Liam Scarlett’s enduring legacy: Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake reviewed

Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has been. In 2019, having been accused of unspecified sexual misconduct, the choreographer and his work were cancelled both at Covent Garden and abroad. An internal report into his activities has never been published, so rumours and allegations persist, but the official line exonerated him without explanation. Shockingly, Scarlett killed himself last April.

Now he has been restored, smilingly pictured without mention of any unpleasantness in the programme book for the Royal Ballet’s current revival of his production of Swan Lake. There’s been a chaotic cover-up, and it’s just not good enough.

How much talent did he have? I never sensed creative genius, though his first big success Asphodel Meadows was a perfectly agreeable pastorale. Subsequent efforts such as Frankenstein and Sweet Violets misfired, to put it kindly. Yet there could be no question of his skill and potential (he died when he was barely 35), and my guess is that his largely traditional reading of Swan Lake will prove his enduring legacy.

Quibbles are inevitable. I’m irritated by his emphasis on the dramatically redundant role of the prince’s chum Benno and what amounts to a repetition of the Act One pas de trois in Act Three. Promoting the dastardly sorcerer Von Rothbart to the post of court chamberlain raises more questions than it answers. And the downbeat ending, with Siegfried left carrying a lifeless body, strikes a false note that runs counter to Tchaikovsky’s redemptive music. But there’s plenty of atmosphere and spectacle in John Macfarlane’s designs – audiences get their money’s worth of gilt in Act Three – and Scarlett has honoured what little we know of Petipa and Ivanov’s original conception.

Over the two performances I saw, the company danced it very well indeed. The swan maidens were melancholy spectres in lyrical unison; James Hay and Luca Acri both bounced merrily as the tiresomely ubiquitous Benno; the folkloric shenanigans in the ballroom scene were executed with panache; and Bennet Gartside and Gary Avis channelled their inner mad bad Vlads into a sneery Von Rothbart.

Yasmine Naghdi replaced Marianela Nunez as Odette-Odile for the first performance. Naghdi is technically champion: she jumps as powerfully as she turns, sparking her Odile into a firecracker, but her hard-edged Odette never suggested the wounded, terrified, betrayed creature, all sighs and tears, that Natalia Osipova embodied so movingly two nights later. Naghdi’s Siegfried Vadim Muntagirov was his usual exquisite feline self, nothing exaggerated or effortful as he miraculously eliminated all corners and edges from his immaculately fluent bodily line; drop-dead handsome Reece Clarke partnered Osipova elegantly and conscientiously.

The run continues in repertory until the end of May: of later casts, I’m most intrigued by the pairings of Mayara Magri and Cesar Corrales (22 March) and Lauren Cuthbertson and William Bracewell (10, 13 and 19 May).

In a fortuitous bit of levelling up, one of the Royal’s most stalwart and versatile principals Federico Bonelli has just left the company to become director of the Leeds-based Northern Ballet, succeeding David Nixon who’s been in the post 20 years and made a good job of it. Bonelli will bring not only metropolitan expertise but also intelligence, taste and charm to an ensemble focused on full-length narrative-based work, embracing the classics and adaptations of everything from Dracula to The Great Gatsby. Can dance really add anything to the prose of Scott Fitzgerald? I think not. But Jane Eyre, for instance, was surprisingly successful. The company always dances with gusto and draws a loyal following, very largely female, but Bonelli will need to remedy the shortage of leading dancers with outstanding histrionic gifts.

Northern Ballet’s spring tour features a revival of Kenneth Tindall’s Casanova, first seen in 2017. Skating through the libertine’s life story as related in his memoirs, it is much too plot-heavy. The synopsis in the programme runs close to a thousand words: I think Bonelli should set the limit at a hundred. Nobody could possibly understand all the twists involving cardinals, nuns, castrati and Inquisitors from what we see on stage. A character looking like a fugitive from RuPaul’s Drag Race turns out to be Voltaire.

But the show is superbly lit by Alastair West, magnificently designed by Christopher Oram and fired up by a cheap but effective original score by Kerry Muzzey. Joseph Taylor makes a boyishly engaging Tom Jones of a Casanova, and the company’s one real star Javier Torres offers a brilliant comic cameo as a lascivious aristo. Tindall’s choreography is high-octane if unsubtle. Exotically simulated copulation abounds, and it’s all quite amusing.

Fun, good-natured and schmaltzy: Phantom of the Open reviewed

Phantom of the Open is a comedy-drama telling a true story that would have to be true as no one would believe it. The subject is Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who took up golf at 46 after seeing it on the telly and entered the British Open in 1976, achieving the highest score ever. (‘Does that mean he’s won?’, asked his wife.) Dubbed ‘the world’s worst golfer’, he then hoaxed his way into further Opens, much to the incandescent rage of the snobbish authorities, and you’ll be rooting for him, of course. This is a British underdog film like The Duke – but with some Eddie the Eagle mixed in – and it’s fun and enjoyable and good-natured even if it does play it safe and waltz off into Hallmark schmaltz at the end. Best of all, though, it stars Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins which means it’s immeasurably better than it might have been. (I can’t put a precise figure on this but would guess it’s around 87 per cent better.)

The film is directed by Craig Roberts and written by Simon Farnaby who co-wrote a book about Flitcroft, co-wrote Paddington 2, and who, as an actor, you will recognise from the Horrible Histories troupe. It opens with Flitcroft (Rylance, beset by a set of dentures) about to give a TV interview and asking for his usual refreshment – ‘tea, six sugars’ – before it flashes back to his childhood and his evacuation to a grand Scottish estate. Here, he read books and learned the violin and was told he could be anything. But he’s a working-class boy and after the war it’s back to Barrow-in-Furness and his true destiny. That is, working in the shipyards because that’s what his father did and his father’s father and so on. But he had learned to dream, we are given to understand. I was always wondering: what motivated this fella? But there is no explanation beyond that.

He acquires a loving family. There’s his supportive wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), her son, Michael (Jake Davies), and their identical twin sons, James (Jonah Lees) and Gene (Christian Lees), who will go on to become world disco champions (really). Flitcroft is inspired by catching the Open on TV and is determined to enter, even if he’s never played before as the posh snobs at local golf club won’t let him join. He orders the cheapest mail-order clubs, practises on the beach (montage time) and, spotting a loophole in the Open’s admission procedure, enters the qualifying round as a ‘professional’. Rhys Ifans plays the apoplectic club secretary who swears Flitcroft will never compete again, but Flitcroft keeps coming back under different names. Sometimes while wearing a fake moustache.

There are some delicious moments as when, for example, Jean lists Maurice’s ‘handicap’ as ‘false teeth and lumbago’ or a TV regional news programme asks Flitcroft to come putt in their studio and he misses every shot. But you always sense this is skipping along the surface of something deeper and more interesting. Did Flitcroft imagine he was a good golfer? Was he simply determined to get one over on the establishment? Why does he come back time after time for yet more mockery? Could we say he was crazy? There is something here that isn’t in the film, is what I’m saying.

Both Rylance and Hawkins give lovely, warm, affectionate performances even if the characters are somewhat lightweight. Flitcroft is mostly innocent and guileless while Jean is understanding, encouraging and sweet. The ending is schmaltzy, with one of those messages about the importance of family, but overall this does what it says on the tin. It’s cheerful, it’s crowd-pleasing and you win at golf if you achieve the lowest, not the highest score, so I learned something too.

The psychopath who wrecked New York

Robert Moses was the man, they say, who built New York. He was never elected to anything, yet he had absolute control of all public works in the city for more than 40 years, until 1968. His record was mind-bending. He personally conceived and directed the building of 627 miles of New York parkways and expressways, seven of New York’s bridges, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the entire Long Island highway system; he built the Lincoln Centre arts complex, the United Nations, Jones Beach Park, JFK airport, Central Park zoo and the Shea Stadium; he built 658 playgrounds, 11 swimming pools, 673 baseball pitches and cleared thousands of acres of slums; he put up tower blocks for hundreds of thousands of families; he created vast acres of state parks and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam on the St Lawrence, one of the world’s engineering wonders.

Yet for all his mighty achievements, he is largely unknown in Britain. Partly because his reputation in America was demolished way back in 1974 by a mighty 1,300-page book by Robert Caro called The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. As Caro tells it, Moses took power by seeing power where others hadn’t – in the boring agencies of state government that ran the parks and roads. As head of the innocuous-sounding Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he received every toll paid on every road and bridge in New York, a vast income that was immune from government interference. Moses used the revenue to build other toll projects, a cycle that would feed on itself, giving him control over all of Gotham.

His working life – he routinely put in 17-hour days – was facilitated by a vast expense account with teams of secretaries, chefs and chauffeurs. He died in 1981, aged 92. Considering what he built, his life sounds like a cause for celebration. Except for one thing: Moses was a psychopath. If power is a drug, then Moses was a massive user. His undoubted genius hid a vindictive, cruel personality that became deranged. His façade was ever the humble public servant. Yet he despised the poor, especially if they were black or Puerto Rican.

Though there is talk of a Netflix series, there is still no film about this extraordinary man. The Bridge Theatre, however, has taken up his story. Nicholas Hytner is directing a new play the theatre has commissioned from David Hare. ‘It’s the greatest work of non-fiction I’ve ever read,’ says Hytner of Caro’s book. ‘The first thing you realise is that there isn’t a play in the Caro book because it’s just too immense. The play David has written is narratively narrower than the book. It’s about who Moses is, what he stands for, and what might resonate for audiences today.’ Ralph Fiennes will play Moses. Hytner reckons ‘that slightly mad glint in his eye’ should come in useful. Hare, incidentally, has form at writing villains. Back in 1985, he co-invented a fictitious newspaper tycoon, Lambert Le Roux, for his comedy Pravda. Anyone who saw it will remember Anthony Hopkins, fists balled, face jutting, like a human mastiff: ‘Who are you? You’re fired.’

‘This is a much subtler play than Pravda,’ says Hytner. ‘It’s not a big, ribald epic. It’s a more private play.’ It presumably helps that villains are all the rage and good box office? ‘I wouldn’t say we are doing this just because Moses was a villain. But it is true – if you get a villain right, it always works.’ Moses was actually a most sophisticated man. He was a visiting Rhodes scholar at Oxford who wrote a book about the British civil service. He loved the English poets. He was a big Dr Johnson fan and he knew screeds of Shakespeare by heart. Throughout his life, he was dapper, handsome, always the perfect host, always civil to his wife.

It is the case against Moses that makes the book so gripping. Moses used the grovelling New York press to smear and ruin those who crossed him. New York’s succession of mayors and governors were ultimately all in his power. He became indispensable. But it’s Moses’s racism that is the most potent charge against him today. According to Caro, he designed bridges too low to allow buses – the only form of transport for the under-paid minorities – to leave the city to get to his lovely beach park on Long Island. His contempt was revealed in little details. He had decorated the ‘comfort stations’ in Riverside Park with curling wrought-iron waves. But in the Harlem section alone the decorations are monkeys. Of the 255 playgrounds he built in the city in the 1930s, Harlem got just one. He also demolished swathes of perfectly good housing – with no regard for the evicted – for multi-lane expressways that choked up with traffic as soon as they opened. He left the city’s subway system to rot and spurned the idea of modern light railways, even to the airport. The city on his long watch became an Autogeddon of fuming cars and fuming drivers.

The play, Hytner says, is about ‘how an unelected autocrat operates in a democracy, how attractive they may seem, how disastrously they turn out. It’s about a splendid vision that curdles.’ Hare has put into his play a woman who was edited out of the book, for reasons of length. Jane Jacobs (played by Helen Schlesinger) was a ballsy activist and an influential urban theorist who was deeply anti-Moses and very pro-people. She dreamed of community living and the thriving street corner; Moses dreamed of the wrecking ball. Jacobs actually beat Moses in a notable battle to stop him building a road through Washington Square Park.

Moses doesn’t seem to have liked women very much. It was a factor in his eventual undoing. When he decided to tarmac over a dappled glade in Central Park much used by toddlers, the well-to-do mothers and mink matrons in the locality got militant. At a hearing Moses slammed his palm down, insisting that there was no opposition: ‘There is nobody against this: NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY but a bunch of… a bunch of MOTHERS!’ He was defeated by a tsunami of mum rage.

By the time he retired, he had spent $27 billion on public works. So one has to ask: what about the upside? After all, he never enriched himself and he was pro-cars in an age when everyone loved cars. ‘There is a pro-Moses case which the play will make,’ says Hytner. ‘As well as the grievous assaults on the city’s infrastructure, there are many things about New York which wouldn’t have happened without him – for example, the Verrazzano bridge is one of the most beautiful bridges ever built. It’s true, Moses was defiantly unsympathetic. But [about his housing schemes] it is perfectly reasonable to say that the rat-infested tenements of the Bronx was no life for the inhabitants.’

The Moses urban vision of roads and tower blocks lives on. It breeds banality and inhumanity. Modern Chinese cities are Moses on steroids. London is little better. And Americans still obey the greatest of Moses’s commandments: Thou Shalt Drive. The joke being that Moses himself never learned how to.

Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican’s Postwar Modern reviewed

Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten. That’s one attraction of the new exhibition Postwar Modern at the Barbican. It’s a survey of what might seem all-too-familiar territory: British art in the two decades that followed VE day. Yet it succeeds in revealing numerous half-forgotten or undervalued movements and people, the good, the bad and – most intriguingly – candidates for reassessment.

The decades that followed the second world war were marked by dreary austerity, perhaps explaining the tendency for the art to be coloured oatmeal, beige, grey and brown. But this was also a time of dawning hope, increasing prosperity and growing optimism. One of the out-and-out masterpieces on display, Leon Kossoff’s ‘Willesden Junction, Early Morning’ (1962), manages to embody both these contradictory moods.

It is executed in shades of sludge, while the subject – a snaking tangle of railway lines under overcast sky – is the reverse of picturesque. But when you see the actual picture, it knocks you back on your heels. The thickly encrusted paint is pulsing with force and energy.

Here Kossoff presents something banally familiar, north London commuter transport, but in a way so utterly fresh you might think the artist was from another galaxy or a different age. Frank Auerbach pulls off a similar feat in his marvellous ‘Head of Gerda Boehm’ (1964), a portrait of a modern woman that looks like something excavated from an archaeological site. It was painted in 1964 but you could believe it came from Mycenae or Babylon.

From Lucian Freud there is a trio of early masterpieces, depicting his first wife, Kitty Garman, and second, Caroline Blackwood. The almost incredible levels of observation and precision that he then achieved are visible if you look into the eyes of ‘Girl with Roses’. In each of her pupils the sash window of his studio is clearly reflected. Worlds within worlds, observed in the rundown area of Paddington where Freud worked.

Francis Bacon fares less well in this selection, understandably since there is a phenomenal exhibition of his greatest works elsewhere in London. The trio of his pictures at the Barbican are of lower wattage. On this basis it would be hard to explain the enormous impact Bacon had on his contemporaries. But his example was crucial, for his audacious ambition as much as for his actual pictures.

On the opposite side of the divide between figurative and non-figurative art, Alan Davie was perhaps the nearest thing Britain produced to a true abstract expressionist. He was also one of those artists who were only briefly on peak form – at more or less the moment of the two works in this show. His ‘Creation of Eve’ (1957) looks roughly like a half-and-half mix of Pollock and Bacon: a swirling mass of brushstrokes disquietingly like body parts and innards.

Even better is Frank Bowling’s ‘Big Bird’ (1965), in which two wounded and bleeding swans flutter against geometric areas of colour (borrowed from abstraction). These birds stand, Bowling explained, for ‘people who had broken lives’, adding, ‘If you don’t straighten up and fly right, you’re going to end up in the gutter.’ There’s a touch of Bacon here too, in the splattered gore and free-flying paint. Altogether more buoyant, indeed sumptuous and ebullient, is Gillian Ayres’s ‘Break-off’ (1961) in which a whole genus of new organisms like plankton or protozoa seem to float out of the canvas.

Biology was one of the obsessions of the age, as was science fiction. The ‘action sculptures’ of the short-lived Peter King suggest both: inchoate masses of material which seem just on the point of transformation into a body or a face. Something similar is true of Eduardo Paolozzi’s strange sentinel figures made by pressing bits and pieces of detritus into clay and suggesting robots, but also vagrants.

To my eye, though, the most effective three-dimensional works on show are not conventional sculptures but an array of pots by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper (both refugees from the Nazis). Coper especially was able to create forms and surfaces that look as if they might belong to an ancient culture and were simultaneously filled with the spirit of the times. His ‘hourglass’ vases are a bit like miniature versions of those monumental works of the 1960s, the cooling towers at power stations.

There is much more, too much to describe here, including remarkable documentary photographs by Roger Mayne and Nigel Henderson. Other artists and idioms and reputations remain in the not-to-be-resuscitated category. But, having said that, it’s true that our view of the past continues to alter as the present unfolds.

That’s happening as I write to works by Elisabeth Frink, William Turnbull and Lynn Chadwick in the idiom known as ‘geometry of fear’. These sculptural evocations of tangled metal, ruined cities and burned, blasted bodies used to seem like relics of a distant age. In the past few days, they’ve started to look horribly close to news reports.

The Battle for Britain | 19 March 2022

I stink at virtue signalling

The lodger looked at me blankly and pronounced wearily, as though intoning something he was tired of parroting, that I was putting vulnerable people at risk by not having the vaccine. I stifled a yawn. Can anyone really still think this?

A half-hearted argument of sorts ensued while I was washing up and he was heating his microwave dinner in which neither of us could really be bothered. I tried to politely point out that it was a good job an irresponsible person like me was so foolhardy and fearless about Covid or he would not have found a room in the middle of lockdown, especially since he works at a hospital.

And he put a stop to the discussion by saying: ‘Well, I’m trying to get my head around Ukraine now.’

A friend of mine who has a branch of his business in St Petersburg remarked grimly to me the other day: ‘Putin is going to be awarded the Nobel prize for ending Covid.’

We’ve been in a pile-up of world events since leaving the EU, is how it feels. Brexit crashed into coronavirus, which crashed into the vaccine, which crashed into Putin’s invasion. And while the way these events unfold is one thing, I’m almost more perturbed by the binary way I’ve been told to think about them, and how I’m expected to move on to the next while forgetting the previous.

Anyone deviating from the line has been subject to bullying – by the system, and by their friends. Why? When did it become taboo to question the prevailing narrative, even while parts of it unravel before our eyes?

I can’t quite believe I’m in my kitchen half-arguing with a hospital consultant who lives in my spare room since breaking up with his wife in lockdown about why I haven’t had the vaccine, because I may be putting vulnerable people at risk, while giving him a home.

When I point out that the authorities have admitted that all the scientific evidence confirms the vaccine does not stop you transmitting Covid, his eyes glaze over and he repeats the line, as if he hasn’t heard me: ‘Yes, but you might be putting vulnerable people at risk.’ I feel angry. ‘Everyone’s vulnerable,’ I mutter under my breath.

The lodger coughed as he argued. He’s been coming down with something constantly for the past year. He sniffs and wheezes the entire time he’s around me. I ask most evenings if he’s overworked and he says no, he’s bored. He complains of sitting around all day waiting for operations that don’t happen because they are cancelled or postponed.

And now he’s telling me, between coughs, that I ought to get myself vaccinated. As if I am singlehandedly spreading all the germs that have been or are being or will ever be spread, without showing any signs of having the lurgy, aside from that one time when yes, I admit it, I got the two lines on the test and had to go to bed for two weeks with a horrible flu. And I can’t really smell anything properly still. But the system isn’t interested in telling me why that might be, where this virus came from, or why it attacks your senses. The system is only interested in telling me that it is all my fault, for thinking as I do.

I argue using only facts and proven scientific data. I quote from studies published in the British Medical Journal. I tell him that almost everyone I know who is vaccinated has had Covid, while socialising and travelling around on holidays. But he’s simply not interested.

He doesn’t want to listen to my side of things on the vaccine, because – and now he’s employing the argument-ender supreme – he’s more worried about Ukraine. And I didn’t even go there, because it would be impossible for me to spout the line required without deviating in any way from the narrative that has been deemed absolute in the establishment circles in which he moves.

I would be bound to get some word or phrase slightly wrong in the eyes of those who take the line, enthusiastically. I would fail to sufficiently emote. I would irritate by being too nuanced.

Anything less than flying a blue and yellow flag in your front window has been ruled inadequate. Virtue signalling has taken over, as usual. And I stink at virtue signalling.

I’m on the side of anyone who is suffering in a war. But I don’t want to hang their flag in my window, any more than I want to stand on my doorstep and bang a saucepan with a wooden spoon for the NHS. I’ve done my bit by renting a room to a doctor and letting him tell me off in my own kitchen.

No. 694

White to play. Rapport-Rogic, Austria 2010. Black threatens Qa1+ and then Rxf2+, so Rapport must strike at once. Which move did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 21 March. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1…Qxc3! Then 2 bxc3 Ba3+ 3 Kb1 Rd1 mate, or 2 Rxc3 Rxg7 and Black should win with the extra bishop.

Last week’s winner Rob Udy, Norwich

2544: Fives – solution

2547: Ascending order

The (unrelated) unclued lights (one of three words, four of two words, (one with an apostrophe), one pair and two hyphened), can be arranged in ascending order with one appearing twice.

Across

4 Fire extinguisher reveals bone and shoe (11, two words)

11 Cross-country for Porterfield’s team (7)

13 Ken’s forte amending binders? (9, two words)

14 ‘There’s no commoner letter …’ (Macbeth) (5)

16 Party including one teetotaller once again (5)

23 Exhibitors in the rain? (7)

24 Czech, maybe, in square loo (4)

25 Feel less miserable given standing ovation? (7, two words)

30 Tremendous weight of surreal montage (7)

31 Beseeching chum for gem (4)

32 Straw breaking camel’s back, profligate (7)

34 It’s almost dark – almost! (4)

35 With immediate effect, a sign of winter – about 0F (7, three words)

37 Finally unsafe – caught in aircraft, Do this! (5)

40 Hot rock from good-hearted mother (5)

41 Sadly leave rich knight (9)

42 Spending spree, wasting pounds on plant (6)

43 Yes indeed. Under 50% (7, two words)

44 Cold and hot sweets are prepared for snack (11, two words)

Down

2 Health food, 18 of course (6)

3 Bird has change of course over far end of lake (5)

6 Europeans with no head for travellers’ accommodation (4)

7 Pulled out or turned in (7)

8 Irritable, like our cats and dogs? (7)

9 Fitness review: I buy last one (9)

10 Delivery vehicle with nickel and lead following motorway (7)

15 Prophet’s artistic grandma (5)

22 Tub-thumper, US politician, keen on getting a hearing (9)

26 Irish composer involved in tribal feud (5)

27 Inscription in mine in terrible heap (7)

29 Extra few words on unknown county (43) featuring old butterflies (7)

33 Fruit for Doc during game (6)

36 Welshman and Scotsman clash over nymph (5)

38 Some divorcee’s name (4)

39 To start with, Tim Ambrose twice says ‘good bye’ (4, hyphened)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 4 April. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.

Download a printable version here.

Spectator competition winners: lives in three limericks

In Competition No. 3240, you were invited to tell the life story of a well-known figure in three limericks.

In the excellent How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry, E.O. Parrott summed up the charms of the form neatly:

With a shape of its own it’s imbued – That’s the limerick, witty or lewd;       Two lines, then you oughter       Have two more, much shorter Then one longer that’s funny or rude.

Though there was wit aplenty in the entry, you there was little appetite for bawdiness. Brian Murdoch, Sylvia Fairley, Frank Upton, Carolyn Beckingham and David Silverman earn honourable mentions.

The prize winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

A young poet and man about town Earns bon mot virtuoso renown,       Aesthetic, ironic       And self-made iconic As philosopher/dandy/wit/clown.   Comic plays win him fortune and fame, Make his British lit pantheon name.       Then a Lord with whose boy       He’s shared dare-not-speak joy Wins a bout, and his life’s not the same.   He does gaol time for sexual crimes (Blameless acts in more civilised times),       Then self-exiles in France       To conclude the romance With harsh truth in lush rhythms and rhymes. Chris O’Carroll/Oscar Wilde

William Shakespeare’s the bard of our nation, With his plays a poetic sensation;       In his sonnets of fire       He had power to inspire And his words are a timeless quotation.   He performed in the age of Queen Bess And for James his Macbeth meant success.       With the force of his pen       He was monarch of men And his craft never failed to impress.   He made comedy when he was dead For his wife got his second-best bed;       And a tragic surprise       Is, where lifeless he lies, Like poor Yorick he’s minus his head. Frank McDonald/Shakespeare

Born in London, this lad was no fool, He was tutored at Oswestry School.       Of brains not deprived       At Oxford he thrived And, as warden at New College, ruled.   With a wife and five children to raise He taught for the rest of his days,       But being befuddled       His words he’d get muddled And call foggy days, ‘doggy fays’.   It’s a tragedy one of the best Should be famed as a figure of jest       And sadly this saint,       Who was clever though quaint, Was at Grasmere at last ‘raid to lest’! Alan Millard/William Archibald Spooner

Salute to the great Enid Blyton! Though never a lit’r’ry titan,       Her books, on the boil and       From Kirrin to Toyland, Entertained where they didn’t enlighten.   At Newnes, funny tales filled her head; And she wed her commissioning ed.       Their daughters were later       Both banned from their Pater, For she moved in a new Dad instead.   She bombarded the world’s under-twelves With fairies and pixies and elves,       With the picnicking frolics       Of ginger-beer-holics. (These were banned from the library shelves.) Bill Greenwell/Enid Blyton

The Tories chose Heath with great care As something more ‘vin ordinaire’       Than their normal tradition       Of vintage patrician With privilege rather than flair.   But apart from his music and yacht It was unclear what talents he’d got;       While his famed three-day week       Plumbed new levels of bleak And saw Britain’s prosperity shot.   Then Thatcher derailed his career Thus causing much Tory good cheer       Though his petulant hulk       Sat on in a sulk In the Commons for year after year. Martin Parker/Edward Heath

His comfortable bourgeois nativity Had somehow instilled a proclivity       For clever critiquing       Of anything reeking Of common commercial activity.   While flaying with lifelong legerity The wealthy, he shared the prosperity       That Engels inherited,       Albeit unmerited, But otherwise lived in austerity.   He found the free money sublime, And savoured it while there was time;       His readers, he reckoned,       Perhaps any second Might deem it a Kapital crime. Alex Steelsmith/Karl Marx

No. 3243: lost and found

You are invited to submit a poem about the discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance. Please email entries of up to 16 lines words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 30 March.

Establishing Rapport

Richard Rapport took first place at the Fide Grand Prix in Belgrade last weekend. The Hungarian grandmaster is now almost assured of a place in the Candidates tournament in Madrid later this year, which will determine a challenger for the World Championship. Only a very unlikely outcome at the final Grand Prix event (which begins in Berlin next week) would see him knocked out of the cycle.

Rapport is popular with fans for his rich imagination and penchant for offbeat openings. In the past, that sometimes made for erratic results, but a newfound consistency has propelled him into the world’s top ten. The diagram position shows the critical moment from the final match. Rapport could repeat moves with 30 Qe3, leading to a draw by repetition in light of the previous moves. Instead he used up nearly all his time and chose the ambitious 30 Qe5. Though it allowed Andreikin’s knight into d2, Rapport saw that need not interrupt his attack.

Richard Rapport-Dmitry Andreikin

Fide Grand Prix, Belgrade, March 2022

1 d4 d5 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 a6 4 cxd5 exd5 5 a3 h6 6 Bf4 Nf6 7 e3 c5 8 Be5 Be6 9 Nge2 Nc6 10 Nf4 cxd4 11 Bxd4 Nxd4 12 Qxd4 Bd6 13 g3 Rc8 14 Rd1 Qa5 15 Rc1 O-O 16 Nxe6 fxe6 17 Bh3 Kf7 18 O-O Rc4 19 Qd3 Be5 20 Ne2 Rfc8 21 Rxc4 Rxc4 22 b4 Qa4 23 Nf4 Bxf4 24 exf4 Qc6 25 Qe3 Ne4 26 f3 Rc3 27 Qd4 Rc4 28 Qe3 Rc3 29 Qd4 Rc4 (see diagram) 30 Qe5 Nd2 Placing the queen on e3 was safer. Now if 31 Rf2 Rc1+ 32 Kg2 Nc4! Black gains a decisive advantage, e.g. 33 Qd4 Rd1! 34 Qa7 d4. 31 f5 Nxf1 This move is good enough for a draw, but requires an extraordinary follow-up. Another path to a draw was 31…Qb6+ 32 Kh1 Nxf1 33 fxe6+ but that also demands extreme precision from Black. For example, 33…Ke8? 34 Qh5+ Kd8 35 Qxd5+ wins. In fact, the only move which draws is 33…Kg8! when the imminent counterattack with Nf1xg3+ means that White has no time to advance the e-pawn. Instead White should bail out for a draw. One pretty line goes 34 Qb8+ Kh7 35 Bf5+ g6 36 Bxg6+ Kxg6 37 Qg8+ Kf6 38 Qf7+ Ke5 39 Qg7+! and here Black must acquiesce to the draw, since 39…Kxe6 40 Qxh6+ wins with a skewer, or 39…Kd6 40 Qd7+ forces the king back to e5. 32 fxe6+ Where should Black put the king? Unlike in the line above, 32…Kg8 is well met by 33 e7!, and then 33…Kf7 34 e8=Q+ Qxe8 35 Qxd5+ wins the rook, or 33…Qb6+ 34 Kxf1! is similar to the game. Andreikin’s next move looks like the only plausible alternative, but it turns out to be the decisive mistake. Ke8 In fact, the strongest move was extremely hard to foresee: 32…Ke7! allows White to capture with check, but after 33 Qxg7+ Kd6 there are several tries which all fall short. For example, 34 Qf8+ Kc7 35 e7 Qb6+ 36 Kxf1 Rc1+ 37 Ke2 Re1+ 38 Kxe1 Qe3+ and Black draws by perpetual check. 33 Qxg7 Qb6+ The advanced pawn affords White all manner of tactics. For example, 33…Qd6 34 Qf7+ Kd7 35 e7+! Qxe7 36 Qxd5+ wins. Or 33…Qc7 34 Qg6+ Ke7 35 Bxf1 Rc1 36 Qf7+ Kd6 37 e7! Qxe7 38 Qf4+ forks the rook again. 34 Kxf1 Rc1+ 35 Ke2 Re1+ The perpetual check is a mirage, but there was no better try. 36 Kxe1 Qe3+ 37 Kd1 Qd3+ 38 Kc1 Qe3+ 39 Kb1 Qd3+ 40 Kc1 Qe3+ 41 Kb2 Qd2+ 42 Ka1 Qc1+ 43 Ka2 Qc4+ 44 Kb2 Qe2+ 45 Ka1 White meets a check on e1 or d1 with Ka1-a2, when a subsequent check can be blocked by Qg7-b2. Andreikin falls on his sword: Qf1+ 46 Bxf1 Black resigns

He knew a swan from a duck: remembering Andy Turnell

You don’t always have to win to enjoy it. At the end of the £100,000 Paddy Power Imperial Cup at Sandown on Saturday the exhilarated 7lb claimer Archie Bellamy jumped off Lively Citizen with a grin on his face you could have driven a car through. ‘I got some spin off that,’ he declared. ‘You’re turning in and he just takes off. I had such a lot of fun out there.’ So he had, riding a well-judged race on the 28-1 shot to take the lead two out and keeping on well. Lively Citizen’s handler David Jeffreys, who trains at Hinton on the Green, Worcestershire, proved almost equally chuffed: ‘He’s a real trainer’s horse,’ he beamed. ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve and gives you everything. He’s so good for the yard.’ So he had been but as Lively Citizen struck the front there was a spelling mistake sitting on his shoulder.

Ridden on his 21st birthday by James Bowen, who has this season completed the transition from teenage wunderkind to dependable top race jockey, Suprise Package sailed past Lively Citizen on the uphill run-in to triumph by a clear nine lengths. Without a win in his previous seven races, only ninth at Leopardstown on his previous run and allotted 6lb more by the English handicapper than he would have carried at home, Suprise Package is trained in Monasterevin, Ireland, by Peter Fahey and when David Jeffreys admiringly declared, ‘Bloody Irish – I hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come next week,’ he voiced the thoughts of virtually every English racegoer present.

By the time most read this column, thanks to publishing schedules, the Cheltenham Festival will be almost over and many of the home team who suffered a 23-5 trouncing by Irish horses at last year’s festival fear that the statistics could make equally disastrous reading this year. As I write, there is only one English-trained horse, Dan Skelton’s Protektorat, in the first seven in the betting for the Gold Cup. Honeysuckle is odds-on to win another Champion Hurdle and of the Grade One races only in the Champion Chase is there an English-trained favourite – Nicky Henderson’s star Shishkin. In part it is a numbers game. Even the top English trainers are likely to have no more than a dozen horses at the Festival while of the Irish contingent Gordon Elliott will be sending more than 50 from his Cullentra base and Willie Mullins a similar number from Closutton.

The one heartening sign at Sandown had been a thumping 17-length victory for Nicky Henderson’s Luccia in the British Stallions EBF Mares’ bumper. Some had been alarmed that a fortnight or so with scarcely a winner from Nicky’s Seven Barrows yard suggested a loss of form at just the wrong time. But there is no greater master of the art of peaking a horse at Festival time than Henderson and he has remained staunchly unworried. You could see his problem. What he has been trying to say to the media is: ‘The swans back home are fine; I’ve only been running the ducks,’ but you can’t say that too loudly or too often because some of the duck-owners still think they’ve got potential swans. Having trained Luccia’s mother, sister and brother, Nicky knows what he’s got in his hands and is already looking forward to next year’s Cheltenham with Luccia.

One man who instinctively knew a swan from a duck was former jockey and trainer Andy Turnell, who sadly died last week at only 73. Andy trained Maori Venture to win the Grand National, Cogent to take a Hennessy Gold Cup and Katabatic to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase but he will probably be remembered even longer as a jockey of remarkable bravery with a quite extraordinary sense of balance. He rode shorter in his irons than any other jockey I can recall and confounded the pundits by having fewer falls than most. Along with a few fellow journos in the Eternal Optimists syndicate I had a share in a horse with Andy called Rhapsody in Blue – one definitely in the duck rather than swan category – and I remember his patience with an animal who flattered to deceive with a habit of swallowing his tongue.

One of the syndicate was a little less patient and on hearing Andy give instructions to our jockey – the lovely Luke Harvey who is now such a joyous part of the ITV racing coverage – not to hurry Rhapsody but to ‘let him find himself during the course of the race’ at Worcester one day the jaundiced scribe exclaimed that it would be nicer if, rather than finding himself, Rhaps could for once find the others in the race. Luke was happy enough with the unplaced performance that day to offer to take the horse off our hands but Andy persevered. Alas the syndicate didn’t and in the end Rhapsody didn’t win for us but for new owners in the north with Richard Ford.

The shadowy charisma of the Mater Dei sisters

Catriona has a commission to paint the 17th-century façade of the chapel of St Joseph’s. She’d made a start when she decided that a foreground figure would lend greater interest and perspective to the composition. Following an email exchange, one of the nuns agreed to pose on the stony path leading up to the chapel for a photograph, from which Catriona would complete the work.

At the appointed time she clanked the bell beside the pointed nunnery door. I was her out-of-breath photographer’s assistant. After two long minutes, the door opened and the youngest and prettiest of the seven sisters stepped from the cloister into the windy world.

Two years ago the ancient white Algerian nuns who were here for as long as anybody could remember disappeared, and seven Argentinian nuns appeared in their place. This great replacement was a sensation among the small côterie of regulars who trekked up to the chapel at five o’clock to meditate on the sung Latin mass. The old Algerian nuns’ voices had rung out thinly but beautifully in the thick chapel silence. But this younger Argentinian choir was sublime. We couldn’t believe our ears at the exquisite purity of their soaring praise. When trying to tell others about it, I failed words.

‘Just go,’ I urged.

The new religieuses’ shadowy charisma and our peasant-like awe has remained a barrier to even formal acquaintance. Though I remember Vernon cutting one out after the service, like a cowboy deftly separating a steer from the herd, to present her with two litres of his first of that year’s olive oil pressing. The audacity shocked me. She was tiny beside him and he had her pinned up against the outside chapel wall by the sheer force of his personality. Yet when she raised her face and smiled up at him, I saw Vernon pale and take an unsteady step backwards.

It was this pretty one who now stepped outside. She was full of apology. She was sorry her French was so poor. We spoke English? Well, she was sorry about her English too. The smiling, guileless young face ovally framed by the wimple was so lovely I just gaped speechlessly at her.

She voiced a further anxiety. ‘What do you call this?’ she said. ‘Wimple,’ I managed. ‘My wimple is like this,’ she said, fingering the length as it hung down behind. ‘My friend’s is longer. Is better for picture.’ And turning to the dark doorway from which she had emerged, she gave a sign and a second nun stepped timidly from darkness into the daylight.

This one was, psychologically speaking, more cloistered than the first and no looker. But the prospect of having her photograph taken for an oil painting excited her visibly, and her smile, when it came, was as disturbing in its loveliness as her friend’s. The wimple business puzzled me though. If seniority was advertised by wimple length, the difference here was as subtle as the quarter-inch in the stripe of Paul Pennyfeather’s tie that misled Lumsden of Strathdrummond.

Having collected our religious mannequins we walked them round to the chapel front, a distance of perhaps 50 yards. I walked beside the prettier one. Through the scrub oak trees immediately on our right you could see for miles. ‘Are you happy?’ I said in English.

I expect she has been asked some inane questions during her time of devoted service. But this one made her stumble on the path. ‘Yes,’ she said, adding: ‘I am allowed to go home every three years.’ I thought it kind-hearted of her to entertain the idiotic notion of happiness, even for the sake of idle chit-chat with the photographer’s assistant during her first modelling assignment.

According to the internet, these Mater Dei sisters have taken three simple vows: poverty, chastity and obedience. ‘Stand there,’ I said, pointing, when we reached the chapel front. ‘And you,’ I said to the other one, ‘you stand there, facing her.’ Using Catriona’s half-completed canvas as a guide, and by closing one eye, we fine-tuned the nuns into their exact position in the frame.

Afterwards they clustered around Catriona’s phone to view the image from which their likenesses would be immortalised. They were delighted. Catriona was delighted. She promised the sisters a quantity of postcards of the final image to sell to pilgrims. Now everyone was delighted, except the photographer’s assistant, who benefitted from none of this and felt short-changed. He submitted a claim of his own.

‘Pray for you?’ said the nuns. ‘Of course!’ They said they would pray for me for nine days consecutively starting from today. Why nine I couldn’t fathom. All the same I felt that I’d hit the jackpot. As we parted from the smiling sisters with inarticulate expressions of goodwill on every side, I pulled my point of orgasm face and bowed to them with real humility.

The folly of Nato enlargement

If western universities were not brimming with leftist professors, the present situation in Ukraine would surprise no one. History would have taught us that the complete defeat of Nazi Germany was bound to clear the way for Soviet Russia’s domination of the Eurasian continent, although not going for total victory would hardly have been a vote-getter back in 1945. Gen. George Patton, for one, wanted to fight the bear right there and then, but cooler heads prevailed.

The H-bomb, needless to say, has encouraged aggressive types to wage war knowing full well that opponents might feel reluctant to commit suicide. In fact, the bomb has increased limited wars, as they are now called. What I find funny is that we in the West provoked Russia by bringing the Baltic States into Nato, hypothetically forcing us to fight the nuclear-armed bear over, say, Estonia, a tiny nation geographically attached to Mother Russia with a population of 1.3 million, many of them Russians. This makes as much sense as the first world war did, with 25 million dead over an Austrian archduke’s assassination. Those two clowns, Biden and Blinken, are busy telling anyone who will listen that ‘Nato’s door is open and remains open and that is our commitment’.

Uncle Sam used to be a good guy before he became a bully. He helped rebuild the devastated European economies and created the Atlantic Alliance. But there was always something in it for him. He had, of course, provoked and almost incentivised Japan to attack due to FDR’s embargo. With colonialism down the drain after the war, new nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the scene. These new nations did not see eye to eye with Uncle Sam’s vision of corporate paternalism. America’s motto back then was ‘What is good for General Motors is good for America’, but what was good for GM was not good at all for, say, Italy or France, or Germany, or Japan, or Britain. People who used their brain began to see that America’s role as a test for moral perfection was bull. I began to see the light in Vietnam, where the good uncle pretended his interests were universal, whereas North Vietnam’s were simply national interests.

Still, the good old US of A was a religious and pleasant country to live in, people went to church, did not swear like drunken sailors, and even read books. Then Hollywood decided to liberate the country from its sexual mores, and drugs and violence became the norm in its product. While Hollywood was busy churning out subversion, disenchanted liberals needing action became known as neoconservatives, and Uncle Sam became the greatest bully the world has known since the second world war. He has engaged in something like six wars, has lost most of them – except Grenada, a tiny island that could easily fit inside Miami Beach – and has killed approximately three million people. Some 2.5 million in Vietnam, 450,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which brings me to the tragedy of Ukraine. Back in 1932 three, maybe five, perhaps even ten million Ukrainians starved to death thanks to Uncle Joe Stalin’s forced famine against the Kulaks, a horrific crime against humanity and one denied by the Liverpool-born Stalin apologist and New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty. This scumbag’s prize should be exhibited next to the other Pulitzer the Times was awarded for yet another monstrous lie, that of Russian collusion in the Trump victory of 2016.

So, I ask you a very delicate question, knowing full well that two wrongs do not a right make: who has killed more people, is the world’s worst ever man at this moment, Vladimir Putin, or George W. Bush? In cahoots with Sir Tony Baloney. I’m afraid that Bush-Blair win this one hands down, while a newspaper that denied a monstrous crime is still respected by the very same types who looked the other way when Stalin was murdering Ukrainians by the million.

Putin was not involved when a drunken Yeltsin signed the Paris Charter and the Budapest Memorandum back in the 1990s, granting Ukrainian sovereignty in return for it giving up its nukes. Once in power in 2000, Putin asked that there should be no further eastward expansion of Nato and that offensive missiles be removed from Russia’s borders. Their deployment reduced the warning time to a mere five to seven minutes. His response was to threaten to station hypersonic missiles on ships just outside US territorial waters. Which means we would be right back to the Cuban crisis of 1962.

So make no mistake: American intransigence in expanding Nato played a pretty big part in this mess. The world weeps now. But as a poor little Greek boy, I have a question: where was the outrage while millions of Ukrainians were being deliberately starved to death by the left’s golden boy, Uncle Joe?

Never mind, we now have a Russophobic West, with Tchaikovsky, the conductor Valery Gergiev and the divine soprano Anna Netrebko banned, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on the brink. Funny way to fight a defence of civilisation.

The Belfast Blitz: These Days, by Lucy Caldwell, reviewed

Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks up at the sky, transfixed by its eerie beauty. She watches ‘the first magnesium flares falling, bursting into incandescent light, hanging there over the city like chandeliers’. It is the sort of thing you never forget, she thinks, ‘not in a lifetime’.

This scene in These Days, by the Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell, brilliantly captures familiar territory for anyone who has read about the Blitz. The awe at the peculiar beauty, the feeling that this is unforgettable and will change people forever, the desire to domesticate these undomesticated happenings (the chandeliers): all this comes up often in fiction and memoir from the period. Caldwell’s originality is to push moment-by-moment reflections into consuming thematic concerns. What is a lifetime? her novel asks, movingly and compellingly. Do we have an individual responsibility to shape our lives, and does that mean somehow being true to the kinds of intense feelings that an extreme experience such as the Blitz brings out in us?

Caldwell’s cast is an upper-middle-class family in central Belfast. The father, Philip, is a doctor, used to putting on a brave face and therefore unprepared for being overwhelmed by the traumatic sights he witnesses. The mother, Florence, is still half-consumed by the loss of a secret youthful lover. Their two daughters, Audrey and Emma, are just embarking on adulthood when war breaks out. Emma signs up as a first-aider and falls seriously in love with a female colleague whose death is overwhelming both for Emma and the reader when it happens daringly early in the narrative. Audrey has just started a career that she will soon give up when she marries the respectable fiancé she is dimly aware she does not love.

The narrative voice moves between Florence, Audrey and Emma, capturing their patterns of thought and speech with a casual eloquence that calls to mind Mrs Dalloway, especially in Florence’s sections (‘Yes, she thinks: we must each face our death alone, rise up to meet it, untangling all of the cords, all of the tiny hooks by which our souls have sought to attach themselves.’) Behind these intimate points of view there is also a grander voice – of Belfast – which finds its way into large-scale set pieces and also intimate cameos of people of every age and class. As the book progressed, I was astonished by the calm confidence with which Caldwell weaves this vast tapestry.

I did wonder at times why this novel has come to be written now. The answer may lie simply in what novels at their best do, which is to illuminate the overlooked and to take us away from any over-easy sense that we know what the big questions are. There are themes here that speak to our times: the wastefulness of war, the need not to do things just because they are the obvious things to do, the inequity of class, the uneasy relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic (heightened in the war by the Republic’s neutrality). None of these are pressed especially hard and the book seems to delight in its own old-fashionedness. To most readers this won’t matter; what does is the sumptuousness of the prose, the evocativeness of the descriptions and the fully realised characters, all of which make this a masterly achievement.

The ghostly ruins of vanished Britain

Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses, the hedgerows and footpaths – much of this has been preserved for centuries. However, as Matthew Green argues in Shadowlands, there is also a history of lost towns and abandoned villages hidden beneath the tranquil surface. His book tells the stories of eight such places, as well as the disasters that led to their disappearance, offering a phantom history of Britain through vanished settlements and forgotten occupants.

Shadowlands begins with the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney that was buried in sand several thousand years ago. It ends with the rural community of Capel Celyn, who lived in a remote valley in north-west Wales until their homes were submerged in 1956 to provide a reservoir for the people of Liverpool. In between, Green discusses river ports becoming silted over and coastal towns sinking into the sea, as well as villages emptied by plague or relocated by war.

He does an excellent job of placing these locations in a broader context, incorporating geography, economics and urban planning. We learn how the medieval arms industry powered the rise and fall of various Welsh border towns, and how the profits from the wine trade with Gascony were behind the wealth of the Cinque Ports. At the same time, he brings this material to life with tales of pirates and poets, soldiers and kings, as well as testimonies from the helpless inhabitants of vanishing homes.

The book also debates the meaning of ruins and the preservation of the past. Lost places can house any number of human longings, because once perished they become sites of creative possibility. Also, a ruined building can be much more impressive than one still standing, as we reconstruct the vanished splendour in our minds. For instance, the lost city of Dunwich has enjoyed more attention from writers and artists than any of its neighbours on the Suffolk coast precisely because it was claimed by the sea. Absence has a special presence of its own, as Green writes:

Dunwich was a magnet for Victorian dreamers. There was something in the air: a fugitive odour of loss – eerie, gentle and strangely intoxicating. As more of the city disappeared into the sea, the more it grew in the public imagination.

The Victorians were especially keen on places that evoked the distant past. In the 18th century, the islands of St Kilda were among the most isolated in Europe, their illiterate inhabitants living off a diet of fulmars and seaweed, without any money or possessions. Travel writers would cross the Outer Hebrides to visit this lonely spot, seeking proof for Enlightenment theories about mankind’s natural state. By the 19th century, however, steamers were taking tourists on cruises around the islands, while the locals exaggerated how primitive their lives were in order to earn cash. They would rush on to the tourists’ yachts and attempt to eat their coal, or respond with alarm when they glimpsed themselves in a mirror, even though both these items could be found on St Kilda. The past had become a performance to entertain the present, and in due course that present – the mixed pressures of tourism, war and changing agricultural practices – led to the islands being abandoned in 1930.

Green blends his historical account with nature and travel writing when he describes visiting the sites of these former settlements. Compared with the historical material, the personal passages are often flat, either because too little has remained to justify the visit, or because his attraction to such places remains vague. Of course, there was no need to turn the book into a memoir; writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Olivia Laing (obvious models here) mostly keep their own lives off the page. But Green suggests that these journeys helped him overcome the death of his father and the end of his marriage: ‘Having toured and meditated upon so many ruins I had somehow emerged less of a ruin myself.’

The book concludes with a warning about how many more British settlements could become shadowlands this century. As Green makes clear, the seeming permanence of our landscape is an illusion: these islands are fragile, and protecting them requires constant vigilance. That said, what I ended up feeling was not so much anxious but hopeful, because so much more has lasted than has been lost. Besides, the book shows that even those places which have vanished can still live on in the memory, and that nowhere completely disappears as long as we keep telling its story.

Portrait of a domestic tyrant: The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson, reviewed

If vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families stuffed with passive aggression and seething resentment are your thing, you will gleefully hoover up Charlotte Mendelson’s riotous, prize-winning novels. These buzzing sagas dissect dysfunctional relationships with spiky wit and remarkable acuity.

The Exhibitionist is as good as any of her previous books. Ray Hanrahan is a failed artist who once glimpsed mild critical approbation before lapsing into obscurity. He’s also a comically monstrous anti-hero: narcissistic, abusive, controlling, dishonest and a hypochondriac. He has quashed his talented sculptor wife Lucia’s career with guilt- tripping and spurious claims of plagiarism. She is so cowed by his bullying that she jumps to his every command.

The couple’s younger daughter Jess has taken refuge by escaping London for Edinburgh, but she too has been so subdued by her father’s tyranny that she lacks the confidence to call time on her own relationship with a space-invading, opportunist dullard. The elder daughter Leah has sacrificed any life of her own to soothe and placate her father. Patrick, Lucia’s son from a previous relationship, is an anxious introvert, banished from the house by Ray.

But change is coming. Lucia has just met someone who has made her re-examine her life. As the family gather for an ostentatious private view of Ray’s work that he has demanded – in the absence of gallery interest – they organise, the poisonous pus at the heart of this family rises to a head and must be lanced.

It’s a glorious ride. Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist, skewering pomp and sulking faux victimhood. But the drollery doesn’t mask the oppression of the real victims of this domestic autocrat. My only cavil is with the passivity of the family: the lack of insight and self-saving action of intelligent individuals. There is no glimpse of the ‘fun’ Ray, for whom Lucia has stayed all these decades. But then again, self-delusion affects both tyrants and their brainwashed prey and Mendelson’s astute perception demonstrates this with aplomb.

The Greek myths are always with us

Once upon a time there was a collection of stories that everybody loved. They involved brave heroes such as Perseus and Theseus defeating fearful monsters like Medusa and the Minotaur. Sometimes they used ingenious gadgets to achieve their goals, a bit like James Bond with his exploding pen. Sometimes they were helped by women who took a fancy to them.

Some, like Icarus, failed. Others succeeded but still came to a sticky end – like Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but also killed his dad and married his mum. The point is that these stories were so old they came from a time before writing. There was no set text, so they could be adopted and adapted and take many forms.

This was handy when Christianity came along, whose followers were keen to reinterpret the myths to make them sort of Christian. Early writers zoomed in on details of particular stories that allowed them to suggest that the heroes were really allegorical representations of Jesus Christ. The mighty Heracles descending into Hell and living to tell? Jesus, of course. The crooner Orpheus, who also went to Hell and back? Same deal. Odysseus strapped to his mast, listening to the song of the Sirens? A bit like Jesus on the Cross.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is a major theme of Richard Buxton’s bountiful, beautifully illustrated guide to eight Greek myths: Medea, Oedipus, Orpheus, Heracles, Prometheus, the Judgment of Paris, Icarus and the Amazons. Time and again, people have picked up these myths and viewed or skewed them according to their own particular interests.

Consider the two Francis Bacons. The 17th-century philosopher took a look at the Orpheus story and decided that it was all about philosophy. The singer’s ability to tame the animals and combat death with his song represented distinct branches of philosophy: ethics, and natural philosophy or science. The 20th-century painter took the tale of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes as the starting point for his deeply personal triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which is currently on show at the Royal Academy. The bloodstained story, it turned out, was all about him.

Buxton, who is emeritus professor of classics at Bristol University, doesn’t explore what a myth is, nor tell us why he has chosen these eight. He has two aims. The first is to show the infinite adaptability of the Greek myths. The second is to argue that they are ‘meaningful for virtually everyone, regardless of their economic circumstances or cultural background’.

In the first aim he succeeds completely. I had no idea that in 15th-century Florence, wedding chests, known as cassone, often bore an image of Medea: an odd choice, since she murdered her children. Buxton’s book is a literary wedding chest, packed with fascinating curios, intriguing asides and spiralling sub-plots. But it, too, bears a slightly misleading label. The Greek Myths That Shape the Way We Think? Presumably these should also include the stories of Perseus, or Theseus, or Odysseus, or Achilles? Or if they don’t, why don’t they?

The present tenses in the title also seem dubious, as it’s in its most recent examples that Buxton’s book is weakest. If he wants to speak to a broader audience he must dust down his prose style, which is peppered with fusty double negatives (‘not for nothing’ etc). And he should probably say ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘chronologically concomitant’.

Why wouldn’t such a book take in the extraordinary dominance in Hollywood over the past 15 years of superhero movies, involving larger-than-life characters that seem obvious descendents of Greek mythological heroes? In 2008’s Iron Man, for example, Tony Stark’s imprisonment in a cave, and how he escapes, arguably hark back to Odysseus and the Cyclops.

The street artists Banksy and Zilda reference Greek myths, but don’t get a mention. Buxton might equally have touched on the Twitter poet Brian Bilston’s take on Orpheus, which sees the hero search for his lost love in the modern hell of a JD Sports outlet, or have name-checked re-takes on familiar myths from a female perspective by Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes.

Admittedly, in some cases, these aren’t the myths that Buxton has chosen, but in many instances they are. Why, for example, is there no nod to Disney’s Hercules film? I recently saw its latest animated feature Encanto, with its female Colombian equivalent of the muscle-bound hero. (‘I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus… Was Hercules ever like “Yo, I don’t wanna fight Cerberus?”’) That probably came out after Buxton handed in his final draft. But why not include the absurd exhibition staged in Moscow in 2014, in which obsequious artists presented a butch President Putin performing equivalents of the Labours of Heracles? In one, he shoulders the globe, which is turned to present Ukraine foremost. In a detail that now seems disgusting, a white dove of peace flutters.

The author is clearly happier referencing Rubens than lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, let alone second-rate post-Soviet propaganda. That is fine, of course, but it doesn’t really land his blow for up-to-the-minute relevance.

Knotty problems: French Braid, by Anne Tyler, reviewed

Anne Tyler’s 24th novel French Braid opens in 2010 in Philadelphia train station. We find the teenage Serena, who has the ‘usual Garrett-family blue’ eyes, with her boyfriend James, waiting for a train back to Baltimore, where they’re at university together. Serena runs into her cousin Nicholas – although she’s not certain it’s him – and doesn’t seem especially keen to speak to him. There’s an awkward meeting; then Serena and James go to catch their train. A sense of unease hangs over the whole encounter. James speaks for the reader when he says: ‘Maybe there’s some deep dark secret in your family’s past.’ Uncovering this secret is at the heart of the novel. The ‘braid’ of the title is a metaphor for the intricate knots of love and obligation that bind families together but which may also come to feel like shackles.

From that near contemporary beginning, French Braid spools back through time, seeking to pinpoint the moment at which the wound in the Garrett family is first opened. It’s 1959 and the patriarch, Robin Garrett, has taken his family on their first ever holiday. His wife Mercy sees the break as an opportunity to work on her painting. Alice, the eldest daughter, is 17. For her, the trip is ‘nothing to look forward to’ and we perceive the days at Deep Creek Lake largely from her perspective. Lily, the middle girl, immediately falls in love with a preppy neighbour whose family own a lakeside holiday home. Then there’s David, still a child, a sensitive, tender soul. Already we can see the tensions that animate the family dynamic. As Alice says to herself, watching her parents and siblings by the lake: ‘A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, so lonesome.’

The novel then traces the lives of the family, their successes and defeats, their loves and losses. As soon as David is safely packed off to college, Mercy moves out of the family home to live in a rented studio, a place she keeps obsessively clean and free of emotional ties. It isn’t a separation as much as a physical distancing – Robin in particular works hard (although, we learn, unsuccessfully) to ensure that his children don’t discover their parents’ unusual domestic arrangements.

What Tyler does so well is to arrange set pieces that serve to represent the intricate way the family evolves over time. Some are glancing – the first time the family meet David’s wife Greta and his stepdaughter Emily is a brief but brilliant illustration of the space that has opened up between David and the rest of the family. Others are more studied: Robin’s attempt to throw a party to celebrate his and Mercy’s 50th wedding anniversary is tender and painful in equal measure.

French Braid finishes with a new generation of Garretts getting on in a world that has been changed dramatically by the pandemic. We realise that, through this study of a family, we’ve been delivered something larger and more ambitious: a portrait of a nation at a time of crisis. It seems that Tyler is saying that in the very awkwardness and angst of her archetypical family lies something essentially American, entirely resilient. Or, as David’s straight-talking wife puts it: ‘This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people.’

Those thorns are wounding, but they are also protective, and once you work past them there is the beauty of the rose. French Braid is a family saga of uncommon subtlety and grace, a novel which shows that, at 80, Anne Tyler is still amongst the very best writers around.

Could China get sucked into war in Ukraine?

If war in Ukraine is to end any time soon, the relationship between Moscow and Beijing will prove crucial. A relatively benign scenario is that China might become increasingly frustrated by the protracted war, and by the obvious incompetence and spectacular inhumanity of Putin’s military offensive. It would be rational for president Xi Jinping to tell the Russian autocrat that he has to stop. But there is a much darker, more frightening, scenario in the history books that could point to what happens next.

That precedent is the story of the development, and increasing belligerence, of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II before 1914. Like modern China, the German Empire was an autocracy trying to modernise, very well connected with the world economy and with a powerful export industry that would suffer from long drawn out conflict or a collapse of world trade. It was at the same time trying to find an alternative to what it perceived as an illegitimate and hypocritical British domination of the world, achieved by means of a control of finance. It wanted a land-based globalisation that would rival Britain’s sea-based trade and political network.

All these aspects are easily translated in the modern parallel of China’s increasing frustration with what it sees as the decaying US control of global finance and the world’s political and security architecture. There are quite precise echoes of the Berlin-Baghdad railway project in Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative.

But the Kaiser’s Germany was also increasingly worried about its isolation and friendlessness. It believed that with France on the west, the Russian empire in the east, and Britain across the North Sea, it was encircled, and its development restricted. It needed to look to adventures far away – in southern Africa, or in the Middle East – in order to find room to expand.

The only ally for Germany was Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg dynastic empire. The dependence on the relationship with Vienna meant that Germany could not afford to let the Habsburgs be humiliated, or subject to pressure from other European states. The consequence was that Germany needed to use any diplomatic or security crisis that involved Austria to tie the link even more closely.

When worldwide conflict erupted, it did so because of the incident that involved Austrian interests and prestige. The aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, by Serbian nationalists with pretty clear links to Serbia and the Serbian intelligence service meant that Austria’s existence as a state seemed to be at risk. Germany pushed Austrian forward with a ‘blank cheque’ on 5 July, effectively encouraging the Austrians to deliver an impossible ultimatum to Serbia and then to start with the bombardment of Belgrade.

But the Habsburg mobilisation was increasingly chaotic and feeble, and by 1917 Germany in effect took over running the Austrian war effort. The consequence of being chained to what amounted to a political corpse pushed Germany into taking one risk after another: invading Belgium and thus triggering the British intervention in the war; and then in 1917 launching unconditional submarine warfare to subdue Britain, but in effect bringing the United States into the war. The result was devastation, and in the end defeat and humiliation. That outcome was the logical outcome of a strategy of ‘friendship’ in an unfriendly world that in the end meant tying oneself to a political, economic and military dead body.

China today also feels encircled, with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and India suspicious or hostile. The Chinese client states are far away, Pakistan or Sri Lanka, or in Africa. There is also an acute awareness of the story of 1914, and of the grim precedent it paints. In 2014, as the hundredth anniversary of what George Kennan called the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe raised the spectre – and elicited a curious reply from China, to the effect that Beijing had made a formal decision not to seek war with Japan. The discussion focused on the possibility of a direct clash in the South China Sea.

What was not debated in 2014 was the intellectual basis for a security ‘friendship’ that looks very similar to the arguments deployed in Europe before 1914. Putinism offers a coherent rationale for mixing autocracy, nationality and opposition to what Americans see as a liberal international order, and its critics denounce as hypocritical US-centred globalisation and neoliberalism.

And what also went unspoken in 2014, but now appears a terrifying possibility, is that China may be sucked into an impossible, unwinnable and destructive conflict because of a psychological dependence on maintaining a relationship with Russia, the country it now styles its ‘best friend’.