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Letters: the problem with emojis
Industrial waste
Sir: I endorse your concerns about the closure of Grangemouth and Port Talbot and the statement that ‘if high-quality jobs are to return to the North and the Midlands then re-industrialisation is presumably the answer’ (‘Time for a change’, 12 October). However, your leading article fails to observe that Ed Miliband has already committed £22 billion to the re-industrialisation of Liverpool and Teesside in the form of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) projects.
One might wonder where Miliband acquired the daft notion that it is a good idea to spend £22 billion on a technology that has only been proven to work in a coal-fired power station (a sort we don’t have any more). Even when it works, it substantially increases the cost of the power generated, while sequestering a small quantity of carbon dioxide – which will probably leak from whichever cavern it is subsequently stored in. Perhaps Miliband had been reading the government’s ‘Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy’, published in 2021 while Boris Johnson was PM. This states that ‘our commitment to support deployment of CCUS could help to create 50,000 jobs alone in the UK by 2030’ – in a chapter entitled ‘Levelling Up’.
Richard North
Hayling Island, Hampshire
Too many bishops
Sir: Marcus Walker’s critique of the selection process of bishops is timely (‘Mitre reading’, 12 October). However, he could have gone further. If questionable managerialism is producing corporate clones, then the same managerial criteria should be used to measure success.
In business, those leaders who fail to grow their market share are soon dispatched. The Church of England in 2024 has 108 bishops, roughly the same as in 1924 – but the numbers of clergy, parishes and membership have declined dramatically. Even so, few voices are raised to question the cost of keeping 108 bishops in the comfortable lifestyle they enjoy.
The Revd Larry Wright
Kings Norton, Birmingham
Suits you, sir
Sir: Charles Moore reports that Jeffrey Archer took John Major to be fitted out at Austin Reed in order to improve his image (Notes, 12 October). Quite so – why go further? What a great place the flagship Regent Street shop was. In the 1970s and 1980s, aspiring men, such as barristers, country gentlemen and youngish teachers like me, literally fought over items to take to the fitting rooms during Thursday late-night shopping.
One of the last managers replied to my complaint that I could no longer find a foulard tie by saying that they were seeking to attract a younger clientele. Shortly afterwards, the chain turned turtle. Today companies like Peter Christian are Austin Reed by mail order, and doing very nicely.
R.H.W. Cooper
Grasmere, Cumbria
Black Russian ops
Sir: The head of MI5’s warning of the threat from the GRU – Russia’s military intelligence – benefits from historical context (Portrait of the Week, 12 October). Aktivnye meropriyatiya (active measures) is the Russian term for subversion, sabotage, assassination and disinformation. Developed in the Soviet era, these techniques are hardwired into the Kremlin’s ruthless approach to security, with stark implications for its adversaries.
Struan Macdonald
Hayes, Kent
RSVP
Sir: Philip Womack laments the disappearance of invitations (Notes on, 5 October). For our 50th wedding anniversary this summer we sent out stiffies with our Christmas cards, the cost of sending them separately being prohibitive. Some guests even replied by letter!
Mary Moore
Croydon
Transport of delight
Sir: Christian Wolmar’s ‘Notes on trams’ (28 September) mourns the rapid post-war closure of tram systems, beloved in their day by passengers across the UK. Hong Kong’s 165 classic electric trams (the world’s largest surviving double-decker system) continue to ply a popular, cheap and well-used 19 miles of track along the original shoreline route of Hong Kong Island, with a welcome branch loop in Happy Valley carrying me practically door to door to my office in Central.
We also continue to enjoy a long tradition of ‘tram parties’ on antique Edwardian-style open-top cars. Guests at my 70th birthday enjoyed assorted refreshments on the lower deck, while those upstairs watched the bustling metropolis seemingly drifting by at a leisurely pace.
Henry Wheare
Happy Valley, Hong Kong
Column inches
Sir: Toby Young notes (No sacred cows, 5 October) that Michael Gove has promised to continue the editorial tradition of giving his columnists ‘a free hand’. So much the better. In defiance of E.B. White’s remark that ‘only a person who is congenitally self-centred has the effrontery and the stamina to write columns’, your weekly columnists are the first place I turn to when the magazine drops through the letterbox. Keep the effrontery flowing, Mr Gove!
Tim Gooding
East Lothian
#Puzzled emoji
Sir: I am as perplexed by the variety of emojis as Melissa Kite (Real life, 12 October). My own bugbear is the flushed, smiling face doing jazz hands. My best guess is: person deep in their cups blandly disclaiming responsibility for a catastrophe.
Neil Sewell-Rutter
Oxford
Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk
No, Israel isn’t deliberately killing children in Gaza
In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called ‘the epicentre of child suffering’.
The echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now
And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in this ghastly war Hamas started with its fascistic pogrom against the Jewish state on 7 October last year. Yet there’s something new and strange in the discussion of child suffering in Gaza. In this war, the agony of the guiltless ones is not seen as accidental, as an awful byproduct of the fierce fighting. No, it’s seen as intentional, calculated, an actual war aim of the Jewish nation. Israel, its legion haters cry, is an infanticidal regime.
This is the first war I can remember where there’s been such a feverish urge to prove that kids are not just dying but are being murdered. Israel is ‘targeting childhood’, its critics insist. Peruse the Israelophobic toilet of social media and you will be confronted by wild cries about Israel exterminating the next generation of Gazans. ‘Infanticide’ is ‘inherent in Israel’s genocide’, some say. Leftie podcasts bristle with dark chatter about Israel’s bloodlust for innocent life.
This view of the Jewish state as a child-killing machine has even leaked into the mainstream discourse. A high-ranking UNICEF official described Israel’s war as a ‘war on children’. ‘They shoot children, don’t they?’, said a headline in Ireland recently.
Even pre-7 October, Israel was talked about as a nation that positively relishes in child death. In July 2023, in an interview with the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, a BBC news anchor put it to him that ‘Israeli forces are happy to kill children’. Happy. These freaks get a kick from child suffering. The BBC later apologised, but it was too late – the ugly dinner-party belief that Israel loves to kill kids had seeped into public view.
We need to talk about the unusualness of all this. Even the hippies who chanted ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ – referring to Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War – did not think the president was sending troops for the express purpose of bumping off Vietnamese kids. They were simply saying that child death is a bloody repercussion of war. Those of us who opposed the Iraq War may have drawn attention to the misery of the innocents there, but we did not for one minute believe our troops were targeting those wee souls. Our point was that war is reckless.
With Israel, it’s different. Apparently it kills kids not in error but by design. Apparently the little Gazans who have met their end in this hell inflicted on them by Hamas are not ‘collateral damage’ – an awful phrase – but rather are akin to child sacrifices. The view of Israel as uniquely infanticidal was further boosted by a New York Times feature last week in which numerous doctors, nurses and paramedics said they had seen young ones in Gaza who had been shot in the head or the chest.
I don’t want to get into the accuracy or otherwise of the NYT’s report – there is much scepticism about it online, some of which I have found convincing. No, the thing that has struck me most is what has been unleashed by that piece: yet another frothing wave of infanticide talk. Yet more bony fingers pointed in judgement at the Jewish state and its supposed lust for slaying innocents. It is inescapable now; all who venture on to the internet will hear it: the frenzied cry that Israel murders children.
What is driving this obsession? What motors this double standard whereby ‘we’ kill kids by mistake but ‘they’ do it on purpose? To my mind, the echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now. The targeting of the Jewish nation as an infanticidal nation grossly mimics the old singling out of the Jewish people as a child-sacrificing people. It feels to me like that old blood libel has been given a bit of spit and polish for the modern age.
The great Howard Jacobson spoke to this in a column for the Observer last week. The furious conviction that Israel ‘targets innocent children’ brings to mind the ‘merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians’, he wrote. The piece caused outrage. X went into meltdown. It is my belief that people went nuts because, deep down, somewhere in the recesses of their reason, they know Jacobson has a point. He made them feel the hot flush of shame over their bizarre obsession with ‘Israeli infanticide’.
Is it anti-semitic to point out that children have died in Gaza? Of course not. Is it anti-semitic to say the Jewish State, unique among the family of nations, hunts kids down so that it might spill their blood and exterminate their kind? It kind of is. Let’s put it another way. Is it anti-semitic to criticise Israel? No. Is it anti-semitic to feverishly obsess over Israel, to brand it as uniquely murderous, to judge it by a different standard to every other state, and to hint darkly that it is sacrificing Gazan children at the altar of its demented regional ambitions? Honestly – yes.
Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now
Does it matter that Thomas Tuchel isn’t English?
Thomas Tuchel has been confirmed as the next manager of the England national football team, to take over from the hapless and seemingly confused Lee Carsley. The 51-year-old German will be given an 18-month contract and will assume his duties in January 2025, in good time to get to work on the qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup (which begin in March).
This is good news for England fans. Isn’t it? Tuchel is one of the top ranked coaches in the world and probably the best qualified man available (assuming Pep Guardiola was the pipe dream most assume it to have been). Tuchel has actually won stuff – like the Champions League at Chelsea – and served at multiple top clubs. He’s a former Uefa men’s coach of the year.
The whole concept of international sport is, by definition, discriminatory
A tactical whizz apparently, Tuchel knows most of the players, speaks English and, unlike England’s incumbent manager, actually seems to want the job. Oh, and according to Harry Kane (whom he coached at Bayern Munich) Tuchel is a ‘top bloke’. What’s not to like?
Well, there is the small, or perhaps not so small, matter of Tuchel not actually being English, which is bothering a few people at least. A straw poll in the Daily Telegraph is running at 67 per cent for the appointment and 33 per cent against. Given the above-mentioned advantages, it is reasonable to assume that for those opposed the issue is Tuchel’s nationality.
In today’s hyper sensitive identity obsessed world such attitudes might provoke gasps of horror, and accusations of at best a provincial attitude, and at worst racism (or perhaps Germanophobia?). We have had foreign coaches before after all, so surely the only people questioning Tuchel’s appointment are the sort that sing ‘Ten German bombers’ and still obsess over the second world war. Deplorables in other words – the Guardian certainly seems to think so.
But the problem with this interpretation is that it disregards the whole concept of international sport, which is, by definition, discriminatory. Only players either born in this country, or with a verifiable bloodline, are eligible to play for England. No financial inducement is going to enable Kylian Mbappe or Lionel Messi to sport the three lions. They are barred.
And with good reason. International football would be meaningless without at least reasonably strict eligibility rules. The rationale being that when the team succeeds, the whole nation can take pride in that achievement, as members of a society that is well ordered enough to produce winning sportsmen and women. If you buy into international sport at all, and enjoy it, you are buying into that hypothesis.
More broadly (though some, such as Emily Thornberry, may find this distasteful) international sport is a validation of the concept of the nation state. The idea is that we belong to, and can take pleasure and pride in the achievements of the representatives of a geographically and culturally defined area. When a foreign coach leads a British international team, any triumphs are somewhat diluted.
I’m just about old enough to remember when this seemed to matter to the FA. Back then the question of a foreign coach for the England national team would have been unthinkable. Even being English wasn’t enough, you had to be well-behaved too. The best qualified candidate to replace Don Revie in the late 70s was undoubtedly Brian Clough but ‘old big head’ was passed over in favour of (in Cloughie’s words) ‘an old sheepdog’ in the amiable and unthreatening form of Ron Greenwood. Those days are long gone, winning is now clearly the uppermost, perhaps only, thought on the minds of the FA’s board of directors.
To be fair, it could be that for the FA, and apparently the majority of the fans, England’s trophy drought has induced a form of neurosis where almost anyone would be welcome if there is a reasonable chance of success. You feel even the sadly departed Maradona could have had the job if it were believed he would have delivered a trophy or two. Well, perhaps not, but you get the point.
No disrespect to Thomas Touchel in any of this, and one is impressed at him taking on this unenviable challenge when a better remunerated club job would probably have been his in time. He may well be the best man for the job, if the job is just winning trophies. But if that is so, then the job description, the unwritten one, has narrowed considerably in my lifetime, in a way that might make you worry a bit about the future of international football.
Almeida’s Look Back in Anger is flawless
Strange title, Juno and the Paycock. Sean O’Casey’s family drama is about a hard-pressed Dublin matriarch, Juno, whose husband Jack ‘the paycock’ Boyle refuses to support his family and spends all day drinking with his penniless cronies. The producers have labelled the show an ‘Irish masterpiece’, which raises the bar.
Mark Rylance plays Jack as a stammering, dissembling, wisecracking malingerer and he’s terrific value on stage, of course, but he seems detached from the material. He performs like a star comedian stranded in a boring classic against his will and he pokes fun at the script rather than immersing himself in the story. His halting, semi-improvised delivery relies on the same range of gimmicks that he showcases in every part he takes, whether it’s a Shakespearean tragedy or a romantic farce. He’s always brilliant – and always the same.
There are signs of greatness about Howle. Not many in his generation can touch him
The plot in O’Casey’s lumbering yarn gets started when a lawyer arrives to announce that Jack has inherited £2,000 from a long-lost cousin. The legacy transforms him into a cocky and pretentious spendthrift who dresses in tailored suits and fills his crumbling hovel with costly furniture supplied by greedy tradesmen at inflated prices. It’s the kind of clunky but enjoyable plot-twist that Neil Simon might have dreamed up. However, the play is a century old and its cultural atmosphere is fading into obscurity.
The ponderous second act is like a nostalgic vaudeville routine. Jack and his neighbours share a bottle of whisky while singing folk songs, telling jokes and swapping antique gossip about Parnell’s career, the corrupt clergy, the Easter Rising, the fighting on O’Connell Street and so on. Truly turgid stuff. You’ll probably miss a lot of the references unless you’re an expert on Irish culture.
Instead your eye may linger over Rob Howell’s superb two-layered set, which shows Jack’s grim tenement surmounted by a huge red shaft which seems to glow like an iron foundry. Perhaps it’s a nod to the everlasting fires that await Catholic sinners.
The final act changes gear and becomes an epic history play about loss and endurance. Plot-twists galore arrive at the same moment. A hidden pregnancy is revealed, a shifty lawyer goes missing and a political traitor is murdered at a patriot’s funeral. As drama, this is very effective and O’Casey’s rhetoric reaches sublime heights – but the change of tone is irksome. The jokey, wisecracking Jack is omitted from these harrowing scenes and the drama feels horribly lopsided. The best parts of the play don’t feature the best actor. Perhaps this hit-and-miss show has opened in the wrong capital. It would thrive in Dublin. London may lack the patience for it.
Look Back in Anger, directed by Atri Banerjee, is nearly flawless. He adds a lot of warbling music that drowns out some of the dialogue. And the bombastic dance routines between each scene add nothing of value. But the play itself is a wonder of the theatrical world. Jimmy Porter ranks as one of the most loathsome, grotesque and repellent personalities ever created by a playwright and yet he doesn’t seem manufactured at all. He’s a real person, not a work of art. He’s instantly recognisable. The flatmate from hell. The surly genius in the pub who knows exactly what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. Jimmy never stops snarling, bullying, carping, whining, pleading for attention and spoiling for a fight.
He’s a market trader who shares a home with his upper-class wife, Alison, and a rootless drifter called Cliff. To enliven their boring Sunday afternoons, Jimmy loves to float provocative remarks and to challenge Cliff to wrestling matches on the carpet. His favourite hobby is hurling insults at the insipid Alison, who absorbs his abuse like a masochistic punchbag. Even when he discusses the maggots who will feast on her mother’s corpse she doesn’t react. And Jimmy is no gentleman. When confronted by Alison’s plucky friend, Helena, he flares up like a touchy gangster. ‘By God, I’ll lay you out,’ he says.
John Osborne’s 1956 play has depth as well as superficial cruelty. Jimmy’s marriage to Alison is a weird act of revenge against the ruling class whom he despises. And he uses the same strategy as activists who join political parties in order to subvert them: imitate, infiltrate, dominate and destroy. This is a show you may hate from start to finish. You’ll want to bawl with rage at Jimmy and you’ll want to curse and scream on behalf of the lifeless Alison who lets him get away with it. It’s a horrific but unforgettable ordeal.
Billy Howle plays Jimmy with the relaxed menace of a jungle predator who kills for fun. There are signs of greatness about Howle. To stand out, an actor has to excel in four categories: voice, looks, physique and stage presence. Howle scores highly in each area. Not many in his generation can touch him.
Will falling inflation save Rachel Reeves’s Budget?
Inflation slowed to 1.7 per cent in the twelve months to September, taking the inflation rate to its lowest levels since spring 2021. While markets and forecasters had expected the inflation rate to drop below the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target at some point this year (market consensus for September was 1.9 per cent), the bigger-than-expected fall has come as a surprise, as core inflation also slowed to 3.2 per cent in the 12 months to September – down from 3.6 per cent in August. The largest contributions to the slowdown came from falling transport costs, while overall services fell to 4.9 per cent on the year, down from 5.6 per cent in August.
‘It will be welcome news for millions of families that inflation is below 2 per cent’ the chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones said of the news this morning. It certainly will be, but it is unlikely to stay there. The BoE has been suggesting in its reports for months now that it expected the inflation rate to fall to target – or just under – before rising to something close to 3 per cent by the end of the year.
That rise is nothing compared to what the country has been through these past few years, which amounted to a full-blown inflation crisis. But it’s still a rise above target, and the Bank isn’t getting complacent. After implementing its first rate cut since the crisis in August, taking the bank rate down to 5 per cent, the Monetary Policy Committee voted 8-1 to hold rates in September, recommitting to a slow and steady process of bringing down interest rates, rather than a more hurried one.
From this perspective, today’s inflation news isn’t game-changing for the government or the Treasury, which is preparing for its first Budget in just under two weeks’ time, as the Bank has already been clear about how quickly (or rather, slowly) it plans to move on rates. That said, today’s news does confirm that the Bank has the scope to implement its second rate cut at its next meeting in November: a move that has been expected by markets, but could be pushed to December, if there were growing evidence of secondary inflationary pressures.
But between today’s inflation news and yesterday’s labour market data, which slowed average weekly wage growth slowing to 4.9 per cent in the three months to August (its slowest pace in over two years) the Bank is more likely to push ahead with a rate cut. It’s unlikely to be the ‘aggressive’ push the Bank’s governor curiously called for a few weeks back, but the trajectory is likely to provide some relief, nonetheless.
There is one, potentially large, benefit here for a Chancellor who has to find tens of billions of pounds in her first Budget just to service the debt. Not only will the prospect of lower borrowing costs in the future make her Budget slightly easier to balance, but crucially the signal rate cuts give to the markets will help her sell her plan to further loosen the fiscal rule, to allow for more borrowing for capital spending.
As I noted on Coffee House last week, it’s not an easy sell. Gilt yields have been drifting upwards since speculation began that Reeves’s plan involved more borrowing. Even by preparing the markets for the change, investors will still need to be convinced her plans to borrow are both credible and sustainable. Any indication that rates are on their way down will help the Chancellor, bit by bit, to more convincingly make her case.
Watch more budget analysis from Kate Andrews on SpectatorTV:
A hit – but please don’t pretend it’s feminist: Disney+’s Rivals reviewed
For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It therefore came as a bit of shock when I finally tried her novels for myself and found what they contained. There is, for example, no mistaking Jilly’s scorn for women who are fat and/or hairy, her belief that all female unhappiness can be cured by a damn good rogering, and the idea that not only is it fair enough for middle-aged blokes to lech after teenage girls, but that teenage girls rather like it when they do. (I was also slightly disconcerted by her favourite word for female genitalia – which, by way of a big clue, is the surname of the 41st and 43rd US presidents.)
What the show seems to know most of all is how much we secretly dislike our current pieties
So how on earth would Rivals go about adapting her work in 2024? The unexpected answer, judging from the two episodes I’ve seen so far, is pretty wholeheartedly. Now and again, you can detect a knowing glint in the show’s eye about the couldn’t-happen-now antics of the 1980s – but what that glint seems to know most of all is how much we secretly dislike our current pieties.
So it was that the first episode began with a kind of defiant overture. In an aeroplane toilet (Concorde naturally), vigorous sexual congress was under way, featuring the toned, thrusting bottom of Jilly’s long-standing cad Rupert Campbell-Black, a red stiletto shoe pushed hard against a wall and a climax duly accompanied by the popping of an onboard champagne bottle. Emerging afterwards, Rupert (Alex Hassell) walked down the aisle in slow motion while glossy women peered over glossy magazines, objectifying away.
And with that, it was time to introduce the show’s eponymous rivalry. Back in his seat, Rupert exchanged brittle, charged banter with Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) who owns a TV channel, inevitably – if also somewhat improbably – based in the Cotswolds, where both men live and to where the action now shifted.
Among the other occupants of huge houses there is Tony’s new star presenter Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), whose wife Maud and 20-year-old daughter Taggie would soon catch Rupert’s impressively roving eye. As would Tony’s glamorous new star producer. For now, though, poor Rupert had to make do with the journalist he’d enjoyed on Concorde and the wife of an MP.
Not that he’s the only Cotswolds-dweller in possession of a pair of heaving buttocks. As a handy recap, the episode ended with multiple orgasms – which is to say multiple people, in various couplings, having one orgasm each.
Even so, the main driving force of the plot is not so much sex as class, where again at Jilly’s prompting the show takes an unfashionable line: much preferring posh people and generally regarding those who aren’t as arriviste oiks.
Leading team oik is Valerie Jones, a woman so hilariously common that she owns a boutique in Colchester and calls her drawing room ‘the lounge’. But even Lord Tony is not exempt from a sneer or two. Sadly, you see, despite his title and wealth, he’s a grammar-school boy and as a result chippy, insecure and essentially charmless. Above all, he’s eaten away with such resentment of Harrow-educated Rupert’s obvious superiority that he doesn’t realise that when Rupert gropes young Taggie, it’s just a spot of harmless upper-class fun.
Given the level of advance publicity – and the programme’s own ultimately irresistible shamelessness – Rivals seems bound to be a hit, even a well-deserved one. But however much you like it, please don’t pretend it’s remotely feminist.
And so to another series about rich people, where the younger characters are constantly shocked by the older ones’ immorality and class plays a big part. But that’s where all similarities end between Rivals and Industry – a show from the other end of the dramatic spectrum: savage rather than jolly, thoroughly researched rather than cheerfully fantastical and resolutely free of froth.
In fact, though, what makes Industry one of the best dramas on television is that its darkness and cynicism are so alarmingly convincing. Created by two former City boys and set in a London investment bank, the show is now in its third series. Yet it’s still finding ways to both horrify and titillate us with revelations as to how the world of high finance works (with staggering ruthlessness on the whole).
By now, it’s something of a cliché to compare Industry with Succession – the trouble being that it’s hard not to. After all, the two share the same sense of anger bordering on fury, combined with the same ability to channel it into perfectly controlled episodes bursting with thrilling incident, razor-sharp characterisation and high-tar acting. They also have the same sort of blistering dialogue that, in theory, should be somewhat over-theatrical in its endless fluency but that, in practice, delivers one gut-punch after another.
Less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch: Sleater-Kinney’s Little Rope reviewed
Grade: B-
Given that Carrie and Corin are now in their fifties and one of them has settled down with a nice man, this is perhaps less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch. You cannot expect fury to sustain itself for 30 years, not least when your band has long since ceased being an upstart revolution to the patriarchal rock order and has become instead a kind of indie heartland rock institution.
This is Sleater-Kinney’s 11th take on that curiously bloodless American version of punk, a genre which is now comfortably mainstream. They never had quite the cuteness or pop sensibilities of, say, Veruca Salt: what marked them out originally was a disinclination to compromise. They sing better than they used to and have at last arrived at the notion that a decent melody here or there might help their cause. It has indeed – this is one of their better albums, even if a significant proportion of it is boring and bombastic.
The usual sonic inferno has been grafted on to each composition – the rule of thumb is, the more studio FX is involved, the slighter the song – so we’ll pass on the opener ‘Hell’, which is about Hell and is overwrought, the mindless chug of ‘Needlessly Wild’ and take notice only when the polite, plodding pop of ‘Say It Like You Mean It’ kicks in, with its most unexpected saxophone embellishments.
They alight upon a catchy riff in ‘Hunt You Down’ and there is something very becoming about the breezy, Byrdsian chorus of ‘Don’t Feel Right’. But they have been outstripped in their marginal field – catchy punk pop sung by girls is now everywhere in the USA, and often done a lot better than this.
You’re unlikely to see a better case made for this Bernstein double bill
It’s rare nowadays to see a new opera production that’s set in the period that the composer and librettist intended, but they do occasionally come along. In the case of Leonard Bernstein’s operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, the time and place are basically the whole plot. Trouble in Tahiti dates from 1951; a sassy little one-act satire on America’s postwar consumer idyll. It’s practically perfect. A Quiet Place is from 1983 and it’s a sequel, set 40 years later – post-Vietnam and post-Woodstock, with the nuclear family in full meltdown.
These performances, and this production, provoke thoughts that might rob you of sleep
It’s a bit of a mess, in other words, and Bernstein never really made the pairing work. His final version stuffed the whole of Trouble in Tahiti inside Act 2 of A Quiet Place: an operatic turducken, scored for a hefty orchestra (complete with synthesiser – this was the 1980s, after all) and duly ignored by all but the most dutiful American companies. The Royal Opera restores Tahiti to its pristine form, and puts A Quiet Place on a brutal weight-loss programme, trimmed and tucked into coherence by Garth Sunderland. Both are rescored for a chamber ensemble. Bernstein never heard or authorised this version, though given what he did authorise in his later years we probably shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Trouble in Tahiti is always fun, and Oliver Mears handles it with wit, using the Linbury’s letter-box stage to create a suitably 1950s split-screen effect as the young married couple Sam (Henry Neill) and Dinah (Wallis Giunta) go about their suburban lives. Giunta is terrific; an all-dancing knockout, just as she was when she sang this role for Opera North in 2017. Mindful that the piece is now essentially a prologue, Mears goes easy on the satire and starts to pick at the vulnerabilities of both characters. Dinah is hitting the bottle, and as Sam, Neill lets a defensive, pained edge enter his voice when he works out at a (distinctly homoerotic) gym.
This is intelligent directing, and it pays off in A Quiet Place, which opens at Dinah’s funeral with the couple’s estranged adult children centre-stage. The early-1980s signifiers are amusingly etched, with big hair, rolled-up jeans and daughter Dede (Rowan Pierce) looking kooky and kohl-eyed in an oversize trouser suit – very Annie Hall. Their son Junior (Neill again, utterly transformed as the moustachioed, shorts-wearing gay stereotype of red-state nightmares) is a mentally ill draft-dodger, and the siblings’ (apparently) shared lover François (Elgan Llyr Thomas) is from Quebec. An elderly, embittered Sam is now sung by Grant Doyle, in a performance that flips from steely aggression to sudden, fragile tenderness, sometimes within the same bar.
Still, ‘What a fucked-up family!’ exclaims one character. Mears does his best to dig beneath the wisecracks and point-making, and if Bernstein’s late lunge for redemption doesn’t quite ring true, the fever-dream mood swings of a family forced together by grief are superbly drawn, with Pierce in particular finding pain and anxious laughter in that lovely, lucid voice. It’s a fidgety score and the conductor Nicholas Chalmers keeps a cool head. Even so (and even in the reduced scoring) the orchestra occasionally overwhelmed the voices. That’ll probably come out in the wash; meanwhile you’re unlikely to see a better case made for A Quiet Place. This is a bold, thoughtful staging of an opera that tries hard – possibly too hard – to do something different.
There’s equally sophisticated theatre over at English National Opera, where Isabella Bywater’s staging of The Turn of the Screw is the company’s first really substantial new production in nearly 18 months. The setting (Bywater is the designer, too) is a psychiatric hospital about 50 years ago (to judge from the nurses’ uniforms) – which, since the action is portrayed as the memories of the now-ageing Governess (Ailish Tynan) places it within striking distance of Henry James’s era. The drab institutional walls slide back and forth, while black and white film of a country house flickers and whirrs to disorienting effect.
Apparently Hitchcock was an inspiration and that’s certainly the effect here: psychological thriller rather than ghost story, with Britten’s music taking on a Bernard Herrmann-like weight and tension under the baton of Duncan Ward. You’d never guess that there were only 13 players. The two children (Jerry Louth and Victoria Nekhaenko on the first night) were unnervingly self-possessed, and Robert Murray, as Peter Quint, suggested menace with controlled gestures and a voice that took on a cold, hollowed-out ferocity. Tynan’s singing, meanwhile, told its own tale as she pottered about in her slippers; sweetness, anxiety and a haunted, fading sadness at the ends of phrases. A memory of despair, or a dread that’s still present and active? These performances, and this production, provoke thoughts that might rob you of sleep. That’s a recommendation, by the way.
Serious and gripping – though Trump disagrees: The Apprentice reviewed
The Apprentice is a dramatised biopic of Donald Trump, covering his early business years. He has called the film ‘FAKE and CLASSLESS’ and ‘garbage’ – but he wishes it well. I’m pulling your leg. ‘It will hopefully “bomb”,’ he has said. He hasn’t seen it, as far as anyone knows – I wish I could review films without seeing them; so time-saving – but even so, the writer, Gabriel Sherman, is ‘a lowlife and talentless hack’.
If Trump had not trashed the film, you could say it had failed in what it was trying to reveal, which is: why does he behave this way? Where does his attacking mindset come from? It’s an origin story, if you like, and I was gripped throughout. It’s brilliantly acted and conceived, and it takes its subject seriously. It’s not like an extended Saturday Night Live routine.
The film is set in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s and begins with Donald (Sebastian Stan) working for his father’s real estate company as a rent collector. His father has never made him feel worthy, is disdainful of him in fact, which makes him desperate to impress – desperate for success. (This is not laid on thick. This is what you infer from the scenes round the family dining table.)
Donald is ambitious. He’s already dreaming of Trump Tower. But he’s a no-mark who no one entertains seriously until he enlists the help of lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who had previously been Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and is now working for the Mob. I could write reams about Cohn (look up the nose job he was forced to have as a teenager), but for our purposes he’s a power-crazed, ruthless, amoral force who will stop at nothing to win.
At the time, Donald and his father were facing a federal suit for alleged discrimination – and the evidence that they would not rent to black people was overwhelming. But Cohn gets them off the hook by blackmailing a government figure with compromising material. ‘Play the man, not the ball,’ he tells Donald, whose eyes are opened. He becomes Cohn’s apprentice. When Cohn imparts his strategy for always coming out on top – attack, attack, attack; deny everything; claim victory and never admit defeat – he takes these principles so to heart it’s still his playbook today. If Trump’s first response had not been to attack this film, I’d have wanted my money back.
The movie is sometimes compassionate, sometimes ruthless and often tragic, particularly when it comes to Donald turning his back on Cohn, having outgrown him (here I felt some All About Eve vibes). It’s directed briskly by Ali Abbasi and is episodic as we catch up with Trump down the years. We see him court Ivana (Maria Bakalova), make deals, obfuscate his debts, build Trump Tower and basically seek to fill his emotional void with wealth and status. His vanity becomes monstrous. When Ivana taunts him about his weight gain and thinning hair, he rapes her. He has liposuction, a hair transplant, and there’s a wonderfully comedic scene with a diet-pill doctor.
The performances are insanely good. Stan, after years of putting the hours in to the Marvel franchise, has suddenly emerged as one of the most transformative actors working today (See also: A Different Man). He embodies the essence of Trump without slipping into caricature. You get the occasional mannerism, or those lips that purse like the tied-up end of a balloon, but nothing that ever seems like a crass imitation. And Strong’s performance convincingly takes Cohn from a place of strength to one of devastating heartbreak.
It’s pure class. But, just to be clear, reviews from those who have yet to see the film are also available. In this instance, you may find that it is ‘disgusting’ and has been made by ‘HUMAN SCUM’.
An uncompromising master: David Gilmour, at the Royal Albert Hall, reviewed
It doesn’t matter which dictionary you consult, they all agree on what a song is: words, set to music, that are sung. Yet it’s also an entirely inadequate description, since there are so many types of song.
Take David Gilmour and Neil Finn, both men of passing years who like to switch between electric and acoustic guitars, both backed by plenty of singers and kindred instrumentation (though Finn didn’t have a pair of harps on stage with Crowded House), both playing music largely rooted in the late 1960s, both offering lightly mind-bending songs.
Yet this misses something crucial. Because, of the 23 songs that Gilmour performed – from both his solo and the Pink Floyd catalogue – over the course of two and a half hours at the Albert Hall, it became striking how few of them were actually songs. That’s not meant pejoratively. Gilmour simply does not do – and never has done – toe-tapping singalongs. We can test this theory out; just imagine a Pink Floyd song before you read the next paragraph.
There’s a fighting chance that what you imagined was something played at a torpid pace, with huge washes of keyboard, some possibly profound, possibly ridiculous lyrics and a soaring guitar solo. Something like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, or ‘Breathe’. That’s the template, and that’s what we got a lot of. And let’s face it, they’re not songs so much as chord progressions with lyrics and a guitar solo. (There’s no middle eight, or bridge, or chorus.)
That is a style that Gilmour and his bandmates invented, and it’s one, in its non-specific melancholy, that continues to echo down the decades. It’s what Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits was 40 years ago; it’s what Coldplay were updating when they became huge 20 years ago. And Gilmour, with that utterly inimitable tone – as unhurried as a bowler adjusting his field as the last session of a county championship game peters out into a draw – is its master.
There’s been a lot of critical love for these shows, and they are wonderful, but in their way they are every bit as unyielding as any monostylistic band. I wonder if some of the adulation comes, perhaps, from the likelihood of this being Gilmour’s last tour (he’s 78). And I wonder, too, if his former bandmate Roger Waters’s impressive campaign to make himself the most dislikeable man in pop has, in effect, made Gilmour the only game in town for critics who like ‘Comfortably Numb’.
That song, which closed the set, was a reminder of the effect of real songwriting. There’s a reason it was last. Here were verses and choruses rather than chord progressions – lyrics with such specific imagery that it’s hard to imagine the song not enduring – and, of course, two of the most famous guitar solos in history. Which is why everyone was there. To hear that sound. That tone.
Neil Finn can do sound and tone. But he does melodies above all: glorious melodies that seem to tumble out of him at will. He’s got so many that Crowded House could open with one of their biggest hits, ‘Weather With You’, rather than save it till the encore. This show wasn’t quite the ecstatic kaleidoscope that their gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire had been earlier this year, but it was hard to find fault with it.
Even the less demonstrative songs from the new album Gravity Stairs – ‘Teenage Summer’, ‘Magic Piano’, ‘Oh Hi’ – shone because of the attention to detail. Here was sound and tone: interlocking harmonies, the shimmering guitar lines of both Finn and his son Liam (his other son, Elroy, played the drums), the careful addition of other instrumentation, including bouzouki (played by a fella from the Greek island where Finn now lives, apparently).
And that’s before you get to the catalogue. Finn is undervalued I feel. There are so many wonderful songs, all of which were written with both a keen appreciation of pop classicism and how to reach a wide audience. ‘World Where You Live’, for example, was recorded as bouncy 1990s pop and became a hit, but it could equally be played as a 1960s garage R&B rave-up, and virtually all of his songs sound as though they could withstand any arrangement.
‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, ‘Four Seasons in One Day’, ‘Fall at Your Feet’, ‘Locked Out’ and – my favourite – ‘Distant Sun’ were perfect distillations of a vision of pop that seems incredibly human, gentle and intimate. What constitutes beauty in pop is very much in the eye of the beholder, but for me this show was truly beautiful.
I’m done with Hofesh Shechter
I think I’m through with Hofesh Shechter, and that’s a pity, because earlier work of his such as Political Mother thrilled me with its unedited passion and energy. But after several duds and misfires, I feel that with Theatre of Dreams he’s run out of ideas and hit a dead end. The title suggests what’s gone wrong: labelling something Theatre of Dreams gives you licence to go crazy and do what the hell you like, without any purpose or structure, rhyme or reason. And that’s what has happened here. Over 90 uninterrupted minutes, curtains close and open to reveal a hundred or so snapshot tableaux of 13 dancers doing nothing of any discernible significance in a void.
It’s all great if you suffer from attention deficit disorder. But count me out
It’s a trick Shechter has played several times previously, and it is realised here in dance that is entirely without originality, expressive nuance or formal elegance. Random and largely frenetic, it relies on periodic outbreaks of tribal stomping, as well as the odd feeble joke, such as a man running about naked but for his socks, clutching his genitals in embarrassment. The dancers are admirably tireless and committed; the electronic music, composed by Shechter and enhanced by a jazz combo, is thumpingly banal; Tom Visser’s lighting is the show’s most imaginative aspect. I should add that the audience – invited at one point to jump up from their seats and join in a mass jive, which they did with vigour – went wild with enthusiasm. All great if you suffer from attention deficit disorder. But count me out.
The first thing to note about the National Ballet of Canada, which last month briefly visited Britain after a decade of absence, is that its dancers emerge collectively as a beautifully schooled troupe, cohesive in style and confident in different idioms. The second thing of note is its management’s brave decision to present a programme of new work by three native choreographers, all of whom had an engaging idea to offer. Never mind that total success wasn’t the result.
For Passion, James Kudelka builds on Beethoven’s piano transcription of the first movement of his Violin Concerto. It’s an oddity of a score, swollen by repetitions that oblige Kudelka to over-extend his promising concept. This consists of a mismatch between a posse in tights and tutus responding to the music through conventional balletic classicism – all symmetries, parades and poses – and a couple in vaguely contemporary clothing who seem alienated and anxious about each other, looking for a way into or out of a relationship. Both parties seem oblivious of each other, and there’s no obvious resolution or pay off, though the modernists are left alone to dance out Beethoven’s extended cadenza. If only Kudelka had ratcheted up the contrast between styles of movement, but there’s not enough tension or development on offer to make it forceful and it all merely peters out.
Emma Portner’s islands squeezes Heather Ogden and Genevieve Penn Nabity into a giant pair of elasticated trousers, inside which they move like conjoined twins, their writhings and wrigglings comic rather than erotic. When they finally divest themselves of this cocoon, they yearn to be reunited and can’t let each other go.
A gentle allegory of us all, I suppose, in modest contrast to the more grandiose statement made by Crystal Pite’s Angels’ Atlas, an exercise in apocalyptic eco-mysticism. Against gushes of abstract video evoking volcanic smoke and torrential inundation in the manner of Bill Viola, a mass of dancers, moving in inexorable swarms, rage against the dying of the light as if imploring harsh gods for mercy on a beleaguered planet. Tableaux of pietà are enacted; humanity confronts its nemesis.
There’s magnificence here, and a breadth of vision to complement Pite’s boldly sculptural vocabulary. But it’s also a bit vaporous in its generalised imagery and mournful musical soundtrack, similar to but less focused than the Flight Pattern that she created for the Royal Ballet. I can’t help ultimately preferring the subtler shades and ironies that colour Pite’s brilliantly original work for Kidd Pivot.
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: ‘That is surrealism.’ Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip. A former student of neurology and psychiatry, with no qualifications other than an instinct for the coming thing (‘an astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms’, as he later described his fellow conspirator Louis Aragon), Breton encountered the early writings of Freud as a medical orderly on a trauma ward, during the first world war, and immediately recognised the significance of his work.
Surrealism was in the first place a delayed response to how ordinary life had been exploded by the carnage of 1914-18. The dadaists prepared the ground with their charge that rationality itself had led the drift to war and was no longer to be trusted, but ridiculed and subverted. Compelled to repeat the trauma, in their performative fashion, dada demanded reparations in the coin of the irrational: the right to transgress in perpetuity. To which surrealism added its constructive twist, and Breton’s almost mystical sense of the group as a vital source of intelligence.
The surrealists wanted to put us to sleep in order to wake us up
The movement, kickstarted by the Surrealist Manifesto, which was published 100 years ago this month, gave us a new world – literary, visual, photographic, filmic – and a new word, which has been used and abused ever since. ‘Surrealism’ is hard to take stock of because it had to cross so many boundaries to say what it meant: art, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, politics, ethnology, science, magic…
Breton had a sheepdog-trials zest for rounding people up and telling them where to stand. He took over naturally or mysteriously from Apollinaire (after the latter’s early death in 1918) as the spokesman for a Parisian avant-garde, whose cosmopolitan ranks were swelling. The dadaists Picabia and Tzara arrived from Zurich in 1919 and 1920, Miro from Barcelona in 1920, Man Ray from New York (1921), Ernst from Cologne (1922), Hans Arp from Strasbourg (1925), Dali from Madrid (1926), Magritte from Brussels (1927) – a full flush of proto-surrealists, of whom only Aragon and Yves Tanguy were true-born Parisians. Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, described the movement as ‘the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’ – and no group ever loved posing for the camera as much, often with eyes closed. The Manifesto codifed surrealism as a vision of life, open to whatever lies beyond human agency. A new art was needed, verbal and visual, ‘free from all control by reason, exempt from all aesthetic or moral preoccupation’.
The term ‘surrealism’ was first used by Apollinaire in 1917 (as an improvement on ‘supernaturalism’) to describe Cocteau and Satie’s ballet Parade. But its second outing was courtesy of Breton and his early comrade Philippe Soupault, with whom he had collaborated in 1919 on The Magnetic Fields, a headlong exercise in ‘automatist’ procedures, or pure expression, on the page, and they named this new activity ‘surrealism’. Uncontrol was in the first place an event in language, not unlike the new kinds of listening outlined by Freud to define the analytic encounter: a form of free-floating attention or unconscious communication.
In senses now difficult to recover, surrealism was not, at the outset, an art movement with an aesthetic, and Breton at one point referred to painting as a ‘lamentable expedient’. Rather it harnessed and repurposed dada’s intransigence (anti-art, anti-craft, anti-easel, anti-humanist). The means were artistic and diverse, but the ends were other: to refashion human understanding ‘from top to bottom’ and transform the mindset of everyday life – to make us aware of the Truman Show that is ordinary reality. The surrealists wanted to put us to sleep in order to wake us up – to free the subject from false rationality and restrictive templates. It is a style of thought, in the first place. The idea being that if you transform the imagination, the rest will follow. (Outsiders often felt there was something ‘fundamentally black-magicky’ about all this, in the words of Mina Loy, and Freud regarded them as a bunch of cranks.)
The classic objects and images of surrealism have shock in common, or what Breton called ‘le saccade’ (a jolt), and they seem to shock each other rather than share an iconography: a melting watch in a desert landscape; a lobster telephone; sugar lumps made of marble; a cup and saucer covered in fur; Man Ray’s close-ups; Ernst’s eerily controlled yet oneiric procedures: mineral and archaic scenarios alive with eyes, mosses, insects and encrusted hybrid figures; or the wriggling biomorphic communities which dance through Miro’s serene canvases and the precisely seen organicist wreckage of Tanguy.
But we know a surrealist image when we see one, their hidden premises are legible – we file them effortlessly in the same mental drawer, which suggests that reality has indeed re-arranged itself around the surrealist dream of an alternative order. It is also true that the movement never surrendered its connection to realism. ‘Surreal’, we say, meaning (in one of its senses) a step away: holding up a cracked mirror to what is there, rather than freely imagining an elsewhere. (In this sense surrealism has little to do with utopias, or utopian thinking.)
The interest in primitive arts was a reaction to the horrors of civilised behaviour in the first world war
In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘problems are solved not by new information, but by rearranging what we have always known’, and Magritte’s paintings showed common things in unthinkable arrangements: a steam locomotive emerging from a marble fireplace into an empty room, a blue sky filled with a grid of identical floating men in overcoats and bowler hats looking like rain, a full length portrait of a man whose face is hidden by a large green apple – images the more disturbing for being so diligently rendered. The realistic has become the enemy of the real.
Breton invoked The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as a foundation for the renovation of art and its capacity to convey buried meanings. But Freud was concerned to excavate the psychic origins which govern individual destiny – the dream has a hidden explanatory force for the dreamer. Surrealism, on the other hand, was fascinated by how the dream loosens individuality, and by the dream as a work of art which creates itself (a recurrent surrealist fantasy and more recently a widespread AI fantasy), offering a duplicate world, rather like photography. Giorgio de Chirico – whose painted enigmas (first seen in Paris in 1911) kickstarted the visual imagination of surrealism – went so far as to suggest that ‘no dream image, however strange, strikes us with metaphysical force. Far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of waking life’. This strikes the surrealist note, with its extroversion and urge to legislate for collective as much as individual experience.
The first surrealists were interested in the unconscious as it erupts into the light of common day, which meant the city as much as the psyche. Thus the quest motif that informs so much of their thinking and behaviour, the pilgrimages and wanderings, the allegiance to chance and its dictates. Breton’s autobiographical novel Nadja (1928) imagines the unconscious as a street. The heroine of its title is a passer-by, a spontaneous surrealist pursued by obscure promptings, a follower who is in turn followed, led on by the collage of coincidence that is the city.
The street included the suggestive power of certain objects, randomly encountered. The Parisian flea markets were a favoured site, where free-floating attention encountered things with nowhere to go, stripped of context, ‘old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible’. This passion for material culture was continuous with the interest in the dream as the key to the riddles presented by the observable world, the aleatory and enigmatic ‘evidences’ present everywhere around us.
Modernity is a salvage operation, and surrealism often has an air of looking backwards. With Rimbaud in mind, the word ‘hallucination’ would have defined most closely their aims and expectations. They were conscious of excavating what existed already but had no name – rather as Freud had to coin his own lexicon of new words for old psychic realities. There was an odd reassurance in the fact that these things had remained nameless – too close to be seen clearly.
In this sense there was no rupture between before and after the war. One reason they needed the past, the pre-surreal order, was that if a hidden continent existed inside the ordinary it must have been there all along, and prior art must be full of confirmatory traces. Moreover so many retroactive forces are involved. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Benjamin praised Breton for grasping the revolutionary energies of the outmoded: ‘the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photographs, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has started to ebb away from them…’
A section of Aragon’s 1926 novel Paysan de Paris is set in the about-to-be demolished Passage de l’Opéra, one of the ubiquitous Parisian covered corridors, ‘human aquariums’ with their glaucous light, at once indoors and outdoors, the city in a bottle, all cast iron and glass. Aragon itemises the contents of this microcosm as a dream-order of redundant things – its shops and small trades, its façades and erotic possibilities, where the tread of a stranger is closer to us than our own thoughts.
The old Trocadéro museum of ethnography (which closed in 1935) was another privileged site of the surreal – an unlit and unheated remnant of the 1878 World’s Fair, long fallen into disuse – whose arrangements did not spell disorder so much as another dispensation. Opposition to the French colonial war in Morocco in 1925 was the founding political gesture of surrealism, and the movement was intricately bound up with the explosion of French ethnography in the 1920s.
The interest in the primitive arts (of Oceania, especially), was a reaction to the horrors of civilised behaviour exemplified by the first world war, but also a curiosity about the survival into the present of societies where art has functions (symbolic, ritual) other than aesthetic, and whose objects or fetishes are also tools, integrated into ordinary life. Breton and Ernst were avid collectors of artefacts, on the lookout for the anonymous masterpiece.
At times, surrealist researchers (they were deeply and paradoxically vested in study and documentation) threw up the question as to whether more works of art are needed: how to interrogate art without merely adding to the existing excess. Anchored in states of mind, surrealism could sometimes seem like a religion of faith rather than of works, its broader purpose ‘to create a movement in the mind’, rather than to change material conditions or the physical order of things. In some respects it was a hypothetical affair, and its acolytes were peripatetic wanderers rather than men (mostly) with art careers. Direct action was never the movement’s strong suit, and what Sartre referred to as surrealist ‘quietism’ left the world magically unchanged after its passage. As Magritte remarked: ‘I think we are responsible for the universe, but this does not mean that we decide anything.’
This is why the politics of surrealism – and its early choice of the French Communist party as unwilling bride – were so hazardous and inconclusive. When push came to shove, the subjugation of art and anarchy to the revolutionary cause was unpalatable for Breton, who had a genius for inconsistency. In one self-consuming formula he declared surrealism to be in favour of ‘the independence of art – for the revolution; The revolution – for the complete liberation of art’.
Hollywood adapted its methods with hypnotic fluency – starting with Dali’s dream-sequence in Spellbound
The afterlives of surrealism begin in New York. When the surrealists washed up there in the early 1940s, their work had preceded them, notably in a big exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in 1936. They kept themselves apart, like a lost tribe, but their presence was momentous and it is curious that surrealism, with its referential relation to the outside world and intermittent hostility to abstraction, could have so influenced advanced art in America. But painters such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock found richly intuitive ways of exploring the principles of automatism for abstract expressionist ends. At the other end of the spectrum, pop art found ironic uses for the surrealist object-world, and the movement’s hybridising of high and low enabled the soup cans and dream furniture of pop (just as the shamanic posturings of Dali indirectly licensed the antics of a showman like Jeff Koons).
Part of the reason why the movement endured was its ability to penetrate contexts deeply inimical to its principles. If it seems dateless, rather than alive or dead, this is because of the ubiquity of its meanings, from which we establish a safe distance only with difficulty. We need the word, as part of the small change of modernity. In this sense surrealism ended when it began to flourish as a brand, a figure of speech, part of the image-repertoire. Having topped and tailed psychoanalysis, surrealism was in turn asset-stripped by advertising, which channelled its flair for the instinctual into the science of subliminal suggestion and the arts of persuasion. American cinema adopted its associative methods with hypnotic fluency – starting with the dream-sequence provided by Dali for Hitchcock’s Spellbound – but the analogies lack conviction: Hollywood stays wide-awake, while it is we who do the sleeping.
AI image-generation too seeks to pass itself off as a creative heir to surrealism, but the outcomes of image-generation are merely the products of a different form of rationality. The machine dreams of AI depend on the market forces that produce them, and programmes with names like DeepDream® proffer an idea of the unconscious that is all too conscious. The word ‘proprietary’ had no place in the surrealist lexicon, and if the surrealists were alert to the eventuality that desire would lose its capacity to disrupt, AI is what they might have had in mind.
The surrealists desired to be ‘unacknowledged legislators’ (as Shelley defined the poet in 1821, a hundred years earlier). And it survives as a mood, or rather an imperative mood, a form of bossiness. You must change your life, was Breton’s essential demand. It also survives as a certain kind of image: momentary, implosive and non-negotiable. The most memorable of the street slogans from the Paris protests of 1968 was ‘Sous les Pavés la Plage’ (‘beneath the pavement the beach’), referring to the sand on which the cobbles repose, with a filial nod to the barricades of 1848. It spoke for unconscious life, beneath the mineral city – not unlike Rimbaud’s compressed vision of ‘a drawing room at the bottom of a lake’, which surrealism adopted as one of its earliest talismans.
The image also looked back to dada and its sense of purposelessness, which was the lifeblood of surrealism. For both movements, everyday life was the theatre of play and the condition of possibility. The surreal is contained inside the real, which is where the movement’s belief in the unfettered imagination still plays out, as an intuition that is alive a hundred years on.
Does Kamala Harris think black men can’t be trusted with crypto?
There have been plenty of accusations made against crypto currencies such as Bitcoin over the years. It is too flimsy, you can’t buy anything with it, and it is wildly volatile. All fair enough. But is it racist? That appears to be the view of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president.
The US vice president has unveiled a set of policies designed to help black men, an important group of voters who have been showing worrying signs of drifting towards her rival Donald Trump. It included pledges to improve healthcare, education, and to legalise marijuana, presumably on the grounds they think that black guys smoke a lot of weed. It also included a pledge ‘to protect cryptocurrency investments so black men who make them know their investment is safe’.
Why do black men in particular need protection for crypto?
Seriously? There are two odd things about Harris’s pitch to black men. To start with, a plan to protect cryptocurrencies is completely barmy. The whole point of Bitcoin, Ethereum and any other type of web-based cash is that it is completely unregulated. Any scheme that tried to protect investors will either be completely irrelevant, or else will end up costing the government billions of dollars in compensation. Investments can’t be ‘protected’ because they are inherently risky. That is surely the entire point.
Next, why do black men in particular need protection for crypto? Harris’s plan appears to suggest that they are somehow uniquely susceptible to crypto scams, an argument for which there is precisely zero evidence, and which might well be slightly racist. Unless she is planning a scheme that bails out black men, but not black women, Hispanics or whites, when their investments go wrong, it does not make any sense.
The truth is that Harris’s crypto policy is just weird. Harris is proving a formidable campaigner, and a far better candidate than her dismal record as vice president would suggest. Yet many of her ideas are an incoherent mess. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Harris will be a very poor president – even if black guys won’t have to worry about their Bitcoin while she is in the White House.
Russian spies are intent on wreaking havoc in Germany
If ever the West needed confirmation that we have become firmly entrenched in a new Cold War with Russia, this month’s warnings from intelligence services across Europe should do it. Just a week after MI5’s Ken McCallum said that Russia’s military intelligence service is ‘on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets’, the German security services have also raised the alarm. They have warned that the coming months would see the Russian secret services crank up the heat on acts of espionage and sabotage in Germany ‘without scruple’.
Appearing for their annual grilling at the Bundestag’s parliamentary control committee on Monday, the heads of Germany’s three intelligence agencies spelt out in alarming terms the extent of Russia’s ambitions. ‘The Kremlin sees the West and therefore Germany as an enemy,’ warned the federal intelligence service’s Bruno Kahl. ‘We are in direct conflict with Russia.’ The Russian army, he said, was likely to be capable of launching an attack on Nato by 2030 at the latest.
Russian sabotage and espionage on European soil is perhaps the undervalued cost of support for Ukraine
Putin, Kahl said, wants to test the West’s ‘red lines’. The head of Germany’s military intelligence, Martina Rosenberg chimed in, describing the ‘worryingly’ high levels of espionage targeting the German army. Arms deliveries to Ukraine, training and armaments projects are particularly vulnerable to such unwanted attention, she said.
The country’s domestic intelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang then raised an incident from July in which a parcel caught fire in a DHL parcel processing hub at Leipzig airport. The package had been sent from Lithuania and was bound for Britain. It had been placed in a cargo container, the whole of which set alight. The cause of the fire was found to have been an incendiary device. Thanks to what Haldenwang called a ‘lucky coincidence’, the cargo plane due to carry it to Britain was delayed; had it not been, the parcel would have exploded mid-air and downed the aircraft, he revealed.
It would be easy to dismiss the German spy chiefs’ warnings as alarmist. This isn’t, for one, the first time that the German authorities have suggested that Russia could attack Nato in the near future. Back in January, leaked documents from the German ministry of defence claimed to spell out a potential route to war by mid-2025. Many of the steps laid out in that plan have not come to pass. But it is worth considering that while Germans may see little disruption to their daily lives from Russian sabotage and espionage, that doesn’t mean such incidents don’t – and won’t continue to – occur.
The Leipzig parcel incident is far from isolated: over the course of this year, instances of arson at places such as depots and storage warehouses have been cropping up right across Europe. From Britain to Poland to Germany, with many others in between, all have been linked back to Russia.
The reason for this increasingly unsubtle campaign of hostility is straightforward. These countries make up some of Ukraine’s biggest European backers. With the war in Ukraine about to enter its third winter, it is in Russia’s interest for western support for Kyiv to falter. In countries such as Germany where backing Ukraine is an increasingly politically divisive subject, spying and sabotage help to create fear and feed sentiment among some quarters that Putin’s invasion is none of Berlin’s business. Alluding to this on Monday, Haldenwang stressed – a touch sardonically – that even those ‘here in Germany who sympathise with Putin and his regime’ would, of course, not have been spared by falling debris from a sabotaged plane.
The warning from Germany’s intelligence chiefs coincided with comments made by the country’s interior minister Nancy Faeser, who confirmed that ‘Putin’s regime is becoming increasingly aggressive’. But it would be a mistake for Germany to interpret this as a sign of Russia’s strength; rather, like an animal backed into a corner, the Kremlin is lashing out, trying to make itself look bigger and scarier in the hope it won’t be eaten.
Russian sabotage and espionage on European soil is perhaps the undervalued cost of the West’s support for Ukraine. But giving up on Ukraine now won’t reduce the security risks to Germany, or any other European country. The Kremlin’s blood lust is up, but there is strength in numbers.
Trump’s Chicago interview was magnificently weird
Kamala Harris has been criticising Donald Trump for ducking interviews. Today, however, she avoided a sit-down with the Economic Club of Chicago. Trump, by contrast, showed up and spent an hour facing difficult questions from Bloomberg News’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
It was, like all the best Trump appearances, a magnificently weird occasion. Who needs LSD when you can watch him as a presidential candidate, eight years in, still melting reality live on YouTube?
If Kamala Harris speaks in confusing word salads, Trump speaks in even more baffling fruit jellies
Micklethwait is a brilliant man: polished, Ampleforth and Oxford, highly successful. His hair is coiffed and his loafers look expensive. For the benefit of the affluent audience, he endeavoured to have a serious conversation as to the concerns rich people have about a second Trump term. He asked about tariffs, growth, China, Putin, monopolies, immigration and 6 January.
But Trump is a rude 78-year-old force of nature, an economic populist who says the Wall Street Journal has been ‘wrong about everything’ – and the Wall Street Journal-reading crowd seems to love him for it.
He entered to a standing ovation, abused Micklethwait for asking perfectly reasonable questions, boasted ad nauseam and wandered wildly off-topic whenever challenged. Then he left the stage to even louder whoops and cheers.
On tariffs, Micklethwait gently tried to confront Trump with the possible problems his second administration might cause if it pursued an even harder protectionist line. ‘It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re wrong,’ said Trump. Again, the crowd erupted approvingly.
Micklethwait pointed to ‘bipartisan’ studies and tried to argue that American consumers and jobs would ultimately suffer if Trump froze out global trade. Trump just ignored him. Boring! Instead, he rattled through his favourite anecdotes and conversations with his hugely successful business friends. ‘I’ll give you an example,’ he said, repeatedly, only to give yet another instance of how marvellous he is.
When Micklethwait asked if he had spoken to Vladimir Putin since leaving office, Trump snapped back: ‘If I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.’ That, funnily enough, was about the straightest answer he gave.
The rest of the time, whenever Micklethwait tried to pin him, Trump would just veer off bogglingly. Asked about whether or not he would tackle the power of Google, Trump sighed and replied: ‘I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes, and the Justice Department sued them to get the bad votes put back on.’
In fairness, Trump did eventually imply that, while Google has been ‘very bad to me’, he would be reluctant to break it up as a monopoly. But when Micklethwait asked what wasteful government spending he might axe, Trump started up: ‘Let me give you an example, when I came into government, I was…’
‘An example going forward,’ interjected Micklethwait. ‘Well this is going forward because it’s the same thing,’ replied Trump. He then recounted one of his hoarier tales – ‘some of you have heard this’ – about the time he shaved a couple of billion off the cost of Air Force One.
Moving on, Micklethwait pointed out that, while Trump might make exceptions for giant corporations such as Apple, smaller companies might suffer from his tariffs. ‘We gave exceptions, no no… I gave Apple an exception,’ said Trump. Micklethwait bravely insisted that Apple was not a small company, but Trump rumbled on – ‘we had great people, we had central casting…’
Pressed again to come up with an instance in which he helped a less profitable business, Trump spoke of a man he met who ran a ‘pretty big’ kitchen cabinet business and who benefited from the Trump tariffs on his Asian competitors. ‘I saw the guy two three days ago,’ he said. ‘He said you saved my company… and he started to cry, this isn’t a guy who cries too much, I can tell ya.’
Is that true? Does anyone care? If Kamala Harris speaks in confusing word salads, Trump can speak in even more baffling fruit jellies – even as he insists he’s all about ‘common sense’. The effect is hypnotic.
He is also curiously candid about his evasiveness, which makes him disarming. At one point, while not giving an answer, he explained: ‘I call it the “weave”…You have the weave as long as you end up in the right location at the end.’ That was funny.
Towards the end, Trump referred to ‘Gavin Newscum’, the governor of California. ‘Newsom,’ Micklethwait corrected him. ‘NewSCUM, I call him,’ Trump answered. The crowd laughed.
Micklethwait suggested that a regular CEO could be sacked for using such language. ‘They don’t know how to survive like me,’ Trump concluded. ‘They don’t have to go through what I have to go through. There has never been a president that has been treated like me so I have to fight my own way.’ He’s not wrong.
Sir Keir faces scrutiny over Taylor Swift policing fiasco
Dear oh dear. The Home Secretary, the London mayor and even Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff have all been in the firing line over the Taylor Swift security row – and now the Prime Minister is under the microscope. It transpires that after Labour figures pushed police to give special protection to the star during her London shows – on the orders of her manager and mother – the PM was not only given free tickets to her Wembley gig but even accepted backstage access to Swift at the event. Good heavens…
The latest update, broken by the Sun newspaper, comes after the news that singer’s mother insisted that the global pop icon received VVIP police security usually reserved for senior royals and politicians while she performed in the UK – and threatened that if she didn’t, Swift’s shows would be cancelled. It then emerged that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and London mayor Sadiq Khan had personally intervened in the case, with reports that the Met police felt pressured to capitulate. Officers were uncomfortable about offering the public purse-funded service to the US singer as forces insisted there was no specific threat against Swift, and Scotland Yard even requested legal advice from the Attorney General on the issue. Crikey.
The revelation that the PM was given 10 minutes of backstage access to the singer, and even got to introduce his family to US pop sensation after the whole policing palaver, ties into the ongoing freebie fiasco dogging the Labour lot at present. It turned out the Home Secretary attended Swift’s show on gifted tickets just before her, er, helpful intervention over the star’s security. And Mr S is rather bemused as to why, after the police had been pushed to provide the pop icon with a special envoy – a decision Starmer’s then-chief of staff Sue Gray was said to have been involved in, according to Whitehall sources – Sir Keir himself appeared to think it was a good idea to accept £2,600 worth of concert tickets from Swift’s own music label. Talk about a lack of political nous…
No. 10 was adamant on Tuesday that it was ‘entirely legitimate’ for ministers to hold talks with police forces over security for major events – but Steerpike wonders quite how the public will react to the news. Not least as it comes after Labour’s cronyism row, anger at the government’s winter fuel payment cuts and weeks of bad press over the PM’s recently-replaced chief of staff. It’s certainly been an eventful start to the job, eh?
Should the UK copy Europe on standardised chargers?
You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce?
It was this frustration, together with the wastage which arises when old chargers are thrown away purely because they won’t fit a charging port, which led the EU to announce in 2022 that phone companies will have to use a common charging cable: the USB type C port. Apple protested that iPhones would no longer be allowed to use their own unique charging sockets, but relented. The changes are due to come in from 28 December this year.
As it is, Britain is in the best of two worlds
In its crusade to standardise chargers, though, the EU has set post-Brexit Britain one of its first big challenges over product standards. Do we oblige phone manufacturers to copy EU regulations in Britain or do we take advantage of our new-found freedom and allow them to adopt whatever kind of chargers they want?
At the risk of sounding too reasonable, there are arguments both ways. Yes, it is irritating that there are so many different kinds of charging cable. It means, for example, that you often can’t borrow a friend’s charger when you have forgotten to pack your own. When it comes to electric cars the preponderance of different cables – and apps required to use chargers – is a huge impediment to their take-up. Had manufacturers adopted standardised chargers, so that any car could drive up to any charger and plug in their vehicle, using any credit or debit card, I suspect the resistance to electric cars would be a lot weaker.
But there are serious problems, too, when a government, or supra-national organisation like the EU, tries to demand standardised products: it chokes innovation. Imagine if, ten years ago, the EU had demanded one type of electric car charging cable. We might never have had ultra-rapid chargers. Worse, imagine if in the early 1990s the EU had decided that henceforth there should only be one standardised form of storing computer data: the floppy disk. How would that go down now?
The previous government declined to join the EU’s standardisation drive and said it wouldn’t force phone manufacturers to adopt a single design of charger. But the current Labour regime is reported to be thinking otherwise.
But why? As it is, Britain is in the best of two worlds. No phone manufacturer is going to design a uniquely British charging cable purely for the sake of it. Why would they want to? Most phones sold in the UK are going to adopt the EU standard whether or not they are obliged to because it makes business sense. Even if you wanted to distinguish your product from a rival’s by employing a different standard, you are unlikely to want to manufacture two versions yourself, each to be sold on opposite sides of the Channel.
On the other hand, refusing to adopt the EU standard on electrical and electronic goods means that if there is a very good reason to experiment with a new, improved design. Britain could become the test bed. We can become an island of innovation, where future equivalents of DVDs, flash drives and so on can be developed before they are allowed to be sold in a floppy disk EU.
Thank God for the EU phone cable directive. It will mean less fiddling around for most of us as our phones adopt one standard. But the government has no need to follow the EU with legislation when standardisation will happen anyway. If our new government has wisdom it will leave things as they are.
Working people will pay for Reeves’s NI hike
Who would pay for Rachel Reeves’s increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions? Well yes, in the first instance it is the companies that would have to hand over the cash, but the real burden would be much more widely shared.
To see why, start with the simple question: what does a company do if it finds its labour costs have suddenly gone up? It can do nothing, in which case its profits fall (or even less agreeably, its losses rise) and it pays a bit less in corporation tax. It can trim its workforce to hold costs down, which will cut the government’s take from income tax, and – of course – from National Insurance. It can increase its prices, in which case customers pay. It can cut or postpone investment, accepting some damage to future growth. It can hold down wages, in which case it is the workers who pay.
Governments have to raise money, and they should do so in a way that does the least damage to the economy
The balance between these different consequences varies enormously from company to company and sector to sector, and it is extraordinarily hard to predict the overall outcome. As you might imagine, there is a sizable industry of economists trying to work out how people react to tax changes, and there is a sub-section devoted to NI. For example, there was a paper by the OBR last February that looked at what happens when the government cuts NI. It examined the ‘income effects’, ‘substitution effects’, ‘participation elasticities’, ‘progression elasticities’, together with ‘separate elasticities for income and substitution effects’. The outcome was that the cuts led to an increase in hours worked equivalent to another 94,000 people in jobs… in 2028/29.
It is easy (and unfair) to mock. So much depends on the mood of the hour – what John Maynard Keynes back in 1936 dubbed ‘animal spirits’, the way emotions drive business and investment decisions. In a time of overall high inflation, a company is more likely to try to pass on higher costs by jacking up prices. If a business is already worried about falling demand, a rise in NI might push it to trim staff numbers now rather than take the risk of having to cut more savagely later.
Right now, the jobs market seems to be softening. The latest ONS stats just out are weaker than expected, and there is the prospect of the government’s reforms to workers’ rights coming into law soon, which may encourage companies to try to trim their workforce as soon as possible. It is quite possible then – though we just don’t know – that most of the impact of higher NI will indeed be on employment, rather than any of the other variables. If that is right, it will be the people who lose their jobs, or fail to find work, that will pay much of the bill. On the other hand, a softening job market may enable companies to hold down pay increases anyway, and the rise in NIs will give them another lever to do so.
The bottom line is this: governments have to raise money, and they should do so in a way that does the least damage to the economy. But pretending that ordinary working people won’t have to pay for an increase in employers’ NI contributions is wrong. Working people, or formerly working people, will stump up.
My life as a historian of the Great War
As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone else. Fortunately, most have.
I started early, writing my first title, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, when I was in my twenties. This, my most personal book, was a homage to my late father, Frank Jones, a very elderly dad who had been in his sixties when I was born. As such, he was a veteran of the first world war, but, like me, a myopic spectacle-wearer, he spent the conflict behind the lines in the châteaux where generals like Douglas Haig planned their bloody offensives. Dad’s task was to take down their battle orders in shorthand and then type them out. The nearest he came to danger was when a shell exploded on high, killing a pheasant which fell at his feet. He took it into the Mess for lunch.
My books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, enlisted in the Rifle Brigade in 1914 aged 18 and was killed the following year near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother. My father brought me up on stories of the war and took me to visit the old battlefields and Uncle Ernest’s grave. I became obsessed with the subject, but only when I read other books on the subject did the obsession crystallise into the idea of writing my own.
The first book I read on the Great War was Verdun: The Price of Glory by the late Alistair Horne, for my money the most moving and brilliant of all the myriad books written about the war. Verdun is an ancient citadel in north-east France that was the scene of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. A French friend inherited an old family house there, which I used as a base to explore the haunted glades of the battlefield. (After the war, despairing of ever returning the poisoned ground to the plough, the French planted a huge forest to cover it and the nine villages obliterated by the battle.)
The second book that inspired me to write was A Walk Along the Wall by the journalist Hunter Davies, a travelogue about his tramp from one end to the other of Hadrian’s Wall. Why not, I thought, apply this idea to the whole western front, and walk the 400-mile active section of the old trench lines, from the Belgian coast to St Mihiel in Lorraine, combining my travels, my family story, a potted history of the war, and my interviews with some 30 surviving veterans in a single book. Obtaining Mr Davies’s permission to nick and adapt his idea, I began my work.
My first problem as a complete unknown in the literary world was to find a publisher, but this was solved more easily than I had feared. At a book launch party, I met Norman Longmate, a social historian, who recommended Robert Hale, a small publisher with offices on Clerkenwell Green. After a single letter outlining my plan, I was summoned there for an interview and left clutching a contract for the book.
My second book sprang directly from the first: one of the veterans I had interviewed was the famous German writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, the much-wounded and decorated author of the classic great war memoir Storm of Steel. I found him so interesting that my interview stretched to a three-week stay in his village, during which the 90-year-old sage mentored my first (and only) LSD trip: Jünger was a friend of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had first synthesised the drug, and had been writing about it since the 1930s – long before Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary followed him down the psychedelic trail. Incidentally, both Jünger and Hofmann lived to be over 100, so not all drug fiends die young.
Earlier in his varied career, Jünger had been the bard of the Freikorps, the mercenary force of ex-soldiers and young right-wing students who had crushed communist uprisings in Germany immediately after the Great War, and been so brutally effective that they had even tried to overthrow the young Weimar Republic with a military putsch. There was only a single history of the Freikorps in English at that time, and so I put myself forward to fill the gap, making Jünger the dedicatee of my book. This time my publisher was the venerable John Murray, a gentlemanly house who brought out my book Hitler’s Heralds in 1987, coincidentally in the same week that Rudolf Hess, like Jünger a Freikorps veteran, hanged himself in Spandau jail.
Lucky happenstance played a part in my third book, when for the first time I dipped my toe into the tricky waters of biography. At school, I had played a role in a production of a play by Patrick Hamilton, the alcoholic playwright and novelist now celebrated as the coiner of the concept ‘gaslighting’ from the title of his eponymous stage thriller.
I moved to Brighton in the late 1980s and discovered that Hamilton’s only surviving relative, his sister-in-law Aileen, was a near neighbour. Despite the fact that she detested him, Aileen was the guardian of Patrick’s papers and literary manuscripts, and delighted me by pulling out a huge suitcase stuffed with these relics from beneath her bed, giving me the freedom to use them as I wished. Within a week I had obtained a contract to write Hamilton’s biography.
I then found that I had a rival in the field. The publisher Faber had written Aileen a slightly snotty letter announcing that they had anointed the writer Sean French to pen a biography, and demanding her cooperation with the project. Aileen had taken umbrage at their presumption and not even bothered to reply, and, thanks to her, I had Patrick’s literary legacy and a decisive head start over my competitor. Nevertheless, once I had completed my book, I invited Sean to visit and consult my papers. I got the drop, and my biography Through a Glass Darkly duly appeared first.
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, was killed near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother
Sean had the last laugh though: together with his wife Nicci Gerrard, he formed the best-selling crime writing duo ‘Nicci French’ and a whole shelf full of books now testifies to their success. Aileen bequeathed me Patrick’s papers in her will, but having already used them, I sold them via Sotheby’s, and today they rest in that graveyard of British literary legacies, the University of Texas at Austin.
Another projected biography brought me more grief than poor Patrick had ever done. Richard Cohen, a distinguished books editor, decided to set up as a publisher with his own imprint and commissioned me to write the life of the artist Lucian Freud as one of his first titles. I was living in Austria at the time and was desperate to return home, so I accepted the brief without knowing too much about Freud or his private life. It turned out that Freud strongly objected to anyone prying, which was fair enough. I had not appreciated the lengths he would go to to stop the biography appearing, despite being warned by a former friend of the painter that he was a nasty piece of work with close contacts in London’s criminal underworld.
Anonymous phone calls warning me off soon escalated to actual threats, and I became paranoid enough to leave my home and sleep out in the office of a small literary magazine in Hove. Richard Cohen decided that publicity was my best protection, and arranged for the story of my disappearance, together with a gnomic comment from Freud, to appear in the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. The date was 31 August 1997, and although both papers had put the story on their front pages, it was immediately swallowed up and forgotten by what happened in Paris on that day: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Deciding that no book was worth the trouble that Freud’s life had brought me, I proposed to Richard that I should abandon the project, and instead write the biography of the safely long-dead poet Rupert Brooke, a figure from the Great War era who had long fascinated me. Brooke’s official biographer, Christopher Hassall, had been discreet to the point of deception about the poet’s busy hidden life, and as Brooke had died without heirs, I assumed I would be safe from any Freudian persecution. I was wrong.
A beak at Eton College had acquired the unpublished letters that Brooke had written to Bryn Olivier, one of several women he had wooed simultaneously. The beak lent me copies of the letters without imposing any restrictions on their use, but strangely objected when I published them in the Hove literary magazine as a taster for my biography. A legal letter from his solicitor demanded £25,000 from me, which I declined to pay, and used the letters in my biography regardless. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth duly appeared and was serialised in the Sunday Times without more ado, and when the beak died soon afterwards, I saw it as a kind of divine retribution.
And so, somehow, the books kept coming: a history of the Tower of London; a brief biography of Britain’s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, written with the cooperation of Mosley’s eldest son Nicholas; an account of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, written with the help of Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, eldest son of the heroic would-be assassin; a history of the Edwardian era on the eve of the first world war; the story of a Berlin brothel used by the Nazis to spy on the clients. I am not sure what such varied interests say about their author, but it has been a very exhilarating ride.
Tesla is in trouble if Kamala Harris wins
In the third century BC the city of Rhodes, in celebration of the defeat of Demetrius I of Macedonia, built the Colossus, a 30-metre-high statue of the sun god Helios. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Now there is a new Colossus to wonder at, not a statue but a supercomputer, reputed to be the most powerful in the world. So which American tech company built it? Apple, IBM, Google, OpenAI? Actually, none of the above. The new Colossus has been built by a US auto company… Tesla. How come?
In the space of 14 years, Tesla has risen from being the manufacturer of an electric sports car based on the Lotus Elise and powered by mobile phone batteries to an EV behemoth which, despite competition from China’s BYD (Build Your Dreams), is the world’s largest producer of EVs. Tesla has achieved this with only two mainstream models – the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y, a mid-size SUV. (It should be noted that these figures do not include hybrids. Nor should they. As one analyst wittily pointed out, in technology terms it would be like a company sticking a petrol engine on the back of a horse in the early 20th century, when the world transitioned from horses to internal combustion engines.)
Sales of Tesla’s Model Y (a four-year-old car) are poised to now overtake Ford’s F-150, which has been America’s top vehicle every year since 1977. Last year, Tesla’s SUV was the world’s best-selling vehicle, even though it is relatively expensive compared to the previous title holder, Toyota’s subcompact Corolla.
If this year has been a year of consolidation in terms of Tesla’s EV sales, next year is likely to see a second wave of exponential growth. The now-dated Model Y is likely to be replaced. As with the Model 3, which was replaced at the end of last year, the improvements in build quality, technology and battery life are likely to be spectacular.
In addition, next year Tesla is slated to build a cheaper ‘Model 2’ using elements of a revolutionary manufacturing system called the ‘unboxed’ method, which is expected to cut production costs by 30 per cent. Meanwhile, Tesla’s futuristic Cybertruck, an electric pickup, is already being produced at a run rate of 50,000 vehicles per year. That compares with GM’s electric pickup, the Hummer, which only sold 13,001 units since its introduction in 2021.
Lastly, Tesla will start production of a £230,000 ‘Semi’ (lorry in British parlance) in a new gigafactory in Nevada in 2025. It plans to have a production capacity of 50,000 units per annum; in an industry where most semis are quasi hand-built, this would be the most automated plant in the world. The new plant is next to Tesla’s Gigafactory I, which will overtake the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, as the world’s biggest manufacturing facility when its current build-out is completed.
Despite these production plans, which will likely increase Tesla’s capacity from 1.8 million units to 3 million units per annum over the next two years, its CEO and founder, Elon Musk, places little value on its automobile business. As he recently told investors, ‘I recommend anyone who doesn’t believe that Tesla would solve vehicle autonomy… should sell their Tesla stock.’ He is right. At a £575 billion market capitalisation, Tesla is massively overvalued as a car company or even as a utility-scale battery power manufacturer, in which it is also a world leader.
However, Tesla would appear to be close to reaching the Holy Grail of autonomous self-driving. Musk’s confidence is such that, last week, he appeared on stage at Warner Brothers’ vast Burbank, LA studio complex to launch the Robotaxi, Tesla’s dedicated autonomous vehicle which is designed with no steering wheel or pedals.
This is where Tesla’s Colossus comes in; its computing power is such that it can massively increase the company’s neural network training capacity. Colossus comprises a water-cooled array of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs (£23,000 each). A projected expansion next year will add a further 50,000 H100s, plus 50,000 H200s. The total cost will be in the region of £3.8 billion, which shows the extent to which Musk has gone ‘all-in’ on real-world artificial intelligence.
The result is that Tesla’s ‘Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD)’ system is rapidly improving to the point where it will be considerably safer than human drivers. On current trends, it will soon be ten times safer. In the past fortnight alone, Tesla has added ‘Smart Summon’ to its FSD. For example, Teslas can drop off their owners at a supermarket and then park themselves. After buying groceries, the Tesla owners can then ‘summon’ their car using a phone app.
Tesla’s Robotaxi launch has been compared to the legendary introduction of the Apple iPhone by Steve Jobs in June 2007. But whereas Jobs’s iPhone presentation was brilliantly slick, Musk’s ‘We Robot’ presentation was chaotic. Self-admittedly aspergic, Musk is an erratic performer. His jerky bodily movements, his stuttering speech, and his frequent hyena laugh sometimes make him appear like a malfunctioning robot… unlike the platoons of humanoid robots who interacted with the invited audience at Warner Brothers.
The fact is that Tesla’s humanoid robots are being trained in the same way as its Robotaxis. Within two years, Tesla has propelled itself to the lead of the race to produce humanoid robots. Next year, Tesla aims to have up to 2,000 humanoid robots operating in its factories. Last Friday, Tesla’s robots played a more entertaining role. At Warner Brothers’ Westworld (after the dystopian film Westworld, starring Yul Brynner), Tesla’s cowboy-hatted robots poured drinks and gave out snacks. They even played ‘rock-paper-scissors’ with guests while they waited for their ride in the 20 Robotaxi prototypes.
Given that Musk has gone all-in on his support for Trump, his Robotaxis may not be too welcome in Democrat states
While the value of a business that dominates the Robotaxi market has been estimated at £3.8 trillion or more, the value of the humanoid robot business, which Musk aims to sell for £23,000 per unit from 2026, is expected to be much more; ‘the biggest product ever’, as he has described it.
So, what are the pitfalls for Tesla in this ‘brave new world’? Firstly, there are rivals such as Google-owned Waymo in America and Baidu in China. Over the past two years, they have built up significant automated ride-hailing businesses in cities such as Wuhan and San Francisco. However, Waymo and Baidu rely on expensive geofenced systems supported by radar; on the road, their cars appear to be carrying a traffic cone atop a surfboard above their vehicles. It is estimated that they cost up to £115,000 each compared to a Tesla Robotaxi, which, relying only on inexpensive cameras and neural network training, will cost just £23,000. A fearful Uber has now formed a defensive alliance with Waymo to combat Tesla’s Robotaxi. Perhaps the best indication that Tesla may crush Uber is that its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, sold £53 million of Uber stock in June.
Secondly, there is the problem of public acceptance for automated taxis; in San Francisco, Waymo’s cars have suffered Luddite attacks, and in Wuhan, there has been a public outcry over risks to jobs. Thirdly, there is the problem of regulation. Musk plans to roll out autonomous driving in California and Texas next year. But given that Musk has gone all-in on his support for Trump, his Robotaxis may not be too welcome in Democrat states.
Neither will Musk be popular at the federal level. Democrat-leaning federal institutions such as the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) have already blocked Musk’s SpaceX company from launching its revolutionary Starship and from deploying its broadband Starlink business, which has doubled its subscribers from 2 to 4 million since 2022.
There has been little love lost between Musk and President Joe Biden, who gormlessly excluded Tesla from his White House EV summit in 2021. But whereas Musk, like most California techies, voted for Biden in 2020, he has now gone all in for Trump, appearing at his rallies and donating hundreds of millions of dollars in support. If Kamala Harris wins, Musk, who has described Harris as a ‘puppet’, is aware of the consequences; as Musk only half-jokingly said to Tucker Carlson, ‘If he [Trump] loses, I’m fucked.’