Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Hilary Spurling and AL Kennedy celebrate the life and work of Mervyn Peake, who was born 100 years ago next Saturday.
Editor of the Times James Harding talks to his predecessor William Rhys Mogg about the latter’s memoirs (£).
‘What did you think of Ted Heath? “Well, I liked him, but he could be appallingly difficult.” That said, “He was a serious and important figure to a degree which people don’t at the moment realise”. What about Harold Wilson, you didn’t seem to have much time for him? “He was frightfully dodgy at the way he handled difficult issues.” Rees-Mogg remembers a dinner in 1966 at which the Labour Prime Minister suggested that he would approve the sale of The Times to the owners of The Sunday Times if the paper sacked its then troublesome political correspondent. (The sale was approved; Rees-Mogg was appointed Editor; Harold Wilson’s advice on staff changes was ignored.) “There was always this feeling that there was something absurd about what Harold Wilson was up to.”
Jim Callaghan was “a bit lucky to become Prime Minister”. John Major was “indecisive and alienated both wings of his party. He was unlucky in coming after a major prime
minister and not being of that calibre.” Tony Blair seemed, if anything, too appealing. “I always thought there must be something wrong about [the Blair project].” Rees-Mogg ran
into the future PM in the mid-1990s, when both men were changing planes en route to a Bilderberg conference. As they waited for their connection, Blair talked widely. “Everything he
said,” recalls Rees-Mogg, a lifelong Tory, “I approved of. And I knew that I wouldn’t make a good Labour prime minister.”
David Cameron? “Basically favourable … He’s a shrewd professional, probably not a great Prime Minister but a very competent one … I would compare him more to Harold Macmillan
than all the other Conservative prime ministers.”’
Writing in the Guardian, Julian Barnes pays candid tribute to Candide.
‘The acknowledged classics of French literature crossed the Channel at widely differing speeds. Rabelais, for example, took almost a century and a half to be translated; whereas John Florio’s version of Montaigne’s Essays came out only 11 years after the Frenchman’s death. The earliest recorded English translation of Racine’s Phèdre (1677) dates from 1776; whereas the immigration of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses was fast-tracked (French 1782, English 1784), no doubt because of its saucy reputation. On the other hand, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) had to wait until 1900 to find Anglophone readers. Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (French 1834, English 1860), and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (French 1856-7, English 1886) were rather quicker. But with the exception of Laclos, none of these writers could ever have set eyes on an English edition of his text. It was the norm for death to precede translation.
All this makes Voltaire’s Candide even more of an extraordinary case. It was written between July and December 1758 and published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam in January 1759.
That year no fewer than three English translations appeared, shortly followed by the early version that is now most often read, by Tobias Smollett. This formed part of a 25-volume edition of
Voltaire’s works “translated from the French with Notes by Dr Smollett and others” and published between 1761 and 1765. Even the British acknowledged Voltaire as Europe’s most famous
public intellectual, and his Candide as a prime example of literature as news. This philosophical tale may be described as an attack on Leibnitzian optimism – and, more broadly, on all
prepackaged systems of thought and belief – a satire on churches and churchmen, and a pessimistic rumination on human nature and the problem of free will. But it was no fable inhabiting some
make-believe or symbolic location; rather, it was a report on the current state of the world, deliberately set among the headlines of the day.’
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