. I once spent an entire month in Provence lying on a riverbank with no SPF on and smoking Gitanes sans filtre. That's some skincare regime. Mercifully, a new buzzword in beauty has appeared, and it suits me down to the last frown line. 'Old Money Face' is an active rejection of Kardashian beauty optimisation and the reviled 2D 'Instagram Face' retrofitted by plastic surgeons after AI taught us to edit ourselves through filters on a phone.

Forget filters, forget Botox, forget the hush of the clinic, and the scolding word of the surgeon as he taps the needle. The grandest thing you can do in this beauty revolution is to wear a sensible hat and smear some sun cream from the bottom of a drawer over your mug. Picasso, speaking to Gertrude Stein, once pointed to a face and said: 'It is as old as the world.' Could he have known, 100 years later, that this would be the greatest compliment of all?

But Old Money Face is more than skin-deep. Like most things to do with being posh, money simply can't buy it. Old Money Face betokens a way of the world that has, rather hilariously, nothing to do with the altar of wealth upon which the beauty indus-

try (worth £28 billion in the UK) relies. Or, as Alan Clark would have it, face work is the surgical equivalent of having to buy your own furniture. Old Money Face speaks to a life spent outside in the country – walking the dogs, riding, gardening – and a stout, immovable scepticism about sun skin damage ('I think climate change is absolutely bloody marvellous, the sun shines more,' one jolly aristocrat tells me during 'over the

Old Money Face is the weatherbeaten sign of a life well-lived and a suspicious approach to 'beauty'

yardarm' drinks in the walled garden). It is the weatherbeaten sign of a life well lived and a suspicious approach to 'beauty' – a Mitford-esque belief that one looked in the glass only out of concern rather than vanity.

I can spot Old Money Face a mile off: sunspots from lashings of skiing and sailing; bags under the eyes from too many boozy afternoons in the Chelsea Arts Club; craterous frown lines across the forehead after paying the school fees for four children; and, importantly, smoking lines down either side of the mouth which gives it a slightly doggy, chic look. Its most famous possessor, of course, is the Queen – no stranger to the Gloucestershire wind or the yardarm drink and cig. Other poster girls include the late Mollie, Marchioness of Salisbury, who helped the King design the gardens at Highgrove (more

wind), and the late, great 'Debo', Duchess of Devonshire, who wouldn't have gone near a needle in a fit. Regarding needles, Old Money Face is absolutely, categorically opposed to Ozempic. 'You don't look so wrinkled if you're a bit fatter,' a wise OMF confided.

Why now? Are we postface as we were once postmodern? Perhaps we have lived too long in the age of digital visibility anchored in the face: on Instagram, on Zoom – where the face has become suspended from the body – and even within the realm of emojis where

affect is short-circuited in a range of variations on the cartoon countenance. And only cartoons could explain 'Mar-a-Lago Face', a look worn and engineered by the women of the Trump administration such as Kimberly Guilfoyle. Mar-a-Lago face constitutes a crude artificiality; perhaps, like its political crucible, it is a dismissal of reality altogether. Like its brother philosophy of looks-maxxing, it rests on the credo that everything – from the eye area to the shape of the skull – can be improved. But we have become faced out. For if the female face has become the site of the struggle between time and vanity-induced terror, it was inevitable that it would come undone. Face capital could last only so long; expect the same to happen with semaglutides before long.

Another early morning dawns and I resolve to seek a professional opinion (for journalistic purposes) on the ghosts in the mirror. Is it Old Money Face as I hope, or simply the beginnings of Old Hag Face? The plastic surgeon greets me in his immaculate Belgravia clinic with loafered calm and kind assurances. I have, he tells me, 'pronounced sun damage' across my forehead and, rather mysteriously, my chin. I lie back and he begins to outline a range of treatments: light exfoliation, laser treatment, bespoke pigmentation creams. I pretend to listen, but I am elsewhere, lost in a gallery of faces that I don't recognise. I leave the clinic with my dark glasses on, light a fag and sit in the sun.

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LIONEL SHRIVER

Let them eat celery

I'm sufficiently nostalgic for the British supermarkets I left behind in 2023 that on visits to the UK I run a small-scale import business between London and Lisbon. I restock: Tesco Dijon mustard (top-drawer and a bargain), rice bran oil (unavailable in Portugal) and (do not tell Portuguese customs) blocks of extra-sharp British cheddar along with bags of slender fine green beans, tails all lined up marvellously on the same side.

Thus I was put out by the new Chancellor's warning earlier this month that the government will be 'watching closely for any suggestions that customers are being taken for a ride' in supermarkets. John Healey's keeping an eye out for 'price-gouging', assuring the public that 'our regulators have the powers to clamp down on it'.

Fair enough, the soaring cost of food has been shocking – up in Britain by 38 per cent in five years. The President butter I used to splurge on at two quid for 250g is now £3.65, and many butters are now slyly packaged in 200g units instead. In one year, the price of value blocks of cheddar has doubled. Before a weekly shop, pre-loading on high blood pressure medication is a must, and queuing at the till bracing for the bad news conveniently serves as the day's aerobic exercise.

The biggest contributors to escalating food prices are energy and (related) core inflation. Admittedly, a national government has limited influence on international oil and gas markets, especially when it's not the one bombing Iran. That said, on average half of the cost of petrol in the UK is taxes – including the infamous tax-on-tax levy of 20 per cent VAT on fuel duty. Because fuel duty is fixed at 52.95p per litre regardless of the price of oil, lower oil prices can result in petrol that's up to 75 per cent taxes.

The appalling price of British electricity is directly related to the government's net-zero policies: renewables subsidies, constraint payments and even negative pricing (paying people to take your excess electricity off you); the need for an entire second, fossil-fuel energy system to back up intermittent wind and solar; massive upgrades to the grid to handle an energy transition that will make net zero difference to the temperature of the planet – not to mention the der-

eliction of multiple British governments to plan competently for the UK's energy future.

As for core inflation, it's heavily influenced by the not-really-independent Bank of England pumping out too many pounds. The public often complain about rising prices when they should really be complaining about the plummeting value of their currency.

The other major pressures on supermarkets are labour costs and taxes, both of which this government has raised. One reason for £3.65 French butter is that Sainsbury's can no longer hire 18-year-olds at a significantly lower wage than mature workers to stock the dairy case. Far worse, the 2p rise in employer national insurance brutally raises the price of pretty much everything, including labour-

Before a weekly shop, pre-loading on high blood pressure medication is a must

intensive food distribution. Pubs and restaurants may have been given a modestly lower hike of their business rates, but this kindly dispensation was not extended to supermarkets. The chains have been hit by Labour's large property surtax and this year's ruinous re-evaluation of warehouses – because business rates are still idiotically calculated in accordance with a property's open-market rental value (see previous column; file under 'don't get me started'). Labour's new packaging tax is apt to cost retail two billion quid. Every single glass jar of mayo is now taxed an extra 12p. (Crap. I hate mayo in plastic.)

Getting the picture? The real 'price-gouging' is your government. Ultimately, most corporate taxes get passed on to consumers. Big British supermarkets have a profit margin

of 2-4 per cent, now trending towards 1-3 per cent and down from 5-6 per cent before budget competition from Lidl and Aldi. They can't swallow all these extra costs without going under.

The party that really deserves to complain here is British farmers, who have little leverage with behemoth chains in setting prices for perishable products they must move quickly. Farmers are often forced to accept as little as a penny on the pound in profit and are sometimes obliged to sell for less than their meat, milk and vegetables cost to produce. Along with sky-high fertiliser prices, farmers are also hit by that heavily taxed fuel and the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. The UK already imports 40 per cent of its food, and you'll miss your farmers when they're gone. I gather that stir-fried solar panels are hard on your non-stick cookware.

If the Chancellor's reference to 'regulators' who might 'clamp down' was hinting at price controls, ask the Russians: they only result in barren shelves. In a market economy, whatever politicians may promise you, it isn't the government's business to set the price of celery. Only countenance political promises – e.g., to scrap net zero – that government policies actually affect.

Making my mother proud, I'm a frugal shopper. Advice? Eat chicken: you can still get a 2kg bird for a fiver. Buy on offer and use your freezer. Ignore use-by dates and trust your nose. Hit the discount aisle, though beware: these days, multi-customer scrambles for a cut-price ribeye can be life-threatening. And try not to throw anything out. Brits bin more than six million tons of food every year, nearly three-quarters of which is edible. That's £700 worth of nosh annually for a family of four.

Call this mental, but I feel responsible for the food I buy. I feel entrusted with something that has died for my sins, and I want to do right by it. Chucking a broccoli head whose florets have liquefied seems a betrayal of all the people who grew it and helped place it in my care. This sense of being a custodial disappointment isn't about money. I feel I've personally let my broccoli down. Neurotic? Sure. But a bit more of that neurosis could save you Brits a packet.

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War of the words

Who decides what's racist?

NIGEL BIGGAR

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I'd written a sentence containing the word 'Chinamen'. She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, 'Chinaman' is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur.

In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they're delivered. Even 'Yes' can mean 'No', when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.

Sure, 'Chinaman', given a certain intonation, can be spoken in a deliberately demeaning way – rather as I learned as a youngster in Scotland to use 'Sassenach' to refer to the English. Strictly, it just means 'Saxon' in the Gaelic and when non-Anglophobic Gaelic-speakers want to refer to the people south of the border, that's the word they use. But out of an English-speaking Scotsman's mouth, you can be sure that's not all it means. Uttered with a certain, semi-spitting vigour, it also means 'snobbish, morally degenerate wankers'.

So, yes, I accept that 'Chinaman' can be used as a slur and that it has been. But there's nothing necessarily or intrinsically slurry about it. It's the verbal equivalent of 'Frenchman', 'Dutchman' and 'Irishman'. Indeed, in the sentence to which my editor took exception, 'Chinamen' appears nine words after 'Englishmen'.

So, who declares it generally verboten? According to my editor, nothing less than the Oxford English Dictionary. But then I checked. Although the OED does say, 'Frequently disparaging or derogatory (see also John Chinaman n. Johnny Chinaman n.)', it also lists four possible meanings, the first of which is the entirely innocent, 'A man who is Chinese by descent, birth, or naturalisation'.

Wikipedia, of course, is less nuanced. It simply announces that 'Chinaman is an offensive term'. But it also tells us, indicatively, that its usage is 'strongly discouraged by Asian-American organisations'.

What that indicates is that the original energy for the policing of language is generated by certain ethnic minority groups in the US. I suspect this is true in general: that the movement for linguistic censorship springs from America, perhaps from certain groups of members of ethnic minorities, often from

'decolonising' academics who presume to represent them.

These are the kinds of people trying to busybody us into abandoning the word 'slave' for 'enslaved person', on the entirely spurious ground that the former necessarily dehumanises, implying that someone is a slave by nature. That this is nonsense we can easily see by observing that, in English, if we want to refer to the idea that someone is a natural slave, we have to qualify 'slave' by putting the word 'natural' in front of it. No, 'slave' is not intrinsically racist.

Frankly, my contextual view of verbal meaning extends even to the n-word. Lest there be any doubt, I object strongly to the racist use of that word to disparage people

Some members of historically 'victimised' groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers

with non-white skin. Nonetheless, I was appalled years ago, when I read of a woman high up in some British organisation – a nursing one, I think – being sacked for referring explicitly to the original title of an Agatha Christie novel that contained the word. And I've heard of similar cases since. That people should be so punished is stupidly unjust, since using the n-word to refer to what someone else has written in no way endorses the racist disdain usually attached to it.

I say 'usually', because, according to Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction, and the excellent 2002 TV series The Wire, African-Americans often use the n-word to refer to each other – but in an ironic, not a racist, manner. So, I think it plausible that

a white person could use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived. Tarantino thought so, too.

I don't say all this because I'm keen to revive use of the word. Trust me, I'm not. I say it only because people are being unfairly penalised through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness and fear.

Some members of historically 'victimised' groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers. They're on the lookout for opportunities to work themselves into a lather of being 'offended' and daring others to call them out on it.

But the others don't dare. Terrified of being called 'racist', they can't afford the luxury of thought. Instead, jettisoning their critical faculties, they defer to the 'offended' party and prove their 'anti-racist' identity by punishing the alleged offender. It's a disgusting dynamic, in which the malicious triumph and the innocent suffer through the cowardly thoughtlessness of those in authority. And the result? The bullies strut around while everyone else walks on eggshells. Fear dominates the field.

All that was at the back of my mind when I chose to make a fuss about my use of 'Chinamen'. In the end, my editor was overruled by her boss, who, with some reservations, said I was free to go ahead and use the word if I wanted to. On reflection, however, I satisfied myself that a mellifluent alternative was available. That, together with uneasiness at the thought of making myself look even more cantankerous than usual, by going to war over a word, made me decide to drop the controversial noun.

Rod would have been bolder, of course, and more bloody-minded. And he might have been right. For I'm aware that this is how the authoritarian ideologues carry the day. Someone says something they don't like. They kick up a fuss, defaming the offender. Conflict-averse onlookers, disturbed out of their quiet lives, view the person upsetting the offended as 'contentious' and 'divisive'. So, unwilling to suffer further opprobrium, the offender backs down and shuts up. Tongues are tied and the air is chilled. And the illiberal bastards win.

Nigel Biggar's The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win The Culture Wars is out now.

'I'm going to Cambridge!'

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Pen pals

Nothing is as calming or rewarding as writing by hand

JAMES DIXON

I wrote the first drafts of both of my children's novels by hand. It's a great feeling: tactile, calming, a little ritualistic. I crack open a brand new Leuchtturm notebook, bought from the artsy place round the corner, pour myself an espresso, and set to work with the Cross ballpoint my nan gave me as a graduation present.

It's a slow and painstaking process, but one that is hugely rewarding. As a journalist and novelist, I can touch-type 100-odd words per minute, which is great when I've got a deadline for an article. It's not what I'm after in a novel's first draft manuscript, however. Time needs to be taken, the narrative voice discovered, pacing slowed a bit. Because my pen cannot keep up with the speed of my thoughts, especially after a few espressos, every sentence is weighed and measured before it goes down. I'm far less inclined to overwrite this way, too.

The slow work of pen on paper demands complete attention, which it's rare to give to anything these days. I stop and start, pausing at times to stare into the middle distance, rather than having my eyeballs bulging at a screen with podcasts or music playing in the background and YouTube shorts forever on tap.

This all points to the many benefits to be had from picking up pen and paper. A surprisingly robust body of evidence, amassed over the past 15 years or so, has shown us that writing by hand is good for you. Studies have found that students doing so consistently outperformed their keyboard-addicted peers, especially on conceptual questions. The slower pace forced them to process and summarise information before putting it down, rather than simply unthinkingly transcribing it.

More recently, a Norwegian EEG study found stronger connectivity between brain regions associated with memory and learning produced by handwriting compared with typing. Other studies have suggested that writing by hand can activate a broader network of regions within the brain, including those responsible for movement, vision, language and memory, than typing does. In

some studies, participants have reported a more positive mood when writing by hand (which chimes with my own experience).

Writing by hand is a human endeavour. This is, of course, vital as Silicon Valley seeks increasingly to rob us of our humanity. AI can give us polished, soulless prose in a matter of seconds. It almost makes my untidy notebooks seem subversive, with their messy scrawls, their smudges, their crossed-out paragraphs and notes to self which show,

Time needs to be taken with the first draft, the narrative voice discovered, the pacing slowed a bit

to me, that a human mind and a human hand worked bloody hard together to wrestle each sentence into being.

Handwritten artefacts once perfectly detailed ordinary human lives. I'm re-reading Middlemarch at the moment and hankering after the kinds of handwritten notes and letters through which each character lives. What I wouldn't give for a missive from Dorothea Casaubon or a fresh copy of one of Will Ladislaw's articles for the Pioneer in his own hand.

My mum wrote me a letter a few years ago, just as a spur-of-the moment catch-up. I was living in Edinburgh; she was in London. I still have the letter in a box in my office, and I re-read it now and then. A time will come (hopefully a long way off) when

my mum will be gone, but I'll have a very human reminder of her in that letter, with her unique and beautiful penmanship (which she unfortunately failed to pass on to me).

The scribbles we leave behind are important and often illuminating. My sister-in-law is a medievalist lecturing at St Andrews. Large parts of her PhD were to do with medieval marginalia. The notes, doodles, complaints, asides and outright insults left in the margins of manuscripts from centuries ago tell us so much about how and who people were at the time.

One extensive piece of marginalia she shared with me concerns Highland funeral rites. A Mr R. Campbell, for example, tells us that after a person dies, people 'sit up with the corpse singing, smoking, drinking, playing cards & courting all night'. In the same manuscript, insults are scrawled over the pages in different hands – 'a blockhead like you should hold your tongue,' one reads.

It's the kind of sordid stuff you wouldn't get in the official textbooks. Again, gloriously, filthily human: compare it with modern in-text comments and track changes that disappear with each iteration and software update and you can see the soul we are losing by typing everything.

Handwriting is an extension of the self, as any graphologist will tell you. Two people may write the same sentence, but each will leave a different mark on the page, with a difference between them far more remarkable than whether they chose to go with Times New Roman or Garamond.

I'll still type up every manuscript eventually. Editors quite reasonably expect Word documents, not a pile of dog-eared notebooks, and typing my handwritten manuscripts up is an excellent proving process that leaves me with a solid draft. But that first draft will always be written in a fresh Leuchtturm with that same Cross pen. It will still be human, very much my own; very much the result of a human mind and a human hand working hard together.

It will still contain a piece of my soul, thank you very much.

22

JOHN BROWARD

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JULIE BURCHILL

How I learnt to stop worrying and love pessimism

I was on friendly terms with Rod Liddle for quite a few decades. He applied for the job I got when I was 17 at the New Musical Express, which kicked off my writing career. Though I wouldn't claim we were bezzie mates, we had a lot of the same friends and we met up in a couple of group lunches and had a laugh.

So I was surprised at my lack of grief when he died. (Apparently he too was remarkably sanguine about his ending.) My overwhelming feeling was: 'Good for Rod – he escaped!' It's the first time I can recall feeling that way about the premature death of someone I knew a bit and liked a lot. Why, I wondered, did I react like this?

Lionel Shriver might be partly to blame. This year I've been reading her complete oeuvre and my favourite of her underappreciated novels is the jauntily titled So Much For That. 'So much for that' – it's become a recurrent phrase in my head ever since I read it. I've come to apply it to everything, from my disablement at the end of 2024, to where exactly the human race is going.

What's happened, I've realised, is that after a lifetime of being proudly optimistic (hope is, after all, a virtue), I've become a pessimist. Yet what's odd is that my newfound pessimism hasn't made any difference to the cheer with which I greet each day. I suppose you could say I'm a Perky Pessimist.

Most of the world's pessimists can be divided into two kinds: miserable sods who genuinely enjoy grumbling and get an almost parasexual thrill from it, like Frazer in Dad's Army; and posers who think a dash of the doomed poet will help them pull girls. Both are very wearing to be around.

The Perky Pessimist, though, is a different breed. We're cheery coves in our day-to-day lives, not inclined to carp or cavil. We simply believe, as surely as two and two make four, that the world – and specifically western civilisation – is on the road to nowhere and is never coming back. We're Mustn't Grumble Nihilists: yes, everything is falling apart, but there's noth-

ing we can do about it so why fret? We take comfort in the fact that when we were young we got to enjoy an unprecedented level of highly enjoyable sex, drugs and house music before it all went sour. By the way, this attitude, as much as the triple lock, is probably what makes The Youth so cross with us.

If you doubt the case for pessimism, if not perkiness, look at the facts. Barely any developed nation is even bothering to have children. Japan is especially bad; so low is its birthrate that more adult nap-

Violent criminals released to roam the streets – and violent criminals imported to roam the streets

pies (of which I am an enthusiastic wearer) than baby ones have been bought in the past ten years, to the extent that a major nappy producer announced it would no longer manufacture the traditional kind.

Over here, schools – where once there were worries about over-sized classes – are closing; more than 100 in the past decade. The tens of thousands of children, mostly from disadvantaged homes, who never came back after lockdown have contributed to this. They're sometimes vividly called 'ghost children' and I think of this phrase as going beyond Covid. To me, they're a legion of little ghosts of the world's lost hope for itself.

Children who show up are suffering record levels of unhappiness which often

prevents them from learning with vigour and rigour; this extends into university level. Mind you, I can see why the poor little sods are sad. When they leave education, many will go on benefits, mostly because of 'mental health'. A modern-day Yosser from Boys from the Blackstuff wouldn't be asking 'Gizza job!', but boasting proudly: 'I got ADHD – pizza hand-out!'

Then there's the breakdown of civil society, from shoplifting to fare-dodging. The sectarianism of voting. Violent criminals released to roam the streets; violent criminals imported to roam the streets. The emergence of snake oil salesmen to pick up the slack from the main parties. Oh, and there's AI, always waiting in the wings, warming up, like a sinister robot ballerina, soon to take the stage in a vast danse macabre the like of which the world has never seen.

No wonder only 6 per cent of Brits say they would volunteer to fight off an invasion by a foreign power. And who could blame the almost two-thirds of people who believe the country's 'social contract' is broken? All around the western world, young people in particular are losing faith in democracy.

Over in New York City, capital of the international capitalist dream, they've elected a communist mayor because they feel the same. It's a good job Zack Polanski's not as presentable as Zohran Mamdani. But still... what have we got to protect? A country with a decreasing number of schools, churches and pubs; a shell and a shadow of itself.

Rod, of course, made his stellar reputation by writing about all this; the degradation of every hope and dream our generation had nursed as bright-eyed youngsters. Everyone who was fond of this exceptional man will miss him. But he is better off out of it. Much as he excelled in decrying these dog days, there are far worse times just around the corner, which perhaps even he was not prepared for. So much for that.

SPECTATOR.COM/JULIEBURCHILL The debate continues online.

'Could I kindly ask you to leave – you're affecting my mental health.'

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Licence to kill

When does targeting the enemy become murder?

OWEN MATTHEWS

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? 'We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,' Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20 – stand on the scale?

Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia's Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast). Chayko commanded the northern group of Russian forces which advanced to the outskirts of Kyiv in February and March 2022, which pro-Ukrainian bloggers maintain makes him ultimately responsible for the massacres of civilians in Bucha and Irpin. Following that logic, the attempted assassination of Chayko stands alongside heroic partisan killings of war criminals – for instance the shooting of Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, gunned down on a Prague street by British-trained Czech agents in May 1942.

But if you believe that the Balzi Rossi bomb was justifiable, what then is the difference between that attack and the Irish Republican Army's 1981 nail bombing of British soldiers at London's Chelsea Barracks, or bomb attacks on Household Cavalry troopers and an army band in Hyde Park and Regent's Park the following year? All were assaults on military personnel in a civilian setting in the cause of overturning a colonial occupation.

Our answer obviously depends on how we feel about the righteousness of the perpetrators' cause. The US and UK have been taking out al-Qaeda and Isis members in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan by drone attack for years, accepting collateral damage to unlucky civilians as part of the butcher's bill. Few would shed tears for Mohammed Emwazi – 'Jihadi John' – killed in a US-UK drone strike in Raqqa in November 2015 or

'White Widow' Sally-Anne Jones, terminated by a Predator drone in 2017. Israel's Mossad, with its arsenal of exploding pagers and pinpoint hotel-room strikes, is a world leader in taking out enemies en masse wherever they find them.

Nevertheless, approving of extrajudicial execution opens a moral can of worms. We can say that it's fine when Barack Obama smites his enemies but bad when Vladimir Putin does it because we approve of one but not the other. But that argument quickly slides into a dangerous moral ambivalence, a whataboutism of the kind that the Kremlin loves to exploit.

Kremlin-controlled Russian media have blamed Ukraine for organising the latest Moscow bombing. Officials in Kyiv, mean-

We can say that it's fine when Barack Obama smites his enemies but bad when Vladimir Putin does it

while, have remained silent. But the Balzi Rossi explosion is the latest in a long string of bombings targeting Russian officers, occupation officials and propagandists. In August 2022, Darya Dugina, a 29-year-old pro-war commentator and daughter of the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, died in a car bomb blast presumably aimed at her father. In April the following year Maxim Fomin, a pro-war military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette presented to him as a gift during an event in St Petersburg. Zakhar

Prilepin, a nationalist novelist and commander of pro-Russian forces in the Donbas, was badly injured by another car bomb.

Similar devices have, since 2022, killed three Russian lieutenant generals, a deputy mayor of Stavropol and the founder of a pro-Russian battalion in Ukraine. Ukraine's SBU security service has either denied responsibility or said nothing about bombings on Russian territory. But it has claimed several identical bombings inside occupied Ukraine, including two lawmakers in the Russian-installed assembly in Luhansk, an official at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the former head of the Olenivka prison in Donetsk, all blown up by improvised explosive devices. Occupiers were 'a completely legitimate target', SBU sources told Ukrainian media. Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for at least 15 assassinations or attempted assassinations by handgun that killed or wounded, among others, a Russian submarine commander, a cruise missile software engineer and the deputy head of GRU Russian military intelligence. Russia, for its part, has also organised at least six shooting assassinations inside Ukraine.

What makes some of these bombings especially morally complex is the apparent use of unwitting suicide bombers to deliver the devices. Darya Trepova, an anti-war Russian, maintained that she did not know the statuette that killed Vladlen Tatarsky contained explosives (she was nonetheless sentenced to 27 years in jail for murder). Zaur Gurtsiev, deputy mayor of Stavropol, and Armen Sarkisyan, founder of the pro-Russian 'Arbat Battalion', were killed by suicide bombers who were both apparently unwitting pawns with no known patriotic links to Ukraine and no observed desire to die for Kyiv's cause. In October 2022 delivery truck driver Makhir Yusubov picked up a load of goods destined for Crimea after accepting an order on a logistics website. Halfway across the Kerch Bridge the truck detonated, killing Yusubov and damaging the bridge. Vasyl Maliuk, then chief of Ukraine's SBU security service, publicly acknowledged the operation and admitted that Ukrainian services deliberately 'used people in the dark'. It's not known if the woman who delivered the bomb to the Balzi Rossi – reportedly

'I hope you've installed aircon by the time I get back.'

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wrapped as a present – volunteered for a suicide mission or whether she was just another expendable human carrier.

Is there a difference between killing a Russian commander on the battlefield and blowing him up at his own birthday party? You can argue that all's fair in love and war, that the horror inflicted by Russia on Ukraine justifies killing enemy officers even when they're unarmed and off-duty. But that moral choice comes with an uncomfortable trail of logical contingencies. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, every man who commits evil does it for reasons he considers good.

In the wake of the Hyde Park bombing the IRA put out a statement justifying killing British servicemen because 'the Irish people have sovereign and national rights which no occupational force can put down'. The Kremlin liquidators sent to murder KGB and GRU defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal undoubtedly saw their victims as traitors who had betrayed their country – and themselves as righteous executioners. Menachem Begin, in his memoir The Revolt, claimed that US president Harry Truman 'said that he would have joined the 'terrorists' had he been in Eretz Israel during the rule of the British'.

Yes, that's a list of very different cases – bombing as an act of war vs poisoning as an

act of state revenge, post-colonial independence movements vs sovereign warring states. But that's the point. Circumstances matter. Motivation matters. And here's the nub of the problem. We can easily agree that our ends sometimes justify extrajudicial means,

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, every man who commits evil does it for reasons he considers good

but not the ends of those with whom we disagree. Ultimately we judge the actions of our heroes and villains by who they are, not by the things they do.

To return to the original question: where does the Moscow bomb attack lie on the scale? Operationally, ordering this kind of suicide bombing is an outlier by the stand-

ards of any western army or security service – including the Israelis. Accurate targeting, as well as minimising civilian casualties, is an important part of the moral equation for any democracy. Even if drones inadvertently blow up whole wedding parties in Afghanistan the civilian chiefs who ultimately authorise such operations can be told it was a genuine accident. A 1kg bomb full of ball-bearings brought to a crowded restaurant, as the Balzi Rossi bomb was reported to be, is not by any stretch of the imagination a targeted means of assassination.

To be clear, there is no direct evidence that this attack was the work of the Ukrainian government. Indeed I honestly hope that neither the SBU nor the HUR was involved. Because whoever ordered the bombing is treading a dangerous path. First, being found responsible for an indiscriminate attack of this kind would erode the moral superiority that Ukraine undoubtedly holds as the injured party in this conflict. But more dangerously, it opens the door for a new tit-for-tat front in an already supremely vicious war, fought not by guns and missiles but improvised explosive devices in restaurants. Is there a difference between these two methods of dealing death to innocent civilians? For many people the answer depends who's doing the killing and who's doing the dying.

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LETTERS

My all-time hero

Sir: I was gutted to learn of the early death of one of my all-time heroes (8 August). Rod Liddle's was the voice of a beleaguered Middle England, standing for the long-established Christian values of common sense, integrity, fairness, respect for all, and many other aspects so fundamental to this country's traditional way of life. Rod never took prisoners: he just demolished their arguments with the supremely elegant and simple language.

Richard Longfield Weston Patrick, Hampshire

A true wordsmith

Sir: A friend speaks for all Liddleites when he writes: 'Anyone who can think up the word "wankpuffin" is irreplaceable.' RIP.

J. C.H. Mounsey Minchinhampton, Glos

In Rod we trust

Sir: Thank God for Rod. Christopher Ellis Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxon

Battle of the Blob

Sir: Rod Liddle pointed out every one of the Establishment's innumerable failures by shining the brightest of spotlights into its darkest recesses – and the Blob squirmed in its glare. His unflinching analysis will be sorely missed by everyone who despises the complacency, apathy and hypocrisy of many within Britain's political class.

Stefan Badham Portsmouth

Fighting spirit

Sir: To say that Rod will be missed is to liken Passchendaele to a mild scrap.

Sue Mason Long Sutton, Lincolnshire

Four little words

Sir: How I shall miss those four, hitherto disappointing, words on the contents page of the magazine: 'Rod Liddle is away.' The promise of future delight is no more. John Doran Birmingham

A moment to savour

Sir: Rod's columns were the beating heart of every Spectator issue. Unlike many of his fans, I did not go straight to his column

every week. Much like a good meal, it was important to work through the starter and main course first before gorging on such a fabulous pudding.

Max Bigley Rohmenden, Kent

Honesty is a virtue

Sir: Your tribute to Rod Liddle last week offered a well-rounded encomium. As a Benedictine monk, perhaps I should steer clear of the kind of red-blooded views Rod enunciated. But, as you say, he was above all honest – honest to himself, a virtue in anyone's lexicon.

Alexander Kenyon OSB Belmont Abbey, Hereford

Free speech champion

Sir: Rod's take on the virtue-signalling wokerati gave me hope that one day society will return to what I, and I suspect millions of others, consider to be normality. We have lost a true champion of free speech.

Kate Fletcher Bedford

How dare he?

Sir: I deplore the death of Rod Liddle. How dare he take his leave at this moment of crisis! There is too much stupidity around and if there's one sure thing in the race of life, stupidity is a very strong runner. I need him back at once to restore my sanity.

Robert Twyford Morpeth, Northumberland

Shedding a tear

Sir: There are only three public figures that I shed a tear over when they passed: Christopher Hitchens, the Queen and now Rod Liddle. His articles were an antidote to the suffocating era in which we find ourselves. One of the best nights I have ever had was when I went to watch Rod and Fraser Nelson in conversation at the London Palladium. My highlight was Rod telling the story of one of the many visits he had had from police because they had received a report about him potentially torturing mice. God bless!

Mark Seeds Ollerton, Nottinghamshire

Never fear

Sir: It was with profound sadness that I learned of the death of Rod Liddle. I have been a Spectator subscriber for many years and it has been my custom every Friday to go straight to his column. Rod's articles were controversial and acerbic but they could be relied upon to energise debate. A fearless journalist, dare I say it, of the old school.

Peter Bishop Salisbury

Big softie

Sir: May I respectfully join those in expressing condolence to The Spectator upon the sad demise of one of your finest, and indisputably funniest, columnists. His weekly ruminations were, to my mind, worthy of the grand British tradition of satirists and iconoclasts. Some weeks Rod's column would unfold like an unstoppable crash in an action movie and you just knew a massive wallop was impending – just so funny. I never met Rod in person but we did exchange messages on Facebook in March, during which he told me he was ill, but resigned to it. His hilarious message made clear he was delighted to hear from a reader, saying it had 'made my day'. The big softie.

Dave MacIntosh Newtonmore, Inverness-shire

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LETTERS

After Arday

Sir: Lara Brown scathingly condemns Cambridge University's acceptance of Jason Arday's credentials ('The fabulist', 8 August). That it did so comes as no surprise, given the modish progressivism that pervades academia. However, the sheer extent of its gullibility in taking Arday's claims at face value is startling, and the reputational damage that will follow is hardly undeserved. Cambridge University is not a victim here. Our sympathy should be with the qualified black teachers and students for whom it is already hard enough to make headway. They will now have to contend with the inevitable shadow over their legitimacy cast by the Arday farce.

Gordon Bonniman Frant, East Sussex

Snob alert

Sir: I am writing to challenge what could be seen as a rather snobbish claim made by Lara Brown in your recent edition, suggesting that it would be 'quite unusual for anyone with a doctorate from a post-1992 university to ascend to such lofty heights' as attaining a Chair at Cambridge.

Professor Anne Watson, now Emeritus, was appointed to a Chair in Education at the University of Oxford. She gained her PhD from London South Bank University in 1998. She was, and remains, a leading researcher in her field, her work taken up by researchers and teacher educators across the world.

I know this because I was her supervisor at London South Bank University. I gained my PhD at King's College London in 1986, a university reputable enough for Ms Brown I hope.

Stephen Lerman, Emeritus Professor London South Bank University

Special brew

Sir: I was moved by Flora Watkins's article about the chronic shortage of hay owing to poor harvests ('The hay wane', 8 August). Early visitors to the Scottish Highlands were astonished to discover that the natives did not grow hay, despite the regional economy being pastoral. How did the cattle and horses survive the harsh northern winters? Answer: draft – the residue of brewing and distilling (spent grains and husks), still extensively used in Scotland as nutritious cattle feed. There are many breweries and distilleries in East Anglia; I suggest she might approach them.

Charles MacLean Edinburgh

Wish you were here

Sir: Since my 93-year-old father has been happily living with us following the passing of my mother, holiday postcard-writing has been fully revived by his 17 grandchildren (Arts, 8 August). English Heritage is right to promote the habit of holiday postcards in children: the joy of receiving them cannot be overestimated. My father's well-travelled grandchildren find the perfect postcards for their well-read grandfather, indulging him with their itineraries, reminding him of his adventures and bygone travels and inspiring much-loved conversation once they are home.

Claire Matthews Moulton, Northamptonshire

Bookshop find

Sir: I was delighted to read (Letters, 8 August) that the Rutland Bookshop continues to flourish. In past years I spent many happy hours browsing among its shelves, shyly greeting the proprietress who sat at her table, peering out from behind teetering piles of books, before climbing the narrow stairs to the top floor. Here one day I picked up a nondescript Latin dictionary which I purchased for a few pounds and subsequently presented to the historic library where I then worked. Many years later, revisiting the library, my successor held up the dictionary and asked: 'Did you look inside the front cover?' There, in faint pencil, was the signature 'Margaret Roberts'. Could this indeed be Mrs Thatcher's Latin dictionary? Two distinguished parliamentarians subsequently confirmed that it was her writing. One of them offered me £100 for the book; 'Not for sale!' I replied. I would urge your readers to visit the Rutland Bookshop – you never know what you may find.

Dr Nicholas Bennett Nocton, Lincs

Live stream

Sir: Peter Hitchens's critique of my book The Nord Stream Conspiracy substitutes conspiracy theory for argument ('Murky waters', 25 July). He claims Joe Biden effectively confessed to destroying Nord Stream when he said an invasion of Ukraine would mean 'there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2'. In fact, President Biden's threat was more powerful than explosives: US sanctions. Those sanctions have since blocked repeated efforts by Russia and others to repair and restart the

pipelines. Hitchens also finds it incredible that explosives could penetrate an inch of steel and four inches of concrete, or that Ukrainians could dive to 80 metres. Technical divers routinely reach such depths, and experts giving evidence in the High Court recently testified that even a small shaped charge could seriously damage Nord Stream – a commonplace technique in commercial subsea demolition.

Most inconveniently, German investigators found matching explosive traces at the blast sites, aboard the Ukrainians' yacht and on their diving equipment. Germany's federal prosecutor, who issued seven arrest warrants and indicted an alleged commander, says that the operation was ordered by Ukrainian state authorities.

Hitchens's answer? It's an American-German cover-up. Once every investigator, forensic result, arrest warrant and inconvenient fact can be declared part of the conspiracy, evidence ceases to be necessary. Everything that disproves his conspiracy theory becomes further proof of it. Bojan Pancevski European Politics Chief, the Wall Street Journal

Perfect plastic

Sir: It is precisely to maintain 'lower stress levels and reduced heart rates' that I have plastic plants, despite Ella Veakins's championing of the real thing ('Notes on... plastic plants', 1 August), which are seldom satisfied with conditions or position in the house and behave accordingly. I also recommend my two vases of cut flowers, constructed from Lego.

Angela Laing Wells, Somerset

Sock it to them

Sir: I am not quite as old as Mr. Robin Aird, who wrote to advocate the wearing of long socks with shorts (Letters, 1 August) but I distinctly remember that more than 50 years ago in Australia it was common for men to wear very short shorts with long white socks. Coupled with a short-sleeved white business shirt and a tie, it was sometimes referred to as 'Darwin rig' and was generally accepted as summer-time office wear throughout Australia.

John Nankervis Martock, Somerset

We have a consignment of Gentleman's Relish, a pot of which will be sent to the writer of the best letter each week. This week's winner is Angela Laing.

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ANY OTHER BUSINESS | MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Farming today: field fires and food price hikes ahead

I report from FTSE boardrooms and City bars, but I also spend time – mostly in Yorkshire, currently in France – among farmers who often feel ignored by the rest of the business media. This week, with three-quarters of England officially in drought and produce imports afflicted by fierce heat across Europe, agriculture is for once top of the agenda. So what has this freakish summer really done to our fields?

My northern arable correspondent has never seen an earlier harvest, with 'barley less than average, oilseed rape excellent, wheat OK on heavy clay but very poor on lighter soils. Slight rises in crop prices won't compensate for yield reductions, we've lost the safety net of direct acreage subsidies – and a single spark from a combine or baler can set whole fields alight.'

The truth is that farmers cope with nature's vicissitudes but are rarely helped by politicians, especially Labour, who would rather not hear NFU president Tom Bradshaw banging the drum for UK food resilience and import reduction. But it's a glaring long-term problem which is now pointing straight to a food price spike that will derail Andy Burnham's flashy cost-of-living campaign. He and his Defra Secretary, Dame Angela Eagle, had better get their wellies on.

Know your partner

The easyJet takeover story has changed course in mid-air. One US private equity bidder, Castlelake, has walked away, leaving a clear run for another, Apollo, offering £5.7 billion. EasyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou reportedly likes Apollo's plan to accelerate the low-cost airline's shift upmarket – whereas a more typical private-equity plan might load it with debt, gouge it for dividends or break it in pieces.

But I'd advise easyJet's board to order an advance copy of Money to Burn, William D. Cohan's history of Apollo due out next month, of which I've had early sight. Founded in 1990 from the remains of the fallen investment bank Drexel Burnham, Apollo

pursued a strategy of ruthless opportunism that reaped huge rewards for its founders – led by Leon Black, now worth $13 billion but best known for the $158 million he paid Jeffrey Epstein for personal tax advice.

Cohan offers the parable of Apollo's $1.2 billion acquisition of Noranda Aluminium, a major employer in the small town of New Madrid, Missouri, in 2007. Apollo's $214 million equity stake (the rest was debt) was swiftly recouped as the firm's five-year return on investment surpassed 300 per cent – but Noranda subsequently went bust with a hefty pension fund deficit. No doubt there are examples of happier outcomes for Apollo's investee companies, but let's just say it's wise to know a new partner's past form.

Free lunch

I'm grateful to World Socialist Web Site for the most lucid account I can find of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's motive in intervening to prop up the sinking yen. In concert with Tokyo's finance ministry, the US action on 31 July briefly boosted the Japanese currency (which a few years ago stood at 100 to the dollar) from 164 to 155. 'It was a signal of friendship, Japan's been very good to us...' said President Trump, adding a touch of his special diplomacy: '...with the exception of course of Pearl Harbor.'

But it seems the relatively small US intervention, executed by selling euros rather than dollars to buy yen, was actually intended to deter other international investors, including the Japanese themselves, from selling US government bonds to raise dollars for the same purpose. That might have had the effect of nudging long-term US interest rates upwards at a time when debt-funded American corporate investment in AI is running at $1.5 trillion per annum. The more expensive that debt becomes, the greater the likelihood of a crash in AI-related US stocks, already a quarter down on average from recent peaks.

Meanwhile, if investors believe what Japan really needs are a higher official interest rate and finer-tuned fiscal policies, the

impact of one day's intervention on the foreign exchanges will rapidly evaporate – as the former hedge fund manager Bessent ought to know. At the time of writing, the yen-dollar rate is already back at 159. And as one non-socialist market-watcher points out, the temporary discount has been little more than 'a free lunch for traders'.

Marché rising

France's unemployment rate has reached 8.3 per cent. That's two-thirds higher than the UK's if you want to feel smug, though also likely to be based on more accurate records of benefit claimants who are fit for work, our own stats being notoriously fudged. Either way, the trend is grim for Emmanuel Macron, whose goal was to achieve 'full employment' (below 5 per cent unemployed) by the end of his presidency next year. And as in Britain, there's a media riff that progress merely makes prospects worse: beside the jobless figures, there's news of robot delivery vehicles that will take out another swath of human work.

Even in la France profonde, where no bot has ever been seen, the lack of business confidence to hire and invest in the face of soaring energy costs and consumer hesitancy is apparent in many premises shuttered or for sale. That includes numerous restaurants for which there are no willing buyers; among those still open, strugglers have jacked up menu prices to no good effect. In Cazals (Lot), the ever-reliable Auberge de la Place, which charges €29 for three fine courses, was packed, while the fancier L'évidence nearby (€42) looked almost empty.

But at least one market here is on the rise. I refer of course to the weekly marché gourmand nocturne in my own village of Saint-Pompon: €15 for an assiette vietnamienne, €8 for a bottle of ice-cold rosé and, oh, the line-dancers – those hip-swinging grandmothers and teenagers in near-perfect formation, led by a young black guy radiating energy and joy. In this dismal world, they give me hope for humanity.

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BOOKS & ARTS

Bryan Appleyard explores the many meanings of the kiss

Richard Walker wonders whether we really want to be spied on all the time

Andrey Kurkov celebrates the intrepid volunteers rescuing Ukraine's museum treasures

Damian Thompson finds a reason to keep his Apple Music subscription

James Delingpole is in no doubt that The Shards is the best drama on TV right now

Digby Warde-Aldam is amazed that anyone respects the Chinese Banksy, Ai Weiwei

The Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of Game of Thrones Richard Bratby – p38

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BOOKS & ARTS

In Scene 33 of the Bayeux Tapestry, Halley's Comet, which appeared in the spring of 1066, is regarded as an omen of doom. A frightened man rushes to deliver the bad news to the newly crowned Harold

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BOOKS

A cunning chancer

The last Anglo-Saxon king made few mistakes – but Hastings proved a battle too far, says Alex Burghart

Harold: Warrior King

by Tom Licence

Yale University Press, £25, pp. 416

Oh Harold. So near and yet so far. So close and yet no cigar. In January 1066 the world (well, England) was at his feet. Two hundred and eighty-two days later he was battle meat. On day one he became the richest ruler Anglo-Saxon England had ever known. In late September he defeated the hardest bastard in Europe (Harald Hardrada). In mid-October England was changed forever, but not by him.

He had, of course, no right whatsoever to be king. Sure, he was Edward the Confessor's brother-in-law; but under the sacred rules of hereditary power that gets you zip. He claimed that Edward had promised him the throne (he hadn't); but, again, that ain't how the royal circus rolls. Moreover, there was a blood heir – Edgar Ætheling, the great-grandson of Ethelred the Unready – whom Harold had sworn to support. He reneged, pulled off an epic coup and became the only Englishman ever to assume the throne without one drop of royal blood in his veins. Somehow, later generations came to believe that he had been on the side of right. How on God's merry Earth did this happen?

Tom Licence's superb biography – ingeniously timed for the Bayeux Tapestry's return – sets out to rebuild the man afresh from first principles and primary sources. A central and often blithely discarded fact is that Harold was half Danish (on his mother's side; the name is Danish and was not used by Englishmen before his time). Licence's Harold has a touch of the Viking about him – a taker of slaves and a man who had no qualms about ravaging

English lands when politics demanded it (poor old Somerset). He was lascivious to boot: two wives, perhaps in bigamy; a reputation as an adulterer; and at least one illegitimate son. Domesday Book records 'a certain concubine of Harold's' owning property in Canterbury.

The son of Earl Godwin of Wessex, the great survivor and royal fixer extraordinaire, Harold was made Earl of East Anglia in his early twenties. Historians have often asserted that the 'House of Godwin' was a potent force, hemming in a weak King Edward. Licence shows it to have been a far from tightly knit family but full of fractures and

Harold became the only Englishman ever to assume the throne without one drop of royal blood in his veins

disunities that often brought the senior siblings (Earls Swegn, Harold and Tostig, and Edith, the Confessor's queen) to blows.

For all his roaring and raiding, Harold did not waste the talents or opportunities which God and Godwin had given him. Raised to Earl of Wessex on his father's death, he became the king's top dog. He took command of the south-west Midlands and used this base to attack the Welsh kingdom of Gwent. Licence reveals how Harold deployed his military wiles to bring about the death of King Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, seize part of his domain and have his wife.

The ultimate power plays were to come. One of the author's most intriguing theories is that the great northern rebellion of 1065 – which saw Edward's favourite, Tostig, tossed out of his Northumbrian earldom – was masterminded by Harold, who then emerged, to Edward's fury, as the

de facto successor to the throne. This is major and fascinating revisionism. It has ordinarily been thought that, in 1066, the English chose Harold either because they needed a warrior to fend off invasions and the Ætheling was too weedy, or because Harold's people pretended that Edward's dying breath had left him as heir. Licence makes the case that, with Edward old and ill, Harold fomented discontent in the north and presented himself to his peers as the only man who could bring order. This being so, the succession question may have actually been resolved in 1065, rather than on Edward's death. Where Licence perhaps goes a smidge too far is in suggesting that this was the only viable course for the kingdom. The stench of ambition can be smelled 960 years down the way. Harold had options. He chose himself.

In any case, a badder beast with a yet more spurious claim was coming. Licence is persuasive in showing that, up against it, Harold made few mistakes as king. Cunning and luck gave him victory against Hardrada. The use of his fleet may have spared some of his troops the forced march back from Yorkshire. And even after two critical battles in the north, the English ran the Conqueror close in the south. Alas, Hastings was a battle too far.

There is much the specialists will long debate. But all future biographers will need to wrestle with the man Licence has assembled: a shagger, a chancer, an oath-breaker, a soldier and a grandmaster of the great political game. Here is a three-dimensional Harold who stands in his own time and on his own terms, and who, for all his human faults, is still, like the blazon on his banner at Hastings, 'an armed warrior woven in pure gold'.

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BOOKS & ARTS

Culture wars

Andrey Kurkov

Ukrainian Lessons:

Art in a Time of War

by Charlotte Higgins Jonathan Cape, £22, pp. 272

'The nonsense was over at last,' wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czesław Miłosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of 'local' warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.

Higgins, a celebrated arts journalist, took up her first Ukrainian assignment in September 2022 and found herself both 'inside' the war and inside Ukrainian culture, which, like everything else, had become the target of Russian drones and missiles. The same autumn she began taking language lessons online from a teacher living in Ternopil.

Her latest book is about Ukrainian culture, which is at war with Russian culture, and has regularly fallen victim to Russian imperialism. It is filled with the stories of artists, writers and poets whose voices I recognise, and is organised not in chapters, but in 'lessons', each with a date.

Higgins regards her experiences surrounded by such figures in the war-torn country as an education, something akin to a fascinating course of lectures during which you see artefacts at the precise moment that attempts are being made to destroy them. The way our attention is drawn to all manner of things that could disappear at any time makes Ukrainian Lessons far more than just another book about the war.

The title is significant. We get miniature language lessons – which create a rhythm and a vivid sense of Higgins's involvement in the events she describes. But we also learn much from her conversations with the writers and poets she meets, who explain what the war is doing to the language and culture – how metaphors disappear and why literary experimentation, so familiar in peacetime, becomes an atavism. War inflicts pain on everything it touches. It is precisely this wounded reality that becomes the raw material of culture. Artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians begin to perceive culture not only as a victim but also as a weapon. 'No metaphors work against a man with a machine gun,' says the Lviv-based poet Halyna Kruk during one of her events. Then, in a conversation with

Higgins, she adds: 'I'm sorry that poetry doesn't kill.'

No matter how hard these people try to 'arm themselves', culture remains a victim of war. But its wounds encourage the most unlikely characters to rush to its aid. Among the many inspiring stories told here, those of the volunteers who rescue works of art and archives from war zones stand out. We hear of two friends, Leonid Marushchak and Arif Bagirov, who, without official instructions or permits, risked travelling 22 times to the besieged historic city of Bakhmut to retrieve treasures. Bagirov, a self-proclaimed former hooligan, entrusted his life to the more decisive Marushchak, who drove his wife's Mini into places that had become mainly accessible only by tank.

On another perilous trip, having swapped the Mini for a more spacious Mercedes Sprinter, the two drove to the city of Lysychansk to save the contents of a small muse-

Artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers begin to perceive culture not only as a victim but as a weapon

um devoted to the Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Sosiura, including his hat. Higgins asks Bagirov whether he was afraid to die. He answers:

I told myself, 'Listen, Arif, these are your last days. You might as well live them brightly. Make your death beautiful. And if I die for the sake of Volodymyr Sosiura's hat? That would have been the most beautiful death of all.'

This book is full of vibrant, energised personalities – the sort you don't often meet in peacetime. They emerge against a backdrop of ruins, fires and death, which they ignore. The threat to Ukraine's heritage is described with the urgency of a thriller. Ukrainian Lessons conveys a message from all the brave people Higgins meets – those still alive, and those, like the novelist Victoria Amelina, who did not survive to see its publication.

'It's said you reap what you sow. Not with this weather you don't.'

Two roads diverge

Lee Langley

How to Make a Woman

by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston Fitzcarraldo, £14.99, pp. 256

Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good one, studious and kind, with a sweetheart she plans to marry. Solange is the wild child: rebellious, dishonest and pregnant at 15. How to Make a Woman might sound like a Gallic take on Elena Ferrante territory, but it's much more than that. Visceral and cerebral, with echoes of Simone de Beauvoir, it describes what it means to live in a world apparently created by and for men.

The novel unfolds as a triptych: Part One 'According to Rose'; Part Two 'As told by Solange'; and, finally, 'Together'. Typically, while Rose goes on a school trip to Madrid, Solange survives a horrific birth, described in unflinching detail. Rose gets a degree and a job and dreams of married life. Solange wangles a scholarship to drama school in Bordeaux, leaving her unwanted baby to be cared for by her mother. Occasionally Rose slips away to have fun with Solange, swapping clothes and dancing crazily in Bordeaux nightclubs. Then Solange moves on, to Paris and London, chasing an acting career. There's talk of TV slots and a movie audition, with hints of fame and wealth ahead in Hollywood. Part One ends with Rose's marriage and the newly-weds safely together in bed.

In Part Two we get the story from Solange's point of view, and the book springs rowdily to life as we see the reality behind the façade: vodka hangovers, one-night stands, dirty mattresses, inevitable disappointments – and the guts needed to keep going. World events form a background frieze: the Berlin Wall comes down; there's famine in Africa. The stylish translation by Penny Hueston captures the humour and the pain.

Marie Darrieussecq is a distinguished literary figure, the author of more than 20 successful books, but she can get down and dirty with the kids to put a point across. In fleeting scenes, almost strobe-lit, like the clubs where the girls seek oblivion, we get the crucial moments – the choices, right and wrong. There are shocking episodes: no euphemisms for sexual acts or bodily fluids.

Past and present occasionally change places. On the novel's first page there's a flash-forward picture of Solange, dazzling in fashionably frayed denim shorts and knotted shirt, suntanned, looking over dark glasses as she sips an exotic drink, with a hint of a swimming pool in the background... glamour and success projected in one vivid snapshot. The truth emerges when the girls are reunited in the bittersweet final part.

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Speechless messages

Bryan Appleyard

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power

by Katie Barclay

Reaktion Books, £20, pp. 240

Kissing is a tricky subject. It has a complex, baffling history. The kiss of a baby is one thing; the kiss of lust something quite else. Kings, generals and prelates used to kiss, as did mafiosi – often before killing. The kiss has many meanings, all of which are explored in this informative, if sometimes wearing, book. Finally, a warning: if you're queasy about arse-kissing, don't read it.

But then you would be missing a lot. Katie Barclay, a diligent Australian academic, has written an 'overview of the world of the kiss in Europe from medieval times to the present'. Her opening words begin listing the startling variety of the kissing involved: 'Smooch, snog, pash, smack, peck, canoodle...' But the core of the book concerns the changing historical connotations of osculation.

Nowadays a kiss denotes something primarily sexual, largely because of mass media. Nothing sells like sex, and so the snog is the dominant form of the kiss in the contemporary imagination. This is followed by familial kisses – which, strangely, may be life-savers. American insurance companies have claimed that men who were kissed goodbye by their wives before driving to work were less likely to have car crashes. I find this a little threadbare, but maybe...

Barclay sees the kiss of peace as a 'central ritual of medieval life for Europeans'. We are told that for many Christians the mouth was the entry to both the body and soul, so taking the Eucharist could signal an intimate form of a kiss. The most notorious use of the Christian kiss was when Judas kissed Jesus to indicate he was the one who should be arrested and crucified by the Romans. Another case of perilous intimacy was St Francis Assisi in 1206, climbing down from his horse to kiss and give alms to a leper, who then disappeared.

Should men kiss each other? In 18th-century France, 'Lamourette's kiss' was a way of bonding men in the legislative assembly. At the same time, the British were distancing themselves from man-on-man snogging and replacing it with handshakes. The Danes produced an osculatory text in The Kiss and its History (1901) by Kristoffer Nyrop: 'We all yearn for kisses and we all seek them: it is idle to struggle against this passion.' Scandinavian eroticism was thus unleashed.

Richard Wagner suggested that 'the kiss of love is the first intimation of death'; but then modernity brought us the 'kiss of life',

by which a dying person could be resuscitated by the application of lips and blowing in air. (It happened to me once, but I was unconscious and unaware.) The present century pursued osculatory truth in brain scans, designed to see what exactly is happening when we kiss. But this is difficult. So scientists resorted instead to monitoring people as they viewed others kissing. It turned out that watching same-sex kissing produced the most striking results. But it was all still unclear: 'Measuring the impacts of the kiss remains a fraught and rather futile business,' Barclay observes.

Finally, there's that arse-kissing – 'an inversion of the holy kiss, a corrupted ritual used by heretics and witches to shame and humiliate others'. It was apparently much favoured by the Waldensian movement that began in 12th-century France. The practice crops up quite often in this book – and seems to be considered Ok for animals. I will pursue the subject no further.

Barclay's scholarship is formidable, but the deluge of information can be confusing. Were, for example, medieval kisses never sexual? Surely all kinds of kisses are going on all the time. I hope so.

The Kiss, by Francesco Hayez, 1897

Mortals' chiefest enemy

Richard Walker

Age of Security: The Rise of a Global Obsession

by Ruben Andersson

William Collins, £22, pp. 352

Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell cameras and automatic number plate recognition systems that have proliferated in the public sphere – but they would be wrong. In fact, according to Ruben Andersson's Age of Security, the whole world is sliding towards a state of perpetual surveillance, where everybody is spied on all the time, by cameras and communications interceptions and data capture, without debate or accountability or even much public reflection on what is happening.

Do we actually want to live in this state of heightened supervision, looked over by what we are told are 'machines of loving grace' (as the novelist Richard Brautigan once wrote)? Does it matter? And who

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cares? Those are the questions tackled in this book about the global shift towards a security culture and the possible cost of that shift.

Of course there is surveillance and there is surveillance. The total of surveillance cameras in London, for example, is high, at more than 60 cameras per 1,000 of population. But if you only count government-linked cameras, then Washington DC has more spycams per head than anywhere else in the world; Dubai has the densest population of cameras accessible to the government (2,072 per square mile); and Stockholm is per capita the most intensely remote-monitored city in Europe.

In short, everyone is getting into the game of looking at everyone. Whether you are in Delhi (a quarter of a million public CCTV cameras) or Doha (15,000 cameras for a population barely over a million) someone is watching you. We are approaching the point where the dream of the East German Stasi is fulfilled: that everyone should be spied on, all the time. This may be in the name of security, or safety, or community cohesion, or defence of civilisational values – it doesn't really matter. Once established, the logic of the surveillance society is that surveillance has to expand.

This logic does have inherent contradictions – not that they count for much in practice. The more surveillance expands, the more resources it demands (someone or something has to look at the output); and because resources usually have a natural limit, the more surveillance expands the less effective it becomes, with the result that what is needed is... more surveillance.

This is a logic that is very difficult to reverse, although not impossible (in the few cases where UK local authorities have reduced the number of CCTV cameras it has been for cost reasons). It used to be the case that surveillance growth was limited by manpower: on the day the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees, one for every 180 citizens, and one in every 30 citizens was some kind of informer. The state had already run short of people to spy on people.

Today these limits do not apply. Artificial intelligence can do the work of countless thousands of surveillance bureaucrats much faster and much more cheaply (although not necessarily to any better purpose). Yet there are other intrinsic limits to the total security concept, and the viability of what Andersson calls the 'harm-industrial complex' that seeks to install ever more monitoring devices, and instil ever more paranoid needs for them.

Although this book does not dwell other than very briefly on the second world war, it was then that one of the paradoxes of security thinking was identified: the more secure any system tries to make itself, the more insecure it becomes.

When, in the 1930s, the German military

began to adopt the message coding machine known as Enigma, it quickly became so complex – with trillions of combinations – that its users began to believe that they had achieved a total security advantage. This turned out to be the fundamental flaw. Any security system is crackable, and Enigma was no exception. The true vulnerability was belief in invulnerability. In the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, the Germans refused to believe that Enigma had been compromised and carried on using it.

This is what the goddess of witchcraft in Macbeth means when she says: 'And, you all know, security is mortals' chiefest enemy' (the epigraph of this book). Macbeth, an early exponent of the paranoid style in politics, becomes so fixated on threats and their suppression that he ends up convinced of his own invulnerability. A modern Macbeth might sit surrounded by hundreds of screens and data feeds (the studio fur-

The whole world is sliding towards a state of perpetual surveillance, where everybody is spied on all the time

niture of just about every contemporary TV thriller), unaware that all this security technology has bred its own fatal insecurity.

We might reflect on that as we install another dashcam or home security system. Most of the great changes in the way we live come about by stealth. There has never been any referendum on whether we want to live in a world dominated by cars, for example, or to have the skies filled with aircraft, or have music piped everywhere. So do we really want to live in a world of security systems, all devised – they say – for our safety and convenience?

The answer may well be 'yes'. As I put the finishing touches to this review I read that in my provincial English town the number of security cameras had just been more than doubled (to 'strengthen community safety'). The voices on the street approve: it is reported on the BBC that public opinion says that the cameras will crack down on people gathering in groups and making noise.

So that's a relief.

The way to dusty death

Peter Parker

Passage

by Colin Thubron

Chatto & Windus, £14.99, pp. 144

Colin Thubron's compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour. Kathleen has had a successful career as an actor and is married to Robert, a pompous neurologist with whom she is planning to go on holiday to Egypt. The operation stalls and so is postponed until their return from the Valley of the Kings.

This passage to Egypt, where Robert, in an ironic echo of E.M. Forster's Adela Quested, hopes to see the 'real' country, is complicated by the inclusion of Robert's younger brother, Alan. It was Alan who first met and fell in love with Kathleen when he was an adolescent, and he still nurses a passion for her, exacerbated both by the realisation that her illness may prove terminal and by her apparent attraction to their Egyptian guide, Ashraf. The trio are taken to Ashraf's village to see a play he has written, which is at once the ancient story of a pharaoh's vain bid for immortality and a satire on the present-day Egyptian regime. Tensions within the group lead to a desperate act of betrayal, as a result of which 'the real Egypt' brutally reasserts itself.

Kathleen has previously enjoyed an excursion into a tomb along a richly decorated underground passage. A bored and resentful Robert attributes his wife's enthusiasm for what he describes as 'these morbid and ridiculous images' to her astrocytoma, whereas Alan 'loves the fervour ignited in her by whatever it was she found resplendent in these indecipherable corridors'. If the hieroglyphs and images remain largely unreadable, this is unmistakably 'a passage that would lead at last to death', and the novel's title reverberates throughout the book. As well as the trip from England to Egypt and this literal passage and what it represents, there is a preoccupation with the passage of time, which alters everything and is enacted by a group of black-veiled actors trooping across the stage in Ashraf's play.

The novel is also an investigation of identity, of the perhaps unanswerable question of who we really are and what of us will remain. Kathleen's tumour is pressing on her hippocampus, which we now know is responsible for memory; but the ancient Egyptians believed that it was the heart that remembered things, and so left it inside mummified bodies, while the brain was merely siphoned out through the nostrils and thrown away. Watching the surgeon probing his wife's brain, Robert is 'struck again by the mystery of this infinitely complex machine that somehow projects the illusion of a coherent

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self'. This is not something he finds relatable to Kathleen in their everyday life. As an actor she creates characters by committing to memory the words from which playwrights have constructed them, and then reproducing those words and embodying those invented people on a stage. Robert consequently finds Kathleen unknowable, and excuses his infidelities by claiming that it is she who has deserted him with her 'self-displacement into what was surely the facile irresponsibility of the theatre, the pretence of being someone else'.

Here, as elsewhere, Thubron catches Robert's deadening rationality perfectly, while his portrait of Alan, a man who has never really recovered from romantic disappointment as a teenager, is oddly moving. As one would expect, he also writes brilliantly about Egypt in a subtle and compelling novel that, for all its brevity, brings science, psychology and different religious beliefs to bear on the question of what makes us who we are.

A media revolution

Dennis Duncan

Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad

by Jeff Jarvis

Bloomsbury, £17.99, pp. 384

Here's a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It's called 'The Story of the Recorded Word' and it's divided into four scenes, each one a pivotal stage in the development of writing. Can you guess what they are?

I daresay you managed to picture something resembling the third scene: a bearded Johannes Gutenberg showing off a page of type from his new invention, the printing press. I think you might have got the second one, too: a medieval monk, with quills and inkpot, copying out a manuscript in his scriptorium. Perhaps, if you're religiously inclined, you even guessed the first: Moses receiving the Ten Commandments carved into stone. But what about the fourth scene? That's right: it's Ottmar Mergenthaler, in the offices of the New York Tribune, demonstrating his Linotype machine to the newspaper baron Whitelaw Reid. Of course it is.

In the 1880s, Linotype's invention seemed as momentous as Moses on the mount or Gutenberg's moveable type. What was it, then, and why does its inclusion in this great lineage look so quaint now? Jeff Jarvis's Hot Type is the story of the rise and fall of Mergenthaler's miraculous machine. Ignore the subtitle, by the way. That's something that publishers do: make you ham up the celebrity angle.

Linotype typesetting machine, 1897

TL; DR: Mark Twain was the principal investor in a machine called the Paige Compositor, the Betamax of newspaper typesetters, and he lost eyewatering sums of money on it. The hero here is Mergenthaler, and the villain is Reid.

Over the course of the 19th century, a series of inventions radically increased the speed at which newspapers could be produced and distributed. The steam-powered press – introduced at the Times in 1814 with a kind of union-busting secrecy (hold on to that thought) – brought printing speeds up to thousands of impressions per hour; the telegraph meant that far-off news could be reported at the speed of electricity; the ability to make paper from wood pulp rather than linen rag reduced production costs; and the railways widened circulation. By the 1870s, it was clear that the last remaining bottleneck in the mass media system was typesetting. Since the days of Gutenberg four centuries earlier, every letter that was printed had to be handpicked, one by one, by a compositor standing in front of a case containing thousands of tiny metal pieces of type.

Imagine this sentence, this exact one – capital I, lower case m, then an a, a g, and so on. In letterpress printing, each letter requires an arm movement to the typecase and back. Imagine this whole article, this whole issue in fact. Or let's say your Spectator is not a weekly but a daily, and that new stories might break urgently, perhaps just an hour before the publication goes to press. Even with a large team of (skilled, highly paid) compositors, the scale of the thing hardly bears thinking about. Newspapers of the 19th century were notably thinner than they are

today, often only a single sheet folded into four pages. If only someone could take a typewriter keyboard (the Remington company had successfully commercialised their 'Type-Writer' machine, with its QWERTY layout, in 1873) and adapt it, so that instead of just making an inked impression on paper it would line up the metal type that could then be placed on to a printing press.

The race, then, was on, with inventors like Twain's disastrous acquaintance James Paige trying to replicate the work of the compositor reaching to the typecase each time a key is struck. The great advantage of Mergenthaler, a young German immigrant living in Baltimore, was that he had never worked in printing and was not therefore wedded to its processes.

To a letterpress printer, Mergenthaler's innovation seemed like a wild one. Traditionally, all those individual pieces of type were cast from molten metal at a type foundry, then purchased by printers, often by the ton. What if, thought Mergenthaler,

instead of picking out pieces of type, the machine picked out the tiny moulds that the foundry used, then cast these as a single metal slug? This made a line of type (hence the name) ready to be laid out by the editor arranging the columns for printing. A Linotype machine, then, is its own type foundry. It has a pot of molten metal, and yesterday's news can be melted down and recast into today's.

Jarvis, the founder of Entertainment Weekly and a former editor of the New York Daily News, knows a thing or two about journalism. Hot Metal is a labour of love and a tribute to the machinery on which he cut his teeth. As a lifelong newspaperman, he understands how to tell a story with charm and wit. His chapter on the aftermath of Mergenthaler's breakthrough – the explosion in the number of newspapers and magazines circulating, the thickening of their contents with supplements and Sunday editions, the tilt towards advertising as the primary source of profit – is as brisk and clear an essay on mass media as one could hope for.

Hot Metal is primarily an American tale, but it ends in Wapping. In 1986, the striking print unions failed to stop Rupert Murdoch from forcing through the shift from Linotype to phototypesetting, whereby a page could be printed from its camera-ready paste-up. Setting up a page of newsprint was no longer a matter of raised metal type, but of typewriter, scalpel and glue. Wisely, the NYPL resisted updating their mural. Within a couple of decades the photo era had given way to the digital. If there is to be a new panel in 'The Story of the Recorded Word' then surely it should be of Steve Jobs thumbing a hasty text: Sent from my iPhone.

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Bird of passage

Edward Platt

Eva and the Island: Life at the Loneliest Farmhouse in the World

by Tim Ecott

Icon Books, £10.99, pp. 272

Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: 'I once ran away from England to live in the Seychelles so that I could scuba dive obsessively in the Indian Ocean,' he writes at the beginning of Eva and the Island. 'The tropical humidity and seductive blue water drew me into its spell.' Gradually his love for what he calls 'the torrid zone' faded, and he found himself attracted to 'the higher latitudes'. He decided to spend time on all the inhabited islands in the Faroes, including the smallest, Stora Dimun, 'a frayed and crumbling chunk of basalt' covering 'just over one square mile', which has 'the qualities of a secret kingdom'.

Stora Dimun used to be home to 35 people, but today there are only two human inhabitants – a woman called Eva, whose family have farmed the island for eight generations, and her husband, Jogvan Jon. Even their two children, Dogg and Sproti, have left. Not surprisingly, other Faroese islanders regard it with suspicion: 'Naughty children were warned 'Behave yourself, or you will be sent to Dimun,' according to Ecott. 'Not everyone will feel at home here,' Jogvan Jon says, 'but for those that understand it, there's nowhere like it.' Ecott agrees: 'I have met magic here, if not wizards.' He doesn't say exactly what he means by magic, and perhaps he can't: doing so would be at odds with what drew him there in the first place.

Eva and the Island is not a memoir of fleeing to the north, like The Outrun, Amy Liptrot's account of escaping addiction by returning to her childhood home in the Orkneys. Stora Dimun is not a destination on a personal journey of discovery, or a refuge. It is the kind of place that renders such ideas irrelevant. Ecott relishes the sense that 'the razor-thin boundary between life and eternity is visible from the kitchen window', and seeks to emulate the characteristic of the Faroese, who value 'understatement, modesty and a relatively low-key attitude to expressing emotions in public'. Vanity is

discouraged. The Nordic precept of janteloven (the Law of Jante) 'enforces humility, and a lack of ego'. Self-abnegation, rather than self-fulfilment, seems to be the goal – though even an 'unemotional Englishman' like Ecott cannot help standing out in such an environment.

This is partly due to his ineptitude: when he is required to wring the neck of a fulmar, he pulls so hard that he takes its head off, resulting in a 'small vertical fountain of blood spraying over my hands'. He also plays up to the comic stereotype of the Englishman abroad. His expensive walking boots and rain gear are not only garish but dangerous – if you trip or slip on the slopes, the locally made woollen clothes might slow you down, but waterproof nylon will speed your descent to the cliffs.

Yet Ecott devotes himself so patiently and wholeheartedly to the Faroes that he begins to feel like he belongs. Walking back to his hotel in the capital, Torshavn, one snowy night after the annual Sheep's Head Banquet, he has a distinctly Faroese epiphany, induced by 'the wintery beauty of the tiny capital, amplified by a full stomach and,

What better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep's heads and singing?

possibly, the afterglow of a glass or two of schnapps. It wasn't possible to imagine a better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep's heads and singing.' Later, he arrives on Stora Dimun by helicopter as a storm descends. He knows he won't be able to leave. But the thought doesn't scare him: 'Dimun feels like the safest place in the world.'

Again, he doesn't say why, but by this point it doesn't matter: Ecott wanted to immerse himself in the rhythms and textures of life on the island, and having done so, he wants to make the reader do the same. He describes the 'small chores' of daily life – 'cutting turnips, fetching silage, sweeping the byres clean of dung and spoiled hay' – and the more demanding tasks of raising and slaughtering the animals. Otherwise, his attention is devoted to the seabirds that are the true owners of the island. Many are described in stand-alone chapters, illustrated by Ecott's wife, Jessica. He is fascinated by the 'pirati-

cal' skuas, who are powerful enough to chase sheep away. But he feels the greatest affinity with the less obtrusive birds – the 'tiny flying shadows' of the petrels, or the rock pipits, the commonest resident bird. These look as if they are 'using their wings to hop through the air', and land near him when he sits on the high plateau – 'tiny spirits dancing on the edge of the abyss'.

Party time

Alexander Larman

The Millionaire Waltz

by Anthony Quinn

Abacus, £22, pp. 407

Anthony Quinn's deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the first rank after his earlier books failed to receive the appreciation they deserved. Since then he has published seven books, wildly varying in style and settings, but featuring a core cast of characters. Memorable among them is the James Agate-inspired figure of the portly, bibulous, louche theatre critic Jimmy Erskine – surely one of the great literary creations of modern times.

Erskine reappears in The Millionaire Waltz and is given many bon mots, but he is not the protagonist here. The action now revolves around Edie Greenlaw, a 1920s middle-class not-quite-flapper, who, when not modelling for Dickens & Jones or playing Cleopatra on stage, is entangled in two storylines: a case of homosexual blackmail and entrapment, involving one of her friends; and, more compellingly, a love triangle, involving herself, her decent-but-dull war hero fiancé, David, and his more simpatico cousin, Chris.

The thriller aspect is limited, even perfunctory, and the resolution to the blackmail story rather too neat. But the real pleasure of The Millionaire Waltz, as with all Quinn's novels, is not so much the plotting as the evocation of period. Edie is an especially compelling protagonist – undeniably decent but also capricious, flighty and not without vanity.

As she sashays from drunken country house parties to West End first nights (playing opposite repellent co-stars) to the relative slums of Islington, she drives the story in a consistently engaging fashion. Quinn gives her and her friends (including Curtain Call's leading lady Nina Land, here appearing as a charming ingenue) plenty of witty dialogue; but we are never allowed to forget that the martini-laden hijinks are taking place in a society devastated by war, with further conflict on the horizon. By the time the genuinely surprising conclusion delivers a bittersweet rug-pull for Edie, you'll be keen for a follow-up to her adventures.

Horseplay 1966

Twas a choice then between Bobby Moore and Nyree Dawn Porter, till Trish shoved the cut hay down my shirt in Ryan's Acre. The smell of coumarin from her hands will be on my hands till the day

– Maurice Riordan

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'The Destruction of the Temples of Jerusalem by Titus', by Nicholas Poussin

Brother against brother

David Isaacson

The Jewish March of Folly: The Dramatic Events, Fateful Results and Unlearned Lessons of Ancient Israel's Political Suicide

by Amotz Asa-El Yedioth Books, £20, pp. 511

According to conventional wisdom, David was a proper hero. He slew Goliath; he wrote beautiful psalms; he built Jerusalem. His celebrity prompted a jealous King Saul to try to kill him. The legend of David is just one of the myths debunked by Amotz Asa-El in this book.

David was actually 'a shrewd and violent usurper', who behaved like 'a Sicilian mafioso' at the head of a Judean militia that consisted of 'everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate' (1 Samuel xxii 2). Moreover, his proclamation of Judah's secession from Israel accelerated a tradition of political folly that would blight the Jews' entire future.

The Israelites had long been plagued by factionalism. For all that Moses prefigured Thomas Hobbes in conditioning his leadership on popular consent, and Montesquieu in establishing a separation of powers, his ban on intermarriage between tribes enforced a sectarian mindset. The internecine disputes that followed the crossing of the River Jordan resulted, on Joshua's death, in a rigid separation of tribes. From then on,

the Israelites were beset by civil wars, disastrous conflicts with foreign powers and lengthy periods of exile.

A nadir was reached shortly after King Herod's death in 4 BC when a delegation of 50 Jewish notables travelled to Rome to ask Augustus to rule over Judea, a forfeiture of sovereignty that was 'historically absurd and nationally suicidal'. It was also typical of a people so divided that they were unable to rule themselves. ('Two Jews, three opinions' goes the saying.) The battles fought between Johanan Hyrcanus, who was a high priest,

The Israelite leaders' gravest mistake was to outsource their people's fate to God

and his brother Judah Aristobulus, between monarchist Sadducees and God-fearing Pharisees, between libertarian Zealots and moderates who acquiesced to Roman rule, all showed only that ideology had replaced tribalism as a cause of internal conflict.

The Israelite leaders' gravest mistake was to outsource their people's fate to God. From the earliest days, they assumed that 'history, at its every level, is managed by God'. The writers of the Books of Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles shared an intention to 'serve morality by belittling government in all its forms', because human rule was an affront to divine will. Asa-El calls Samuel's oration to an assembly of tribal leaders (1 Samuel viii:11-18) 'an anarchistic manifesto'. This loaded ter-

minology is not as outlandish as it seems. In his Introduction to Josephus's The Jewish War, Martin Goodman recalls Judean society's belief in 'an anarchist philosophy which forbade submission to any mortal master'.

Asa-El also challenges the 'disjointed reporting, ideological partiality and descriptive poverty' that characterise Old Testament narratives. Rather than taking the text at face value, we should regard Biblical stories 'as suspiciously as a news editor treats a press release'. Ancient spin can be seen in the allocation of just a few sporadic verses to David's vast military campaigns, in contrast to the extensive coverage of the Bathsheba affair and its lessons in morality. Similarly, the Book of Kings's treatment of a summit between Judah's King Jehoshaphat and Israel's King Ahab is inexplicably terse. Given that it ended six decades of civil war, the meeting should have been covered as a momentous event, yet in what amounts to 'a literary scandal', it is reduced

to a minor detail.

There are, of course, many ways to interpret the Old Testament. One chapter frames it as 'the Hebrew tragedy', which differs from its Greek, Roman and Shakespearean counterparts in being 'designed not to entertain but to preach, moralise and admonish'. The other difference is that between pulpit and stage.

After the Romans destroyed the second Jewish commonwealth, rabbis now living in exile continued their foolish preaching from the pulpit. Where they should have analysed the past rationally and attributed their misfortunes to the failures of weak political leaders, they saw only God's punishment for the sins of ordinary Jews. And on they marched, to the 20th century (and beyond), when rabbis on both sides of the Orthodox-Reform schism opposed Zionism, the movement that was to redeem the Jewish nation. One side claimed that only the messiah could revoke their exile; the other said they were quite happy to stay in the diaspora, thank you very much.

The book's title, inspired by Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, might well ruffle feathers. I can already hear Jewish friends complaining: 'What, we don't have enough enemies bringing charges against us?' But in Israel, polemical truth runs deeper than self-serving propaganda. The original Hebrew-language version was in the bestseller lists for several months; and in 2022, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett gave each of his 26 cabinet members a copy inscribed with his words: 'Together we will protect our third commonwealth.'

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A huge juicy feast of a show: The Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of Game of Thrones

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Fit for a king

Why can't the RSC do Shakespeare like its triumphant new adaptation of Games of Thrones, asks Richard Bratby

Wasn't it Philomena Cunk who first observed that Shakespeare's greatest work is Game of Thrones? She had a point. When I told friends that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting George R.R. Martin's saga for the stage, the GoT fans lit up. The non-fans were incredulous, and not in a good way. Now Game of Thrones: The Mad King has landed, nearly four hours of it, and it represents a gamble for the RSC. Nearly a decade after peak Thrones, a vast inbuilt audience can no longer be assumed. This new stage version needs to please both camps if it's to become the money-spinner that the company clearly (and justifiably) intends it to be.

I'd like to imagine that I'm the target audience. I enjoyed the TV series (cheered for Tywin; never trusted Daenerys; fast-forwarded past Arya) but drew the line at reading the novels. My companion, representing the opposite faction – a Lannister to my Stark, if you like – had never encountered Martin's work in any form, and detests the entire fantasy genre. So I'm here to tell you that as sheer, eye-popping theatrical spectacle, The Mad King triumphs. More than that; it overwhelms. I doubt that the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in recent memory, has ever seen such an onslaught of visual wonder, or such epic unbridled stagecraft. And I saw the Russell Beale Tempest.

The theatre itself has been transformed. The director, Dominic Cooke, has divided the auditorium into four, so it all happens in the round. To baleful horn calls (the music is the usual RSC assemblage of thuds and rumbles) huge gates swing open and a shadowy host processes through mist and light, banners swaying. Hang on, is that a horse? Actu-

ally, there are several horses (War Horse puppetry scales new heights of subtlety and daring here). We see armies ride into battle, and a full-scale tournament on horseback. It's thrillingly kinetic. There are circling ravens, a quivering Heart Tree, and towering puppet knights (the audience purred when one was announced as the Mountain).

Duncan Macmillan's drama (written in consultation with Martin) is set 17 years before the start of the first TV series, so spoilers are inevitable. Scrub that; they're practically the whole plot. Macmillan retells the tragic love story of Lyanna Stark (a tom-

As sheer, eye-popping theatrical spectacle, The Mad King triumphs. More than that; it overwhelms

boyish Harmony Rose-Bremner) and the crown prince Rhaegar Targaryen (Noah Ritter, who looks and sounds as if he was born with dragon's blood). Then comes the rebellion that deposes the psychopathic King Aerys (Michael Shaeffer pitches the title character somewhere between King Lear and Logan Roy), and ends with the ascent of Robert Baratheon (Callum Woodhouse – think Andy Burnham with a warhammer) to the Iron Throne, which is impressively spiky.

Naturally, it sprawls – it wouldn't be Game of Thrones if you could actually follow everything that's going on. Unseen characters appear for the first time, familiar ones pop up as their younger selves (sometimes unnecessarily – no one cares about Dorne) and the dialogue is authentically terrible. A few 'mayhaps' and 'sweetlings' go

a long way; fewer might have gone further. And when did Ned Stark become such a wet blanket?

Meanwhile fan service is applied with a power hose, possibly to compensate for the lack of gore and nudity. In fairness there probably aren't enough intimacy co-ordinators in the kingdom to do justice to the TV series in all its gratuitous, pre-woke glory; still, it's a rum business when there's more sex in Kenneth Branagh's The Cherry Orchard (currently running next door in the Swan Theatre) than Game of Thrones. There's also a jarring, preachy lurch in tone towards the end of Act Two, which feels alien to Westeros. Landing shortly before the entrance of Cersei Lannister (Daisy Franks), a trite feminist moral – 'Heed the wisdom of mothers' – is probably best taken as a grim joke.

But come on: this is a huge juicy feast of a show. Cooke and Macmillan deliver set piece after showstopping set piece, even if they don't quite know how to tie up all the dangling storylines (again, it would hardly be Game of Thrones if they did). They even find a way to finesse Martin's timeline and introduce a full-size dragon – a moment so unexpected, and so stunning, that I wanted to applaud there and then. Devotees will lap up The Mad King; newcomers will certainly not be bored. The West End beckons, and my fantasy-hating companion is making noises about streaming the TV series, though her official verdict was double-edged: 'Why can't the RSC do Shakespeare like this?' Good question. Why?

Game of Thrones: The Mad King is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 5 September.

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BOOKS & ARTS

Goldfinch

He spoilt her. That man. Nine years after Dad died. Re-kitted out her wardrobes. She bought couture coats, scarves, tall, long-legged leather boots, burned new gold, autumnal; braided in seasonal colours, burgundies and bronze. Finally found a man who cherished her. Let her shine. And shine she did, a glowing goldfinch, as his days dimmed.

They road-tripped across Ireland. There's a photo; her stood in some pub in Tipperary, Guinness pints, centre stage on an upturned barrel; her, him and another couple, raising a glass, living it up, doing the things she never did with Dad letting life flow, chasing fun, speeding in her mate's fiancé's flash car, round the Ring of Kerry, hitting, one after another, those colourful, shack-like bars.

— Paul Deaton

Exhibitions

Ai why why?

Digby Warde-Aldam

Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 6 September

Jasper Marsalis: Still Life

Chisenhale Gallery, until 6 September

When Ai Weiwei (b.1957) arrived in Europe in 2015, fresh from state-imposed house arrest, he was greeted as a hero. Museums and galleries fell over themselves to host exhibitions devoted to the West's new favourite dissident – even while he continued, mysteriously, to participate in Chinese art fairs. Nobody dared say it at the time, but his actual art – vast, chaotic installations and whimsical sculptures that drew on Chinese folklore – was even then just a bit dull.

Soon enough, the artist was positioning himself as the voice of the global dispos-

dispossessed, in the process (to borrow someone else's phrase) morphing into a kind of Chinese Banksy. His work became self-aggrandising in tone and ever more naff in form, in the process losing any trace of subtlety. A particular low came when the artist laid down on a Greek beach and posed as the

I'm honestly not sure I can remember seeing a show quite so objectively, impressively wretched

drowned Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, an 'awareness-raising' stunt as ill-judged as it was risible.

That picture doesn't figure in his current retrospective in Manchester, but if it did, it wouldn't be anywhere near the stupidest exhibit in the show. Everything here is crap; it's also massive, for somewhere down the line, it seems that the artist has mistaken monumentalism for profundity. The Zeppelin-hanger space is rammed with outsized exhibits, accompanied by patronising captions that assume

that no Mancunian has ever been to an art exhibition.

The major attraction here is a giant black dinghy hanging from the ceiling, its sides weighed down by 258 anonymous, scaled-up mannequins in lifejackets. This tells us that, firstly, Ai cares about the migration crisis; second, that whatever talent he once possessed has long since evaporated.

It's heroically awful: there's a billboard-sized chart depicting the history of bombs; an upturned, crochet recreation of Jacques-Louis David's 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps', which – colonial-studies alert! – replaces the Emperor's horse with a zebra; massive banners displaying the flags of the erstwhile 'Great Powers'. Empires and police states are bad, Ai tells us, and we all bear the burden of guilt.

He's probably right, but this stuff is pure finger-wagging junk, less an art exhibition than a really tawdry theme park. I'm honestly not sure I can remember seeing a show quite so objectively, impressively wretched.

Not that there's much going on in London. The best exhibitions – Donald Locke at Camden Art Centre, or Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern – commemorate dead artists. A notable exception comes with Jasper Marsalis's show at Bethnal Green's Chisenhale Gallery – a flawed display that nonetheless manages to be miles more interesting than any other contemporary art you're likely to see this summer.

Marsalis (b.1995) is the son of jazz musician Wynton and he is charismatic in the extreme. His eloquence doesn't always translate into what he makes, but there's nonetheless something wild to his practice. The mise-en-scène here involves a multiplex-scale screen broadcasting live imagery from webcams positioned in beauty spots around the globe. Meanwhile, massive speakers blast atonal FM frequencies, creating a near-symphonic continuum of white noise.

We thus get weird, grainy and gorgeous 30-second livestreams of the Sussex Downs, unidentifiable night skies, a view of a beach in (I think) Socotra and whatever else, set to an undetermined jumble of radio signals, the music they carry wiped from the equation. No matter that all we're likely to see in motion are rippling waves on Alpine lakes and perhaps the occasional, speck-like passing car. The pot-luck roll of images introduces an element of jeopardy to the proceedings: you could, potentially, catch someone dumping a corpse in a bush.

Marsalis says he's trying to make us reconsider our appreciation of landscape, and alert us to the hidden means via which we receive live information. I'm not sure he succeeds, but I was seduced all the same – and before I knew it, I'd spent more than an hour in the show. Whatever the artist's intention: it draws you in, it feels new, and most important, it looks ravishing. In August, in London, I could settle for less.

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Classical music

I've got a little list Damian Thompson

Just two weeks ago I was ready to cancel my subscription to Apple Music. I'd stumbled across its 'Composer Essentials' – a list of 100 composers so significant that they merit their own curated playlists. It includes Bonds, Boyle, Caccini, Dawson, Dett, Perry, Poldowski, Sohy, Strohl and Walker.

If those names don't ring a bell, how about the composers who are missing? Albeniz, C.P.E. Bach, Bellini, Berg, Bizet, Borodin, Chabrier, Kodaly, Martinu, Messiaen, Mussorgsky, Nielsen, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Walton, Weber and Webern.

See what I mean? The 'Essentials' list is stuffed with DEI hires. Which – an analogy with Cambridge University comes to mind – does no favours to the black and women composers who deservedly feature in it, such as Joplin and Beach. In what twisted alternative musical history does Bizet bite the dust, the whole Second Viennese School drop off the map and Germaine Tailleferre nudge out Francis Poulenc?

As I say, I was thinking of cancelling my direct debit. But then Apple Music announced that, to mark the 150th anniversary of the premiere of Wagner's Ring Cycle, it has created a Listening Guide that 'accompanies listeners through all 15-plus hours of Wagner's drama via expert text-based commentary synchronised in real time to Sir Georg Solti's legendary Decca Classics recording'. That's 45,000 words of 'moment-by-moment insights into the music, mythology, characters and ideas'.

Apparently there are already 200 synchronised guides. That was news to me. To be fair, it's not the sort of thing you just stumble across. Intuitive it ain't. Go to the Apple Classical homepage, choose 'search', and up pops a page of icons. The Listening Guide section displays the albums that have received the treatment; when you start playing a track, click the tiny treble clef at the bottom and, at last, you're in.

As the music moves, so do the highlighted words. For example, in the first few seconds of a famous piano concerto: 'Over a gentle murmuring accompaniment, the solo piano plays a simple, very singable theme in both hands...' Run the text without the music and there's a neat challenge for music buffs.

Anyway, you can understand why Wagner's Ring would be perfect for a synchronised commentary – and also why it took a whole year to assemble. There are dozens of leitmotifs in the cycle; by the time we reach Götterdämmerung they're in every bar, though they're so beautiful that we scarcely

notice. Alas, the score doesn't name them, so Wagnerian transporters are always squabbling over whether one group of notes represents a curse or the renunciation of love, or at what point the Ring motif turns into Valhalla, and so on.

There are several rival lists out there, some running to nearly 200 entries and all guaranteed to bore the average listener to tears. On the other hand you can't totally ignore the leitmotifs because they drive the story forward, often revealing things that you won't find in the libretto. But blink and you've missed it – and, let's face it, it's easy to blink during what Rossini called Wagner's mauvais quart d'heures.

Listening Guide to the rescue! The commentary kept me alert during the Norns' moanathon in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, after which comes my favourite moment in the whole cycle, beginning with Brünnhilde's post-coital cry of 'O! heilige Götter!' Here's Apple's description: 'The descending Siegfried's Missions motif and Brünnhilde's new Love motif are rapturously combined... The salutes become a duet at last: they greet each other, culminating in a top C for Brünnhilde.' That's precisely the right level of detail, and my iPad served it up without prompting, allowing me to forget the fatuous libretto. Needless to say Birgit Nilsson hits that C like a laser and Solti whips up the Vienna Phil into

To cut a long story short, Apple's Classical app is my new favourite toy

a frenzy as it spurts out 'an orgiastic treatment of Siegfried's harmonised Horn Call'. Ooh, missus!

To cut a long story short, Apple's Classical app is my new favourite toy. I can't wait to use the simultaneous commentary on the Goldberg Variations: I'm embarrassed to admit that, after decades of listening, I routinely mix up canonic and non-canonic variations. Likewise, I still need extra tuition to show me where Mahler begins his development sections.

But, see above, Apple still subscribes to bien-pensant fantasies. Will it waste its new superpower? I wonder if some hard-up music critic has been dragooned into writing a simultaneous commentary for, say, a symphony by Louise Farrenc (1804-75). Imagine if, instead of the prescribed gushing, the text told the truth: 'Here the composer switches on the autopilot as she glides towards the home key and a derivative coda...'

On second thoughts, let's not go there. I've just remembered which company manufactured, and can presumably peer inside, the computer on which I'm typing these words. So... guide my listening, Apple!

THE LISTENER

John McCabe

Grade: B+ 'Cheltenham Symphonies', they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab.

Now listen to John McCabe's Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe's orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colours on the surface of a bubble. Not that there's anything fragile about McCabe's musical engineering. McCabe, a Liverpudlian who died in 2015, was a formidably intelligent pianist (his Haydn recordings are still unrivalled) and in fact the Third Symphony takes its inspiration from Haydn, plus another of McCabe's symphonic heroes, Carl Nielsen.

You'd never guess it. McCabe's imagination – here, and in the bigger, more austere Second Symphony of 1971 – has a force that stands unaided, and which carries over into his late cello concerto Songlines, eloquently played by Raphael Wallfisch. Don't be fooled by the hippy-dippy title; it's closer to Shostakovich than world music.

All three works are driven with fiery conviction by American conductor Kenneth Woods who has spent much of the last decade reviving and recording Britain's neglected symphonic heritage. Some day we'll thank him. Meanwhile, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra struts like a peacock – and why wouldn't they, when Woods and McCabe make them sound this good?

— Richard Bratby

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BOOKS & ARTS

Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain

Cinema

Cooking the books Deborah Ross

Tony 15, Nationwide

Tony is a biopic of Anthony Bourdain, the late, great chef who, in fact, considered himself a writer first – his memoir Kitchen Confidential has sold in its millions – and a ‘skilled cook’ second. It’s not a Wikipedia entry, filmed. And it’s not hagiographic. It focuses on 1975 and the formative summer he spent washing dishes in Provincetown. He was 19 and the film opens with his own description of himself at that age: ‘I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, thoughtless young lout who needed a good ass-kicking.’ I would say Nigella is also a writer first, skilled cook second, but perhaps any similarity ends there.

Though the film feels authentic, it isn’t true true. In fact, you may sometimes wonder: did that actually happen? The creators insist that, while they have taken liberties and introduced composite characters, it is

at least metaphorically true and that it gets to the heart of a troubled soul in search of somewhere to belong. It stars Dominic Sessa, who is terrific. He captures the swagger, the awkwardness, the anger, the vulnerability, the physicality. (I don’t know what Bourdain would make of the film but I don’t believe he’d have objected to Sessa looking so lean, sexy and brooding.)

We start, more or less, in his family’s New Jersey home where he punches a hole in

I don’t believe Bourdain would have objected to Sessa looking so lean, sexy and brooding

the wall after a row with his exacting mother. (Her lack of approval will drive his lifelong quest for acceptance, it is suggested.) He is a liar – he maintains the fiction that he has won a writing fellowship when he was rejected – and a thief, stealing money from his father’s wallet to fund his fare to Provincetown in pursuit of his high-school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones). On his first night there, he finds a seafood place, orders oysters, gets drunk, hits on the barmaid, makes a spectacle of himself, gets thrown out.

The following morning, when he swings round to apologise, he encounters ‘Chef’ (played by Antonio Banderas – his best work for ages; thankfully, his Puss in Boots years are now behind him). ‘Chef’ – he has no other name – is tough but also kindly. He takes pity on Tony, lets him sleep in the hammock on his back porch, gives him a job in the kitchen’s ‘dish pit’. His workmates are Sal (Leo Woodall), a sociopathic line cook with a liking for cocaine and heroin, and Stavros (Stavros Halkias), who is sweaty, stained, chaotic. They haze Bourdain mercilessly but also, in their way, put their arms around him. Bourdain is home. For now.

Sadly, we know his troubled nature will remain. He committed suicide at 61 and this is foreshadowed by a scene where Chef relates the story of Vatel, the 17th-century French chef who killed himself because a fish delivery failed to arrive. ‘He killed himself?’ says Tony. That moment is too on the nose, even if it does break your heart. That said, the film doesn’t stray into sentimentality as such, which is excellent, as Bourdain would have hated that for sure.

It’s well directed (Matt Johnson) in that you get a sense of events unfolding organically, but it’s Sessa’s film. He brings a sad-

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ness and sensitivity to the part that will keep you on side even when Bourdain's at his worst. (He even betrays Chef.)

And he does live on through the advice he left behind. We all remember his restaurant rules: never order fish on a Monday, never order the special, brunch is for losers (cheap bulk ingredients sold at exorbitant prices). I think of him every time a new brunch place opens nearby – so that's nearly every day.

Pop All in Graeme Thomson

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Fringe By The Sea, North Berwick

The title of the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival is also the thesis statement for this year's entire EIF programme. All Rise is intended to be a celebration of integration, pluralism and collective acceptance, 'togetherness and ascendance', at a time when such notions could hardly be less in vogue.

It takes a big work to live up to the billing. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's 12-part symphony, which premiered in New York in 1999, certainly doesn't lack scale or ambition. For this mammoth hybrid composition for jazz ensemble, symphony orchestra and

The snout of his trumpet reared up for a couple of blazing solos, but he was otherwise just one of the masses

choir, Marsalis and his Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra were joined at the Usher Hall by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers. With more than 200 performers on stage under the baton of James Gaffigan, this was a monumental endeavour designed for maximum impact.

The man himself was tucked away among the body of the JLCO, emphasising the intrinsically collegiate nature of the symphony, both musically and thematically. 'It's my piece,' he recently stated, 'but it's not my show.' In the stalls, we could see the snout of his trumpet rearing up for a couple of blazing solos in the second set, but he was otherwise just one of the masses.

The 12 movements were split into three groups of four by two intervals. The various attempts at integration – between orchestra and big band, between melody and rhythm, between America's north and south – were often far from seamless, but perhaps that

was partly the point. A rich but somewhat scruffy sprawl, All Rise embraces Stravinsky, Gershwin, Dixieland, plantation stomps and African chants, gospel shouts and hymnal Allelujahs, salsa, tango, blues, improvised jazz, train rhythms and funeral music. An acceptance of confusion – rather than the dread 'fusion' – is baked into a work that seeks common ground often by sheer force of will. The third movement, 'Wild Strumming Of Fiddles', was not alone in failing to wholly convince in its attempt to connect ragtime to its Celtic source music.

All Rise is overwhelming, excessive, entirely too much – as though Marsalis is demanding not just that humanity but every type of music under the American sun should hold hands. And yet the overall effect was joyously affirming, most often when the choir roared into life. At the close, as a second line New Orleans parade played us down the aisle and out into the street, I looked around and everyone was smiling. For a few hours, at least, the EIF seemed to have achieved its stated aim.

Even two or three years ago, a prominent Scottish indie band celebrating the 30th anniversary of their most acclaimed album would have been a slam dunk booking for the EIF. These days, the festival's contemporary music programme is sadly depleted, and so it was left to Fringe By The Sea to do the honours as Belle And Sebastian took a spirited gallop through If You're Feeling Sinister.

One of the newer Edinburgh festival satellites, Fringe By The Sea takes place over a week in the comely seaside town of North Berwick, 20 miles east of the capital, and has cultivated a pleasing mini festival vibe. A lodestar of 1990s indie pop (as opposed to indie rock), If You're Feeling Sinister has always left me more or less cold, but performed in a big top, with a crystalline PA and the cool salt air filtering through, the album's innate tweeness and general air of bookish self-satisfaction felt much reduced.

The group performed the album in sequence, its baroque touches – violin, recorder, cello and trumpet – faithfully integrated with more traditional group instrumentation. A sense of cheerful communality was achieved without recourse to cliché or cheap sentiment. 'Fox In The Snow' was tender and beautiful. Singer Stuart Murdoch donned a pantomime horse's head to trot around during 'Judy And The Dream Of Horses' and high-fived his way into the crowd while singing 'Piazza, New York Catcher'.

A handful of songs from across the catalogue followed the album set. By the time they launched into the glammy stomp of 'The Boy With The Arab Strap', joined by dozens of dancers plucked from the crowd, there were almost as many people on stage as there were during All Rise – and almost as many people smiling.

Television Paradise lost James Delingpole

The Shards Disney+

My father once drove down the King's Road with Marianne Faithfull and Terence Stamp in a paisley-painted Mini to buy a velvet suit from Granny Takes A Trip while high on acid. No, not really. I was always very disappointed with my parents' 'what it was really like in the 1960s' anecdotes because basically they didn't have any.

Now my own children are having similar problems with my anecdotes about the legendary 1980s. Yes, it's true that I did go to see Duran Duran at the height of their fame, but only to keep my little sister company in a football stadium smelling of chips and fizzy pop and filled with screaming 12-year-old girls. Yes, I did wear eyeliner and white lipstick once, but I looked a prat. Yes, I did listen to lots of fashionable synth pop, like the Human League's Dare. But I also listened to Dire Straits, because that was how it was.

Great decades are only really worth living through second time round through a haze of nostalgia and with a much more carefully curated soundtrack. That's one reason I can so heartily recommend The Shards: finally the 1980s as you almost wish you had experienced them – endless sex with beautiful

Shards is a bit like a younger, hipper version of Riders

people, hot tubs, fast cars, cocktails, sharp tailoring, languidly drawled one-liners, tennis, horses...

It's a bit like a younger, hipper version of Riders, only without the self-deprecating humour and faint whiff of naffness. That's because we're not in Jilly Cooper's jolly, bonkastic, tongue-in-cheek Rutshire but in Bret Easton Ellis's oppressively chic, cruelly sardonic, exquisite but ghastly Los Angeles, recreated in his semi-autobiographical slasher novel The Shards. We're in the early 1980s: the music is great, all the kids are beyond cool, and they live in beautiful houses with maids, pools and absent parents. But there's a snake in the garden and it's about to wreak havoc on this pampered, insolent community of tragically spoiled brats.

The author Bret is represented by a character called Bret (Igby Rigney) who provides the dry, knowing, wistful voice-over. Bret is writing a novel about his world – the last year at an elite prep school for kids of the rich and famous, some of them played by kids of the actual 1980s rich and famous. Supermodel Cindy Crawford's daughter

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BOOKS & ARTS

Igby Rigney as Bret and Homer Gere as Robert Mallory in The Shards

Kaia Gerber plays pouting, supermodelish Susan Reynolds; the mysterious, handsome and sinister new arrival Robert Mallory is played by Homer Gere, whose father is, of course, Charlie Sheen. Joke. But you see how meta the whole project is.

Anyway, this snake in the garden I mentioned... It is, as per usual, Bret Easton Ellis's trademark MacGuffin: a savagely inventive serial killer. This one quickly acquires the nickname the Trawler because first he sneaks into your house and nicks all the fish in your tropical tank (to be disembowelled and served up later with your body, along with your other pets which he also kills); then when he's ready to display your corpse, somewhere ostentatious

like your tennis court, he wraps it all up in fishing nets.

Normally I dislike this sort of thing. I couldn't even start Ellis's American Psycho, let alone finish it. There is far too much

I wouldn't at all blame you if you don't think it's for you. But it's easily the best drama on TV

violence in cable TV drama, often involving women being tortured and ritually murdered by serial killers. (I blame young female audiences. They're the ones driving this masochistic trend.) But though the horror scenes are pretty graphic they're somehow rendered

bearable by the context because, a bit like the permanently drugged-up characters, you feel as if you're experiencing everything at one remove.

That is, it's real and simultaneously not real; intense and at the same time, yeah, whatever. Showrunner and co-director Ryan Murphy has captured perfectly the bizarre, unsettling register of this tainted paradise, where anything you want is yours, the drawback being that you can't enjoy it because it's never enough, and anyway emotions are so uncool and best suppressed with another quailude.

This is a world where one second girls can be speculating on the final moments of the latest classmate to have gone missing,

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Theatre Culture bores

An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One's Mind

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 30 August

Call Me Elizabeth: from Lassie to Cleopatra

Assembly George Square Studios, Edinburgh, until 29 August

Krapp's Last Tape

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, until 31 August

Mandy: Prince of Darkness

Greenside @ George Street, Edinburgh, until 29 August

The Edinburgh Fringe is getting bigger. Last year's total of 3,893 shows is surpassed this year by 4,206 productions. More people are coming to Edinburgh in search of fame but the pressure of numbers doesn't guarantee quality. Rival events are treading on Scotland's turf. London produces two festivals in August that appear to challenge Edinburgh directly. The Camden Fringe offers 450 shows covering theatre, comedy, opera and dance, while the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival stages a mix of theatre, circus and street art.

The Edinburgh Fringe used to hold a unique place in the world of British entertainment as an informal talent contest where newcomers were spotted, nurtured and launched as stars. That route has become less attractive to producers who can find new performers online and measure their popularity by checking their viewership. Why spend three weeks watching unfunny comedians in dank pub theatres when you can discover rising stars on your laptop? And the flood of talent appears to have stalled. The top comedy award has been won by an amazing sequence of celebrities including Sean Hughes, Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan, Lee Evans, Jenny Eclair and Al Murray. But since 2000, the list of comics has become less distinguished. Few are well known outside the club circuit.

And the fringe's theatrical repertoire has registered only sporadic hits in the past 25 years. Black Watch premiered in 2006 and became the first National Theatre of Scotland play to tour internationally. The fringe claims that Fleabag (2013) was one of its successes but the show held its world premiere at the Soho Theatre earlier in the same year. The raucous musical Six opened at Edinburgh in 2017 and turned into an unexpected worldwide hit while Baby Reindeer, from 2019, never became a theatre production at all. It went straight to Netflix. These are slim pickings from a festival that launched Beyond the Fringe in 1960 and the

Cambridge Footlights Revue of 1981 which included Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Even the joke of the fringe prize ground to a halt last year, when its sponsor deserted it. This year the winning gag will be chosen by the US crisp firm Cheeze-It, the 'Official Snack Partner of the Fringe'.

What the Fringe remains unrivalled at, however, is its obsession with the culture wars. Edinburgh was the ideological Mecca for the era many are now calling Woke 1. And it seems incapable of moving on.

This year, the war against the patriarchy is being fought by Lucy Stevens (An Audience with Virginia Woolf: Writing One's Mind) who impersonates the pioneering feminist and reads passages from her novels as well as work by other celebrated women. The performance includes goblets of Aphra Benn's poetry sung by Stevens in a piercing soprano. The singing starts randomly and without trigger warnings so the show is full of surprises. Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, seems blissfully unaware of her good fortune as an upper-middle-class woman living in the world's wealthiest city. Having to choose between the 'servility' of domestic life and the inconvenience of a professional career strikes her as a massive chore. In need of a husband to support her financially, she selects Leonard Woolf whom she finds physically repulsive. Never mind. All she

What the Fringe remains unrivalled at is its obsession with the culture wars

wants is to write, write, write. Her fiction is filled with gorgeous sunsets, crashing seascapes and heroically beautiful lovers, and it all sounds a bit Barbara Cartland but without the discipline of a decent plot. And Woolf's observations lack depth. She suggests that if Tolstoy had been an impoverished milkmaid and not a land-owning army officer, he might have written shorter novels. This is true but hardly worth saying. The same goes for Benn's opinion, alluded to by Woolf, that the world would be nicer if it contained more peace and beauty.

The patriarchy gets another kicking from Elizabeth Taylor in Call Me Elizabeth: from Lassie To Cleopatra where she reveals the truth about her first marriage. Nicky Hilton was a violent, philandering drunkard who attacked Taylor when she was pregnant and caused her to lose her first child. The actor, Kayla Boye, has no trouble impersonating 'the world's most beautiful woman' and she plays the role with louche elegance while sipping champagne and swallowing pills from a silver jewellery box. Taylor hated the foul-mouthed moguls who ran Hollywood and once she became a powerful star she misbehaved on set as a form of revenge.

The fringe is always good for 'high art'

presumed dead, and next, in almost the same breath, asking with the same degree of seriousness: 'Does this lipgloss make me look fat?' It's a world of pure surface – lovingly captured in close-ups of jacuzzi jets blasting into ultra-blue water and shiny black vinyl discs about to play some classic 1980s banger and the fetishistically observed inner workings of a C90 cassette in a cassette player recording the screams of a terrified torture victim being forced to eat his tropical fish while LSD is injected into his neck.

Very American Psycho revisited in other words: high fashion meets pornographic ultraviolence. I wouldn't at all blame you if you don't think it's for you. But it's easily the best drama on television.

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BOOKS & ARTS

even if it's out of date. Krapp's Last Tape is a Beckett play from 1958 that includes a stunning evocation of a romance that goes wrong during a punting trip. Beckett always punishes his fans for the sin of wishing to appreciate his writing and he conceals this literary gem inside a thick layer of artifice and pretension. The play's narrator, Krapp, is a decrepit pensioner who records his memories on an archive of reel-to-reel tapes. As a birthday treat, he selects a random tape and amuses himself by listening to a half-forgotten recording from his youth. This daft and unlikely set-up is explained by Krapp himself, who sits at a desk surrounded by garbage. (The play is deliberately unpleasant to look at.) When not talking about his eccentricities, Krapp devours bananas and repeats the word 'spool' obsessively.

Could any living actor make this funny? Rowan Atkinson perhaps. David Westhead, as Krapp, does what he can to turn the wittering recluse into an attractive figure. After the first performance, Westhead stood up, took a bow and introduced the director, Stockard Channing, for a discussion about the play. This was much more fun than Beckett's silly and intractable script. Someone in the crowd told us that the tape machine stands for Krapp's mother and that the spools represent her breasts. Westhead pointed to his size 10 shoes (white with pointed toes) which conform exactly to the stage directions. 'I take size eight and a half,' he said,

This is a superb portrait of a fascinating character but it arrives at the wrong moment

'but these are stuffed with paper.' He didn't dare to deviate from the script in case Beckett's representatives, 'the estate police', as he called them, showed up and cancelled the production.

The fringe has not kept abreast of recent political events and the name Andy Burnham appears nowhere on the listing sites. However, Peter Mandelson has arrived. Mandy: Prince of Darkness is performed by Richard Stirling who bears an uncanny resemblance to his subject. His face and his head are exactly the right shape, and he brilliantly captures Mandy's secretive and elusive personality. He's camp, nervy, irascible, self-righteous and only superficially likeable. As a boy, Mandelson won an election at school which taught him three lessons about spin. 'Be factual, don't overclaim and never arrive at a briefing without a story.'

In 1992, when Neil Kinnock quit the Labour leadership, Mandelson backed Tony Blair rather than John Smith or Gordon Brown. Smith won the contest and Mandelson immediately planted a pro-Blair piece in a Sunday supplement promoting him as 'the leader Labour missed'. This

contradicts the traditional story that Mandelson supported Brown until 1994 and then switched to Blair. Mandelson's social ambitions never matched his income and he began to court the company of millionaires. Jeffrey Epstein assured him that his 2008 conviction for sex offences was based on false information, and Mandelson believed him even though Epstein pleaded guilty in court. Despite his legendary reputation as a publicist, he never kept his personal record clean. Only a clueless spin doctor would allow the nickname 'Prince of Darkness' to be circulated widely. Perhaps he loved his bad-boy image.

This is a superb portrait of a fascinating character but it arrives at the wrong moment. Mandelson's downfall is too recent to count as history and too dated to count as topical news. But its time will come. For political wonks, this show is unmissable.

Dance

Goody two shoes

Rupert Christiansen

Marianela: Timeless; Carlos Acosta: Myths and Modern Masters Royal Opera House

No ballet dancer has been a 'household name' in Britain for more than a generation now – even mention of Darcey Bussell would draw a blank on the Clapham omnibus were it not for her post-retirement stint as a judge on Strictly. The days when the likes of Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer were splashed over front pages have long gone.

But Marianela Nunez and Carlos Acosta seem to have enough traction in the metropolis to sell about 11,000 seats each for week-long seasons at Covent Garden showcasing their artistry. (In other words, they could just about fill Wembley Arena once.) Both are without question enormous talents, celebrated internationally, their Hispanic origins reflecting a global trend in ballet demographics. At 44, the Argentine Nunez is dancing in her prime with the Royal Ballet; Cuban Acosta, 53, no longer takes classical roles, but combines direction of Birmingham Royal Ballet and managing with performing with his small contemporary company Acosta Danza.

The soirée presenting Nunez was too long and somewhat indigestible but full of good things. Some superb supporting performances registered as the programme unfolded – notably the effortlessly aerial Vadim Muntagirov, Akane Takada and Calvin Richardson in an intense encounter from McGregor's Infra, and Fumi Kaneko and Lukas B. Braendsrod rapturous throughout a

sublimely interminable extract from Wheeldon's After the Rain.

Nunez herself showed astonishing stamina, dancing in four very different pieces, including two taxing pas de deux by Petipa and Balanchine. The Petipa – Le Corsaire, a piece of virtuoso nonsense, with Muntagirov her partner – demonstrated her unflappable technical mastery, elegance of line, and immaculate finish, as did the more lyrical tonality of the third section of Robbins's romantic reverie In the Night. Every step she danced was lucidly articulated, marvellously precise and cleanly placed.

But in consequence she wasn't very interesting. She isn't that sort. There's no dirt, no venom, no cunning: she has no dark side. Her blandness showed up when it came to the feverish passions of Ashton's Marguerite and Armand. It's far from being one of his best – the word 'kitsch', indeed, is sometimes applied – but more arresting personalities such as those of Sylvie Guillem or Tamara Rojo can make something enthralling of Marguerite the tubercular courtesan, ardently in love, broken by convention. Nunez does it all by the book, and you think about a good little girl trying her best in the school play. Likewise her Armand, William Bracewell, whose interpretation was exquisitely danced but devoid of animal sensuality.

That is a quality that Carlos Acosta radiates in spades, and it goes deeper than mere

There's no dirt, no venom, no cunning: Nunez has no dark side

sexiness. Age may have deprived him of some of his fancier footwork, but I don't think I've ever seen him dance with more richly nuanced character than he did in the centre of a powerful revival of The Moor's Pavane, Jose Limon's fantasia on Othello set to music by Purcell, with BRB's star couple Max Maslen and Beatrice Parma equally fine as the Iago and Desdemona figures. What a masterly ballet it is: so charged with emotion, so chaste in expression.

For dessert there was Christopher Bruce's adorable Rooster, the first and perhaps the best of many ballets drawing on the juke box – in this case, early Rolling Stones hits. It's a witty, sassy take on Mod culture, which isn't afraid to reflect the songs' subject-matter directly – Ruby Tuesday is a lonely waif, and the Little Red Rooster clucks and struts. With exuberant contributions from Acosta himself and members of Acosta Danza, it brought the house down – rightly so.

I could have lived without the fillers – a truncated version of The Nutcracker's 'Kingdom of Sweets' scene, followed by the ludicrous Diana and Actaeon pas de deux and a turgid piece for quarrelling lovers, acted out by Acosta and Amisaday Naara. But the bookends were very rewarding.

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NOTES ON...

Shaving

By Nigel Jones

I was looking at a photo of my great-grandfather the other day and admiring his beard. A magnificent spade-shaped affair, it reached halfway down his chest. He was a Victorian, of course, and his era was, above all, the century of the beard. All the eminent Victorian males, such as Darwin, Dickens, the Earl of Salisbury and Prince Albert, wore them. Gladstone and Disraeli may have been political rivals, but they were united in both being devoted pogonophiles.

When President Trump and Pete Hegseth decreed recently that all US military men should be clean shaven, it struck me that, had that rule been around in the 1860s, the American Civil War would never have been fought, since all the leading generals on both sides were endowed with substantial forests of facial hair. One Union commander, Ambrose Burnside, was so notably hirsute in this respect that he lent his name to sideburns. However, the British Army, unlike the Royal Navy, has usually taken a dim view of beards. In the second world war, only the eccentric General Orde Wingate was given exceptional permission to grow one.

Why did the beardies do it? After all, beards are itchy to the wearer, and scratchy to anyone who encounters them intimately. Scraps of food get stuck in them, and some

men like me are left feeling inadequate because they can't ever manage to grow more than a scrubby approximation of one. Much better, surely, to have it all off with a clean and invigorating daily shave?

The ancient world was as divided on the question of beards: while the Romans were proudly clean shaven, the Assyrians and Egyptians made something of a fetish of their beards, shaping and curling them into painfully elaborate statements of status.

The early modern western world bounced between centuries in attitudes to beards: in the early 15th century King Henry IV sported a forked beard, possibly to compensate for his scabied scalp, which was largely bald. Baldness also afflicted the Bard a couple of hundred years later, but he grew a neat little pointed number on his chin just to show he could. By the 17th century facial hair was

worn to signify the religious and political differences that were tearing the kingdom apart: the Civil Wars were as much a conflict between clean chinned Puritans and pointy bearded Cavaliers as they were about the divine rights of kings and parliamentary governance. Razors held sway throughout the 18th century and only with the Victorian age did beards carry all before them once again.

Shaving was carried out by 'cut throat' razors until the delightfully named King Camp Gillette, a US businessman, popularised the safety razor at the end of the 19th century and cleaned out his competitors.

Shaving technology took another great leap forward in the 20th century with the invention of the electric razor. Shaving was once carried out by barbers, but is now generally a matter of private personal grooming. This is possibly because barbers became unfairly associated with the fictional activities of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, or the execution of mobster Albert Anastasia, gunned down during a shave in a New York barber's shop in 1957.

These days, the mysterious epidemic of premature baldness or shaven heads among modern men is often compensated for by hipsters growing luxuriant beards instead. There's now so sheer as folk.

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No one can be mad in a BMW.

It works too well.

— Tanya Gold, p55

LIFE

No life

Lloyd Evans

'Do you like animals?' asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. 'No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,' I said. That got rid of her. I feel a little ashamed of my hostility to animals, which I inherited from my mother. She was raised in rural Ireland and she loathed the countryside and all its non-speaking inhabitants. To her, animals were either predators or ingredients, and she particularly despised geese, rats, mice, squirrels and dogs. 'Vermin,' was one of her favourite nouns. And she regarded the word 'pet' as a self-deluding fantasy. Which seems reasonable. Animals cannot be tamed but their owners can be deceived. Any beast will turn murderous when cornered.

I have a survival tip if you need one. I was attacked by a dog at the age of 18 while passing through an Arab village in northern

Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still. But people dislike people who dislike dogs so I keep it hidden

Israel. A snarling mongrel scampered out of a copse and barked violently at me. I walked on, suppressing my fear and hoping to project an air of invincible calm. It worked. The dog hung back and I kept walking, relieved that the danger had passed, but it raced up from behind and grabbed my ankle in its pincer jaws. Instinct took over. I froze. Its teeth tore at my flesh but I didn't move or make a noise. This confused it. Perhaps it thought I'd turned into a tree or a fence-post. It realised that I wasn't a meal so it relaxed its grip and lurked nearby, waiting.

I remained stock still, bollard-like, for several minutes until it slunk away. On my flesh it left the imprint of its teeth, first in blood, later in scabs. Nothing has ever nauseated me quite as much as that half-circle of

fang-marks scored on to my skin by a cowardly scavenging fiend. Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still. But people dislike people who dislike dogs so I keep it hidden.

I once knew a woman who loved dogs of all breeds except two. Afghan hounds – 'they look so silly in their flares' – and Dalmatians. 'They're really thick,' she would tell me, lowering her voice in case they overheard her. Touched by her enthusiasm, I started to appreciate the quirks of certain breeds. The lurcher, even when dry, appears to have stepped out of a car wash. The greyhound looks like a rat that's been told it's a super-model. The tubular body of the dachshund resembles a stretch limousine.

Dog lovers use the same argument as gun owners and claim that dogs are innocent and the fault lies with their human custodians. This is true, partially. Sometimes a new owner forgets to feed his dog which then eats a baby or two and brings the entire species into disrepute. That may explain the fad for 'rescues'. If a rescue dog behaves sweetly, the new owners take the credit. If it runs amok and kills, the old owners get the blame.

I want to believe that dogs are not all that bad. But dogs keep persuading me that they deserve to be shot. Last summer I was crossing a park in west London where a trainer was teaching a bald, fist-shaped mutt to retrieve tennis balls. It rocketed across the grass like a plastic baton round and, after snatching up the ball, it pelted back to its trainer at full tilt. I could see that my route would intersect with the mutt's speeding trajectory so I slowed to a halt but it ram-rodded straight into my ankle, bounced off and sprinted away. Its skull, moving at 18 miles an hour, had collided with my ankle. The trainer failed to acknowledge the brute's attempt to amputate my foot. I limped for weeks afterwards.

Perhaps I have an aura that spooks dogs. They howl and bark at me randomly. Or they leap out of doorways and snarl in my face. I've noticed that sunglasses unnerve them so I remove my shades if I see a pit-bull staring at me. A few years ago, I was cycling through the Olympic village when a cross-eyed spaniel frolicked against my front wheel. I lost balance and crash-landed on the tarmac. The owner, watching from a bench, rushed over to see if his half-blind playmate was injured. He cradled the beast in his arms

and retreated to his seat where he tousled its head and whispered consoling words in its floppy ears. I was still sprawling on the path, badly winded and taking a mental inventory of the damage. Palms scuffed, ribs hurt, one knee cut and bruised. Nothing serious. The owner gazed vaguely in my direction. 'Dog all right?' I asked him. 'A bit too much excitement,' he said. 'She needs to go home.'

On TikTok, I watch a lot of dog attack videos and I'm amazed to see that very few owners know how to pacify a hysteri-

I want to believe that dogs are not all that bad. But dogs keep persuading me that they deserve to be shot

cal animal. Shouting, gesticulating, pulling its collar or hitting it with a broom handle will intensify its anger. By all means, strike the dog but make sure you kill it. A less than fatal blow will prolong the attack. This vital lesson should be taught in primary schools. Let's be honest, we live in a dog-eat-man world. I've picked my team. One day, you may have to as well.

Dog's life

Sophia Money-Coutts

Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there's non-stop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up.

The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought 'a little tux' for Badger, so he could look the part.

How do we feel about dogs at weddings? Given the declining birth rate, soaring dog

53

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LIFE

population and lamentations that young people are increasingly relinquishing the idea of children in favour of the cockerpoo, it's increasingly common to see a dog trot up the aisle. He may even have a little pouch attached to his collar, not for poo bags or biscuits, but for the rings. Why rely on the hopeless, hungover best man to remember the rings when you could simply make your dog the ring-bearer instead?

I'd be nervous about including Dennis. The list of contraband that he's swallowed includes but is not limited to: tissues off the pavement, discarded chicken bones, plastic bottle tops, a toy Pac-Man, 597 foam ear-

Dogs may also apparently now 'walk' the bride down the aisle and act as 'flower pup' alongside the bridesmaid

plugs, conkers, shards of plastic Biro, socks and the occasional knicker gusset. I wouldn't put a three-carat solitaire past him.

And if you allow dogs, do you allow other pets? Horses, of course, aren't uncommon at some country weddings, and I once went to a Hampshire wedding where alpacas greeted us as we entered the marquee. But what if the groom wanted to bring his python or tarantula? If he's that way inclined, he's done jolly well to find someone willing to marry him, but some of the congregation may be perturbed.

The dog policy varies from council to council. Islington town hall, for instance, is very pro dogs at weddings, although only one dog per couple is allowed and there's a list of rules. You must stop your dog from climbing on the town hall furniture, the website stipulates, and bring wipes to 'clean up any messes'. Got that, bridal party? Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a packet of Dettol wipes while you're at it. Bromley council has a blanket no-dogs policy at all its venues. Chelsea town hall will allow them, but only if it's a labrador (only joking, spaniels are welcome too). The Church of England, meanwhile, has no official dog policy. If you're doing it in a church, you need to chat up the relevant vicar.

Including one's dog has become so popular that various businesses exist to meet demand. Precious Pets Weddings boasts that it's the 'UK's original wedding dog chaperone service', covering more than 50 venues. Say I was getting married, for instance (don't laugh, just try to imagine it). If I could overcome my fear that Dennis would treat the rings like a delicious snack, Precious Pets would help me on the day.

According to its website, it would collect him on the morning of my wedding for a pre-cemetery walk 'to burn off any pre-wedding excitement' and ensure he was calm, not down the pub knocking back pints with the ushers. They would spruce him up to make

sure he was 'photo ready', then take him to the venue or church so Dennis could 'familiarise' himself with the location. If I fancied it, he could arrive at said venue in its 'Wedding Wheels' car, decorated with paw-print bows and ribbons. There's a built-in camera system in this car, should I want any footage of Dennis making this grand arrival.

Precious Pets would look after him during the service, take photos of his big moment, then whisk him back to an agreed location. No reception for Dennis. He'd only hog all the canapés and do something unmentionable on the dance floor. The cost for this service starts at £425.

It's big business because, according to a Guide Dogs UK survey, more than 90 per cent of dog owners planning a wedding now want their dog to be involved. Ring-bearer isn't necessarily the only role, either. Dogs may also apparently 'walk' the bride down the aisle, act as 'flower pup' alongside the bridesmaids or page boys and be included in the family photos. Astonishingly, 42 per cent of those surveyed said they'd also like to involve their dog in the first dance. How? Does Peta know about this? The idea of including your poor dog in some embarrassing spectacle while a ropey local band cranks out a 'Can't Help Falling in Love' cover feels suspiciously like cruelty to me.

Disaster stories seem to be relatively

common. Dogs that savage the bouquet; dogs that leap into the lake moments before the critical moment and then shake themselves all over the bride's pristine dress; dogs that beat everyone else to the wedding cake and then need an emergency stomach pump at the vet because they've swallowed too many raisins. They make the weddings in East-Enders look quite tame. That said, the Precious Pets website says it's taking bookings for 2028, so even though Mr Right remains determinedly elusive, perhaps I should pick a date, just in case?

Still life

Catriona Olding

Provence

'Imbeciles! I told them! When the fire comes on the hill there, it always goes that way... did they listen? They did not! They fought it from the wrong side. Look at the mess.' The old man, the last in the village still wearing a beret, was angry with the pompiers. This was two days after the fire which almost engulfed American Cathy's house. Now the centre of the village was filling with brown smoke from a fire on the eastern side of our closest hill and the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Grâce was threatened a second time.

In fairness to the pompiers, the last time fire struck there was in 1962. Following the first world war, many parts of rural Provence were depopulated. With fewer farmers, the olive terraces surrounding the villages became overgrown with invasive fire-spreading pine trees. If you look at old postcards of the village, there are virtually no trees on the hills; now they're densely wooded – not with native green oak but pine. Longer and more frequent canicules (heatwaves) exacerbate the problem but the major factor here is malice. A 23-year-old man is in custody accused of starting ten wildfires in the Var.

Walking up past the graveyard on my way home, I took a detour to check on a house I look after. When I got there a huge fire, driven by high and hot winds, was roaring down the hill towards it and four others. Seven Canadains and three helicopters flew low overhead. Each plane can lift 6.1 metric tons of water in ten seconds. I narrowly missed a soaking.

At the gate a few grim-faced spectators, including the tall, wild-haired builder David, gathered. A woman appeared from the lane across holding an empty halter with a leading

54

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rein attached. In her other hand a cat basket and, behind her, a horse walked free. It kept wandering off to chew on some tasty bit of the garigue. It's 40 years since I rode a horse but I know they can be skittish. As a nine-year-old, I was thrown and knocked out by a grey pony called Misty who got spooked by a paper bag. What the untethered horse would make of the planes and helicopters when they returned was anyone's guess, but the woman seemed unconcerned and the three of them – woman, cat and horse – disappeared round the corner.

Suddenly there was panic. On the fifth screechy phone alert of the day came a message to evacuate parts of the village centre. People carrying bags hurried past me down the hill, as I headed up. From my tiny cave house, a safe and natural vantage point high in the cliff, I can see for miles. The flames were confined to the hill but dense smoke clung around the village below. At 6 p.m., I poured a gin, sat on the balcony terrace and lit a cigarette. To my right the hillside burned. A helicopter with speakers hovered above the village making indecipherable announcements. It came towards me, level with the terrace, so I rushed inside and hid until it went away.

By 10 p.m. almost everyone in the quartier below me had evacuated and a thunderstorm, generated by the fire itself, sent sheet lightning flooding across the clouds of smoke and flames, rendering the scene even more apocalyptic. Apart from the sirens, it was eerily quiet. By midnight the wind had subsided and the fire had lost some of its ferocity. It seemed likely the houses had been saved.

The following day I got a message from a friend who lives in Oxfordshire, saying she'd flown back to check on her place up near the monastery of St Joseph and asking if she could come and see me when she'd finished. Charlotte's house is old and stone-built. It

As a nine-year-old, I was thrown and knocked out by a grey pony called Misty who got spooked by a paper bag

was part of the monastery at one time and, indicated on the pompiers' map as a point of special interest, had survived the first fire but only just. A beam on a gable wall was scorched, external parts of the air conditioning units on that side had melted and all the garden furniture, including a big oak table, had been reduced to ash. Her French mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound because of a broken ankle, lives in the house next door and had to be helped to safety.

I had one decent bottle of wine a friend had brought some weeks before, a good Viré-Clessé, which I'd been saving, and stuck it in the fridge. Charlotte was later than expected, having spent hours trying to put out small garden fires which had reignited. Eventually

she found a fire crew to help and by 9 p.m. was with me. She had a quick shower while I made her some food.

As we clinked glasses she showed me photos of the fire crew who'd helped. 'Look at him, isn't he gorgeous?' There was no denying it. 'Do you know, he thanked me, saying there were three crews fighting the fire all night. I asked him why he was thanking me – I was the one who was grateful to them for their heroic efforts. He said that at 5 a.m. after they'd got the fire under control, they ate then went for a sleep on the cushions in my pool house. When they woke, they all had a swim. Isn't that a lovely thought?' We exchanged a look. 'Yes, isn't it...'

Fast life

Tanya Gold

It's the way of good cars that, on driving one, you begin to embody it: to become it. In a hot hatch I am young and lovely and never was a nerd. (I will get to the platonic ideal of the nerd's car. I fear it is a Honda Jazz.) In a Rolls-Royce I am laconic unless I am driving, in which case I am a wreck. In an electric BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) iX3 I am functional, the woman I never was. I own my own company, though I don't know what it does. I am not fat, I am not weird and I am 'good at men', whatever that means. You might laugh at BMW for its solemnity and self-possession – for its very Germaness – but your laughter is hollow. Britain, increasingly a country of cracked and self-destructive romantics, has no such functional marque and has never sought one. We cleave to the flying bath (the Morgan) and the terrier (the Mini). We are all mad.

But no one can be mad in a BMW. It works too well: it must be, to eat up those lovely German autobahnen. It is less a car than a professional mercenary that you sit on. It's called an SAV (Sports Activity Vehicle), but it looks like an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle). Don't ask me why they rebranded by amending the abbreviation. I do not know.

BMW has shaken itself up. The iX3 is the first in its Neue Klasse (New Class) range of EVs, designed to counter the China threat, which seems to evolve in every generation, Korea and also Tesla. Eventually there will be about 40 of them. It's fine-looking if you prefer a CBeebies villain to a consumptive poet, and I do: high and imposing, with a tall and narrow grille. It has a tiny Bavar-

ian flag on its nose and, within, it keeps the complex promise of the age if you have the funds to take it (it starts at £57,750): insularity in comfort.

The dashboard shows the temperature, the battery charge level and the charge on my iPhone, even when it isn't plugged in. It has powerful acceleration because the battery is huge, and this matters to me: 0-62mph in 4.9 seconds, and a maximum speed of 130mph. And it does things to ease my path through life. It lights up for phantoms in the blind spot; brakes to keep a safe distance from the car in front; chides me when I stray from my lane or break the speed limit; plays music on my voice command; brushes my hair.

It promises 500 miles a charge to combat 'range anxiety', one of those terrible phrases journalists invent to subvert the Enlightenment and to keep themselves in work. I do not get 'range anxiety'. It's a car, fool, just pull over and charge it in one of Britain's 122,724 charging points. (Though I don't know how many of them work either.) Have you any idea how fortunate you are not to be travelling by miniature donkey? Even so, it is the first mass production car sold in the UK to make this promise: it will get you from Bude to East Kilbride on one charge. Maybe.

Newlyn is hell for parking. Fashionable fishing villages aren't made for cars though, increasingly, they are made for bourgeois hard leftists dressed as milkmaids, who look absurd. But parking is still the thing we talk

In an electric BMW iX3 I am the woman I never was. I am not fat. I am not weird and I am 'good at men'

about most in Newlyn (people steal enforcement signs), followed by the time a swan was run over by the Co-op. Yesterday I watched a bus abandon its route because so many people had parked illegally for chicken in a basket at the Meadery.

Faced with this, I parked the iX3 in a bush above a small river. When pulling out I reversed over a small twig. The iX3 freaked out. It emitted a flurry of beeps – can cars scream? – and braked itself. Perhaps it thought the twig was a corpse. It can handle the Alps, I thought fondly, it can't handle the twig, and that made me feel tender towards it. It was novella territory, with the iX3 as tragic hero. I overruled it, smashed the twig, and that was that. I missed it when it left, because it made strangers envy me. It made me envy myself.

The most interesting thing I have heard about a BMW is from my ex-husband on the old Series 8 – a hot, mean convertible that made me feel the same. 'It doesn't have a soul,' I told him idly (I did not care, I loved it). 'If the customer wanted a soul,' he replied as if it were obvious, and it is, 'BMW would build you one.'

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LIFE

Chess

Battle Royal Luke McShane

When you're in contention for tournament victory, the final day of a chess tournament is knotted with tension, knowing that even a brief lapse of concentration can squander a week or two of effort. The nerves splinter your sleep, and then the game usually begins early, because the organisers need time to pack up afterwards. Over the years, I've met with Triumph and Disaster, but one of the more painful memories was the final round of the British Championships in 2002, where, as an 18-year-old, I blew a promising position against the Indian grandmaster R.B. Ramesh, who therefore won the event outright.

Last Sunday, 24 years after that debacle, I faced another pivotal final round at the British Championships, held on the campus of Warwick University. The night before, I found some unlikely spiritual reassurance in Bob Dylan's nihilistic drawl on 'Things Have Changed', from the soundtrack to the film Wonder Boys (2000).

People are crazy and times are strange I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range I used to care, but things have changed.

Identifying with that indifference was a fib, of course; playing good chess requires caring quite a lot. But caring too much is no good either; you are liable to second guess yourself and overthink things. A few years ago, Hikaru Nakamura, who enjoyed a late career surge to second in the world rankings (behind Magnus Carlsen), credited his comeback to the parallel success of his career as an internet chess streamer, since he was able to adopt a more relaxed approach to his over-the-board performances. As plausible as that is, there is a sense in which top players never lose their competitive instincts. In fact, Nakamura's utterance of 'I literally don't care', on stream after losing a relatively unimportant bullet game on time against Eric Hansen back in 2021 has become a much parodied meme in internet chess lore, since the more times he repeated it, the less anyone believed it.

On the final day in Warwick, I managed to care just the right amount, playing a long but

steady game to lock in a win against Simon Williams on the second board. Alas, I was out of range. I hoped to see a draw in the top board clash between Shreyas Royal and former champion Harry Grieve, which would have landed me in a playoff for the title. In fact, 17-year-old Royal, already a grandmaster and one of the country's most promising players, won a cool and convincing game to win his first British Championship title – an early career highlight. He finished on 7.5/9, ahead of Michael Adams and me sharing second place with 7/9. Royal's victory was well-deserved, particularly since he had beaten me a couple of days earlier.

Shreyas Royal – Luke McShane British Championships, Warwick University, August 2026

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 exd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nxc6 bxc6 6 e5 Qe7 7 Qe2 Nd5 8 g3 g6 9 Bg2 Bg7 10 c4 Ba6 11 O-O O-O 12 Re1 Rfe8 13 Qc2 Qc5 14 Nd2 Bxe5 15 Bf1 Nb6 16 Nb3 Qf8 17 Be3 Na4? As everyone knows, 'a knight on the rim is dim'. 17...d5 was about equal. 18 Rad1 d5 19 cxd5 Bxf1 20 Rxf1 Nxb2? (see diagram) 20... cxd5 21 Rxd5 Nb6 was still ok. 21 Bc5! Qg7 22 Rd4! A powerful idea, trapping the knight. a5 23 Qxb2 a4 24 Nc1 Ra5 25 Re1 Rxc5 26 Nd3 Rb5 27 Qc2 cxd5? 27...Qf6 was the last chance. 28 Qxa4 c6 29 Rxe5 Rxe5 30 Qa8+ Qf8 31 Qxf8+ Kxf8 32 Nxe5 Rb1+ 33 Kg2 Rc1 34 a4 f6 35 Nd3 Rd1 36 a5 Ra1 37 Rf4 Ke7 38 Nb4 Black resigns

White to play, position after 20...Na4xb2

PUZZLE NO. 912

Black to play. A. Ledger – S. Williams, British Championships 2026. Black played 29...a6, missing a winning sequence on the kingside. What is the first move? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 August. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for delivery.

Last week's solution 1 Qe2! threatens d2-d4 mate. If 1...Bc3 2 dxc3# or 1...Ne3 2 dxc3# Last week's winner Jeffrey Aronson, Oxford

Competition

Slave to the 'rithm Victoria Lane

Competition 3462 invited you to submit a short story in which the protagonist lets an algorithm take charge of their life or an aspect of it. It was a smallish entry but a solid effort and mentions should go to Brians Murdoch and Allgar, David Harris, Nicholas Lee and Nick Syrett; there were other good ones besides. The £25 John Lewis vouchers go to those below.

Ever the termagant, Liza attempted to make Greville, her boyfriend, jealous of the algorithm, whose recommendations, she said, proved its superior insight into her character. Knowing Liza liked, or at least bought, the sourly comedic novels of Rachel Cusk, the algorithm had suggested the brittle tragicomedics of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Adoring these, Liza surrendered her taste to its further insights: it chose her next holiday (Rio), dress (Givenchy), sunglasses (Al). It was left to Greville to point out that algorithmic recommendations were inspired not by empathy or understanding but by having found other consumers with Liza's tastes and commending whatever else said consumerist doppelgangers had bought. For a time, Liza subsided into one of the petulant silences usually occasioned by Greville's inept and perfunctory gifting habits. Within weeks, Liza had ditched him, the algorithm providing a list of those with identically idiosyncratic purchase histories whom she is now courting with unsettling success.

Adrian Fry

She typed 'What to wear when eloping with your lover'. Her husband was too trusting to check her browser history. She clicked on black cloaks and a travelling trunk from Lheureux.com ('18 people have this in their cart'). Copious ads popped up on her feed. Parisian influencers recommended trains, and tour businesses on where to stay discreetly in Italy. 'How to' reels displayed quick routes out of France. Only when she received an email from Rodolphe did Emma Bovary realise her plans were for nothing. Suddenly, as she skipped the love songs on her playlist, her phone began playing Adele, while her feed pushed juicy tips on 'finding a new bit on the side'. Articles promised the easiest way to gain power of attorney and sign promissory notes, plus ideas for carriage routes around Rouen, interspersed with tempting ads for arsenic. She engaged herself afresh, and so it was always.

He downloaded LifeOS™ last Tuesday, because Tuesdays felt arbitrary and he wanted someone to feel arbitrary for him. It picked his cereal ('Optimal fibre-to-regret ratio'), job, girlfriend – swiping right while he watched, praying rebelliously as if at his own atheist-state trial. Soon LifeOS™ wasn't enough. He added HopeStream™ daily prophecies, GleeCore™ curated micro-joys, and BlissLedger™, which tracked his optimism while the 'Moderate™' app burnt his wrist whenever his gratitude dipped 'Below-Quota™' or 'Off-Atheism™'. The apps disagreed slightly, each insisting it alone knew 'The Path! To His Flourishing™'.

Then the servers crashed – all three together, cascading outages in data centres he'd never see. Silence. His thumbs hovered over nothing, stretching pathetically for a rating system no longer there...

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LIFE

He sat in reassuring darkness all week. Then, smiling, he thought: surely this was scheduled, purposeful, 'Good!™' for him somehow. He had no evidence. He felt 'Wonderful!™' anyway.

Mark Brown

Nieces, nephews, the round of birthday presents. Surely these came round more often than annually. William, reduced to asking AI for suggestions of 'trending age-related gifts' for teenagers he never saw and wouldn't recognise, struggled with the answers. Still, he could order online and, as thank-you letters were completely out of fashion, he never knew if he caused offence, or even pleasure. Different in my day, he muttered to the calendar. But he was grateful for the suggestions rolling every time he bought something. Why does She think I'd like eyelash curlers? he wondered. But a chair phone stand looked different, as did a Game Controller Crochet Doll: whatever next! He liked the look of a Star Wars Wrist Saver – it might help him in the garden – and why not buy something for himself? No one else did. Purple ear defenders? He clicked. The Elvis Lookalike suit? Arriving tomorrow.

William beamed. He had a future.

D.A. Prince

After Giulietta left, I immersed myself in my work and pretty much handed everything else over to the algorithms. I hated shopping. Cooking was a matter of following the instructions. When I was working on the Italian Renaissance module of the 'Europe around 1500' course, Meulmaster sent me pizza (yuk), pasta (yum) – I wondered what Renaissance Italians ate before the tomato was introduced – lovely bread and pastries... you get it. The origins of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth brought forth a selection of pierogi, pulpeci, tasty sausages and pickled you-name-it. The Habsburgs confused the algorithm a bit, as you might imagine, but made for variety. Henry VII anachronistically furnished me with beef wellington, jam roly-poly and barm cakes. So, moving on to the early history of the Reformation, I was surprised to receive a package from Anglers Anonymous. I should have guessed. I'd been put on a diet of worms.

Frank Upton

Reverend Proxy was solemnly proceeding with the marriage ceremony for Henry and Isabel in the church of St Anselm the Ontologist. Echoing through the chancel, he dutifully intoned: 'Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or ...' when he was interrupted by a ping from the bridegroom's wrist watch. 'I know of many' spoke the tinny Smartwatch voice. Damn, I should've turned that off, thought Henry, fumbling for the button beneath cuff links and starched cuffs. 'Henry has undertaken no comprehensive risk assessment. He knows nothing of Isabel's genetic profile; he has not scoped her professional prospects; he has no idea of her potential inheritances; he has not enquired of identity, security and criminal records or psychological profiling, or even social media history. This contract is unsound.' Henry looked worried: 'Well, Isabel, maybe still time to ... rethink?'

Shirley Curran

NO. 3465: DOWN THE MIDDLE

You're invited to submit a poem that is centre-aligned, with the middle words creating a message of their own (max. 16 lines; bear line length in mind). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 26 August.

Crossword

2765: Some beef by Fieldfare

The uncled lights are of a kind.

Across

1 Cartoonist has formerly captivated Spain (5) 10 Swayed and quit, sick in the stomach (10) 14 Handles fine fish (5) 15 Have a few days at skate park (5) 16 As support, use skinny leg (4,2) 20 Dancer for one popular in scarlet always (8) 21 A lamb chop? (7) 22 Former army head smokes (4) 25 Coal say in chimney left to the end (4) 29 Manage what deli may supply (4,4) 33 Sea having a unifying motif (6) 34 Teenager cleaned out in pathetic fiddle (5) 35 Transport apparently good army sections (5) 36 May shortly point out a high platform (7) 37 A case in Finland progressively diminished (6) 39 Symbolic ribbons with shore-bird fancier's motto? (4-5) 40 Inhale drug, setting note in type (5)

Down

2 Escaped, not at first deceived (6) 3 Skill in story books (6)

4 Having made comparison, prefer Edward (7) 5 One singing about bird on lake? Not so fast! (10) 6 Cutting one cactus into bits (7) 7 Go mad as result of committing serious foul? (3,3) 8 Greek goddesses in Ireland? It is so (7) 9 Resentment heard from private soldier (6) 15 Man ran out of adrenalin, collapsing (6) 17 Live by a church, the principal side facing the sea (5-5) 18 In worst cases a failure to turn up after exercise (7) 19 Watched short film about sheep (6) 23 Sharp change of direction for extreme socialist (4,4) 24 Beaten up, gets a work-over, from them? (7) 28 A wicket falling, what fixes where bowlers may rest (7) 29 Gloomy doctrine boy is about to accept (6) 30 Behold a born debtor (6)

A first prize of a £30 John Lewis voucher and two runners-up prizes of £20 vouchers for the first correct solutions opened on 31 August. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2765, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Name

Address

Email

SOLUTION TO 2762: KEYS OF THE KINGDOM

The uncled lights are ten of the better-known of Scotland's almost 800 islands.

First prize Mydrim Jones, London WC1

Runners-up David Andrews, Surrey; Jo Anson, Birmingham

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Food

Currying favour

Angus Colwell

One of the things I find most confusing is the practice of going for a curry when you're hammered. Having tried this with friends a couple of times, I have concluded that anyone who likes the pints-then-curry act is a liar or feels so awful regularly that the feeling afterwards is nothing abnormal. There is no type of food I dislike more than bad Indian: the places where a vindaloo means three scoops of curry powder and a rogan josh means two; where onion is undetectable in the sunflower oil bhaji. The last time I went to a bad curry house after drinking, I left the place with a curious sensation, a suspicion that my small intestine had been pushed up into my oesophagus, that a layer of ghee had clogged up my stomach acid pumps, that if I were to take a swig of water then it would just immediately splash

No serious eater is properly accomplished without having discovered an Indian place that no one else knows about

out of my mouth, and that a part of my stomach was in danger of getting trapped in a door. Specifically, of the off-licence over the road.

Cantonese and Turkish food are much, much better for post-drinking. Stir-fried noodles soak up lager very well, while every single Turkish restaurant in the country has contrived to be a 7/10, so you know there won't be any nasty surprises.

And yet Indian food at the elite level is perhaps better than anything else. No serious eater is properly accomplished without having discovered an Indian place that no one else knows about. My dad is one of those with this Indian bug: he even had a phase of growing his own 'ghost chillis'. On a holiday to India when I was a kid, he ordered a laal maas every night, concluding that none was as good as the one he liked at the now closed Shikara in South Kensington. He has been looking for a good Indian ever since and texted me the other week to say he'd found one: Marlbank Indian Cuisine, near Malvern, an area he says is an 'undiscovered gem' because it's 'just one hour too far for London weekend tossers to bother'.

The cravings started as soon as I got that message. But where to go? I'd heard things about Koyal in Surbiton, debatably in or outside London. Andy Hayler, a diligent gourmand who has

visited every three-star Michelin restaurant in the world, says that it's better than any of the Indian food in central London. I suggested going with a former colleague, who's from Surbiton and of course a traitor for leaving this magazine.

We started with hara pyaz (£8.50), which were spinach fritters: these were fried well and the hari chutney was good, but I didn't quite get the vegetal depth you want from spinach. Garlic tiger prawns (£13) had been pelted with Kashmiri chilli and marinade, to the point where it could have been anything under there. The lamb chops (£12 for one) were superb, so if you're a lamb chop ultra, then start your car.

Masala butter chicken (£16) was creamy but not cripplingly so: neither tomato nor butter dominated. It would have been good if I'd tasted it before I'd burned my tongue on the tadka dal (£7.50), which was too spicy. You may also find that your constitution can take the wild boar vindaloo (£19) better than mine.

We then indulged in a rarity: dessert at an Indian restaurant. The kala jamun (£6.50) – fried cottage cheese dumplings in syrup – were wonderful, but on the train home I couldn't help but think: 'Still not quite found it...'

Koyal, 59-63 Brighton Rd, Surbiton KT6 5LR; tel: 0208 399 5533.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. I have a good relationship with a neighbour. She has a labrador and I have a Jack Russell. If I cannot walk my dog she will do it and vice versa. Yesterday my daughter visited unexpectedly and was at the top of the house when she heard my neighbour open the front door and call my dog for his walk. Five minutes later she heard the dog being returned to the house. I don't want to fall out with my neighbour but I would always walk her labrador for at least 45 minutes and my dog needs

a proper walk every day. How should I proceed? – N.B., Stockbridge

A. Fitness trackers for dogs are all the rage – attached to the collar, they count steps and provide GPS tracking. Buy one (roughly £60) and show it to your neighbour, along with the wall diary on which you are now going to be recording his step count. Suggest she buys one for her own dog. This measure should pre-empt any future temptation to 'short change' your Jack Russell.

Q. I was recently ticked off by a lady of some status for saying that I had been invited grouse shooting. She led me to understand that the expression is 'to shoot grouse'. Is this, in fact, correct? If so, I have been

in error for more than 40 years. Does the same rule apply to pheasant, partridge, duck, snipe, etc. Perhaps it exempts vermin? Please might you advise. – N.C., Stanton Saint Bernard, Wiltshire

A. I addressed your question to two sportsmen of status. One, aged 70, says he talks of being invited to shoot grouse, pheasant, duck, etc. His son, aged 30, says he talks of being invited grouse, pheasant, or duck shooting. The two agree however that both expressions are these days acceptable. This kind of pedantry, while enjoyable, is now irrelevant where shooting is concerned since the bulk of those who can afford to take a shoot were never familiar with what was, or was not, a solecism.

Q. I'm thrilled to be invited to a Scottish house party next week but I hear my hosts have a tradition where after breakfast guests are given baps and a choice of fillings and invited to make their own picnic lunches. I don't want to draw attention to myself by just taking the meats and salads but I am desperately trying to avoid wheat. What should I do? – Name and address withheld

A. Load a bap like everyone else but secretly bring a supply of Nairn's gluten-free original oatcakes and a disposable spoon. Discreetly leave the bap behind for local seagulls and use the oatcakes to add bulk to your fillings. No one will notice.

Write to Dear Mary at dearmary@spectator.co.uk

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SPECTATOR WINE | JONATHAN RAY

Everyone loves Rioja. And if they don't, they should. They're such drinker-friendly wines, made with love and care in – largely – immaculately run, family-owned wineries, and only ever released when judged to be ready to crack open and knock back.

They're also superb value compared with Bordeaux 'n' Burgundy. I mean, when did you last buy a 2006 claret of any standing for less than 25 quid? Well, we've a glorious 2006 Rioja here for just £23.50.

I was joined in the garden in choosing my selection from Mr Wheeler by the ever-gasping Mrs Ray and her sister, Felicity, who professed not to be thirsty, but she might manage a drop if a drop was going. Well, they're peas in a pod these two and, despite their focus drifting somewhat on occasion – gosh they can chat! – I couldn't open the bottles fast enough.

2020 Terroir de Zinio, Tempranillo Reserva (1) is brand new to Mr Wheeler's list although they've worked with Zinio Bodegas – a highly regarded, 200-strong growers' cooperative in the heart of Rioja Alta – for more than 20 years. 100 per cent Tempranillo, with two weeks' skin contact maceration, malolactic fermentation and 18 months in French and American oak, it's robust and spicy with plenty of rustic dark fruit with herbs and, hmmm, we couldn't decide whether it was coffee or chocolate on the finish. £21.50 down from £22.95.

We offered the 2006 Urbina Rioja Reserva Especial (2) from family-owned, 150-year-old Bodegas Urbina, last year and, although fully mature then, I reckon it's even finer with the extra nine months in bottle. A blend of old vine Tempranillo with touches of Mazuelo and Graciano, it's rich and fruity with, according to Mrs Ray, plenty of soft, red strawberries and earthy, autumnal notes on the finish. £23 down from £24.95.

From a single vineyard on a bend of the River Ebro, the 2021 CVNE Contino Reserva (3) is a complete delight. I was at the estate – founded by the Compañía Vinícola del Norte de España and the Pérez Villata family more than 50 years ago – in April and fell in love all over again with its wines, helped in no small part by a shirt-popping, magnum-fuelled lunch in the château. We drank plenty of this, of course, a Tempranillo

blend, seasoned with Mazuelo, Graciano and Garnacha, and I can vouch for how well it goes with slow-roasted garlic and rosemary-studded leg and confit shoulder of lamb. £23.50 down from £27.95.

The 2004 Urbina Gran Reserva Especial (4) had both Mrs R. and Felicity firmly in what they termed their 'Rioja zone'. They both loftily declared they'd spot it as a 2004 anywhere but only because they'd copped a

Riojas are such drinker-friendly wines, made with love and care in – largely – family-owned wineries

squint at the label when I wasn't looking. We all agreed, though, that it was worth its 95 points and being termed 'outstanding' at a recent Decanter retrospective, and we loved its teasing mix of plum/cherry fruit, vanilla and savoury beef bouillon on the finish. £28 down from £29.95.

CVNE's artisanally produced Imperial wines are only ever made in exceptional years and the 2020 CVNE Imperial Reserva (5) is a cracker, made from the hand-picked fruit of 40-year-old vines, fermented, aged

and blended with almost obsessive care. Once I'd finally managed to interrupt the sisters' debate about outside lighting and the relative merits of Aldi's special buys vs Dunelm, we got properly stuck in. Mrs Ray loved the soft black fruit, Felicity the whispers of vanilla and I the remarkable concentration of flavour and, well, its sheer elegance. £24.50 down from £29.95.

Unsurprisingly, the 2018 CVNE Viña Real Gran Reserva Selección Especial (6) was everyone's favourite. 'This is what Rioja is all about!' exclaimed Mrs R., beaming. Felicity just sighed happily and gulped noisily. A 95 per cent Tempranillo/5 per cent Graciano blend from the finest plots, aged for two years in barrel and three in bottle, it's soft, smooth and mellow with sweet, ripe plums and prunes, leather, tobacco and the gentlest of tannins. Its 'Especial' moniker is only ever accorded in the finest of vintages, of which this is clearly one. £29 down from £31.95.

The mixed case contains two bottles of each wine and delivery, as ever, is free.

To find out more about our Winemaker Lunches, Masterclasses and Wine Tours, visit spectator.com/tastings

ORDER FORM Spectator Wine Offer

www.mrwheelerwine.com/spectator

Mr Wheeler, Estate Office, Park Lane BC, Langham, Colchester, Essex CO4 5WR tel: 01206 713560; email: hello@mrwheelerwine.com

Prices in form are per case of 12 unless otherwise stated

		List	Club
Red	1 2020 Terroir de Zinio, Tempranillo Reserva, 14%	£275.40	£258.00
	2 2006 Urbina Reserva Especial, 14%	£299.40	£276.00
	3 2021 Contino Reserva, 14%	£335.40	£282.00
	4 2004 Urbina Gran Reserva Especial, 14%	£359.40	£336.00
	5 2020 CVNE Imperial Reserva, 14%	£359.40	£294.00
	6 2018 CVNE Viña Real Selección Especial, 13.5%	£383.40	£348.00
Mixed	8 Mixed case (two each of wines 1-6)	£335.40	£299.00

Prices include VAT and delivery on the British mainland. This offer, which is subject to availability, closes on 26 September 2026. Payment should be made either by phone or direct from the website (see details above or scan the QR code to the right). View the full list at www.mrwheelerwine.com/spectator

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No sacred cows

Say it loud: I'm bald and proud

Toby Young

My father, Michael, who was a sociologist among other things, was once asked by a drug company to do some market research into a pill it was developing that could change skin colour from black to white. The company hoped it might go some way to tackling racial prejudice. After Michael interviewed some prospective customers in south London, he concluded there wouldn't be much demand. The problem, they told him, was that it would leave their features unchanged so they'd end up looking like albinos – and there was no reason to think they'd experience any less racism. On balance, they'd prefer to remain as they were.

As a bald man, I've always felt the same way about hair transplants. Admittedly, it's a slightly insensitive comparison – bald men plainly suffer far more discrimination than black men – but the same principle applies. It's bleedin' obvious when someone's had the operation. I don't just mean they're bald one minute, then, after a three-day trip to Turkey, return with their head covered in bandages, only to emerge a few weeks later with a thin layer of hair. I mean the results of the procedure invariably look a bit weird – more like a grid composed of large red dots than hair follicles. 'Plugs' is a better word than 'transplant' because the dots look like tiny flowerpots that someone has tried to

There's something unmanly about constantly fussing over your hair

plant a few hairs in, and not always successfully. A trichologist once described the effect to me as resembling 'autumn leaves scattered on an empty carpark'.

Unfortunately, my sons don't see it that way. Aged 21, 19 and 18, they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, losing their hair. Now, I have long seen early-onset male pattern baldness as an advantage in that you don't have much time to develop an attachment to your flowing locks – hair today, gone tomorrow. By my late twenties I was reconciled to my fate and haven't worried about it since, saving a fortune on barbers and shampoo. But my sons are less sanguine about their imminent loss and are all talking seriously of making the trip to Istanbul.

I've tried telling them that a transplant will fool no one, but they claim the technology has come on in leaps and bounds and point to various celebrity role models: Wayne Rooney, Robbie Williams, Antonio Conte. Yes, I concede, they may look OK, but they can afford the best hair clinics in the world. You'll only be able to pay for the follicle equivalent of a snake oil salesman. And what happens as your hairline continues to recede, leaving a barren patch between your plugs and your natural hair? Are you going to keep going back year after year?

Even if, by some miracle, you don't look like pincushions, I say, aren't you embarrassed to go through a lengthy and painful surgical procedure for purely cosmetic reasons? That's rich coming from a man on Mounjaro, they retort. But that has medical benefits, I splutter. There's growing evidence that tirzepatide reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease.

'What about your teeth? Didn't

you get them whitened?' 'That was for a magazine article.' 'Maybe the first time. What about the second? Come on, Dad. You've spent as much money on improving your appearance as we'll spend on hair transplants.'

But all those things are reversible, I point out. If I lose too much weight or my teeth are too dazzling, I can just do nothing for a few months and everything will return to normal. A disastrous hair transplant, by contrast, is like getting some ghastly tattoo in cursive script – which, incidentally, I'm also trying to talk them out of.

And why do they think having hair will make them more attractive to the opposite sex? Haven't they heard that women find bald men sexy? What about Jason Statham? What about your dear old dad? He did all right, didn't he? To this, they claim that Caroline is an outlier and mention the number of good-looking women on dating apps who say they aren't interested in men without hair. 'We're already short-arses thanks to you,' they say. 'This is the one genetic legacy we can do something about.'

Finally, I appeal to their masculine pride. There's something unmanly about constantly fussing over your hair. Think of how much freezer you'll be if you just shave it off and have done with it? It's a way of advertising to the world that you're not some vainglorious popinjay, but a real man bursting with testosterone. Say it loud: I'm bald and I'm proud.

This argument is considered so weak that it's met with head-shaking and chuckles. I'm afraid there's no keeping them from those snake oil salesmen. And who knows? If the operations are a success, I might just join them.

MICHAEL HEATH

60

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The Wiki Man

Finding my voice

Rory Sutherland

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse.

You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.

The flat bed was an epiphany. Not only was it a proper bed, but it restored territorial integrity to the passenger. And you could finally get to the loo without ending up on the Sex Offenders' Register.

Looking back, this was the perfect example of what happens when everybody pursues the wrong benchmark, and where a behaviour that is

It's far easier to be polite speaking at 150 words a minute than when typing at 40

individually rational becomes collectively catastrophic.

All the while, from 1983 onwards, a similarly infectious stupidity was infiltrating business life at ground level. This was the cancerous spread of the keyboard.

Youngsters see the keyboard as traditional office furniture. It isn't. Yes, Qwerty is 150 years old, but the practice of everyone typing their own words in a professional setting dates only to about 1983, when spreadsheets began putting computers on managers' desks, along with a keyboard and a screen. Before that, typing was strictly secretarial.

The spreadsheet required people to see immediately on screen the effects of every input. This low latency, the ability to see changes immediately and to edit on the go, led people to spurn the typing pool. Professional typists achieving 90 words per minute were replaced by highly paid executives typing at 20 – the division of labour in reverse.

And because we didn't have a frame of reference, we never noticed how bad keyboards were, and how they got progressively worse. Those clicky IBM keyboards were delightful compared with the touch screen keyboard on a modern mobile phone. But the same Nash equilibrium applies – that reclining seat problem all over again: when combined with email, the curt, ill-considered, asynchronous approach to communication was imposed on everyone. Decisions once made around a table in minutes are

now eked out over weeks by two-finger typists. The loss in productivity is disastrous but invisible.

Salvation may be at hand. Basic voice dictation never delivered, but put a language model behind the microphone and you have something that's better than a dictation machine: like St Paul, Cicero, John Milton and Barbara Cartland, you now have an amanuensis. One that knows how to spell Slavoj Zizek's name better than I do, that knows that Llanelli is a market town in Wales and that gets rid of all the 'ers' and 'ums', the vocal fillers and interjections – I dictated all of this as a test.

I use something called Wispr Flow, and it has changed my life. In the interests of transparency, I am now a tiny investor in the business – but I became one because, like that chap in the Remington adverts, I liked the product.

The implications of the displacement of the keyboard will be immense, and I shall write, or rather pronounce about this more in the future. But one of my first discoveries is that it's far easier to be polite speaking at 150 words a minute than when typing at 40. Some part of the nastiness of the internet comes from the fact that rudeness and brevity go together.

As the old joke goes: why are there more Rangers supporters than Celtic supporters in Glasgow? Because it's a lot easier to chant 'Fuck the Pope!' than 'Fuck the Chief Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church!'.

ANCIENT AND MODERN

Political animals

If the great Rod Liddle was a satirist, as many columnists have suggested, he was not one in the Roman tradition. They invented satire, which often worked by contrasting a corrupt Rome with the golden years of the past.

But Rod was a political animal, like the Athenian comedian Aristophanes (5th C BC), whose plays attacked the living, like Socrates, and even his audience, if he felt they were being too easily deceived by politicians he hated, such as Cleon.

In 424 BC, he imagined the Athenian state as a household, headed up by Demos ('The

People'). Demos is served by two slaves (= politicians), who are fed up that a foul-mouthed new slave, Bullshitter (Cleon), has taken total control of their master.

But they find an oracle saying that Bullshitter will be displaced by a Tripe-Seller, i.e. someone who will outdo Bullshitter in the revolting behaviour the Demos appreciate. So they find one, telling him he will become great. 'T-S: But I don't deserve

to be great. Slave: What do you mean, not deserve to be great? Not got any secret virtues on your conscience, have you? I mean, you're not of good birth, are you? T-S: Blimey, no! Scum of the earth, me. Slave: Best thing that can happen to anyone who wants a future in politics. T-S: But 'ang on. I 'ardly bin to school. I got no learning. I can only just abh't read and write. Slave: Shame – much better if you couldn't. Look, you don't think politics is for the educated or anyone of good character, do you? No, it's for illiterate oafs like you!'

Demos demands a contest

between Bullshitter and Tripe-seller, revelling in their obscene, grotesque and fawning exchanges. ('O Demos, when you blow your nose, please wipe your fingers on my head.' 'No, on mine.') The Tripe-seller wins, telling Demos that, however brilliant he is at home, he turns into a gaping idiot in the Assembly. The contrite Demos agrees to reform.

The play won the comic prize. But a few weeks later, the people in Assembly elected Cleon to a top executive position. How Rod would have laughed. — Peter Jones

61

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Seen elsewhere

All aboard the Love Boat

Helen D'Vorcee

As seen in the Times

I'm fiddling with my phone when a news notification pops up. Another independent school has closed, the latest atrocity in Labour's unrelenting Khmer Rouge-style anti-middle-class genocide. Seething, I knew it was high time for me to spend a few weeks away from Britain, Andy Burnham and mad, bad Ed Miliband.

But where to go? Husband Simon's place in the south of France? No, much too hot. Sardinia? No, can't risk running into Georgia, not after what happened in Sexy Fish on New Year's Eve in 2012. Then I remember. Emilia Cash-Barings has been raving about this saucy sex cruise she's just been on. A week of pure hedonism that made Tiberius's palace on Capri look like the Women's Institute AGM.

And so, about a week later, I find myself aboard a ship bound for Genoa with 650 other sex-crazed passengers. Wandering down from my room, my racy Boden set drawing eyes, I come to a series of doors, each prom-

A week of hedonism that made Tiberius's palace look like the AGM of the Women's Institute

ising different attractions. 'Leather dungeon', reads the legend above one. 'Sultan's Harem', promises another. Then there is 'Bum-slap salon', 'Nero's pleasure garden', 'Toyboy spanking chamber'. I decide to start with something vanilla: Nero's pleasure garden it is.

Entering the room, I'm confronted with a grisly tableau. In the middle of an unfurnished space that looks like a school gym, I see a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer lying prone and greased. An unshapely looking man, naked but for a Venetian mask, smacks him on the hindquarters with a cricket bat.

A gaggle of straw-haired women dressed as flamingos, a hen-do of the Blackpool variety, are taking turns putting condoms on bananas to hoots of merriment, punctuated by amiable chatter about house prices in Letchworth Garden City. Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' is playing through a tinny speaker. No actual sex seems to be going on.

I gaze on in dismay. Suddenly there is a tap on my shoulder. I whirl around to see a man of middle years dressed in motley, who introduces himself as 'The Demon Jester'. The Jester turns out to be Neil, 54, a tax adviser from Taunton. 'It's fantastic to be here,' he says. 'I got on board and was immediately, like, 'Let's get this party started!' Good grief.

He asks what my 'kinks and boundaries' are, and would I mind if he kissed me. I shrink from him, making for the door.

Twenty minutes later I am picking

aimlessly at an immense plate of mac 'n' cheese from the buffet. This isn't Atkins, but I'm past the point of caring. I start thinking wistfully about my latest conquest back home: that awfully sweet young man who kept banging on about how none of us reads books any more and how monkeys are about to start using iPhones. I'd then taken him back to the mews flat in South Ken and shown him the birds and the sodding bees. Can't learn that from a book or a screen.

A young gent sits at my table and asks what I do for a living; when I say 'journalist', he calls me 'low-agency' and asks why I'm not 'London-maxxing' as his hand works its way up my thigh. I throw my glass of 7Up in his face but then the mothering instinct kicks in. 'Don't worry, I'm not going to #MeToo you - women of my vintage just give chaps like you a slap and tell them to sod off.'

Sunset finds me removing the tarp from one of the lifeboats. As I lower the craft into the water, the Demon Jester appears. 'Listen, you just need to get into the spirit of things. Let's face it, none of us is getting any younger.' I glare at him, but he moves off after the intercom announces that 'Naked Quidditch' is about to start.

Soon I am rowing hard for Antibes as the ship disappears behind me. It's brilliant that we're all terribly French about bonking these days, but perhaps this goes hand-in-hand with the chic style, and the slimness that comes from diets of cigarettes and black coffee. Britain, I fear, is just too pale. Just too wobbly.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Yoga

'Well, we all have areas of ignorance,' said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realising that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin.

Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium BC. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life

force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

In perhaps a parallel area of meaning, religio ('religion') was related by early Christian writers to religare, 'that which ties believers to God', though Cicero connected it to religere 'to read over again' - to observe rites carefully.

The Indo-European word that eventually gave us yoke had

been supplying similar words to many related languages. In Greek, 'yoke' was zugon; in Latin it was iugum. Even the Finns seem to have borrowed the word in the form jukka to mean 'crossbar of a sledge'.

Meanwhile yoga slept happily in the Sanskrit vocabulary of Indian religions, until western fashion took up yoga classes. Yoga mats were first noticed by name in 1962, a momentous year that also gave us The Yogi Bear Show.

Does the celebrated bear derive his name, for an obvious reason, from yogi, an adept in

yoga? The Oxford English Dictionary is cautious. 'It is often said that the character was so named with allusion to the name of Lawrence Peter 'Yogi' Berra (1925-2015), a US baseball player known for his witticisms, but this is difficult to substantiate and has been denied by the creators.'

Berra got his nickname from a friend who thought his stance waiting cross-legged resembled a yogi in a film. It is hard to think that the bear of Jellystone Park did not share in Berra's yogic sobriquet.

— Dot Wordsworth

62

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制度与权力批判深度研判：The Spectator (2026-08-15)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有国际政治、经济、社会与文化报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在思想史、文化政治与制度伦理层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【右翼政治的碎片化与“表演性”权力博弈】 [F2_16-F3_26]

   • 事件简述：奈杰尔·法拉奇在克拉克顿补选中的预期胜利被描述为“空洞”，其领导的改革党在面对保守党的反弹（巴德诺克崛起）与极右翼（鲁珀特·洛）的侧翼挤压中陷入困境。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：探讨政治领导力在“媒体景观”与“制度权力”之间的断裂。法拉奇的困境揭示了民粹主义话语在转化为实际治理能力时的失效，以及权力如何在“表演性竞选”与“实质性执政”之间产生异化。

2. 【财富传承的制度焦虑与阶级闭环】 [F1_10-F1_13]

   • 事件简述：针对资产在200万至750万英镑之间家庭面临的高额遗产税，在伦敦顶级会员俱乐部赫林汉姆俱乐部举办针对成功家庭的财务应对活动。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：揭示了法律制度（遗产税）与社会资本（会员俱乐部）之间的共生关系。这种“避税知识”的私密传递，实际上是在制度缝隙中构建一种非正式的阶级防御机制，强化了社会结构的固化。

3. 【身份政治与社会认知的极化】 [F2_22 🔍]

   • 事件简述：鲁珀特·洛（Rupert Lowe）结盟的激进民族主义者否认国王的英国身份，并暗示法拉奇被“犹太利益集团”收买。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：分析极右翼内部的认知撕裂。当政治认同从“政策主张”转向“阴谋论”与“身份纯洁性”审查时，政治讨论如何被彻底去理性化，演变为一种基于排他性认知的部落主义。

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▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：【景观政治与权力真空：民粹主义领导力的表演性危机】

奈杰尔·法拉奇在克拉克顿补选中的预期胜利 [F2_17 🔍]，呈现出一种极具讽刺意味的政治景观：一个旨在挑战建制派的领导人，在一个被对手抵制、甚至出现“垃圾桶头”讽刺人物的闹剧中回归。这揭示了当代右翼政治中一个深刻的悖论：民粹主义的权力基础建立在“反建制”的表演性话语之上，但其最终的政治目标却是夺取建制派的权力核心。

法拉奇的现实困境在于，他成功地创造了关于“小船移民”和“生活标准”的愤怒话语 [F2_18 🔍]，但这种话语在转化为制度化权力时遭遇了严重的“脱节”。当他试图通过补选重新获得势头时，他面对的是一个已经完成自我迭代的对手——安迪·伯纳姆 [F2_19 🔍]，后者在镜头前的自在与对权力行使的清晰认知，实际上是对法拉奇“表演性政治”的降维打击。法拉奇陷入了某种“话语陷阱”：他越是强调人民对抗建制，就越是在制度内部显得像一个边缘化的“班级小丑” [F1_8 🔍]。

从韦伯的“魅力型权威”（Charismatic Authority）理论来看，法拉奇的权力来源于其个人特质与追随者情感的共鸣。然而，魅力型权威必须经历“常规化”过程才能转化为稳定的制度权力。法拉奇的失败在于他拒绝或无法完成这一过程。他更倾向于在媒体景观中扮演一个永恒的挑战者，而非一个能够制定具体政府计划的执政者 [F3_26 🔍]。这种对“竞选状态”的迷恋，使其个人私怨与权力野心阻碍了右翼政治的实质性整合 [F3_25 🔍]。

当代地缘政治的复杂性（如特朗普的鲁莽外交 [F2_19 🔍]）进一步反向质询了这种民粹逻辑：当全球治理进入一个高度专业化且充满风险的阶段，单纯依赖“愤怒”和“直觉”的领导力已成为负资产。法拉奇的危机实际上是“景观政治”在面对真实治理危机时的全面溃败。权力不再仅仅是关于谁能赢得最多的掌声，而是关于谁能在这个碎片化的时代，在制度的废墟上重建一套可运行的治理逻辑。

专题二：【制度缝隙中的阶级防御：社会资本对法律约束的对冲机制】

在《旁观者》关于遗产税的报道中 [F1_10 🔍]，一个极具社会学研究价值的现象被揭示：针对资产在200万至750万英镑之间家庭面临的高额税负，相应的解决方案并非在公共政策层面寻求改变，而是在伦敦顶级会员俱乐部——赫林汉姆俱乐部（The Hurlingham Club）的私密环境中通过专业活动进行传递 [F1_11, F1_12]。

这一现象揭示了法律制度（遗产税）与社会资本（会员俱乐部）之间的一种共生且对冲的关系。遗产税作为一种国家层面的再分配制度，旨在通过法律强制手段削弱阶级财富的代际累积。然而，赫林汉姆俱乐部这类顶级会员组织提供了一个“非正式制度”空间，使得特定阶层能够通过私密渠道获取避税知识、财务策略以及社会资源。这种知识的传递并非公开的法律咨询，而是一种基于阶级认同的“内部互助”。

从布尔迪厄的“资本形式”理论来看，这里发生了从“经济资本”到“社会资本”再转化为“文化资本”（专业避税知识）的循环。当法律制度试图通过经济手段（税收）进行干预时，精英阶层通过社会资本（俱乐部网络）构建起一道无形的防御墙。这种防御机制的隐蔽性在于，它并不直接挑战法律，而是在法律的执行缝隙中寻找最优解。

这种机制导致了一个深刻的社会后果：法律的普适性在不同阶层之间产生了实质性的分化。对于缺乏此类社会资本的家庭，法律是刚性的约束；而对于能够进入赫林汉姆俱乐部等空间的家庭，法律则变成了可以通过专业知识进行“管理”的变量。最终，这种私密知识的传递不仅是对税收制度的对冲，更是通过构建一种不可见的阶级闭环，进一步强化了社会结构的固化，使得阶级流动在制度与非正式制度的双重挤压下变得更加困难。

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▌ 面向学者的开放性思想追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Scholarly Inquiry)

1. 【关于权力异化的追问】：在社交媒体驱动的“景观政治”时代，政治领导力是否正在经历从“治理能力”向“流量操纵能力”的根本性转移？如果“表演性胜利”成为常态，传统的代议制民主制度如何应对这种实质性权力真空？

2. 【关于阶级防御的追问】：分析顶级会员俱乐部在法律制度压力下所扮演的“非正式制度”角色，探讨社会资本如何通过私密知识的传递，在法律的缝隙中构建起一套不可见的阶级防御体系。

3. 【关于认知极化的追问】：研究极右翼内部从“政策分歧”转向“身份纯洁性”审查（如对犹太利益集团的指控 [F2_22 🔍]）的演变路径，探讨阴谋论如何取代理性论证成为政治动员的核心逻辑。

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The Spectator (2026-08-15)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在生活世界痛感、情感政治动员与制度理性冲突层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【右翼政治的碎片化与“闹剧化”补选】 [F2_17, F2_23]

   • 事件简述：奈杰尔·法拉奇在克拉克顿补选中预期获胜，但竞争对手包括一名头顶垃圾桶的编剧，且其政党面临内部挤压与外部抵制。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：探讨严肃的政治权力诉求如何被转化为一种“嗨-德-嗨”式的闹剧（Farce），分析选民的深层愤怒在被符号化动员后，如何因缺乏制度化承接而滑向虚无主义的嘲讽。

2. 【财富阶层的遗产税焦虑与社交隔离】 [F1_10, F1_11, F1_12]

   • 事件简述：针对资产在 200 万至 750 万英镑之间家庭的高额遗产税问题，在顶级会员俱乐部赫林汉姆俱乐部举办针对成功家庭的财务应对活动。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：分析制度性的税收理性（财富再分配）与成功家庭对于“家族延续”的情感执念之间的冲突，以及这种冲突如何通过高端社交空间的物理隔离被转化为一种阶层内部的互助共情。

3. 【民粹领导人的个人野心与政党使命的撕裂】 [F3_25, F3_26]

   • 事件简述：改革英国党内部由詹姆斯·奥尔和丹尼·克鲁格组建的专业团队致力于制定政府计划，但该党整体仍处于法拉奇个人阴影之下，且法拉奇在“执政”与“评论”之间摇摆。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：剖析一个政治组织在追求制度化权力（Logos）与依赖个人魅力型领导（Pathos）之间的内在矛盾，以及这种矛盾如何阻碍变革性政府的实现。

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▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：【政治动员的符号化陷阱：从“人民之怒”到“补选闹剧”的理性坍塌】

在当代英国右翼政治的微观景观中，奈杰尔·法拉奇的克拉克顿补选呈现出一种极具张力的 Logos 与 Pathos 的错位。从制度理性（Institutional Logos）来看，补选本应是民主程序中对民意波动的量化反馈机制，旨在通过选票将社会不满转化为议会席位 [F2_17 🔍]。然而，这种程序理性在现实中被一种极端的“符号化政治”所解构：当竞争对手出现头顶垃圾桶的编剧时，政治参与被简化为一种行为艺术，补选的严肃性被消解为一种《嗨-德-嗨》式的闹剧 [F2_23 🔍]。

这种现象背后是生活世界真实痛感的严重异化。改革党最初的崛起，精准地捕捉到了公众对“小船移民”和“生活标准下降”的深切愤怒 [F2_18 🔍]。这种 Pathos 是具象的，是底层民众面对制度失效时的生存焦虑。然而，当这种愤怒被法拉奇转化为一种“人民对抗建制派”的宏大叙事时，它在制度端并未获得有效的政策转化，反而陷入了领导者个人私怨与媒体表演的循环 [F3_25 🔍]。制度理性将选民的愤怒简化为民调百分比（如曾超过 30% 的支持率 [F2_18 🔍]），而这种简化导致了严重的“话语温度差”：官方话语在讨论“未申报捐款”的议会调查 [F2_17 🔍]，而生活世界则在经历一种被抛弃的绝望。

这种辩证摩擦揭示了当代民粹主义的内在悖论：它依赖于对非理性情感的动员，但其最终目标却是获取理性的权力。当法拉奇在“执政”与“评论”之间摇摆时 [F3_26 🔍]，他实际上是在消费选民的痛感而非解决痛感。这种将政治诉求“娱乐化”的倾向，实际上是一种隐性的理性坍塌——当愤怒不再指向具体的制度改良，而仅仅指向一个“垃圾桶”符号的嘲讽时，社会心理的韧性被极大地削弱，取而代之的是一种深层的政治虚无主义。

专题二：【阶层认同的物理空间化：遗产税焦虑与精英社交的防御机制】

在财富分配的制度理性（Logos）与个体生存情感（Pathos）之间，存在着一个由物理空间强化的防御机制。针对资产在 200 万至 750 万英镑之间家庭支付最高额遗产税的制度事实 [F1_10 🔍]，其背后不仅是财务计算的逻辑，更是关于“家族传承”与“阶层滑落”的深层焦虑。

这种焦虑在赫林汉姆俱乐部（The Hurlingham Club）这一特定空间中得到了具象化 [F1_11, F1_12]。作为伦敦最顶级的会员俱乐部之一，该空间通过物理上的准入限制，将一种制度性的税收压力转化为一种阶层内部的共情体验。在这里，理性的财务应对方案（如通过 wealthlive.co.uk 预订的专业活动 [F1_13 🔍]）与感性的社交仪式（如英国葡萄酒品鉴 [F1_12 🔍]）相结合。这种结合产生了一种独特的心理效应：它将国家层面的再分配理性，在微观空间内重构为一种“共同面对威胁”的阶层认同。

这种辩证关系揭示了精英阶层在面对制度压力时的应对逻辑：他们并不直接在公共领域挑战税收理性，而是通过构建一个隔离的、具有高度情感共鸣的社交场域，来抵消制度理性带来的心理冲击。在这种空间中，财富不再仅仅是数字，而是一种被共同守护的身份符号。这种物理隔离不仅是社交习惯，更是一种情感防御机制，旨在通过强化内部认同来对冲外部制度带来的不确定性。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Ethical & Sociological Inquiry)

1. 【关于“政治娱乐化”的社会心理机制研究】：探讨当严肃的政治诉求被转化为“闹剧式”的符号消费（如头顶垃圾桶的候选人）时，这种现象是如何在潜意识中消解民众的政治效能感，并最终导致公共交往领域（Public Sphere）的碎片化的？
2. 【魅力型领导与制度化政党的张力分析】：研究在改革英国党中，专业技术团队的“政府计划” [F3_26 🔍] 如何在个人魅力型领导（法拉奇）的阴影下被边缘化，以及这种结构性矛盾如何影响民粹政党的权力转化效率？
3. 【阶层隔离与情感共情的空间社会学】：分析如赫林汉姆俱乐部 [F1_11 🔍] 这种物理隔离的顶级社交空间，如何通过构建一种“共同受害者”的情感叙事（如针对遗产税的共同焦虑），来强化阶层内部的认同并抵御外部的制度理性（再分配政策）？