The Battle for Britain | 22 January 2022

No. 686

White to play. Gelfand–Karjakin, Tal Memorial Blitz 2008. Gelfand’s pawn is pinned, and moving the king runs into more checks. But here he missed a surprising shot. What should White play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 January. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Qh6! Bxh6 2 Nf6+ Kh8 3 Rxh7# Or 1…Re7 2 Rxe7 Bxh6 3 Nf6+ Kf8 4 Rc7#

Last week’s winner Peter Keetley, London SW12

2539: Wider

Six unclued lights (all real words) are the names of 35/26 minus one letter. The missing letters match those that will appear in the shaded squares.

Across

1 Take in fire shoe for small firefighter? (11, two words)

7 Titian’s comb (3)

11 Bum governor newspaper backed (6)

15 Evil spirit with heart of grotty sod (5)

16 Camorrist’s gold lace (5)

17 Last part of game to finish (6, two words)

18 Bard’s ashes left in peace (5)

20 Abhorring PT slack stepdame cancels (6)

21 Capuchin pressing for porticos (5)

27 Palest Greek broods beside Troy (7)

29 German menials in sandals (5)

30 Cyst entered round potato (6)

32 University nine abandoned from boredom (5)

36 TV star arrests Georgia (spy) (5)

37 Girl from Israel visiting meadow (5)

39 Vicious Latvian tailed prince (6)

40 Hunger for bread (3)

41 Falsely Siren nicely swims (11)

Down

1 Peter and legless Tony nick miners’ equipment (10, two words)

2 Oil giant developed printing method (8)

3 Straying herds Neal discusses again (9)

4 A river very clear with wavy sheen – it sparkles (12, two words)

5 Most foul fruit shocks (7)

7 Passage out of time provokes composer (5)

8 Service tax (4)

9 Unoriginal work about mess (6)

10 Ordinary flower deficient in two stipules round stem (5)

14 Ancient bod ran common nag ragged (12, two words, one hyphened)

19 Kittens probably go, put in one (10, two words)

21 Secret ale refreshed old villain (9)

23 Pound street with difficulty over in Welsh town (8)

24 Poet’s set about breaking bad steed (8)

25 Copper kitchen utensil (6)

28 Wesker plays transfix (6)

31 Yoga pose some rajas analysed (5)

33 Scottish town with new golf club there? (5)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 7 February. 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. Apologies that there may be a delay in sending out prizes at present.

Download a printable version here.

2021 in sonnets

In Competition No. 3232, you were invited to retell a news story from the past year in sonnet form. An excellent entry this week included submissions ranging far and wide, from Harry Patch and the Everly Brothers to Alaskan walruses and Jeff Bezos’s penis. Commendations to Josephine Boyle, C. Paul Evans, Dorothy Pope, R.M. Goddard, Douglas Hall and Martin Elster, and £20 each to those printed below.

For roofer Charlie Perry and his mates It was a time of Strongbow and cocaine, The chance to nullify decades of pain By getting early into altered states Then watching, with the pride that elevates, As English football claimed a cup again. In an uplifting, patriotic vein They crashed and bunged their way through Wembley’s gates. Anarchy in the UK? This was it — A zonked-out yahoo mob rampaging free, The unleashed Id, the tribe that lost its head. A bottom was exposed, a flare was lit. That, and a shootout loss to Italy, Became England’s epitome. ’Nuff said. Basil Ransome-Davies

Your green bins brim with cardboard: watch it soften, Since impulse-buying’s never out of date — A click, a new arrival. More than often, They’ll overflow, while in West Texas waits The profiteer who crammed your waste with packing. A most suspicious bulge has filled his pockets. His bank accounts are full. They’re almost cracking; And now he’s used your wallet on some rockets.   Your Christmas gifts have furnished him a perq: The chance to charge the rich ten million quid. Today he’s boldly sent up Captain Kirk, Who wept to be in space (oh yes he did!). Around the pad, the rich build airy castles, While at your door, the driver stands with parcels. Bill Greenwell

This rock remembers curvature of clay That cradled him beneath a fragrant pine. The sunset dipped her paintbrush in the bay And tinted rivers red with evening wine.   The centuries have smoothed his granite face And rounded razored edges of his tongue. Upheaved, he wakes within a mob’s embrace — Marauders jeer that traitors must be hung.   When venom burns their veins and blinds their eyes, The riots and the rage inebriate And fuel thirst for liquor laced with lies. The hands that hurl the rocks are hard with hate.   But stones that broke the water left no shard — The ripples stilled, and glass remained unmarred. Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

If COVID be the antidote of love — To touch a sin; to kiss, a very crime, Here’s two, the truth of such would haply prove, Defiant as my mock-antique eye-rhyme. That HANCOCK, gloomy face of Covid gloom Might fall for Gina — just like other blokes — And make us cry ‘For Pete’s sake, get a room!’ Is all too typical of Cupid’s jokes. That COLADANGELO should likewise fall For someone who’s, quite frankly, rather puny, When OLIVER’s so rich and fit and tall, Is strange; but then, they’d met before at Uni. The moral is: don’t trust those PPEs. Their love can grow and dwindle by degrees. Frank Upton

I’m Emma Raducanu… MBE! (Like, totally hush-hush, till New Year’s Day), Teenage sensation? SPOTY? OMG! That’s literally awesome! Whoa, no way! The letter from the Palace said ER — The same initials, right? How spooky’s that? The Queen’s like ‘What do you do?’ I’m like ‘Duh?’ Then she’s like ‘Do you bowl or do you bat?’ So weirded-out at Wimbledon — big yikes! Then slayed it at the US Open — whoa! My Instagram account? A million likes! Chilling at the Met with cool J Lo And Lewis Hamilton? Yay LOL! Like, Year Thirteen are totally well jel. David Silverman

The deal was sealed when Jeff revealed his plan; The Amazon phenomenon was primed To blast off soon, and so in June he ran His press release, a masterpiece well timed.   The SpaceX dude could only brood. He knew He couldn’t chase the Bezos pace to space; In such a span of time no man could do What must be done, so Jeff had won the race.   But then — behold! — a flash of gold, a burst Of light! It’s Branson, gallant handsome knight, Sir Lancelot the astronaut — the first Tycoon to clear the stratosphere in flight!   His rocket’s thrust left Jeff nonplussed and shocked. A cocky scheme, at times, can seem half-cocked. Alex Steelsmith

I met a traveller from an antique land who said — ‘A vast and green container ship stands in the desert, bows wedged in the sand. A sidewind caught it broadside on its trip from Tanjung Pelepas to Rotterdam and spun it like a Pooh stick in a race, so that to north and south a traffic jam of vital trade is visible from space. And words are stencilled on its derrière: EVER GIVEN — PANAMA. Some say A SHAG LIKE SUEZ? might be added there. Nothing beside can pass. Round the dismay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.’  Nick MacKinnon

No. 3235: a bit previous

You are invited to invent a prequel to a well-known work of literature (e.g. The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea or Dante’s ‘Smouldering Rag’) and supply an extract from it. Please email entries of up to 16 lines or 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 February.

Bridge | 22 January 2022

Almost everyone has a set of ‘carding’ agreements with their partners to convey information when defending. But I’m always amazed by how many people feel compelled to do so at every turn, broadcasting loudly how many cards they have in each suit, and whether or not they hold an honour. The truth is, the better your opponents, the more they will make use of the information — and the better your partners, the less they need it. I know a couple of professionals who actually ban their clients from giving any signals at all. That was certainly true of the great Rixi Marcus. ‘Don’t give me any signals!’ she would bark at lesser players. ‘After a few tricks I will know what you’ve got better than you know yourself.’ She enjoyed relating this hand, from a Vanderbilt Cup final, as a cautionary tale:

South’s 2♣ was strong; 2◆ was a relay. Over 2NT, North transferred to spades, then bid Blackwood. When he continued with 5NT, South jumped to the grand. West led a club. South drew trumps, then played three more clubs. West discarded the ◆8, then the ◆5 — high-low to show he liked the suit. Realising that the diamond finesse would fail, South decided instead to try for a Vienna Coup: he cashed the ◆A, then played two more trumps, ending in dummy. In the end position, dummy held ♠6 ♥5 ◆104, South held ♥AKJ ◆Q and West held ♥Q106 ◆K. On the play of the ♠6, South threw the ◆s and West a heart. Now South played hearts from the top, bringing down the ♥Q. Who said honesty pays?

Christmas crossword 2021 – solution

The NATIVITY (89) of the ACTOR (37) HUMPHREY BOGART (47/13), the singers ANNIE LENNOX (112/12) and IAN BOSTRIDGE (4/61), the prolific BAT (34) ALASTAIR COOK (124/119), the colourful writer QUENTIN CRISP (90/92), the outré TV star KENNY EVERETT (97D/82), the expert at ‘THE PLAYING OF THE MERRY ORGAN’ (16/6/38) ORLANDO GIBBONS (99/1), the film producer ISMAIL MERCHANT (127/62), the mathematician who also watched ‘THE SILENT STARS GO BY’ (128/103/10) ISAAC NEWTON (9/55) and PRIME MINISTER (93A/79) JUSTIN TRUDEAU (66/39) was ‘ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS’ (50D/2A).

Christmas crossword: the winners

The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In by Henry Eliot (Penguin) go to the following.

First prize Frances Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks

Runners-up Norman Melvin, Twickenham; Juliet Burgess, Narberth, Pembrokeshire; Duncan Milroy, East Molesey, Surrey

Additional runners-up Ted Pounds, Bath; Michael Ollerenshaw, Altrincham, Cheshire; Virginia Porter, Gwaelod-y-Garth, Cardiff; Jacqui Sohn, Gorleston, Norfolk; Nick Walker, Glasgow; Chris Chatwin, Kenilworth, Warwickshire

Rejecting the Raj: Gandhi’s acolytes in the West

Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate in Surrey was followed by years of rejecting suitors and performing Beethoven on the piano. Occasionally she would sail across the world to visit her father, the commander-in-chief of the East Indies Squadron, who was responsible for Britain’s fleet in the Indian Ocean. But in 1923, a trip to Switzerland to visit the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland in the hills of Villeneuve would change the concert pianist’s life forever. Rolland had recently written about an Indian civil rights activist called Mahatma Gandhi. ‘You have not heard about him?’ he asked in amazement. ‘He is another Christ!’

Rolland’s book convinced Madeleine that she needed to meet the Mahatma. She moved to India, changed her name to Mira (to make it easier for Gandhi to pronounce), learned Hindi and within two years had become the Mahatma’s adopted daughter. Tasked with looking after his spinning wheel, peeling his fruit and even recording the minutiae of his bowel movements, Mira firmly established herself in Gandhi’s inner circle, along with the likes of India’s future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. By the end of the decade, Gandhi’s disciple had become a fully-fledged revolutionary, imprisoned in Bombay’s Arthur Road Jail for civil disobedience. On her release, Gandhi sent her to lobby the president of the United States and create pressure for Britain to grant India’s freedom. ‘The East and West have met before,’ she told a surprised young journalist in New York. ‘To say they have not met is to deny Christianity, for Christianity came from the East.’

In Rebels Against the Raj, Ramachandra Guha explores the largely forgotten story of seven white-skinned rebels who fought for India’s freedom. Transgressing racial boundaries, these anti-imperial renegades joined secret societies, dodged deportation and were imprisoned for their fight against empire. They are an eclectic bunch (four British, two American, one Irish), their lives united by, and interwoven with, the life of Gandhi. Some adopted Indian names, others Indian faiths, or took Indian spouses. Samuel ‘Satyanand’ Stokes brought up his Anglo-Indian children without a word of English, only speaking to them in Hindi and Pahadi.

Guha threads together these lives in a narrative of startling originality. He recently told Outlook magazine that he had never enjoyed writing a book as much as this one, and his excitement at discovering a forgotten chapter of Indian history is contagious. What is remarkable is how important these rebels were. They weren’t just minor allies of the freedom movement, but historical figures whose decisions shaped the histories of both Britain and India. Take the Irish theosophist Annie Besant, who was elected president of the Indian National Congress and ultimately launched the Indian Home Rule movement. She was an inspiration for Gandhi, who later remarked: ‘I have no doubt that she has popularised Home Rule in a manner no other person has.’

Benjamin Horniman was a journalist and art critic who dodged arrest to print the first reports on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. When his newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, became the leading mouthpiece for the Indian Freedom struggle, the British government deported him and revoked his passport. This triggered a national debate similar to the more recent case of Shamima Begum on whether the government had the right to revoke a British citizen’s passport for associating with what was deemed an extremist movement abroad. It was only after the likes of H.G. Wells, along with 19 members of parliament, protested the decision that his passport was reissued.

Today we scarcely remember these renegades who straddled the line between colonialists and freedom fighters. Indeed, many found themselves fading into obscurity in their own lifetimes, rejected in Britain for being too Indian but losing relevance in an India that was moving away from Gandhian ideals. Catherine Heilman, from London’s Shepherd’s Bush, found her movement in the Himalayas restricted after India’s devastating war with China. Mira went into self-imposed exile after falling out with the new ruling class of independent India.

But remembering them is important. Guha’s book emphasises that Britain’s culture wars are not new: that empire was as controversial then as it is now, and that many Britons risked their lives for its downfall. And it shows that the daughter of an imperial naval officer could become one of empire’s most important and vocal opponents. As discussions of Britain’s colonial legacy become increasingly polarised, we are in ever more need of nuanced books like this one.

How the net finally closed on the Nazi henchman Andrei Sawoniuk

Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees, Sawoniuk ordered the women to strip naked, shot them in the back and kicked their bodies into a newly dug pit.

Fifty-seven years later, Zan was one of a dozen witnesses to give evidence against Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey, at the only war crimes trial ever held in Britain. Though the UK lost interest soon after the second world war in prosecuting war criminals, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre continued to pursue former Nazis all over the world, and in 1985 the names of 97 suspects living in Britain were handed to the authorities. One of those on the list was Sawoniuk, recently retired after working for 35 years on the railways, a British citizen by virtue of having deftly changed sides in the closing months of the war.

Even so, it was only in 1991, after many debates in parliament and the passing of a War Crimes Act, framed to allow British citizens to be charged with crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, that the British police went in search of the suspects. One man was charged but died after being declared unfit to stand trial. Others had disappeared or died, or the evidence against them was found to be insubstantial. Sawoniuk, by now a sad, choleric figure living alone in the East End, was the only one to be brought before the courts.

Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson have based their story on the court transcripts annotated by the judge, the late Sir Humphrey Potts, on the vast amount of news coverage and on interviews with survivors, witnesses, detectives and historians. It makes an extraordinary tale, not least because of the light it throws on the persistence and thoroughness of the British legal system.

The first Einsatzgruppen, the SS death squads, swept into Domachevo on 19 September 1942, the eve of Yom Kippur. After an initial round-up and massacre of 2,900 Jews, they recruited auxiliaries to help them with further arrests and killings. One of the first to volunteer was the 21-year-old Sawoniuk, a barely literate bully who terrorised local children. When the SS retreated from Belarus in the summer of 1944, he fled with them to East Prussia, served with other collaborators in various auxiliary forces and eventually, having joined a Polish corps, was able to make his way to Britain. He married several times, changed his Christian name to Tony and found a job as a ticket collector on British Rail.

The account of how he was finally identified and tracked down makes lively reading. The sum of £30 million was allocated to pursuing the suspects and sifting through the records of a quarter of a million Poles who had come to Britain after the war. More fascinating, though, is the trial itself in 1999. Four hundred possible witnesses in nine countries were questioned and, once the trial got under way, the 12 jurors were flown to Warsaw, then bussed through a blizzard to the forests of Belarus to inspect the sites of massacres. Of the witnesses then brought to appear at the Old Bailey, almost all were in their seventies and none had ever flown in a plane before. One woman had never even been on a train. One man, unaccustomed to comfort, spent his evenings luxuriating in hot baths. A crucial witness for the prosecution was another childhood comrade of Sawoniuk’s, Ben-Zion Blustein, who joined the partisans and whose entire family had been wiped out by the killers.

The wealth of evidence against Sawoniuk seemed overwhelming, despite the defence team’s efforts to chip away at the credibility of the witnesses and portray their client as a pathetic orphan, coerced by forces beyond his control. Sawoniuk himself, agitated, furious, contradicting himself and patently deeply unpleasant, did not help his case. After 27 days in court, and a deliberation by the jury that lasted more than 14 hours, he was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to life. He died in prison six years later.

The Ticket Collector from Belarus, much of which is given over to day-to-day court proceedings, is somewhat overlong. The vast literature on the Holocaust, however, contains much more on the extermination camps than on the rampaging SS death squads that massacred their way across the territories they occupied, the men memorably called ‘ordinary’ by the historian Christopher Browning; and still less about the eagerness of local collaborators, such as Sawoniuk, to do their bidding. As a dismal picture of wartime Belarus — which lost half its population first to the Nazi death squads, then to the Russians, and where, out of Domachevo’s 4,000 Jews only 13 survived — it makes for fascinating reading.

A tale of love and grim determination: Zorrie, by Laird Hunt, reviewed

When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a little girl asks how her baby breathes. ‘Like a fish,’ says Zorrie, which is how Hunt treats his readers, luring them with a snapshot of Zorrie’s diminishing days before reeling them in as her life unspools.

Grief stamps an early and enduring presence on Zorrie when diphtheria takes her parents, leaving her to be raised by a harsh elderly aunt who had ‘drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness after a badly failed marriage’. Zorrie takes solace in nature and nuggets of kindness from her schoolteacher, but finds herself alone again, aged 21, when her aunt dies, leaving her nothing. It is 1930, and Zorrie roams the state looking for work, in echoes of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, one of many literary ghosts that haunt this finalist for America’s National Book Award last year.

In Ottawa, Illinois, Zorrie finds work painting luminous numbers on clock faces; she and the other ‘ghost girls’ lick the tips of their radium-dipped paintbrushes for precision. It is hard not to worry, but Hunt balances the angst. Zorrie makes friends, sees her first movie, eats her first ice cream sundae and spots gifts as she wanders along: abandoned nests, arrowheads and monarch wings, in a nod to Gene Stratton-Porter’s Indiana classic, A Girl of the Limberlost.

But oh what relief when Zorrie yields to the call of Indiana and ‘the dirt she had bloomed up out of’ after barely two months of ingesting carcinogenic powder. Back home she settles down, keeping house for Gus and Bessie Underwood before they set her up with their son Harold. Marriage brings love, but sorrow stalks this slender book, Hunt’s ninth, which packs more life into 161 pages than most novels manage at three times the length.

Hunt, who is also a translator, has the precision of a short story writer: symbols abound and even small observations, such as Zorrie watching a man’s arms hang strangely immobile at his sides, unpick a bigger story. Hunt’s skill is in taking familiar themes such as grief, love, memory and the passage of time and making us think afresh about the hastening decades. ‘You could get whiplash trying to watch time go by. Did you sign up for that? I know I never did. Time’ll spin your salad for you,’ says one of Zorrie’s fellow ghost girls when she returns to Ottawa to commemorate a death.

Zorrie’s life is long but hard; she copes by looking for the best even when things don’t go right. A hailstorm thwarts her attempt to spy Lake Michigan from the Indiana Dunes, but she thinks: ‘The hills of sand had been beautiful, so that was something. There was always something. Even when there wasn’t.’ Which is something we’d all do well to remember.

The dark story behind Bambi, the book Hitler banned

The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the rights to his 1923 bestseller Bambi for a paltry $1,000, Walt is reputed to have suggested myriad unhelpful plot additions to the simple story. ‘Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill,’ he offered at one script meeting, ‘and then cut away to see all the damage he’s done to the ant civilisation?’

His writers knew better. The resulting 1942 forest fantasia, which leaps in swooning bounds from one extravagantly coloured and orchestrated natural history lesson to another, was nominated for three Oscars, and by 2005 had grossed $102 million.

The original author did less well out of his gambolling creation. Salter never saw a penny of the Disney movie’s global success and died alone, forgotten, in exile. He had fled to neutral Switzerland from his homeland of Austria because — as it may surprise some to learn — Bambi, along with Salten’s other works, was on a list of books banned by the Nazis in 1935. For, as this elegant, uncompromising new translation by the American academic Jack Zipes (with suitably shadowy illustrations by Alenka Sottler) makes clear, it is not really a children’s book at all.

Salten’s basic plot — the bittersweet Bildungsroman of a young deer — will be familiar to fans of the movie. The book begins enchantingly enough, with Bambi’s mother educating him on the difference between a butterfly and flower. Bambi develops from naive fawn to grand old prince of the woods, coming of age through the rites of love and loss, teaching himself, and us, about the ever-changing natural world as he does.

The eponymous deer is not the only character Disney fans may recognise either: there is Faline, the skittish object of his affections; a harrumphing screech owl to dispense aged wisdom; and plenty of romping squirrels. But if you were one of many children traumatised by an unseen hunter shooting Bambi’s mother in the Disney film, consider this your trigger warning: what follows is far bleaker.

By the book’s end, the woods have turned very dark indeed. Not only does Bambi lose his mother, but nearly every single animal endures brutal suffering or a bloody end. ‘It was quiet in the forest, but something horrible happened every day,’ begins one chapter cheerily. And not just thanks to human hunters. A crow attacks the hare’s son ‘in a cruel way’. A squirrel finds himself unable to talk any more, thanks to the pine marten biting out his neck. A fox tears apart the ‘strong and handsome pheasant who had enjoyed general respect and popularity’. This is a tale of everyday country creatures who live in terror.

Perhaps the cruellest sequence concerns Bambi’s young deer chum Gobo (replaced by Thumper the rabbit in the Disney version), who is shot, wounded, taken in by a human, nursed and fed, then released back to the forest with a heartening message. The human — known throughout only as ‘He’ — is not to be feared after all. ‘If somebody serves Him, He’s good to him. Wonderfully good!’ Not long after dispensing this happy news Gobo is shot again, this time fatally, by another hunter.

By the time a hound on the trail of a trapped fox is surrounded by a mob of baying forest creatures denouncing him as ‘Traitor’ and ‘Henchman’, we are straying into Animal Farm territory, and the real target of this fable becomes clear.

Salten was both a hunter and a passionate advocate for animal rights. And he was also a Jew, living for a time in occupied Austria. As Zipes makes clear in his introduction, he was a man who hoped to overcome his own contradictions through literature, who believed that ‘only when people truly understood how the animals suffered persecution from hunting in the forest could they create peace among themselves’.

Bambi, both book and film, are no advert for blood sports. But Salten’s allegory derives its real power from the experience of anti-Semitic alienation, persecution and genocidal slaughter played out in a grimly ironic woodland paradise. The animals try to be good, to be kind, to survive; yet every path taken — escape, assimilation or concealment — leaves them only more exposed to ruthless cruelty.

John Galsworthy wrote an enthusiastic foreword to the original, much more innocuous translation, in which he extolled the book’s appeal to conservationists, with the dry conclusion: ‘I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.’ Had he read this version, he might have added ‘and autocrats’.

The women who changed American cuisine forever

What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers. In a country shaped by immigrants, there is little else but immigrant food. But while some food cultures are firmly embedded in the American mainstream, well-mixed into the fabled ‘melting pot’, others are not. This is ever-changing: a few decades ago the ubiquity of sushi, for example, would have been unthink-able. Is this a good thing? It depends who you ask. Assimilation can bring belonging, but also compromise.

Greater knowledge and appreciation of different food cultures doesn’t just happen. People make it happen. Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers examines the lives of seven immigrant women, all from different backgrounds, who contributed to the way America cooks and eats: Chao Yang Buwei from China, Elena Zelayeta from Mexico, Madeleine Kamman from France, Marcella Hazan from Italy, Julie Sahni from India, Najmieh Batmanglij from Iran and Norma Shirley from Jamaica.

Immigrant status, gender and an interest in food unite these cooks. But their stories, careers and goals are hugely diverse. Each chapter offers a detailed portrait of one woman. Take Chao Yang Buwei, who brought ‘stir-fry’ into the lexicon with her seminal 1945 book How to Cook and Eat in Chinese at a time when, as Sen puts it, ‘chop suey, a Chinese-American innovation, held tyrannical sway over the American imagination’. Sen considers Buwei’s food carefully and the space she made for less familiar Chinese dishes from regions other than Guangzhou, including Jiangnan’s pea starch noodles and Nanking’s cold saltwater duck.

An examination of food and identity is nothing new, nor is a focus on immigrant food culture in America. Indeed the variety and pervasiveness of food from different countries is often used as a metonym for America’s multiculturalism. But Sen’s approach is different. He avoids quoting family members and acolytes, and therefore hagiography. Instead, he paints a vivid, complex picture of his subjects.

His portrait of Zelayeta acknowledges that her desire to assimilate and persuade meant that

to engage reluctant readers, Elena made her turkey in green mole sauce purposefully mild; she said ‘good old American hot dogs’ worked just fine in lentil soup if cooks couldn’t find the Spanish longaniza sausage that was beloved in Mexican cooking.

This forgiving approach to her readers’ attitude to foreign ingredients, Sen observes, may account for Zelayeta’s writing’s lack of longevity. But to her accommodation didn’t mean compromise; it was part of her culinary identity. ‘I love being an American,’ she said.

Taste Makers doesn’t shy away from some of the problems that surround immigrant food: of translation (Buwei, for instance, spoke little English); of media focus (Zelayeta went blind at 36, a fact that has dominated most writing about her); of the balance between authenticity and accessibility. As a result, it embraces the wider subject of the immigrant experience in America:

I wanted to tell the story of immigration… through the prism of food, but that’s not quite what this book ended up being. I found myself interrogating the very notion of what success looks like for immigrants under American capitalism.

Success is inherently subjective. These women fundamentally changed the American approach to Iranian, Jamaican and Chinese food, but their legacies are incomplete. Most of them, despite enjoying critical and commercial acclaim in the lifetimes, have not been remembered (the exception is Hazan, who remains a figurehead of Italian cooking after her death) and their stories have gone untold for decades. Sen attempts to right this, but also to raise wider questions about culinary acceptance and legacy.

He contrasts one other woman with his subjects: Julia Child. The American who lived as an expat in France wrote about French food for an American readership and enjoyed stratospheric success (not shared by her French co-authors). Sen calls her a ‘reverse immigrant’ and, while acknowledging her well-known eccentricities, observes that they ‘can obscure a very fundamental privilege she carried: Julia Child was American’. Her story feels incongruous set among the others’ — but that is the point. As Sen writes: ‘She carried no threat of the outsider. Her American origins were a crucial component of why viewers listened to her.’

Sen is an excellent storyteller, and his portraits are immersive. Taste Makers is a well-researched book that shines light on seven women who helped to change culinary tastes in America. But at times it is an uncomfortable read. Grouping them together raises more questions than it answers, and forces the reader to look at whose stories we value and why.

For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can testify, having once had the temerity to behead a cat — in a novel, I mean —and then crucify the mutilated corpse upside down on a church door. As a general rule, if you kill a domestic pet in your crime story you should expect a hostile postbag of epic proportions.

But rules are meant to be broken. Which is why it’s a pleasure to find in Louise Welsh’s latest novel a stinking, maggot-swarming Jack Russell entombed in a chest with a tightly fitting lid. She’s an author whose stock-in-trade is the unexpected, which is also demonstrated by the variety of her fiction. Among her books are a historical novel about Christopher Marlowe, a chilling psychological thriller set in Berlin and a dystopian trilogy called Plague Times, based on the ridiculous premise that a hitherto unknown flu-like virus has devastated the UK.

In The Second Cut, however, Welsh brings her career back to where it started: to Glasgow, and a trouble-prone auctioneer named Rilke. In her first novel, The Cutting Room, Rilke stumbles on a snuff movie while valuing a dead man’s effects. Now, 20 years later, he’s back. He may be older and wiser, but he’s still wryly honest about everything, including himself: ‘I am too tall, too thin, too cadaverous to look like anything other than a vampire on the make.’

Rilke is the chief auctioneer of a well-established company owned by a friend. An old acquaintance, encountered among the guests at a gay wedding, gives him a potentially lucrative tip about a forthcoming country house clearance sale, and then winds up dead in a doorway after too much fun on a winter night. The police are content to write it off as a case of drug overdose, plus exposure to winter temperatures.

Spurred by his awkwardly active conscience, Rilke attempts to sell the dead man’s possessions to pay for his funeral. This leads to the discovery of a large quantity of GHB, a date-rape drug much prized at chem-sex parties. It also attracts the malign attention of a particularly nasty homophobic gangster. ‘Sex and death,’ Rilke reminds us, ‘are bound together, plaited like DNA.’

In the meantime, Rilke and his team are making an inventory of the country house’s contents, which brings us back to the rotting dog. The house is in ‘the arse end of nowhere’, otherwise known as Galloway. In what seems like no time at all, we are confronted with a missing old lady, two ageing posh boys on the make, a burned-out car and an illegal immigrant on the run. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, things get a little rough at a spectacular gay orgy.

This novel gave me an indecent amount of enjoyment. It manages to be bleak, witty, unfailingly compassionate and beautifully written all at the same time, as well as a lightly fictionalised love letter to Glasgow. It’s true that the plot grows steadily more convoluted and less plausible, and I’m still not sure who killed the dog, let alone why. But I don’t care, and neither will you.

Confused lives: It’s Getting Dark, by Peter Stamm, reviewed

The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something Stamm accentuates in his spare prose. The result is a distilled essence of unease: the reader is uncomfortable, but can’t look away. This masterful combination of fundamental themes, explored without embellishment through confused lives, has won the author numerous prizes.

His 2020 novel The Sweet Indifference hinged on the possibility of seizing lost chances and allowing events to unfold differently. In this collection of short stories, the narrator of ‘Marcia’ is a recluse who ponders about an ex from whom he beat a callously precipitate retreat. He’s nihilistic, but there’s grim insight in his black dog. When a fever descends, memory and hallucination blend. But given the chance to redeem himself for his past behaviour, would he grasp it or slope off again to emotional avoidance?

Not all characters allow once-glimpsed opportunities to dissolve forever. ‘The Most Beautiful Dress’ is a modern Cinderella story, whose resolution made me wonder whether Stamm has decided to allow glints of sunlight through. A tinge of dark humour colours ‘Nightigal’, about a disgruntled teenager unable to assert himself, who fantasises about escape. Stamm is astute on self-consciousness. The inadequate boy’s plan to get rich is so inept that when he’s poised between childish fantasy and adult action, catastrophe inevitably awaits.

The taut, dry style of ‘Supermoon’ snags our attention mercilessly as we observe the subservient narrator being serially ignored. It’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis for the 21st century: a premonition of a world that continues while you rasp your wings together in frustrated incomprehension.

A flat note is struck in the demotic idiom in ‘Sabrina’. It’s intended to reflect the Nurse’s speech in Romeo and Juliet, but the intermittent use of clichés (‘went in one ear and out the other’; ‘jump out of her skin’; ‘getting on her wick’) don’t succeed as they would in the first person, and are inconsistent. ‘The Woman in the Green Coat’ is let down by clumsy repetition: ‘Feeling… full of confidence I walked on, full of confidence…’

Stamm and his translator, the excellent Michael Hofmann, are at their best in ‘First Snow’, in which a man temporarily escapes from stress, relinquishing control. The surreal humour and evocative writing are mesmerising.‘Dietrich’s Knee’ is entertaining — Kate Bush’s ‘Babooshka’ in reverse — while the title story ‘It’s Getting Dark’ is haunting folklore. This is another enigmatic collection, tense and satisfying.

The misery memoir of a devoted polyamorist

The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his polygamous ways. But in the counterculture today, polyamorists face less of a physical threat and more of a metaphysical one, as chronicled by the journalist Rachel Krantz in her tortured book Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation and Non-Monogamy.

At its heart it’s the dark tale of a vulnerable woman falling for a manipulative man who slowly sucks the soul and marrow out of her. I wondered: why write this book, Rachel? You’re on the path to healing, so why peel your skin off with your nib and present it to the reader? Krantz offers her own diagnosis: ‘Dating Adam elicited masochistic tendencies’; she assuaged his desires by becoming polyamorous in the first place. Perversely, despite a whole book detailing how miserable she was, Krantz continues to toot the trumpet for polyamory, blaming her relationship rather than the idea.

The pain she endures and her dedication to the ‘unfiltered’ make Open the perfect title. Krantz seems to have neither emotional nor sexual boundaries; nor, for that matter, linguistic ones. She identifies at one point what she calls her ‘high stream of consciousness’, and curious similes abound: ‘I nodded appreciatively, like he was some sort of hot Mother Teresa’; ‘When he smiled, the crinkles drew his face up like the curtain before a symphony.’ The book is a generic pick’n’mix of pop psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and the kind of diary entries a teenage girl writes on tear-stained pages. Krantz throws in allusions to academic works such as Sex at Dawn (a revisionist account of the evolutionary origins of human sexual behaviour); but other intellectual references include a feminist analysis of the Little Mermaid that she produced while high on magic mushrooms.

Open also includes an excellent X-rated glossary, ideal for the pervy logophile: MFM/FMF threesomes, hot-husbanding, hotwifing, sex parties, BDSM, girl-on-girl, consensual non-consent, sex dungeons, scabies, pegging and stealthing. For the uninitiated, it might be useful to know that pegging is not something you’d do camping and definitely not something to Google at work. Similarly, hot-husbanding is not chucking a woolly jumper at your bloke in January and hotwifing isn’t, as I learned to my chagrin, a portmanteau of ‘hotspotting’ and ‘wifi’.

The book invites us to consider the claim that ‘ethical non-monogamy’ can ease relationship issues of possessiveness, jealousy, insecurity and competition. Krantz shows how destructive polyamory can be in a toxic relationship: ‘I stared into the mirror at my now common sex bruises, once a source of pride. I looked into my puffy eyes and asked myself a question: so, Rachel, is this liberation?’ When Adam gives Rachel a ‘promise ring’ (which might as well be a Haribo for all the commitment it implies), he follows it with the line: ‘The truth is, everyone’s only as loyal as their options.’ As he pushed the negging splinter deeper, I stifled the urge to yell out like a panto audience: ‘He’s behind you!’

Open leaves you with the queasy feeling that even today polyamorous men get the better deal. Polygamous Mormon men certainly do, as the doctrine still doesn’t accommodate women having more than one husband. Krantz underlines this gender imbalance by quoting bell hooks’s Communion: ‘The female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking [is that] she must be good to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else.’ On the evidence of this book, polyamory demands yet another set of definitions.

Interviewing 42 people for my love and sex podcast The Cupid Couch, I learned that countercultures and sex parties have a longer list of rules than the boring monogamists: which rooms you can have sex in, colour coding, safe words, forms, tests, and when you can see your lovers. Given that polyamory is so evolved, why is it reminiscent of that scene in the Mormon TV show Big Love where the three ‘sister wives’ of Bill Paxton’s character sit around brandishing highlighters and pens to organise their connubial time with their shared husband?

As well as struggling with its unrelenting and deliberately unedited style, I wasn’t persuaded by Krantz that polyamory is an easily achieved romantic utopia. So if you fancy more than one lover, I can’t help wondering whether good old-fashioned infidelity isn’t easier. At least then you don’t need a glossary.

Gay and abandoned: A Previous Life, by Edmund White, reviewed

Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and is in fact almost identical to the present. Indeed, the leap forward in time is merely a narrative device, allowing a 70-year-old Sicilian aristocrat to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the elderly Edmund White, now long dead and more or less forgotten as a writer. Ruggero Castelnuovo has subsequently married a much younger American woman, Constance. The couple have made a pact never to talk about their past lives, but they now decide to write their private ‘confessions’, and much of the book is taken up with these largely sexual memoirs, sections of which they read aloud to each other.

Ruggero is an unrepentant ‘happy narcissist’, very handsome, beautifully mannered and reliably aroused by those who worship his physical endowments. This becomes essential when, after numerous relationships with both men and women, recounted here at length and in considerable detail, he meets the obese, impotent and partially disabled White, ‘a fat, famous slug’ very far from his physical ideal.

Ruggero is initially drawn to White’s books — ‘You’re the great artist who moved me to tears with his writing and the truth of his words’ — but he then embarks on a physical relationship with the sexually abject (and married) author, the details of which will be familiar to readers of the notorious ‘My Masters’ chapter of White’s 2005 memoir My Lives. Despite White being ‘the love of his life’, Ruggero eventually abandons him for a younger man, behaviour that makes Constance live in fear of being abandoned in her turn.

As is often the case with White, the principal characters may be indefatigably horny, but they are also undeniably classy. When Ruggero is 14 and enjoying al fresco mutual masturbation with his male cousin, he summons up the shade of Theocritus. He has, after all, been translating poems from the Greek Anthology into Italian for some time, as well as writing his own poems in Latin.

In addition to his ‘shockingly deep knowledge of the classics’, Ruggero has a precocious talent for music, which finds him playing ‘a simple piece by Kuhnau, Bach’s predecessor at Leipzig’, on a keyboard he has cut out of paper aged ‘six or seven’. He studies philosophy but eventually becomes a world-famous harpsichordist, whose fingers, when not running up and down a keyboard, tend to be probing the assorted orifices of his lovers. White nevertheless insists that he will immortalise Ruggero as ‘the handsome and devoted Ranieri to [my] melancholy, deformed Leopardi’.

The novel manages to be at once preposterous and engaging and is, as one would expect, elegantly written, with a wealth of lively, original and arresting images. It is at its most involving when Ruggero and Constance are swapping and commenting on their memories. When they part, the narrative focuses on the relationship between Ruggero and White, which Constance decides to research and write about after White’s death. Doubts are raised as to the veracity of the two men’s differing versions of the affair and its ending, and White has a good deal of masochistic fun — which is shared by the reader — in trashing his own character and literary reputation.

One does not, however, quite believe in the more rancid aspects of this self-portrait, entertaining as it is, and it could be said that self-involvement in its various forms is as much a theme of this wayward but enjoyable novel as ‘physical beauty and its inevitable decline’.

The Georgians feel closer to us now than the Victorians

‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when the ban on Fanny Hill was lifted in 1963. Penelope Corfield’s big, handsome, enjoyable book goes a good way to illustrating Brophy’s assertion. Part source book, part interpretive history of the long 18th century (1688-1837), it is also a guide and gazetteer to the continuing presence of Georgian England in our towns and minds.

The world before 1688 is largely unfamiliar to us. The 18th century, however, with its lovable rogues, its introduction of constitutional monarchy, its rights of man and its sexual libertines, is akin to ours. Despite recent trends suggesting we may soon be dressing the piano legs again, we are closer to the Georgians than to the Victorians.

Corfield’s grasp and authority are evident throughout. Despite making occasional reference to modern intellectual heavyweights such as Gramsci or Habermas, she maintains a lightness of phrase that makes her book never less than enthralling, even in the midst of a long list of Georgian achievements. For it is the deeds rather than the misdeeds by which Corfield is most taken. While she never shies from the horrors of slavery, for example, her interest is in those who helped abolish it. The subtitle feels like a sop to current academic fashion.

So what did the Georgians ever do for us? Well, they united the four home nations (George III was probably the first king to ‘glory in the name of Briton’, which did not stop Squire Weston in Fielding’s Tom Jones referring to ‘Hanover rats’). The Union Flag took its final form in 1801, when St Patrick’s cross was added. There is hardly an area of Georgian life that does not find echoes or evolution in our own times. Cosfield lists enduring deeds of science and technology, social organisation, commerce (with an emphasis on women’s significant contribution), literature (Jane Austen is a constant point of reference) and, most evidently, architecture. When we think about our most aesthetically celebrated towns and cities, we think of Georgian terraces — of Edinburgh New Town, Bath, Dublin and Islington. Nowadays it is not merely grandees who stroll around the rooms of sumptuous Whig palaces such as Castle Howard, Chatsworth, Blenheim and Petworth. Even as they were raised, the Georgians were promoting meritocracy and reason above blood and superstition. People from different classes started wearing similar clothes.

The author describes her own cultural roots as being in ‘secularised Quakerism’, which is fairly scary at first thought, but is in fact reassuring, suggesting a reasonable, quiet zeal, appropriate to her subject: ‘Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794) was a deistic tract, challenging belief in all forms of religion based upon divine revelation.’ Western Europe was experiencing the Enlightenment. Corfield points out that it wasn’t merely a metaphorical term: oil-fired lamps became common, and by the end of the 18th century gas lamps were being pioneered. Towns and cities were being enlightened. New glass windows helped.

The British went into the world, and the world came to London. It became —as it remains — the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. Corfield dislikes the modish phrase ‘the colonial project’. The empire was, in her view, made haphazardly. Explorers were ‘followed more routinely by traders, farmers, town settlers, missionaries, indentured servants, and (later) transported convicts’. The important imperial factor was the degree of state support for these pioneers, especially in the way of protection, most fundamentally in the Navigation Acts, which more or less gave Britain rule of the seas.

Which brings us to slavery. Corfield tells us: ‘Collectively, all abolitionists agreed that enslavement contradicted the enlightened “temper of the times”.’ Pro-slavers had to work behind the scenes. Abolitionists formed groups and clubs, and fomented movements such as the Anti-Saccharine Society. Corfield emphasises women’s contribution to this politicking.

In one of the particular features of the book, the ‘time shift’ paragraphs that conclude each chapter, Corfield demonstrates the extent of global migration by listing some of the foreign flora introduced to Britain by Georgian botanists, and now considered native. For example, the oldest wisteria in the country (from China) was planted as a cutting in 1816 and still flourishes at Fuller’s Brewery in Chiswick. A little further up the Thames, at Twickenham, Alexander Pope planted the first weeping willow.

The Georgians left Britain literate, meritocratic, legislatively mature, industrially powerful, confident and ready to dominate the world for the next century. It was a country marked by a degree of tolerance, curiosity, and vivacity not perhaps matched until the 1960s. There were plenty of warts — you could be hanged for impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner or damaging Westminster Bridge — and Corfield includes them in what is not far off a celebration. The Georgians will take its place next to M. Dorothy George’s long-enduring London Life in the Eighteenth Century. It is a fascinating book.

Formidable woman of letters: the grit and wisdom of Elizabeth Hardwick

In an author’s note at the beginning of her biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Cathy Curtis warns that she has included ‘only as much information’ about Hardwick’s ‘famous husband, the poet Robert Lowell, as is necessary to tell the story of her life’. Ironically, this caveat highlights Hardwick’s status as another wife of the poet. There’s no question that her tumultuous marriage and singular divorce from Lowell were major events in her literary career, but it’s disappointing that in this very first biography of Hardwick, Curtis offers so little argument for her literary and cultural importance.

Admittedly, that’s no simple task. Although she is highly regarded as a productive literary critic, acerbic essayist and formidable woman of letters, Hardwick never produced a signature great book. She wrote three novels which have won a cult following, especially Sleepless Nights (1979), and 20 short stories, mostly for the New Yorker. But she is generally admired for her non-fiction, especially 168 essays, reviews and op-eds, chiefly for the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded in 1963.

Hardwick’s breadth of literary genres and incisive style gave her writing unusual weight. She believed that ‘essays are aggressive’. No opinion could be meaningful, she argued, unless ‘an assault has taken place, the forced domination of… putting it in your own words’. She was also aggressive in her literary roles. As Joel Connaroe, the president of the Guggen-heim Foundation, said: ‘She sometimes made fellow jurors feel as if they had no literary judgment at all.’

Hardwick seems to have been born tough. Curtis provides a detailed chronological account of her life, based on deep archival research and particularly her unpublished letters. Born in Kentucky in 1916, the eighth of 11 children, she was a gifted student and an omnivorous speed reader, who went to the University of Kentucky intending to be both a professor of English and a novelist. She quickly moved on to New York, aspiring to become a ‘Jewish intellectual’. By 1941 she had dropped out of the Columbia PhD programme, started publishing prize-winning short stories and wrote her first novel, The Ghostly Lover.

Philip Rahv, the co-editor of the influential Partisan Review, heard about her, called her for an interview (and a brief affair), and invited her to write for them. She was quickly accepted for her slashing style and fearless attacks on established writers such as William Faulkner. But for a woman, gaining admission to the inner circle required beauty and sexual sophistication as well as intelligence and chutzpah. As Hardwick later observed: ‘A career of candour and dissent is not an easy one for a woman.’ A successful aspirant needs ‘a great reserve of personal attractiveness and a high degree of romantic singularity’. She always kept that in mind.

At a party at the Rahvs in 1947 she met Lowell, mad, bad and dangerous to know. He was with his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, whose face had been permanently scarred when he angrily crashed his Packard into a stone wall after she resisted his proposal of marriage. They were divorced in the spring of 1948, and although Allen Tate warned Hardwick that Lowell was a violent manic depressive, she was swept away by his passion and charm.

They married in 1949, but in their first decade together he had at least ten manic episodes. Over the 21 years of their marriage he was hospitalised 15 times. The first symptom of an imminent crisis was his infatuation with another woman, flight to be with her, and the inevitable crash. He was a loving but unsupportive spouse. Curtis provides a litany of his criticism, complaints and general irresponsibility. In an essay about Simone de Beauvoir, Hardwick also wrote chillingly about the inevitability of male dominance: ‘Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognises a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch.’

In 1970, on a visiting fellowship at Oxford, Lowell left Hardwick and their daughter Harriet for the Irish heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. After a divorce in 1972, he married Blackwood and they had a son. Hardwick was lonely, anxious and desperate for money. But with generosity, grace and self-control she managed to conceal her pain, work furiously to pay the bills and be an exemplary mother to Harriet, even insisting that Lowell must continue to see her. Then, in 1973, he published The Dolphin, a book of poems which incorporated and even altered Hardwick’s anguished letters to him. Universally condemned by critics and by their mutual friends, including Adrienne Rich, who called it ‘one of the most vindictive, mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry’, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Yet Hardwick remained a champion of his poetic genius throughout her life. In The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, the correspondence of Hardwick, Lowell and their friends, edited by Saskia Hamilton, Lowell is charming, dodgy, selfish, observant, obtuse and unapologetic. But Hardwick is the heroine of what reads like a great epistolary novel. Despite a few outbursts of anger, she shows courage, grit, humour and wisdom, what she called in Seduction and Betrayal (1970) the ‘moving qualities of endurance, independence, tolerance, solitary grief’ that always ‘overshadow the man who is the origin’ of the betrayed woman’s torment. She was even going to take Lowell back, but he died of a heart attack in the taxi heading to her New York apartment. She signed his death certificate as ‘friend’.

She was writing during the height of Women’s Liberation, yet Curtis notes that Hardwick, like her friends Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, was both critical of the movement and ‘hostile to feminist-themed novels that failed to meet her standards for stylistic brilliance’. The only time I met her was on a panel on feminist criticism in the 1980s, when she brushed off the idea of women’s writing as a meaningful category and wittily said that Henry James was a great woman writer.

Curtis points out that Hardwick’s book on women in literature, Seduction and Betrayal, which did not blame seducers and betrayers, ‘led to accusations that she was mired in the judgmental standards of the bad old days’. Yet Susan Sontag called it ‘the most subtle of feminist books’. And Hardwick anticipated much of feminist literary history in her assessment of forgotten American women writers. In 1974, she was the advisory editor for Arno Press of an 18-volume series of rediscovered fiction by American women, including novels by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ellen Glasgow and Josephine Herbst. She wrote a screenplay of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and in 1986 an essay on the 19th-century feminist intellectual Margaret Fuller, so powerful that Mary McCarthy thought she should write a screenplay for a film starring Vanessa Redgrave.

The contradictions that make Hardwick puzzling also make her life story compelling. Now she is having a literary revival, with her three novels in print, her stories collected, the first volume of her essays published and a second coming this spring. She was cynical about literary biography. At best, she opined, it is written mainly for subsequent biographers. Certainly other biographers of Hardwick will rely on Curtis’s groundbreaking work, and, hopefully, make the case for her rightful inclusion among the important women writers of the 20th century.

A Covid amnesty won’t save Boris Johnson now

Timing is everything in politics. Partygate showed the usually sure-footed Boris at his most careless and inept, dwarfing even his run-in with the Commissioner for Standards that cost him North Shropshire last month and (one suspects) helped lose him Bury South on Wednesday. But the British electorate can be very forgiving. When it elected Boris it did not mind too much about his tendency to get things wrong on points of detail, seeing him instead as the man who saw what had to be done, was honest about it and got on with the important part of the job.

At the time the scandal broke about the ‘drinks cabinet’ at No. 10, Boris could have taken advantage of this. Imagine if he had quickly admitted to having taken his finger off the pulse and let down the voters. Suppose further that he had asked their pardon, said it would never happen again, and added that of course it was only fair that there should be an amnesty for all lockdown offences in 2020.

Of course the opposition would have crowed and made a great deal of noise, but its style would have been handsomely cramped. Piling onto someone who has profusely apologised makes you look churlish; and if he’s already offered reparation you can’t very well make political capital by demanding he supply it. It’s worth remembering that electors are always more willing to accept that people make mistakes than opposition politicians are prepared to credit. At least when it comes to public opinion, Solomon’s advice in Proverbs remains good: if you are decent to your enemy you will heap burning coals on his head and come in for a reward later.

Will tactics like this work now? Calls for Boris to climb down and announce a lockdown amnesty for the rest of us, and for the reimbursement of all fines levied for illegal mixing in 2020, are certainly growing louder.

One can understand such pressure from those committed to the Johnson damage limitation operation. Unfortunately, Boris has missed the bus. As regards his own prospects, any such move at this stage is likely to be at best irrelevant, and indeed may well make his position worse. This is for a number of reasons.

For one thing, by prevaricating over partygate and what he knew, Boris has already lost something that convinced ordinary people to vote for him: an appearance of overall honesty and competence, and a willingness to admit to his mistakes. An immediate offer to make good the harm done by remitting all fines for lockdown breaches would have been disarming. Many people, after all, had no clear understanding in 2020 of either the details of the regulations or the necessity for their draconian enforcement. But that time has passed. An apology and offer of reparation after you have been being found out and boxed into a corner is different: it will be seen as neither emollient nor for that matter very sincere.

Secondly, even if an amnesty would soothe tempers, by delaying as he has Boris has given up any chance of gaining any credit for it. Instead of a magnanimous gesture from someone prepared to admit to imperfection, it will now be seen as being dragged from an unwilling and slightly dishonest administration by the efforts of a conscientious opposition and others determined to bring it to book.

As well as this, there could be other collateral damage to Boris’s reputation. Despite some justified grumbling about the severity of the 2020 lockdown, overall the premier’s handling of the pandemic has probably worked in his favour. The background perception has been that even if the government has not always been right, it has at least been a great deal more on the ball than Starmer and the opposition, who have either been conspicuously silent or called woodenly for ever more restrictions on ordinary life. An announcement now from Boris that all criminal proceedings for lockdown offences will stop and all fines repaid will be seen as an admission of failure by him in one of the areas where hitherto he has been seen as a success.

What now? Although it seems pretty clear that no amnesty can now do anything to save Boris’s skin, or (one suspects) that of the Conservatives if he remains, the moral case for the government providing one is actually very strong. If those at the centre of government – including, incidentally, senior civil servants who ought to have known better – were enjoying well-lubricated gatherings in a carefully-guarded Whitehall and Downing Street at the same time as the rest of us were being ordered in no uncertain terms to stay away from conviviality of almost any kind, then the state had no business enforcing the law against others in the heavy-handed way that it did.

One thing follows from this debacle, and the Tories cannot afford to forget it. If and when Boris goes, there must be an immediate and spontaneous announcement of an amnesty. This is vital both to show that the party is back on the moral high ground, and that the ancien régime has gone.

Is this the start of a Labour revival?

Few may know of Baron Howarth of Newport. But in 1995, on the eve of the Conservative party conference, as plain old Alan Howarth he became the first Conservative MP to directly defect to the Labour party. Today, just ten minutes before PMQs, Christian Wakeford became the fourth Tory MP to join the Labour benches. His timing was excruciatingly cruel for a Prime Minister visibly sinking under the weight of his many contradictory obfuscations over ‘partygate’.

Howarth had been an MP since 1983, a junior minister and a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms: he was no wet. His defection was a body blow to the already embattled John Major government. But a party spokesperson put a brave face on it. ‘This will make no difference to government policies’, they said while pointing out Howarth had spent all his time in the Commons opposing Labour. 

In response, the defecting MP attacked the increasing cruelty of the Major government and said it was Labour’s ‘renewal’ under Blair that had prompted him to change sides. As Alastair Campbell’s diaries reveal, Howarth had made his inclinations apparent to the Labour leader weeks before, but it was decided he should announce his defection at the time best calculated to undermine Conservative morale. Howarth was also coached in the words and phrases he should use in interviews to best help his new party, which then was calling itself ‘One Nation Labour’ and had under Blair pitched its tent on traditional Conservative ground.

Howarth’s defection was a well-choreographed piece of political theatre, one now long forgotten, but at the time it dominated the headlines for more than a few days: journalists were agog with its implications for a divided and troubled Conservative government and a Labour party that looked like it was finally, after 16 years in the wilderness, knocking on the door of power.

How many of those future historians, to which contemporaries like to refer, will recall Wakeford’s announcement that he is quitting Boris Johnson’s party to join up with Keir Starmer? But the shock it produced in the Commons and across the nation’s TV studios was visceral.  

Unlike Howarth, Wakeford has only been an MPs since 2019, one of those meant to owe their place to Johnson’s election-winning prowess. His resignation letter however showed little gratitude and was clearly written under Labour guidance. It told the Prime Minister that ‘you and the Conservative party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves’. Labour. Wakeford said. was ‘ready to provide an alternative government that this country can be proud of’. And there Wakeford sat at PMQs, just behind the leader of the opposition with his Union Jack face mask on, something even Starmer has not yet dared wear.

If this provoked a bitter Nadine Dorries to tweet the Union Jack was not welcome on Labour’s side of the House, it allowed Starmer to claim Wakeford’s defection proved Labour had changed. And whatever the real reasons for Wakeford’s defection, that is what Labour will want voters to think. Since becoming leader Starmer has taken every opportunity to claim his party was under ‘new leadership’, and to make the point he has stood by innumerable Union Jacks and loudly declared his patriotism. But a defecting Conservative MP — whoever it may be — makes this argument in a way nothing else could.

Wakeford’s seat of Bury South might be in the North but it is no Red Wall seat — instead, it is a fairly well-off classic Labour-Conservative marginal on the boundaries of metropolitan Manchester. Over the years it has regularly switched between the two parties: usually the one that wins Bury South wins national office. But it is to Labour’s lost Red Wall voters that Starmer will hope Wakeford’s defection will make the most impression.

Already, thanks to Johnson’s alleged breaking of lockdown rules, Labour enjoys a significant lead in the Red Wall seats and — right now — would win back 42 of the 45 that slipped through Corbyn’s fingers in 2019. But while Starmer is enjoying a double-digit lead nationally, the pollster Chris Curtis has calculated that this is largely due to 2019 Conservative voters going into the ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t vote’ column. Only 10 per cent so far have made the direct switch to Labour and about the same proportion say they would vote for a party other than Starmer’s. Johnson has given Labour an opportunity which in November nobody could have dreamed of, but the party needs to persuade more 2019 Conservatives to go directly to Labour — Starmer must make his ‘change’ message land more firmly and permanently.

Wakeford’s defection can only help in this endeavour and the way Starmer’s team dropped their bombshell suggests that they have learnt at least some of New Labour’s tricks. However, it wasn’t just Nadine Dorries who was miffed by Wakeford’s defection. Momentum, which used to act as Jeremy Corbyn’s praetorian guard attacked him for supporting Conservatives policies that have hurt working people. So far as some on the left of the party are concerned, Wakeford’s defection was evidence of change but it is change of the kind they will continue to vigorously oppose.

Britain’s cost of living crisis worsens

If Boris Johnson manages to cling on to his job, he’ll have much more than the parties of lockdowns past to worry about. Britain’s cost of living crisis is worsening still, with CPI inflation rising by 5.4 per cent in the 12 months leading up to December last year. This has, once again, outpaced consensus, surging even further past the Bank of England’s most recent official forecast.

Inflation is now at a 30-year high. And it’s still rising. Capital Economics now estimates a peak of 7 per cent around April, and there is once again increasing speculation that December’s interest rate rise to 0.25 per cent is only the beginning of more hikes to come.

These price hikes will be acutely felt. December’s rises were primarily driven by increases to food prices, clothing and transport: all essentials for households. And the squeeze is bound to worsen. As Matthew Lynn points out, yesterday’s labour market numbers made for good headlines – with unemployment contracting once again – but annualised wage growth slipped down to 4.2 per cent, now more than a percentage point below inflation. Meanwhile, job vacancies rose to a record 1,247,000, creating a labour crunch that is making inflation worse. The rise in costs of hotels and restaurants is partially explained by the lack of staff to operate them, in addition to the goods shortages that are also affecting supermarkets and retail.

It was only months ago that the Bank still insisted price hikes were just transitory. But the shutting down of economic activity worldwide – combined with pumping trillions of dollars into real economies – was always going to create severe inflationary pressures which would prove difficult to control. This will make it harder for Rishi Sunak to service the government’s debts, let alone approve boatloads more spending in future.

This is bad news for a Prime Minister who likes to splash cash, and also for members of cabinet inclined to do the same: Micahel Gove insisted just last week that there’s plenty of money to throw at the government’s ambiguous levelling up agenda. As I mention in the Telegraph this week, while we wait for more details in the much-delayed white paper, most indications about this government’s plans to level up, so far, seem to come with big price tags attached, courtesy of the taxpayer.

But there’s little doubt left that heavy government spending is playing a significant role in the inflation we’re experiencing now. While it’s on the rise, it makes it significantly harder to make any spending pledges that could worsen the cost of living crisis.