-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
2704: Lookalikes
Three pairs of unclued lights suggest three four-letter words which share the same last three letters but together form 40A-25D only. Solvers must shade the clued light that contains those three letters.
Across
11 Lady also studied endlessly (6)
13 Cat televised a medic on board fishing boat (7)
15 Deed of Beatle (5)
16 Kiwi Queen of Crime spoils husband (5)
17 Wild Wyoming women ignored Will’s public disgrace (6)
21 Semi-aquatic beast needs groovy river (5)
22 Mound-birds fashioned piles keeping eggs very hidden (7)
27 Hearing result of being talked about somewhere? (7)
29 Agitator emptied Czech ballot box (5)
30 Energetic goer hundreds back in party (6)
32 Edmund’s together with unknown twin (5)
34 Brit just after athletic goddess (6)
36 Poet had a collection of books (250) (5)
37 Cardinal or chorister? (5)
38 Move to another country, leaving Gabon for Dubai? (7)
39 Plant from peninsula pruned by sons (6)
Down
1 Robert controls clan weaving ornamental fabric … (6,4)
2 … medium long fine muslin (8)
3 Rogue rum honk from regularly pulled organ stop (9)
4 Lame aunts hastily book before jetting out of Lima (12)
5 PM, briefly elated, departed ousted and made off (7)
6 Artist has trouble capturing dry locks of hair (3-5)
7 Elk short with antelope (5)
8 Good Ireland eleven perhaps (4)
9 French sleuth with no time for food-fish (6)
12 Mysterious Amerind ends in purgatory (6)
14 Novel and candid physicist, one I overlooked (12)
19 Break for short story about big black bird (10)
21 Musical glasses cheer up Ms Vitti? (9)
23 I irrationally fear soldier with no papers (8)
24 Yoga has new moves in Chinese city (8)
26 Some cyanide a tester imagines (7)
28 Decorated soldier losing heart in French department (6)
31 Wasps’ centre missing serious game (5)
33 Touch or smell Prudence (5)
35 Last year’s eye problem (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of a £30 John Lewis voucher and two runners-up prizes of £20 vouchers for the first correct solutions opened on 9 June. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2704, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
2701: Mix and match – solution
The title hinted that the twelve unclued entries were six (symmetrically) ‘matched’ pairs of ‘mixed’ anagrams.
First prize Glyn Watkins, Middle Deepdale, Scarborough
Runners-up Gill Wayne, London SW9; Arabella Woodrow, Riddlesden, W. Yorks
The Roman approach to tax
The Sunday Times rich list would have excited the male citizens over the age of 18 who determined state policy in the Athenian assembly in the 5th century bc. The reason is that Athens levied taxes on citizens by their wealth, as judged by the property they owned. The most important tax was the leitourgia (source of our ‘liturgy’). This was imposed upon the 300 wealthiest Athenians and was hypothecated on two specific projects: the funding of the annual comic and dramatic festivals (one of which involved, among much else, the training of 1,165 men and boys for months on end) and the funding and maintenance of fully equipped Athenian triremes, which controlled Athens’s marine empire. At times of emergency, mainly war, a further tax was levied on the 6,000 wealthiest.
For many Athenians it was a matter of pride to be asked to carry out a liturgy. Done well, it brought with it great prestige as well as political benefits. Indeed, we hear of Athenians who volunteered to be liturgists, even if they did not technically qualify. However, it was possible to avoid it if you could prove that someone was richer than you. If you succeeded, he did the liturgy; if not, you did.
Such liturgies were one of the main features of an ingrained culture of euergesia (‘good works’) among the great and good, in a world in which the vast majority were extremely poor, and the Romans adopted it (they translated it beneficium). But there was a problem: Roman society ran on the principle of the quid pro quo. Should one not return a good deed? Did this make receiving a benefit a nuisance? No, said Seneca. He defined a beneficium as ‘an action which both provides and generates pleasure in the doing, from a natural and spontaneous inclination’. Virtue, then, was its own reward. In that spirit, when a famous Greek benefactor, T. Claudius Atticus, offered to hand over his vast fortune to the emperor Nerva, he replied, ‘Keep it, and use it well.’
If only the government used our money well. So keep up the good work, euergetists, especially if you value the study of the ancient world.
The short history of short histories
Alice Loxton has narrated this article for you to listen to.
My friend Ruby recently started a TikTok channel called ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’. With boundless enthusiasm and a colourful wardrobe, she prances around Hampstead Heath, summarising classic novels in 60 seconds. The channel ‘sums up anything ever written so you can talk about it to your mates’.
Ruby is not alone in her approach of offering such educational digests. Scan the tables at Hatchards in Piccadilly and you will find endless shortest histories, or – for brevity’s sake – ‘shistories’. Popular formulas include ‘The Shortest History of …’, ‘A Brief History of … or ‘A Little History of …’.
New publications include The Shortest History of Scandinavia by Mart Kuldkepp, professor of Estonian and Nordic history at UCL (out in hardback next month), and Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music (out in paperback in July). In it, Ford acknowledges the limitations of the format: ‘No history of music – let alone the shortest – can hope to be comprehensive.’ Ford’s answer to this dilemma is to focus on specific episodes that tell the macro-story.
Which brings us to the sister genre, ‘list-ories’, which neatly packages history into numbered lists. This week’s Sunday Times non-fiction chart features two examples: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary and A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge. As the author of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, I am fully complicit in this epidemic.
These sorts of books sell, which is why publishers churn them out. The question, though, is why readers are so drawn to such bare-bones history. The primary reason is ease. Short histories serve as cheat sheets in the quest for self-improvement. They offer a fast, manageable way to feel as if we understand big topics.
Much of the problem is borne of guilt. We feel we should understand cultural movements and have an opinion on political crises, and so short histories are marketed as an easy way to plug the gaps. Fearing ourselves to be uncultured swines, we search for a quick fix. Knowing ourselves to be busy and distracted, we buy the book we are realistically most likely to read, the compact one, wherein we hope to get the gist of a subject rather than a deep understanding. And – oh joy! – the book fits in our pocket.
Some will say our short attention spans are a large part of the problem. No longer can we tackle an enormous plate of literary nourishment. Instead it must be chopped up for us, into palatable chunks. What’s next? ‘A History of Britain in Ten Pages’?
But catch-all histories are in fact nothing new. E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (1935) and H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World (1922) were hugely popular when published. In 1791, Jane Austen, at the age of 15, wrote The History of England (describing herself as ‘a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian’). It is a short, witty account of British monarchs, which ‘pokes fun at the overly verbose and grand histories of her day’, according to its current publisher.
To come briefly to the defence of short histories, there is something liberating about how noncommittal they are, for reader and author alike. They are a haven for the undecided, an opportunity to try out a period of history without fully committing to the bigger tomes. And though we have more free time than our ancestors, today’s information overload creates a feeling that we can never keep up. Lists do at least give some semblance of control. The predictability allows us to develop mental maps – ‘schemata’ – which make it easier to process information. Listories also offer a nifty way to present a ‘new take’. Like a gallery re-hang, familiar subjects are enhanced by a new setting.
When I was writing Eighteen, I compared the adolescence of historic figures: the Venerable Bede, Elizabeth I, Richard Burton and Vivienne Westwood, to name a few. Though each life has been well documented by others, it was the comparison between a specific aspect of their lives which provided the new angle. It was also less daunting. Writing any ‘History of Britain’ is a big task; writing 18 biographies (and even then, only covering the first 18 years) felt more manageable.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with these fleeting formats devised to democratise information. The more history the better. Whatever format you choose, it’s all well and good in my (very short) book.
Why do bite-sized histories have such big appeal? Alice joined The Edition podcast alongside the historian Professor Simon Heffer:
How popular is Airbnb?
Tall order
Two naval cadets were killed and 19 injured when a Mexican sail training vessel, the Cuauhtemoc, crashed into Brooklyn Bridge. How many fully-rigged sailing vessels are there in the world?
— Sail Training International lists 383 such ships which have taken part in races and regattas in recent years.
— The oldest still in use, Constitution, was built in 1797. It is moored in Boston as a museum ship but still undertakes voyages.
— The Australian navy trains sailors on the STS Young Endeavour, a gift from the UK government to mark the 200th anniversary of European settlement in 1988. Other countries which still train naval recruits on tall ships include India, Poland, Germany and Spain. China launched its first naval training tall ship, the Po Lang, last year.
Fish scale
What did EU membership do for our fishing industry compared with neighbouring countries and those with access to our waters?
Tons of fish landed:
1972 | 2022
UK 1.07m | 847,000
France 791,000 | 677,000
Spain 1.56m | 1.19m
Netherlands 348,000 | 367,000
(West) Germany 761,000 | 265,000
Denmark 1.44m | 669,000
Norway 3.12m | 3.76m
Iceland 1.44m | 669,000
Source: FAO
Bed spread
How big is the market for Airbnbs?
— Last year, 90.1m guest nights were booked via Airbnb and other ‘online collaborative economy platforms’.
— The most bookings were in August (12.8m) and fewest in January (3.7m).
— 26% of bookings were in just ten local authority areas, with the most popular being Westminster (3.9m), Cornwall (3.4m), Edinburgh (3m) and Highlands (2.6m).
— Kensington and Chelsea had the highest proportion of international guests, at 85%.
— In the third quarter of 2023, the most international guests came from US (1.9m), Germany (1m) and France (763,000).
Betting the farm
How indebted are farms in England?
— In 2023/24 the average value of assets was £2.69m and debt £300,000.
— The average farm earned £57,000 in farm business income, £12,000 of which was swallowed by interest payments.
— The most indebted type of farm was livestock grazing farms; the least indebted were horticulture farms.
Source: Defra
Inside the Conservative clubs that are turning Reform
My first job was working behind the bar of the Richmond Conservative Club in North Yorkshire. The place was as you might expect: dark blue doors, no women in the bar – other than on Fridays – and a ban on red ties. There were portraits on the walls of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. The local MP, William Hague, sometimes held his surgeries there.
The Richmond club is still open, but many others have closed since the 1950s, when more than a thousand clubs offered cheap beer, snooker and bingo to almost three million Tory members. The party’s membership is now a fraction of what it once was; only 95,000 people voted in last year’s leadership election.
Last month, in the run-up to the local elections, Nigel Farage visited the recently closed Frodsham club in Cheshire. He joked that he was ‘thinking of putting a bid in and making it the Reform club’. Another Conservative club liked the idea. A few weeks later, The Spectator broke the news that the Talbot in Blackpool had been repainted in teal and reborn as the first ‘Reform UK pub’.
From the Talbot, which was converted from two interwar terraced houses, you can see Blackpool Tower rising in the distance. In contrast to Richmond’s 18th-century townhouse, the Talbot has a modern aesthetic. Neon signs for Coors and Budweiser glow behind the faux-slate bar. The television in Richmond was only put on for special occasions; at the Talbot, GB News plays continuously across three screens. When I visited, the older men took turns to chat to a girl in a lurid yellow dress or play the fruit machines. The prices are reasonable: a pint of Premier pilsner costs £2.80.
When I asked one customer if there had been much media attention, she told me they had been inundated. ‘They should have all gone by the end of the week,’ the barmaid added, hopefully. Journalists weren’t the only visitors attracted by the rebrand: one local couple had returned after more than a decade. Another couple visit Blackpool from Harrogate every year on their holidays, and promised to return for bingo at the Talbot on Tuesday. As I stood at the bar, the owner received a phone call from someone who makes pub benches. He wanted to donate six in return for a photo op, an offer he extended to every future Reform club. One punter asked if there were any party-joining forms. Nobody ever asked me that in Richmond.
Many Conservatives in Westminster worry about the loss of their old networks of clubs and associations that once tied the party to their voters. But Conservative clubs have, at best, a tangential relation to the party. When I made the mistake of wearing a red tie in Richmond, one regular winked at me and said: ‘Up the revolution, brother.’ He’d voted Labour all his life.
Despite this relaxed approach to ideology, Conservative clubs did ensure that there was some kind of Tory presence in most towns. Reform appeals more to instinct than tradition: a sense that something’s gone wrong and someone ought to say so. One of the regulars at the Talbot told me that after a few drinks in a nearby Wetherspoons, she had walked over to speak to the local MP and mayor, who had also been drinking there. She was trying to get help from the Labour-run council with a patient hoist for her disabled husband: ‘I told them exactly what I bloody thought.’
Swearing is forbidden in the Richmond Conservative Club, governed as it is by a sense of propriety. The place is hushed and restrained, even at its busiest times. The Talbot feels much more suited to Reform: direct, provocative and openly dismissive of authority. The Tories have little answer to this new energy.
The local Tory association responded to the rebranding of the Talbot by claiming that they had no records of it ever being a Conservative club – which is hard to believe when the words ‘Talbot Conservative Club 1927’ are engraved above its door. The Conservatives have not controlled the council for over a decade. Three weeks ago, Reform took control of Lancashire Council, bordering Blackpool.
When he visited Frodsham, Farage began with a photoshoot outside, telling the media: ‘The club’s closed, the party’s closing down, and Reform are moving in!’ There are already rumours of a second Reform pub in nearby Fleetwood.
Outside the Talbot are three foundation stones, inscribed with the names of three long-forgotten local Tory grandees. Over the years they have been chipped away so much you can barely read them. Since the club switched from Tory to Reform, the names have been painted over, in Farage-friendly teal.
The mystifying cult status of Gertrude Stein
To most people, the salient qualities of Gertrude Stein are unreadability combined with monumental self-belief. This is the woman who once remarked that ‘the Jews have produced only three original geniuses – Christ, Spinoza and myself’. Of the reading aloud of her works, Harold Acton complained: ‘It was difficult not to fall into a trance.’ Even if you are as good a writer as Francesca Wade, it is still difficult to avoid the influence of what she herself calls Stein’s ‘haze of words’. So the first half of this impressively researched biography is cerebral rather than colourful.
Stein’s writing career really began when, aged 28 (she was born in 1874), she lived alone in Bloomsbury and began to record in notebooks her thoughts, observations, descriptions of her surroundings and snatches of overheard conversations. In the spring of 1903 she joined her younger brother Leo in Paris, where the pair, supported by a monthly allowance from the family inheritance, lived simply – both always wearing plain brown corduroy suits. Under Leo’s influence, they spent much of their allowance on works of art by emerging controversial painters. Their first major buy was a portrait by Henri Matisse that had been much mocked by the regular art crowd. Soon they were introduced to an unknown young Spaniard whom they were told was ‘the real thing’. It was Picasso – so poor he had to share a mattress with a friend. As they bought from him, a friendship grew.
In 1907 came Stein’s seminal meeting with Alice B. (Babette) Toklas, herself of Polish-Jewish extraction. There was an immediate attraction and, as their friendship grew, Stein asked Toklas if she would like to type out some of her writings. Toklas leapt at the suggestion, arriving every morning and working away until Stein appeared for her breakfast coffee at noon. It was the start both of a love affair and a lifetime’s routine – Stein working late into the night and Toklas typing the result the following day.
Publication was a different matter. Although both women believed Stein to be a genius, editors found the work incomprehensible, plotless and meandering. Endless rejections followed – all neatly annotated by Toklas in a special black notebook. Even Stein’s first book, Three Lives (1909), was a paid-for publication. As for The Making of Americans, her magnum opus completed in 1912, it languished in a drawer for many years.
In 1913, Leo, who by now disagreed with his sister about almost everything, moved to Florence, leaving Stein and Toklas an established couple in Paris. Much of the content of Stein’s notebooks concerned their daily life (‘Alice is making tapestry’), although new ways of using words were an increasing obsession. Could they mean something different each time they were repeated? Why was a paragraph more emotional than a sentence?
By the 1920s, Stein was a cult personality whom everyone in the literary and arts world wanted to meet
Stein was also moving away from nouns and punctuation – or, as Wade puts it, ‘loosening language from the scaffolding of syntax’. Even the first world war, which she spent partly in England, did not interrupt the flow of poems, plays and essays – or the stream of criticism. ‘Your work… is for the cognoscenti,’ wrote one editor tactfully. Others were crisper, one American paper describing it as ‘a scramble of meaningless words from a writer who nonetheless appears to be the most talked about creature in the intellectual world today’.
For Stein had indeed evolved into a cult personality. Throughout the 1920s, she was at the heart of the modernist movement – a person whom everyone in the literary and arts world wanted to meet. At her weekly salon in the home she shared with Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank she would sit foursquare on a throne-like chair with Picasso’s portrait of herself above her.
More Picassos, a few Matisses and other works of by-then recognised artists hung on the walls. Male writers and acolytes crowded around, their spouses expertly corralled by Toklas (Stein did not like talking to wives). All came to pay homage to Stein, who received it as her due. Conversation focused on her work and her ideas – she had little interest in anyone else’s. She viewed James Joyce in particular with disfavour and perhaps as a rival – as a writer of equally immense, difficult books, especially since Ulysses had emerged to acclaim in 1922. ‘Mention Joyce twice,’ said Ernest Hemingway, one of her protégés, ‘and you will never be asked again.’ You would receive instead a small hand-written card with the words: ‘Miss Stein declines further acquaintance.’
In 1925, after strenuous efforts and through the good offices of a friend, The Making of Americans was finally published. Described by Wade as ‘a work of restless dialogue with itself that seems to be constantly shedding its own skin’ (there is quite a lot of that sort of phraseology in this book), it is a vast, unwieldy tome, notable only for the quote by which Stein herself is best known – ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’. By contrast, her next book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (a portrait of Stein supposedly seen through Toklas’s eyes), published in 1932, was simply and readably written and an immediate success. ‘Gertrude isn’t steinish any more,’ wrote one reviewer. It heralded a renaissance, with lecture tours, interviews and international renown.
For much of the second world war Stein and Toklas continued to shelter in a house they had rented for several years in the French hamlet of Bilignin (Ain), about which Wade writes delightfully and sympathetically. Even in this part of unoccupied France, Jews were being shovelled daily into death trains by Germans and French alike, so it is extraordinary how these two Jewish women survived. They even continued their normal routine of writing and typing out. In March 1945, Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, a vivid first-hand description of life in a small French village under the Nazis, became an instant bestseller. A year later, in July 1946, Stein died in Paris.
The second half of the book, the ‘Afterlife’, is largely a discussion of Stein’s papers, bequeathed to Yale University, and of those who wished to write about her. ‘Everyone knew she was famous,’ says Wade, ‘but no one was quite sure why.’ Indeed.
Thomas More’s courage is an inspiration for all time
Three years ago, when memories of the final series of HBO’s Game of Thrones were still fresh, Joanne Paul published The House of Dudley, a gripping account of three generations of the Dudley family, whose efforts to seize the crown from the Tudors, as I noted in these pages, made the machinations of the Lannisters and the Starks look tame. Now, hard on the heels of the final instalment of the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – and with a revival of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons opening in the West End in August – Paul has published another book equally attuned to the zeitgeist.
Thomas More is a biography of the man known to posterity as both St Thomas More and Sir Thomas More, an enigmatic figure variously worshipped as a saintly martyr and vilified as a dogmatic zealot. The author of Utopia (1516), arguably the most influential work of literature by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare, More was a friend to the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and a patron of the German-born Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1527 portrait of More wearing his golden chain of esses (a signifier of loyalty to the crown) is one of the most instantly recognisable images of the early 16th century.
More was one of the greatest legal minds of his generation in England. Appointed Cardinal Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor in 1529, he – unlike Wolsey, who had favoured a conciliatory approach to the widening confessional divide – used the powers of his office to root out Lutherans and others he deemed guilty of heresy. In 1532, he resigned as Lord Chancellor in protest at Henry VIII’s determination to find a legal loophole by which to have his marriage to Katherine of Aragon declared null and void so that he might be free to marry Anne Boleyn. Three years later, having refused to accept the Act of Supremacy (1534), by which Henry VIII officially supplanted the Pope as head of the Church of England and God’s representative on Earth, More was beheaded for treason on Tower Hill.
For Paul, More was neither ‘a divinely inspired saint’ nor ‘a zealous prosecutor of the innocent’. Rather, he was ‘one of the few who overtly opposed the growing tyranny of Henry VIII’, doing so with full knowledge of the almost certainly deadly consequences of his actions. Yet, for all the debates about More’s legacy, the irony, according to Paul, is that he ‘did almost nothing to change the course of English history’. When the axe fell on More, in July 1535, the King and Thomas Cromwell simply removed ‘a particularly irksome pebble from their shoe as they made their determined way down the path of the English Reformation’.
There are, Paul suggests, important lessons for us all in More’s ‘willingness to stand firm and speak truth’ to power: ‘Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will – a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia – rule today as they did 500 years ago.’ Paul astutely draws out numerous parallels between the politics of the 16th century and our own. That said, even she cannot have been prescient enough to have anticipated, when this book went to press, the extent to which her discussion of tariffs and trade wars – fuelled by the personal animosity between Henry VIII and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor – would resonate with recent headlines.
Paul excels at bringing the past to life in all its gory detail. Expeditions from England to the Continent were no picnic. Or, as More put it: ‘What a fine sort of fun to get seasick from being on a ship, to be battered around by its tossing, to be threatened by storms, and to have death and shipwreck continually before one’s eyes.’ Meanwhile, diseases like the sweating sickness (also known as the ‘stopgallant’, as those who fell victim to it were often young, apparently healthy, gentlemen) posed a near constant threat. Characterised by the sudden onset of a burning sensation, the sweating sickness could kill in as little as two hours. When, as was frequently the case, London found itself in the grip of an outbreak, it was safer, More observed, to be ‘on the battlefield than in the city’.
Fans of The House of Dudley – and, indeed, of Wolf Hall and A Man for All Seasons – will find much to enjoy in this immersive, richly told account of life, death, faith and politics at the early Tudor court.
The novel that makes Ulysses look positively inviting: The Aesthetics of Resistance, by Philip Weiss, reviewed
The translator’s preface to the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance informs us that ‘Several deadlines came and went on the way to this translation’. That is quite the understatement. The German edition of Peter Weiss’s 1,000-page historical novel appeared in 1975. A full English translation has been in the offing for more than 20 years. In the meantime, Weiss has won just about every literary accolade Germany has to offer, and his play Marat/Sade has become known as the theatrical ‘starting gun’ of the 1960s. Whatever the translator Joel Scott has in store for us, it had better be worth the wait.
Weiss was moved to write his magnum opus by the same question that animated his great model Bertolt Brecht, who actually appears as a minor character in Volume II: how to make art that is simultaneously avant-garde and committed. Or, as another character puts it: how to ‘match up the intensity of revolutionary artistic and political actions… the irony of the one with the seriousness, the sense of responsibility, of the other’.
Weiss’s solution was to write a vast, meandering monologue, largely without paragraph breaks, of the kind that will be familiar to readers of later Germanic writers such as Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. Interlocutors are never quite afforded voices of their own. Instead, their wordy disquisitions on art and history remain imprisoned in free indirect constructions: ‘Such a structure, borrowing, said Coppi, from the ideas of Saint-Just, Babeuf, Proudhon, can only lead to anarchism…’
This endless, airless prose works through accretion. Nothing much happens for page after page. Conversations about dialectical materialism slide into long descriptions of the Pergamon altar or Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ and back again. Yet somehow, gradually, we start to detect the lineaments of, if not quite a character, then a particular sensibility and position in history that reveal the protagonist as a thinly fictionalised version of Weiss himself.
Volume I begins with the young narrator’s education among members of the resistance in Nazi Berlin – plus a few proletarian embellishments that early reviewers dismissed as products of a guilty conscience – and ends with him running off to Spain to join the International Brigades. Volume II sees him move to Sweden, where he continues to wax Leninist in the relative safety of a tolerant social democracy.
The novel makes modernist tomes like Ulysses and The Unnamable look positively inviting
For readers who have managed to make it this far, the third and final volume strikes a slightly different note. There are fewer ekphrastic interludes, and the meandering conversations about dialectical materialism, though still very much present, are less callow and more ironic. We are in Berlin again. The members of the Red Orchestra resistance group, with whom the narrator had associated in his youth, are being rounded up and sent to Plötzensee prison, where they are interrogated, tortured and executed. Even formerly longwinded comrades slip into bitter aphorism. Charlotte Bischoff, the beautifully rendered communist resistance fighter to whose views much of this final volume is devoted, replies deflatingly to the narrator’s latest sweeping thesis about the relationship between violence and culture: ‘We lost our hold on culture because we failed at politics.’
The Aesthetics of Resistance is not the kind of book one reads without strenuous mental preparation. Its length, its allusiveness and the strangely hectoring quality of its characters’ orations may be justified by its subject matter – but they make other difficult modernist tomes such as Ulysses and The Unnamable look positively inviting. Nor should the comparison with Bernhard fool anyone: this may well be the least funny novel ever written. But who reads a novel like The Aesthetics of Resistance to be entertained? This is a book that aims to elicit awe rather than enjoyment; it wants to have evenings lost to it, discussion groups consecrated to it and to leave a permanent mark on Europe’s high culture – which, for all his ambivalences, Weiss still seems to think might be the only thing that can save us.
It’s time to get rid of the Rich List
Here’s a takeover tale that captures the zeitgeist. It involves two FTSE 250 companies and some deep-pocketed US investors – and I’ll explain it as simply as I can. In essence, how would you feel if your GP surgery fell into the hands of American investors associated with the book title Barbarians at the Gate?
The first of the two London-listed companies is Assura, which owns 600 NHS surgeries and diagnostic facilities and has accepted a cash offer of £1.6 billion from a pair of New York investment giants. They are Stone-peak, which holds a huge global portfolio of infrastructure assets, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, whose initials KKR may be familiar to older readers as a pioneer of aggressive private–equity dealmaking – most famously the 1989 buyout (chronicled by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the Barbarians bestseller) of the food and tobacco group RJR Nabisco. Imbued with Trumpist swagger, investors like these habitually prowl the London market for undervalued targets.
The second company, Primary Health Properties, is the only other significant player in Assura’s marketplace, as the owner of 516 GP facilities in the UK and Ireland – and has cut in to offer £1.7 billion for Assura in cash and shares. KKR claims PHP’s deal will hit competition issues, though the merged company would hold a relatively small proportion of the NHS surgery estate, most of which is owned by the GPs themselves.
In an era in which public markets are shrinking and private equity is rampant, largely to the detriment of smaller investors, this is a rare example of a listed company challenging the Goliath of KKR and its ilk. I’ve written about PHP before but I’m not a shareholder: the cost efficiencies of a merger are obvious and a company whose mission is to provide decent new buildings for the NHS (while collecting guaranteed rents that make steady dividends for shareholders) is an asset the London market can ill-afford to lose to bargain-hunting foreign financiers, American or otherwise.
Chorus of approval
Last week, our beef farmers were sacrificed for the greater good of UK-US trade; this week, fisherman are the outright losers in Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’ with Brussels. But there’s a line in the UK-EU ‘Common Understanding’ that gives a glimmer of hope for another all-but-abandoned economic minority: the musicians, opera singers and theatre professionals who were blocked from working on the continent as a wholly unnecessary and unintended consequence of Brexit. Point 15 of the signed document recognises the value of ‘artistic exchanges, including the activities of touring artists’ and pledges continuing efforts in their interest.
I take that to mean UK negotiators asked for free movement of performers, to which the response was ‘Not now, but sink your fishing fleet and toe our line on Points 1 to 14, and maybe we’ll think about it’. At least that’s a half-positive signal.
Rename the airport
To Sheffield for the annual Cutlers’ Feast, a grand assembly of metal-bashing business-owners who represent the last and best of industrial England. Sentiment at my table can be summarised as mild optimism about trade deals, mild scepticism about the 0.7 per cent first-quarter growth figure and continuing rage at the punitive cost of Labour’s hike in employers’ national insurance contributions. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds was due as a guest speaker but perhaps wisely pulled out.
A topic on which I had my ear extensively bent during dinner was the fate of Doncaster Sheffield Airport. The former RAF Finningley, with its huge runway built for nuclear bombers, is owned by the Peel property group but has been closed since 2022. Now leased by Doncaster council with support from the South Yorkshire mayoral authority, it’s due to reopen next year. The model is the revival of Teesside airport under public ownership, driven by the Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen. The economic benefits for a struggling region are blindingly obvious, despite opposition from environmental groups. And the amusing twist is that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has endorsed the Doncaster Sheffield relaunch – so Westminster sources whisper – as a sop to the MP for Doncaster North after his furious opposition to a third Heathrow runway was overruled in cabinet.
He is of course the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, and he evidently has no qualms at all about a major airport development in his own patch. They should name it after him, as a monument to political hypocrisy.
Drab parade
Few commentators have squeezed more mileage out of the Sunday Times Rich List than me over the past three decades. I still squirm at the memory of the ‘spoiler’ I wrote for the Mail on Sunday long ago, claiming at the editor’s insistence that hand-to-mouth hacks are happier than millionaires. But in most years I have found at least a handful of plutocrats to admire for their entrepreneurial grit and charitable largesse.
Not so this time: of the 156 top names between the London resident Gopi Hinduja, perched on his £35 billion pile, and a Russian fertiliser tycoon called Vladimir Makhlai with a modest single billion, at least half are completely unknown to me.
Few have created flourishing UK businesses within this century, and even fewer have done anything noticeable for the good of the world. Perhaps the best have already joined the great exodus of wealth that Michael Simmons wrote about in The Spectator last week. Others may have brought injunctions to keep them out of a line-up you’d be mad to want to be seen in, given the risk of tax grabs, burglaries and British public resentment even towards legitimate fortunes. Whatever the reasons for this year’s drab parade, it’s time to bin the Rich List.
Letters: In praise of the post office
Reeves’s road sense
Sir: Is it stubbornness, denial, inexperience or some other agenda that prevents Rachel Reeves changing course in the face of uncomfortable facts? A multitude of surveys have told her that punitively taxing the rich means they will leave (‘The great escape’, 17 May). Recently I had lunch at a fashionable London club that was half-empty. When asked why this was, our waiter commented that he now rarely sees his previous international regulars, and if he does, they are only in town for a short stay. Endless business surveys have also told Reeves that her employer taxes will cost jobs, close companies, weaken growth and raise inflation, yet she has continued with these too, despite evidence that those fears are now coming to pass as these taxes bite. When her excuses run out and it is clear that her policies caused the slow-moving car crash that will be our economy, historians will no doubt find answers to the question above. For now, many remain bemused, not so much by the errors of judgment as by the fact that, despite clear warnings of hazards, she has not swerved to avoid them.
Andrew Haynes
London SW6
Caring students
Sir: Re. John Power’s article ‘Mind the gap’ (17 May), it seems to me that oversubscribed university courses could be linked with care work. A year’s exemplary care-work experience could up someone’s chances of being accepted for such places. Thin sandwich courses could provide six months’ paid care work, with reduced fees on four-year degrees. I think many English students would be willing care workers for an interim period. The training needed for many such roles is not long.
Keith Wain
Yelverton, Devon
Postal vote
Sir: Melanie McDonagh wrote sense about the decline of our postal services (‘Junk mail’, 10 May). My experience of our local post office in rural Nottinghamshire is quite different, however. In a village of about 2,000 inhabitants, the full range of services is available twice a week for two hours. The staff are charming and knowledgeable, and you can post a parcel, pay in a cheque, draw cash, buy foreign currency. So outside of London, you can still find post offices providing a brilliant service. Mr Bates’s successors are doing a brilliant job up here.
Tom Fremantle
East Markham, Notts
Trump is no conservative
Sir: As a relatively recent convert to conservatism, may I applaud Matthew Parris’s column of 10 May (‘Kemi shouldn’t play the Trump card’). He articulates, for me, a vision that chimes very well with what I see as the best virtues of both conservatism and the Conservative party. The behaviour of Donald Trump negates so much of what conservatism stands for, if nothing else culturally and philosophically. Matthew is also right in bemoaning the terrible toll Trump is having on conservatives in elections across the globe. Trump is not a conservative – and the sooner we create clear blue water between conservatism and both Trump and Reform, the better.
David Ford
Saltaire, West Yorkshire
Hard to beat
Sir: I must take issue with the opening sentence of William Atkinson’s ‘Notes on…’ Thomas the Tank Engine (10 May): ‘Ringo Starr is mostly known as the second- or third-best drummer in the Beatles.’ Poppycock! Listen to Ringo’s drumming on ‘Rain’, ‘Ticket To Ride’ or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for confirmation of his unique talent. It’s time to call time on the fallacy that he is ‘the luckiest man in music’. The Beatles would not have been the Beatles without Ringo (a fact corroborated by the other three Fabs).
Jonathan Morris
London SE20
Leo’s signs
Sir: Damian Thompson finds the omens for the new Pope’s reign encouraging (‘Holy welcome’, 17 May). The choice of papal name was an immediate fillip, for Leo XIII was famous for doctrinal rectitude as well as concern for social issues. But we need signs that Leo XIV is willing to correct the mistakes of Pope Francis. Two opportunities come to mind. First, the policy of appeasement towards the atheistic tyranny in Beijing can be reversed. It has left the Catholic Church in China largely controlled by the Chinese Communist party (and President Xi Jinping does not respect weakness). Second, Francis’s unkind restrictions on the use of the old Latin Mass can be abandoned. They reopened divisions between conservatives and liberals which Pope Benedict XVI had healed. Action on these two fronts would set the tone for the pontificate of the Augustinian Bishop of Rome, a worthy successor to St Peter.
John Hicks
Manchester
Hazarding a guest
Sir: Christa d’Souza mentioned several phrases expressed by house guests that make any host wilt (‘Host of problems’, 10 May). There are two others even more chilling: ‘I’ve told a friend all about you, and you’ll love having him to stay’, closely followed by ‘I know how much you like showing guests the sights’.
S. Gimson
Geneva, Switzerland
Back on the Wagner
Sir: Richard Bratby might have reservations about Sir Antonio Pappano as a Wagner interpreter (Opera, 17 May), but I was surprised he had nothing to say about the sheer splendour of the Royal Opera Orchestra’s performance under Pappano’s direction. Together with a first-rate cast, this was a star of the show.
David Woodhead
Leatherhead, Surrey
The battle over fishing is a sideshow
So far, so routine. Labour wants to update and if possible upgrade the United Kingdom’s arrangements with our immediate neighbour and by far our biggest trading partner, the European Union. As any new government would. The recent destabilisation of world trade adds urgency to the task. So our government goes to Brussels and (after the customary silly European ‘to the wire’ theatrics) hammers out what looks like a sensible improvement on the existing unnecessarily irksome restrictions and procedures. The deal involves – inevitably – a few concessions on both sides (we concede a bit on fishing) but overall looks modestly advantageous for us and for them.
A thoroughly workmanlike result. As governments are wont to do, ours somewhat exaggerates the scale of the achievement, but is entitled to take some satisfaction from the result. Polling suggests that a majority of the British population believe a new EU deal will have a positive effect on the UK economy. Lord Rose of Monewden (former boss of Marks and Spencer) is enthusiastic. ‘It has to be a win,’ he tells Times Radio.
And – oh sweet Jesus spare us, here we go – the Tories kick off on Brexit. ‘We’re becoming a rule-taker from Brussels once again,’ snarls their leader, Kemi Badenoch – as if a fair measure of alignment were ever avoidable once Boris Johnson’s Brexiters sensibly swerved the ‘cold-water Singapore’ option. Then ‘Former home secretary Suella Braverman says the government has “let down our fishing community”’, reports the BBC. And the easing of restrictions on youth mobility? ‘Very concerning,’ says Badenoch. Summing up (before the details of the deal have even been announced), the leader of the opposition has given us the Conservative verdict: ‘This isn’t a reset, it’s a surrender.’
In our unwritten constitution, the duty of the official opposition is to oppose. That duty is often best fulfilled by, if not giving credit where it’s due, at least knowing when it is wisest to keep your mouth shut. Often ‘opposition’ most usefully takes the form of scrutinising the small print, asking searching questions, or even – heaven help us – reserving judgment until full consideration has been given to complex matters. Sensible Tory oppositions know the value of circumspection, and on a range of other subjects Badenoch has been sensibly circumspect. We don’t know the Conservatives’ thinking on social care. We’re in the dark as to whether they think government will have to raise taxation. Badenoch’s assessment of Trump’s presidency remains a mystery to us.
The thought has occurred to me that Starmer and Macron conspired to make fishing a key sticking-point
But on Europe? ‘Surrender!’ Within seconds she seems to have made a simplistic analysis of a complicated document that she hadn’t seen before she reacted. And discretion flew out of the window. That old reflexive urge to bang on about Europe kicked in. Muscle memory, I suppose. Good news from Brussels? Conservative eyes swivel straight on to the last two words – ‘from Brussels’ – and see in them the automatic negation of any claim that such news could ever be good.
Surveying the whole wide field of British interests – defence, security, intelligence-sharing, youth opportunities, co-operation in science, ease of trade in food and agricultural products, fast-tracking Northern Ireland’s imports from mainland Britain… – the Tory eye spots the fishing sector (0.03 per cent of our economic output) and at once fishing balloons into a vital economic interest, all but crowding the others out. In their Tory hearts, every opposition MP becomes a doughty trawlerman, brine-soaked and weather beaten, eyes narrowed against the spray, battling the high seas – and Europe.
The truth is otherwise. Fishing has been a gift to the UK negotiating team. Do you remember the story of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch? ‘Please don’t throw me in the briar patch,’ pleaded Brer Rabbit, trapped by his old enemy Mr Fox. ‘Do what you like, anything, kill me, eat me, but please, please, not that, not the briar patch.’ So naturally Mr Fox threw his foe into the briar patch; whereupon Brer Rabbit escaped down the rabbit hole he knew was there. If we are Brer Rabbit, then in these negotiations fishing was our briar patch. No, please, please, M. Renard, not fisheries, not quotas, spare our fishermen!
Fishing has always been neuralgic for the French: for many reasons their political culture holds the sector close to its heart. We British may be sentimental about this dwindling sector of our economy, but its interests no longer resonate with us as once they did. What better ground, then, for us to argue so fiercely for but finally concede? What better pretext for defending this national interest right up to the eleventh hour, then, as a deal clincher, allowing France to celebrate a victory? The thought has occurred to me that Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron knowingly conspired to make this a key sticking-point in the negotiations. It was win-win. Macron comes home to Paris as saviour of the national interest. Starmer returns to London with a good renegotiation deal, and the slight bother of a disappointment in a small sector of abiding concern to few beyond those whose livelihoods depend on it… plus, of course, the Conservative opposition.
On the issue of fish I have no views. On Brexit, to my own slight surprise, my passions have faded. I was a Remainer and I still wish we’d stayed – but, hey, the sky didn’t fall in, and that was all a long time ago. My own apathy is nationally very widely shared, including by many former Brexiters. For the Tories to keep flogging this dead horse will bring no great joy to formerly Brexit breakfast tables, while for former Remainers it will serve only as a reminder of an unedifying obsession that consumed a party and a government some years ago.
There are big policy questions to which those of us who still wish to vote Conservative want to hear the answers. Fish are not among them. Leave it, Kemi, just leave it.
I’ve reached zero tolerance on zero tolerance
I know an astonishing 89-year-old who climbs mountains, uses a chainsaw and has the muscular, vice-like grip of a gym-built thirtysomething. He refuses pills and painkillers and considers it vital to embrace life’s most horrifying experiences. Last week the astonishing 89-year-old tore his Achilles tendon (leaping into a moving car), was driven to A&E and referred for an ultrasound. On the way to the scanning room, helped along by a male nurse, he put his injured leg down by mistake and yelled: ‘FUCK!’ At this, the nurse turned on his heel and walked off, saying: ‘I don’t have to put up with this.’
This is the 89-year-old’s version of events, but I can visualise the scene: the wobbling old titan, trying to embrace the pain as part of life’s rich tapestry; the nurse in the corridor, tending to his own nerves. It’s almost a perfect picture of the collapse in grit from generation to generation. And it’s the natural consequence of an idea that’s burrowed its way into the public sector – that members of the public are violent lunatics, and that everyone must be constantly reminded of this or else anarchy will break out.
‘Zero tolerance’ is the principle, ‘zero tolerance for abuse of staff’, and it’s every-where, not just in the NHS but throughout the Underground, on trains, in libraries, supermarkets, airports.
‘What’s sexual harassment, Mum?’ my nine-year-old asks quite regularly as he reads the ‘zero tolerance’ notices on the train. This week I spent 40 minutes in my clapped-out car on the phone to the RAC trying to report that its website was down. ‘Please note, breakdowns can only be reported through our website,’ said the recorded message on a loop. ‘Any abuse of our staff will not be tolerated.’ Chance would be a fine thing.
The ‘zero tolerance’ approach to abuse was first officially introduced to the NHS in around 2018 by Matt Hancock, when he still had moral credibility and a penchant for trying to sound Churchillian. ‘I have made it my personal mission to ensure NHS staff feel safe and secure at work and the new violence reduction strategy will be a key strand of that. We will not shy away from the issue.’ Every year since, the zero tolerance industry has grown: more training modules, more exciting notices, more merch.
Once you get your eye in, you see an amazing volume and variety of zero tolerance posters plastered all over the place in public life. It’s hard to find an NHS wall that’s free of them. My favourites are the ones in A&E that seem explicitly designed to up the emotional temperature in an already volatile environment. Cartoon faces looking furious, intrusive red signs saying: ‘STOP!’ Policemen making arrests. One fabulously irritating poster shows a shouty middle-aged woman, a ‘Karen’ with her arms folded, having a go at someone. ‘It starts with YOU!’ reads the caption. ‘Be Kind.’ It has the magical effect of transforming me instantly into the very woman it depicts.
Showing already agitated patients pictures of angry faces doesn’t traditionally have a pacifying effect
In a north London A&E I saw a zero tolerance poster which illustrated its point with a picture of a cartoon thug beating up a poor cartoon nurse. You’d have thought that in a medical environment there might be someone who remembered a little something from their psychology class, and knew that showing already agitated patients pictures of angry faces doesn’t traditionally have a pacifying effect. You’d have thought they might have mentioned it to management.
What does have a proven pacifying effect is to consider your opponent’s perspective – their torn Achilles tendon and shooting leg pain, for instance. But zero tolerance precludes considering other perspectives at all.
Seven years of zero tolerance training might explain some of the most dramatic over-reactions in the NHS. In February, a pro-life pensioner, 74-year-old Rose Doherty, was arrested for standing near Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow holding a sign that simply read ‘Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want’. A few days ago Rose said she’d rather go to prison than accept wrongdoing, and the BBC wheeled out the usual hysterical doctor, a chap called Greg who works at the hospital, to explain to viewers why Rose’s silent standing and her innocuous sign constituted actual violence and abuse. ‘It’s such an unbelievably cruel and unkind thing to do,’ said Greg. Here to talk – so unbelievably cruel! Rose’s case is usually reported as a free speech issue but Greg’s response is textbook zero tolerance.
I’m not for a minute saying that attacks on staff don’t happen, or that they don’t matter. The number of violent assaults, especially on medics, has been growing year on year. In April it was announced that they’re at a record high. In the past 12 months there had been more than 22,000 cases of assault recorded against UK ambulance workers, who have been kicked, punched, spat at and attacked with knives. But this is what’s so ludicrous about the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to violence. It’s clearly had zip-all effect over the past seven years, and why would anyone have expected it to?
We know who assaults workers such as nurses, train crew or the RAC. It’s people who are on drugs or psychotic with drink or mentally ill. And there’s no possible world in which a poster or a natty little phrase is going to make a difference to their behaviour. I’d love to see the scenario they conjure in those zero tolerance training courses. A 17-year- old boy, perhaps, high on skunk, pulls a zombie knife from his pants and goes to stab a paramedic – but wait, what’s that? A poster saying: we don’t tolerate violence, with a stop sign. Slowly, he lowers the knife…
The real explanation for a near-decade of expensive anti-violence campaigns is, I suppose, that management can’t think what else to do. They can’t vaporise the jumped-up drunks yet they have to demonstrate to their employees that they’re cared for, in case of legal trouble down the line. But every poster, every announcement, corrodes trust, and that in the end creates the very problem ‘zero tolerance’ is trying to solve.
Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia
Lloyd Evans has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Butlin’s is no longer a holiday ‘camp’. The company has evolved from its postwar heyday and now describes its properties as ‘resorts’ which are crammed with restaurants, bars and venues for live gigs. It’s like a cruise but on dry land.
I went to Bognor Regis for a nostalgic ‘Ultimate 80s’ weekend where the performers included half-forgotten acts such as Aswad and T’Pau, and the remnants of the boyband Bros. The site lies 200 yards from Bognor’s shallow, pebble-strewn beach. The town itself is doing all right, if not exactly thriving. The charity shops are cheap, the estate agencies are full of recently vacated bungalows and the funeral parlours offer a special service for customers in a hurry. You can arrange an ‘unattended funeral’ or ‘direct cremation’ for just £1,595. Death is big in Bognor.
Inside the sovereign territory of Butlin’s, it’s hard to spot one of the redcoats. Ordinary staff in dark uniforms patrol the camp unobtrusively but there are glimpses of the old parks. There’s a funfair with dodgems, a waltzer and a helter-skelter. The vintage merry-go-round bears a slogan that might have been painted in the 19th century: ‘The nation’s finest gorgeous galloping golden horses.’ Nearby are benches which invite the elderly and convalescent to take a break. ‘Relax and chat,’ say the signs. ‘Get your sparkle back.’
The main arena is a vast tented enclosure supported by eight steel struts covered in a draped white roof. On the architect’s drawing-board, it probably looked pristine and beautiful, but years of rain have darkened the fabric with black streaks. It needs a scrub.
Saturday night is party night and the site fills up with groups of revellers in 1980s costumes. Women are dressed as Rubik’s cubes or they wear floaty white frocks like Baby in Dirty Dancing. There are sheeted ghosts and witches with green faces and pointy caps. The men are lazier about their outfits. They appear in cheap Top Gun costumes or they dress as Mexican bandits with sombreros and fake moustaches. A few are very smartly attired in US Navy costumes like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. The outfit is surprisingly dignified and flattering. The peaked cap hides your bald patch. The gold epaulettes broaden your shoulders. And the shadowless white tunic makes your beer gut vanish. You could turn up at Buckingham Palace dressed like this and gain admission.
There are benches which invite the elderly and convalescent to take a break. ‘Relax and chat,’ say the signs
Ahead of the music shows, I caught an hour of ‘Basil Brush, Live and Unleashed’. The puppet appears on stage with his co-host ‘Mr Martin’. They play up their love-hate relationship. Mr Martin introduces Basil as an evergreen celebrity: ‘He’s been a TV star since the 1960s and he’s one of the few who hasn’t been arrested.’ Basil replies with a trusty showbiz putdown: ‘Mr Martin is a performer who can be summed up in one word: available.’ For the fans, Basil is a nostalgic fixture from their childhood but their tastes have matured since then. Mr Martin straddles the gap by reading a spoof erotic novel written by ‘Belle End’ about an Irish seductress named Pattie O’Furniture. Basil listens innocently to the X-rated material and makes comments that appear to misinterpret the book’s sexual content as harmless fun. ‘Boom, boom,’ he cries. The audience cheer. It’s like a helping of childhood comfort food.
Basil is such a convincing creation – the witty toff with a common touch – that he seems like a genuine human being with real opinions and attitudes. You can safely make predictions about his tastes. Whisky not beer. Hiking not sunbathing. The Beatles not the Stones. A Jag not a Tesla. Rugby not football. As for politics, he likes fun, mischief and free expression, so he’s unlikely to support Labour, the Tories or the Lib Dems. As for voting Green, he’d prefer to be torn apart by dogs. His natural allies are Reform but he’s too discreet to say this out loud. At one point Basil flirts with controversy. During a news spoof, he impersonates a TV anchorman who reports a satirical story about Prince Andrew. A photo of the prince appears and Basil sings this ditty: ‘The grand old Duke of York/ He had ten million quid/ He gave it to someone he’d never met/ For something he never did.’
Later I visited the main stage where Matt Goss was due to start at 9.45. No one was expecting him to show up before midnight, but he arrived bang on time. Goss, with his twin brother, Luke, is one half of Bros. They began as a threesome but their colleague Craig Logan quit early, which reduced the band to a two-piece. Goss is now a dependable song-and-dance man who can knock out an hour of hits for a lively crowd. His lyrics mean a lot to him, he tells us. ‘Life’s a Stage’ sets out his personal dreams, which are a little eccentric. ‘I want to live on the right side of the equator,’ he sings. And he describes this strange yearning: ‘I want to live like a butterfly and work like a bee.’
He finished with his best-known hit ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ and left the stage. The lights fell. The drummer glanced anxiously at the rhythm guitarist. They seemed confused and bereft almost. But wait. The guitarist noticed movement in the wings and he started to clap his hands above his head. Could Matt be coaxed back on stage?’ ‘We want Matt, we want Matt,’ pleaded the crowd. A few dissenting voices called out ‘We want Luke’, but it was Matt’s fanclub who won the battle. And he strode out again. Our idol. He launched into ‘I Owe You Nothing’. At the end, people checked their watches. It was 10.46 p.m. Time for bed.
How do I feed my children now my wife has gone on strike?
Caroline has gone on strike. At least, as far as cooking is concerned. Her case for downing spatulas is that she’s been cooking steak, chicken and bacon for my three sons and me for the best part of 25 years and, as a vegetarian, she’s had enough. Henceforth, she’s going to prepare vegetarian meals. If we’d like to share those with her she’s happy to make enough for all, but if we want something meaty we’re on our own.
Now, I wouldn’t mind the occasional nut cutlet and sweet potato – I can even stomach tofu and scrambled egg. But for Caroline, a ‘vegetarian meal’ consists of a fried egg on toast and some spinach leaves. It’s what my sons and I would call a ‘snack’ – and a pretty dreary one at that. We have plenty of snacks in the fridge in the form of mini pork pies, cold sausages and salami. So what Caroline’s industrial action means is that either I cook or we have to plump for a take-away. Neither is particularly straightforward.
The difficulty with cooking is that I have a very limited repertoire and my sons are now bored of the menu. I can do three things: chicken risotto, chicken biryani and chicken paella. Only the last is greeted with any enthusiasm these days, possibly because it includes chorizo. I guess I could learn some new dishes, but the attractive thing about all the above is that the prep time is only about ten minutes and once everything is simmering away you can leave it for 40 minutes and get on with something else. (I know that’s not how you’re supposed to cook risotto, but that’s the ‘Toby method’ and I’m sticking to it.)
There are two problems with take-aways. The first is the eye-watering expense, meaning I can rarely get away with spending less than £45 – and that’s just for me and the two children still living at home. Then there are the arguments. I like Thai, 17-year-old Freddie likes Chinese and 16-year-old Charlie likes Indian. Often the only way to break the deadlock is if two of us can agree on one cuisine, which usually means Freddie and Charlie opting for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The last time I was bullied into this I decided to try the ‘double down’, a sandwich made with two pieces of fried chicken instead of bread, with a filling of bacon, cheese and an unidentifiable sauce. It was the most revolting thing I’ve ever tasted, a toxic cocktail of life-shortening chemicals. If Alastair Campbell still entertains hopes of discovering those ‘weapons of mass destruction’, I suggest he looks in the Acton branch of KFC.
I have a very limited cooking repertoire and my sons are now bored of the menu
I could go back to ordering meal kits every week – and HelloFresh sends me emails every day trying to lure me back. But the reason I stopped is that we never managed to get through them all, and as the new ingredients arrived I’d find myself throwing the old ones away. At one point I thought about getting a pig so we could feed him all this food waste, but it seemed easier to just cancel my subscription. The reason we didn’t eat the food quickly enough is that I’m only home for dinner about two or three times a week and I’ve never succeeded in persuading the children to try making the meal kits, even though the recipes are idiot-proof. The most they can manage is to stick some chicken goujons and frozen chips in the oven, a meal they’ve miraculously never got bored of.
My older two children, both at university, have started to cook, and when they’re home for the holidays they sometimes make meals for the whole family, which is a joy. Sasha, who spent her gap year in Mexico and is now spending a year in Colombia as part of her degree, is particularly fond of Latin American food, which we all love. Ludo, just coming to the end of his first year at Manchester, used to have a half-Polish, half-Omani girlfriend and she taught him how to cook some fantastic dishes, including meat soup. When they’re not here, we sit around pining for those meals.
Perhaps a live-in housekeeper is the answer – an idea I flirted with when the children were younger. My fantasy was a middle-aged Thai woman who’d previously been a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, but when Caroline and I looked into it we concluded it was unaffordable. Even with room and board thrown in, we’d still have to pay her about £1,000 a week – probably more now. It would also mean converting my garden office into a granny flat, and I don’t want to part with it.
Soon Freddie will be off on his gap year so it will just be Charlie and me left to fend for ourselves. At that point, takeaways become a bit more affordable. If I can just persuade him of the merits of tom kha gai and green chicken curry with sticky rice, we’ll be sorted.
The Battle for Britain | 24 May 2025
How football found God
Without wanting to sound like a refugee from the 1950s, it was a shame that last week’s Cup Final was not the climax to the domestic season but sandwiched between a cluster of Premier League games – and kicked off at 4.30 p.m., which must have been unhelpful for those hoping to get a train back to Manchester. Palace wholly deserved to win: they defended brilliantly, broke like lightning and cunningly sabotaged any momentum a ponderous Manchester City might have been trying to develop by hurling themselves to the ground at the slightest opportunity. Never mind: the Palace fans were fantastic and kept Wembley afloat on a rich sea of sound throughout.
As for kick-off timings, don’t expect them to get any better. As part of its multi-billion rights deal, Sky will show nearly 100 more Premier League games next season. So get ready for Thursday night football, Friday lunchtime football, breakfast football, elevenses football so Sky can fit the games in somewhere. But it needs to be careful here: eventually fans will give up as the times keep switching. And nothing screws up a broadcast like a half-empty stadium.
There’s a good argument today that the most influential figure in modern football is not the manager or agent but the Man Upstairs. You must have noticed how many players thank the Lord Almighty after smashing a 30-yard rocket into the back of the net. The wonderful Palace striker Eberechi Eze is a case in point. Immediately after his beautifully taken winning goal at Wembley he pointed towards the heavens. Then in a wonderfully sweet post-match interview, asked to make sense of what had just happened, he expressed one unshakeable belief: it was all God’s doing.
It would be interesting to see a study on the influence of evangelical Christianity on the modern game but if I were the manager of 11 God-fearing disciples, I would be extremely happy. The Christian values of unselfishness, teamwork, clean living, moral responsibility and equanimity in the face of triumph or disaster are just what a successful and harmonious team needs.
Brian Glanville, one of the greatest sports writers who ever lived, left us last week at the grand old age of 93. He was a man of wide interests, robust views and flawless use of the English language, as this snapshot shows. A young colleague was covering a Crystal Palace match for the Observer, and Glanville was also there, for the Sunday Times. This was the mid-1980s, and the Independent newspaper was soon to be launched. My friend asked Glanville for advice: he had been invited to join the new paper but felt loyal to the Obs. What should he do? ‘Dear boy,’ said Glanville, putting his arm around him, ‘loyalty is what they fuck you with’. My friend joined the Indy a couple of days later.
There’s a good argument that the most influential figure in modern football is not the manager but the Man Upstairs
The English are so disapproving of it they call their national ruling body the Lawn Tennis Association. We are talking clay-court tennis here, which is in its high season as the 2025 French Open bursts into view later this month. Sue Barker is the only Brit to have won a singles title in Paris in the Open era – and that was 49 years ago. You have to go back 90 years to find the last British winner of the men’s title: Fred Perry in 1935.
And yet there’s a strong case that two Englishmen came up with the idea of playing on clay, in the late 19th century. Wimbledon champion William Renshaw and his twin brother Ernest, a doubles champion, owned a villa on the French Riviera, and because their grass court wilted in the sun, they covered it with powdered terracotta from a nearby ceramics factory. Some experts dismiss this story but that’s just pettifogging nitpicking in my view. So come on Jack Draper: do your best for the Renshaw brothers.
Dear Mary: How do you decipher modern RSVPs?
Q. I was caught off guard last week by a busybody mother at my son’s boarding school asking us to join them for their sports day picnic. I pretended we would have our son’s godparents with us but she just said words to the effect of ‘bring them, the more the merrier’. My son doesn’t even like their son. How can I get out of this without causing offence?
Name and address withheld
A. Tell the busybody you have thought through her kind invitation but, realistically, you want the godparents to concentrate on your son because ‘they see him so rarely’. At the event itself, the busybody may not notice in the mêlée who, if anyone, you are picnicking with but if queries arise, gush brightly: ‘Yes! We’re wondering where they are as well. They’re not picking up!’
Q. Have you noticed how confusing the RSVP etiquette has become? For a long time there has been ‘RSVP please’, which is of course tautologous. Then there is ‘RSVP if accepting’ on institutional invitations, as a result of which people often don’t respond to private invitations if they cannot come, leaving the host uncertain. Most recently, giving a party, I have had ‘RSVP-ing from John and Jane’. What does that mean – is it a yes or a no?
O.R., London
A. It’s hard to tell. To sidestep the modern confusion (and flakiness) around RSVP-ing, professional party planners now use a medical appointment-type reminder system. They communicate directly with all guests, not only to confirm, but also to winkle out a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ from the commitment-phobic. You could engage a proxy to do this for you. This kind of nuisance is what prompts party-givers to go to Paperless Post, whose online invitations give the bald option of ticking one of two boxes: ‘Will attend’ or ‘Will not attend’.
Q. May I pass on a tip to readers? We like having name cards when we have a lunch or supper party, but it is only the people beside you whose names you can see and often you want to address the person opposite. Despite having been introduced earlier, you may have forgotten their name. We now have double-sided cards so everyone can see the names of those directly opposite and not have to wait to make eye contact with them before saying something.
A.E., Pewsey, Wilts
A. Thank you for sharing this useful tip. And well done in bucking the selfish trend against giving lunch and supper parties. They are vital in the promotion of social cohesion and in general morale boosting.
Food that’s both serious and serene: Babbo reviewed
After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John’s Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it as a land of mistresses and smut; now it is a world of private hospitals, bad parking and MCC members, who seem bewildered by it all, as if Lord’s landed like a spaceship in an alien land. Only Oslo Court seems impregnable, because it manifests Jewish solidity – it is disguised as the home of your cousin in a mansion flat – and Jewish subversion. It is a specialist in seafood and cream cakes. Everything else comes and goes.
In a high street dedicated to underwear, estate agents and aesthetic medicine, it is pleasing to find something as useful as an Italian restaurant. There is an Ivy, of course, but it is generic – it reminds me of Sleeping Beauty’s castle without the magic or ambition – and a Gail’s. Idiots hate Gail’s because they think it is an augur of gentrification. They might as well count blades of grass as perform their stupid activism here. They are a century too late.
Babbo is double-fronted, and it speaks to St John’s Wood’s myths: it means Daddy. A Daddy who double parks and buys underwear. It used to be Harry Morgan’s deli (born 1948), a cheesecake and salt beef bar so beloved that one reviewer said Babbo was dancing on his grandparents’ graves. This is unfair. Nothing lasts for ever.
Even so, Babbo knows it is more than a common restaurant. It must fold itself into St John’s Wood or die – unlike Mayfair, this is an emotional district. Babbo must be an extension of the mistress’s villa and the private hospital. It must give you what you want. All good restaurants exist to infantilise: in St John’s Wood, more so. The pudding waiter at Oslo Court would follow you home if you asked. He would do anything.
Babbo’s awnings are dark red. The interior is a frenzied minimalism of creams and reds; it has a lounge bar that is dangerously fashionable. I do not like this style particularly – my idealised Italian restaurant, the late Spaghetti Junction of Teddington, exists for ever 40 years ago, as if in one of those bad Hampstead novels about memory. (I recommend its successor, Shambles.) But that is only my tribute to Spaghetti Junction, the first restaurant I loved, and interesting decor is expected. Babbo must seem different or you would stay at home. Oslo Court is the exception.
All good restaurants exist to infantilise: in St John’s Wood, more so
The hours are of a brasserie, not a restaurant; the food is both serious and serene. We ignore the serious food (cod, veal, salmon, lamb) and eat mini burgers (£15) which we don’t need: the portions are immense. We have a margherita pizza (£15), which is fine; and a vast, very beautiful lasagne (£22). The restaurant is full: it met its spot between sex and death. It will do well. We don’t eat pudding: the size of the lasagne forbids it.
Four people are seated at the next table. After ten minutes they leave, saying they are cold and it is noisy. In St John’s Wood speak – and I accept this sounds mad, but these are my people and I understand them – it means they like it. They will return with ear plugs, in fur coats, probably on a Monday: the set lunch is £25.
I drink coffee, and feel the light of belonging.
Is Nigel Farage a ‘viper’?
‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not sure Nigel Farage is a Flashman.
What kind of viper did Mr Lowe mean? Presumably one in the bosom – not like Cleopatra’s asp, but one thawed out by a man who pitied it, only to be bitten when the creature warms up. It’s a fable of Aesop with which Cicero was familiar. Hence, in Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy’s denunciation of ‘that wicked Viper which I have so long nourished in my Bosom’ – Tom’s half-brother.
The viper’s big moment comes in the Gospels, when Jesus says to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees: ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Do vipers come in broods, then, or perhaps nests? François Mauriac published a novel in 1932 about a family being horrible to each other called Le Nœud de vipères. It was translated in 1933 as Vipers’ Tangle and in 1951 as The Knot of Vipers. Elon Musk called USAID ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America’.
Yet by a principle of opposites, vipers acquired a reputation as a wonder food, even a theriac or antidote to poison. Dr John Arbuthnot declares in his Practical Rules of Diet that ‘Viper-Broth is both anti-acid and nourishing’.
In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey wrote of Venetia Stanley, the great beauty and wife of Sir Kenelm Digby: ‘She dyed in her bed suddenly. Some suspected that she was poysoned. When her head was opened there was found but little braine, which her husband imputed to her drinking of viper-wine; but spitefull woemen would say ’twas a viper-husband who was jealous of her.’ My own husband sometimes launches into a dramatic monologue of the passage, inspired by Roy Dotrice. He relishes the phrase ‘but little braine’.