The last song the Beatles ever recorded was called, appropriately enough, ‘The End’, on the Abbey Road album. As a consequence of digital sorcery, however, ‘Now and Then’ is the last song we will ever hear from them – a demo passed from John to Paul, dubbed over in the early 1990s by the (then) three surviving members and, more recently, unearthed and remastered. It does not sound very much like the Beatles; it is more akin to a mid-1970s John Lennon solo album song (think ‘#9 Dream’) but overseen by Paul McCartney – which in effect is kind of what it is.

It’s a fine, lachrymose ballad and the notion that it is also a tender love letter from John to his then estranged former bandmate does moisten the eyes a little.

Paul does a good job of imitating George Harrison’s slide guitar, but I suspect Lennon would have preferred the piano to be a little less didactic and might have blanched when the full weight of the strings come in. It shows, too, that in the 1970s Lennon was becoming an ever more nuanced and subtle writer.

It also feels like The End. Not simply of the Beatles, but of the whole shebang which they – and the Rolling Stones – have for decades personified: that upstart cultural phenomenon, rock’n’roll.

Nothing the genre has produced in the past 30 years has come close to the excitement and invention of rock’n’ roll in its adolescent years, from 1964 to 1976. It has become a lovely (if at times overrated) relic, like ragtime or the gavotte. This song is a rather beautiful goodbye from its most talented exponents.

Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, reviewed

Everybody who knows nothing else about the French writer Renaud Camus knows that – as Wikipedia immediately asserts and as therefore is repeated every time he is mentioned in the press – he is ‘the inventor of the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory’.

Until now, actually reading Camus has not been possible in English, so thoroughly has he been shunned by the mainstream media. Here, at last, are some of his core political essays in translation, published by a small press in America, that will make such dishonesty blatant in future. It is in that way, for good or ill, an essential publication, as few can genuinely be said to be.

These are not the writings of Camus that I myself enjoy the most. I first became aware of him through a glancing reference in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission in 2015. Intrigued, I bought a volume of his journals – he has published a fat book of them every year since the mid-1980s, also putting a new entry online for subscribers every day – and found myself captivated by his irascibility, his aestheticism and his radical honesty about being, in almost every little respect, about as deeply conservative as it is possible for a human being to be.

So in 2016 I went to interview Camus for Spectator Life, in the towering castle in the Gers he bought in 1992 by selling his small flat in Paris. I very much enjoyed meeting him and I’ve been reading his journals ever since.

The only book by Renaud Camus to have been translated into English previously was Tricks, of 1982, introduced by Roland Barthes, a journal explicitly describing 25-odd passing gay encounters. What has continued from that into all his subsequent work – unmanageable quantities of it, since he is a graphomane, his most recent tract La Dépossession running to 827 pages – is his commitment to such clarity, however awkward or unwelcome. As an addendum to his online journal he publishes on free access each day an ‘agenda’ of his life, detailing not only what he has read, written, seen, heard and eaten, but also his health, his finances and other setbacks.

Camus, now 77, told me that the notion of the Great Replacement occurred to him around 1996, when he was writing a survey of the department of the Hérault (he has written many excellent guidebooks under the rubric Demeures de l’Esprit, including two on Britain). In the medieval villages there, he found, as he says here in a speech delivered in 2010 simply titled ‘The Great Replacement’:

There almost exclusively appeared a population never before seen in these parts, which by its dress, demeanour and even language seemed not to belong there but rather to another people, another culture, another history.

Some may welcome such new arrivals, but Camus considers the change of population to be an unprecedented disaster:

In 15 centuries, there has not been a single episode, dramatic though some may have been, neither the Hundred Years War nor the German occupation, that has represented a threat as serious, deadly and virtually definitive in its consequences for our homeland as the change of people.

He does not accept that these incomers can be French in any true meaning of the word: ‘If they are just as French as I am then French does not mean much.’ He uses the image of Lichtenberg’s knife – ‘one changes the haft, then the blade, but it is still the same knife’ – to illustrate what is happening.

Camus does not cite any population statistics, those relating to ethnicity in any case being forbidden in France. But, he urges, ‘it is not yet entirely forbidden to believe one’s own eyes and one’s own daily experiences’. One statistic worth knowing, however, is that, despite having been cancelled by his publishers, Fayard and P.O.L, since 2010, resorting to self-publishing, and being prosecuted and traduced, this term that Camus invented has become very widely used in France and not only among followers of the National Rally or Éric Zemmour. A poll from 2021 by Harris Interactive revealed that 61 per cent of respondents thought the Great Replacement would happen.

The other pieces translated in this obliquely titled collection all revolve around the central idea. Camus believes that only educational collapse – ‘the little replacement’ – could have allowed the change in population to happen as it has, having faith that a people that knows its classics does not consent to its own disappearance. The Great Deculturation is a fierce defence of cultural elitism against what he calls hyperdemocracy, ‘the implementation of equality in domains where it has no business’.

In ‘The Second Career of Adolf Hitler’, he contends that it is the legacy of Hitler that has effectively prohibited

not only all references to races, it goes without saying, but also to one degree or another all reference to ethnicities, peoples, civilisations, diverse cultures, origins in general, and nations in their temporal aspect, that is, their heritage, transmission and survival.

Throughout, Camus emphasises that he does not believe in a conspiracy:

Alas, no, what I believe is that there are obscure movements in the depths of the species, subject to the very laws of tragedy, starting with the first of them, which has it that the wishes of men and civilisations whose disappearance is foreordained shall be granted.

The ‘Great Replacement’ is simply an observation, offensively named.

So there they are, in English now, these statements, saying the unsayable with eloquence and vim. The translators are at pains to say that they wouldn’t have published the book if they had thought it would lead to Camus’s inventive terms being further turned to evil ends ‘by determined, violent racists and white supremacists whose violence Camus abhors’. Indeed, they claim, they’re actually making that less likely by filling in the ‘contextual vacuum’.

They make little mention of Camus’s other works, his novels, elegies and eclogues, those remarkable journals and his prolific, aphoristic tweets. There the reader realises that his conservative horror of change extends much further: to the casual use of first names, to degenerate syntax, to the appearance of wind turbines, the prevalence of pop music, the general suburbanisation of the world, T-shirts, public transport, the use of mobile phones in public, loud voices, the disappearance of double doors in hotels. He craves silence, space, courtesy and kindness.

Subtle, intriguing and inventive: Rambert’s Death Trap reviewed

Ben Duke belongs to a class of younger choreographers who have decided to flout the convention that dancers should remain silent on stage. Liberating their voices is by no means a new phenomenon (in 1961 Frederick Ashton had Svetlana Beriosova speak verse by Gide in his sadly forgotten Persephone), but it’s one that particularly suits our culture’s dislike of rigid genres, and Duke makes playful use of it in the double bill entitled Death Trap that makes up Rambert’s current tour, which lands at Sadler’s Wells on 22 November.

Rambert’s superb troupe of dancers let rip in bursts of gloriously exuberant jiving

Goat is the less successful of his two pieces. In what looks like a school hall, a crass television compère interviews the participants in a ritual dance of death, a modern Sacre du printemps, presided over by solemn acolytes traumatised by what we are told is ‘a time of extreme crisis’. Out of their number is selected – how? – the Chosen One, who is none too pleased at the honour. Stripped to his underwear, stickered with Post-it notes and crowned with a ram’s skull, he is taunted by his fellows and left to whip himself into a fatal frenzy. Jonathan Wade endures this ordeal in a stunning solo of terrified self-laceration; his corpse is then mourned by his lover in a rather maudlin monologue. Songs by Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ provide the unlikely music. None of these elements is strikingly original, and although it is performed with total conviction, it’s neither quite funny nor sinister enough to hit any firm target.

Cerberus is a more subtle and intriguing joke. I first saw this last year, and felt it was merely whimsical and bemusing. A second viewing yielded some deeper poetic resonance in the way it plays on the theme of Orpheus’s journey into Hades, a wake for a disembodied Eurydice who is neither dead nor alive, and an umbilical cord that is also the climber’s rope, leading from birth to death. Pretentious perhaps, but Duke has a light, inventive touch that stops it being portentous, and Rambert’s superb troupe of dancers (not least the astonishing one-legged Musa Motha) relish all its nuances and let rip in bursts of gloriously exuberant jiving.

At the Linbury Theatre, more verbalising. The Limit adds a dimension of dance to Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, a recently popular two-hander play which explores the course of a fairly mundane relationship between a left-wing male activist and a conservative female lawyer in a future in which the government restricts its citizens to speaking 140 words a day. Why this ‘Orwellian’ scenario should have come to pass is never explained, nor is one ever told whether the written word counts towards the ration. But unlimited scope for body language remains, and that’s where dance can score. So in the interstices of Steiner’s text, choreographer Kristen McNally (in combination with director Ed Madden and composer Isobel Waller-Bridge) attempts to indicate that the way we move can be more expressive than what we say. Alas, she falls short: the gestures, the contortions, the sculpture, aren’t intense or specific enough to register any psychological charge. They jump, they run, they turn, they intertwine. But they remain dancers; they don’t become people. The effect is bland.

This despite admirable performances by Alexander Campbell and Francesca Hayward, one of several strongly established partnerships in the upper ranks of today’s Royal Ballet. That they should move with total assurance and exquisite fluency one might have expected, but they also handle the dialogue expertly. If only McNally’s moves and Steiner’s words had fed their talents something more than slim pickings.  

Branagh can’t quite banish the spirit of Noel Edmonds: King Lear, at Wyndham’s Theatre, reviewed

Branagh vs Lear. The big fixture in theatreland ends in a win for Shakespeare’s knotty and intractable script which usually defeats any attempt to make it coherent or dramatically pleasing. This truncated version is a two-hour slug-fest set in the stone age – and it sort of works. The warriors fight with sharpened walking sticks and they stab each other using twigs whetted to a fine point. If you ignore the steel buckles and the writing paper, which were clearly invented earlier, you’ll find it just about believable. On stage, Branagh can’t quite banish the spirit of Noel Edmonds and he adds to the cheeky-chappie persona with a thick golden quiff (possibly a wig) and a mink collar that seems to have been backcombed and scented with talcum powder. In Lear’s court, all the menfolk resemble costumed Vikings at a Norwegian tourist attraction. The females wear off-the-shoulder furs and pashminas like dollybirds from a 1970s porn film. It’s a sexy line-up. All that’s missing is Raquel Welch.

Branagh can’t quite banish the spirit of Noel Edmonds

The set is a bombed-out version of Stonehenge drawn by a graphic design student. A video projection above the fractured plinths shows thunderclouds and flocks of hungry raptors scouring the prehistoric tundra for fretful voles. But wait, is that a pterodactyl? No, it’s a heron. The main failing of Branagh’s performance is his bubbling, effervescent energy. He looks 40, not 80, and he finds comic elements in Lear rather than darkness and torment. His rages appear out of nowhere and when he goes bananas at the end he seems to have been styled by Vanity Fair. The best of the Viking support group is Cory Mylchreest as Edmund. Newcomers need to know that Kent (Eleanor de Rohan) is written as a morally courageous warlord and shouldn’t be played as an unemployed dinner lady. Fans of the text will miss Lear’s sexual disgust and the hints that he suffers from a genital infection. Also cut, perhaps for ideological reasons, is Lear’s recollection of Cordelia’s low-pitched speaking voice. ‘An excellent thing in woman,’ he says in the original. Not here. Obviously a dad who praises his daughter’s voice is a fascist pig. The show runs without an interval, and it feels like a visit to a booster-jab clinic. No one wants to be there but it’s worth celebrating once you’re clear of the building.

The Interview examines Martin Bashir’s successful campaign to interrogate Princess Diana for Panorama in 1995. Bashir is portrayed as a deceitful bounder who uses a sob story about a deceased loved one to ingratiate himself with Diana’s faithful minion, Paul Burrell. Moments later he uses the same trick to bewitch Diana. The friendship between the guttersnipe and the princess is brilliantly conceived and executed, and it unfolds with a fairy-tale simplicity, like the Eden yarn retold; an innocent beauty tempted by a wily serpent who poses as her admirer while plotting her ruin.

Yolanda Kettle’s impersonation of Diana is so good you’ll want to practise it during the interval. And Bashir’s spiritual tribulations are given an airing too. Born a Muslim, he converted to Christianity because he felt the need to ‘fit in’ at his south London comprehensive. The writer, Jonathan Maitland, is a freelance journalist who finds the story of Bashir’s dishonesty far more interesting than the royal psychodrama. But the audience is bound to disagree. Everyone loves royalty. No one gives a fig about lying hacks. Maitland’s fascination with journalistic probity ruins the second half which includes a limp 20-minute interlude devoted to the ethics of reporting with the dialogue put in the mouths of abstract unnamed characters. (This isn’t the first of Maitland’s plays to be marred by his fixation with ghosts.) It’s a shame but not a disaster for a production that belongs in a larger theatre. A canny script editor could save this show for the West End. Six out of ten but with minor adjustments, full marks.

Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life columns were dramatised for the stage by Keith Waterhouse in a show that starred Peter O’Toole. The idea is that Bernard has got locked inside the Coach & Horses and he decides to entertain the audience while waiting for Norm, the publican, to set him free.

This revival is set in the actual Coach & Horses, in Soho, and it stars Robert Bathurst as the dipsomaniac scribbler. Bathurst is too spry and handsome to play Bernard (whose crenellated face resembled a chunk of whitewashed tree bark when he died aged 65 in 1997) but he captures the louche, scabrous indolence of the original. The show is a collection of mournful one-liners about ‘the enchanted dung heap of Soho’. Bernard arrived there as a teenager, ‘and after that I never looked forwards’. His frequent hospitalisations were complicated by his smoking habit. Accused by a nurse of trying to incinerate the hospital, he claimed that he only wanted to burn the bed. ‘I have no territorial ambitions.’

Embarrassment of riches: South Asian Miniature Painting, at MK Gallery, reviewed

In 1633, British merchants travelling east were issued with a royal command from Charles I: ‘As the king has considered that there is a great deal of learning fit to be known written in Arabic, and great scarcity of Arabic and Persian books in this country… every ship… at every voyage shall bring home an Arabic or Persian manuscript book, to be delivered to… the Archbishop of Canterbury, who shall dispose of them as the King shall think fit.’

One suspects that a hunger for learning wasn’t the whole story, and that the sight of the exquisite illustrations adorning books sent from India as diplomatic gifts had whetted Charles I’s collector’s appetite. He wasn’t alone. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries British collectors amassed tens of thousands of South Asian miniatures as gifts, acquisitions, commissions or loot. The majority filtered through to museums and libraries. Archbishop William Laud, the beneficiary of that royal command, deposited more than 250 volumes in the Bodleian; 350 rescued from the destruction of Lucknow royal library by East India Company troops in 1858 entered the collection of the British Museum to form the basis of its Department of Oriental Manuscripts. The V&A, relatively late to the feast, snapped up 273 folios of the 16th-century Akbarnama manuscript in 1895 for £100.

The V&A snapped up 273 folios of the 16th-century Akbarnama manuscript in 1895 for £100

Then the craze went cold. Modernism shifted the dial to African ‘primitivism’ and South Asian miniatures began to look fussy and quaint. On the Indian subcontinent, where artists working for patrons in the East India Company had already adopted a westernised ‘Company School’ style, government art schools taught a European curriculum. So when the young Gulammohammed Sheikh from Baroda and Zahoor ul Akhlaq from Lahore won scholarships to the Royal College in the 1960s, they arrived expecting to join the School of London. They were diverted by an accident of local geography: the proximity of the Royal College to the V&A. Discovering the museum’s collections of Mughal miniatures changed the course of their art and that of the students they went on to teach back home.

That Sheikh and Akhlaq ‘had to come here to claim their heritage’, in the words of Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery, is just one of the contradictions at the heart of Beyond the Page, the Milton Keynes gallery’s ambitious exploration of the history of South Asian miniature painting. Through 180 exhibits, ancient and modern, the show tracks the development of the tradition from the 17th-century ‘A Mughal prince drinking wine carried in a palanquin formed of six women’ (1610) – part of Laud’s original donation to the Bodleian – to the contemporary ‘Because You’re Worth It? II’ (2022) by the British-born Singh Twins, which features the same traditional device of a composite creature – in this case an elephant formed of brand logos – to comment on the evils of consumerism.

The good news is that, for once, we’re not painted as the bad guys. It’s fortuitous that museums on our chilly island are not infested with the insect pests that like to chomp their way through manuscripts in South Asian libraries, but as well as helping to preserve historic treasures we also get credit for our role in reviving the miniature painting tradition. In the 1880s, at a time when government art schools across India were feeding students a diet of European old masters, the artist John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard, started the miniature painting workshop at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore that Akhlaq developed into a dedicated department a century later. In the 1890s another British art teacher, E.B. Havell, appointed principal of Calcutta School of Art, would put Indian art at the core of the curriculum, selling off most of the government art gallery’s European paintings to fund the purchase of Mughal teaching models. It was Havell who opened the eyes of Bengal School founder Abanindranath Tagore to his native miniature tradition. He was lost for words at the revelation: ‘I felt so dizzy. So! Our old art too contains an embarrassment of riches.’

The good news is that, for once, we’re not painted as the bad guys

Gone are the court ceremonies, lion hunts and erotica of Mughal art; a new generation has put the traditional language to different uses. Shahzia Sikander takes a trip down memory lane in ‘The Scroll’ (1989-90), following her teenage self through the unfolding perspectives of her family home; her fellow NCA alumnus Imran Qureshi, now head of the department, drip-paints a Mughal courtyard with blood-red splats in his mini action-painted ‘Blessings upon the Land of My Love’ (2011). The beautiful ‘Children of Faith’ series (2022) by more recent NCA graduate li Kazim was inspired by an 18th-century sheet of Bengali portraits from the V&A, also on display. The more precious of the 68 historic contributions to this exhibition’s embarrassment of riches can only be brought out of store once every ten years. Catch it while you can; Milton Keynes and the Box in Plymouth are its only stops.

Love and loathing at Harold Wilson’s No. 10

If Marcia Williams is thought of at all today, it is in terms of hysterical outbursts, a mysterious hold over the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and, above all, the ‘Lavender List’ – Wilson’s 1976 Resignation Honours List in which Marcia is believed to have played a significant part. Linda McDougall, the widow of the Labour MP Austin Mitchell, gives an infinitely more nuanced and sympathetic picture of this extraordinary woman. I found her biography gripping, with its insider knowledge of government, its picture of the emotional dynamics of Downing Street and its sensational claim that Marcia may have been drugged by Wilson’s own doctor. 

She took Purple Hearts to keep alert and handfuls of Valium to sleep, all prescribed by Wilson’s doctor

The Williams-Wilson partnership – there is no other word for it – started when, after graduating from London University’s Queen Mary College, Marcia spotted the potential of Wilson, 16 years her senior and then the ambitious Labour MP for Ormskirk. She became his private and political secretary in the 1964-70 and 1974-6 governments and was ennobled by him in 1976 as Baroness Falkender. 

McDougall sets out the case early on for Marcia – a brickworks manager’s daughter, born Marcia Matilda Field on 10 March 1932 – to be regarded as the most influential woman in 20th-century politics after Margaret Thatcher. She also makes plain just how difficult it was for a woman to forge a career in the 1950s and 1960s – a time of hats and gloves and looking after children at home.

From the start, Marcia was much more than a secretary. Complementing Wilson’s more technocrat approach, her finely honed political antennae picked up nuances he missed. Wilson was considered a touch downmarket by the Labour élite of those days. There was even a rumour that he and Mary had flying ducks on the wall of their front room, while his gritty Yorkshire accent was in strong contrast to the more refined tones of the circle around Hugh Gaitskell. As Marcia (who I knew well from the early 1980s, when I ghosted her second book) once remarked to me: ‘What confused people about Harold was that he had a Balliol brain but Brown Sauce tastes.’ Much sharper and wittier than Wilson, she coached him for speeches in the House of Commons. Politics was the air they both breathed. For the first 14 years she worked with him, Marcia was an equal partner. Roy Jenkins regarded her as the best politician in Wilson’s circle.

Once in Downing Street, after the first Labour victory for 13 years, it was a struggle for Marcia to have her political office installed. ‘I was doing the same job as John Wyndham [Harold Macmillan’s political secretary],’ she said to me, ‘but nobody ever called him a jumped-up secretary.’ McDougall describes how No. 10 was then managed by civil servants who believed it was their job to ‘run’ the prime minister. They failed to see that Marcia was essential to him, a non-negotiable part of his premiership, so that from the start rumours were rife that she had a hold over him owing to some earlier sexual relationship. The fact that in the Strangers’ Dining Room in the House of Commons they would always sit at a table for two and go over correspondence was even cited as evidence.

It was not long before Downing Street began to resemble a medieval court with its plots, counterplots, intrigues and rumours. In 1968 Marcia secretly gave birth to a son, and to another the following year. She had fallen in love with Walter Terry, the political correspondent of the Daily Mail, and believed he would get a divorce and marry her. The births were not reported thanks to Lord Goodman, a lawyer of such influence that he could persuade the various press lords to keep the story dark. Not only was illegitimacy stigmatised; there was the fear that everyone would assume Wilson was the father, unleashing the sort of scandal that would finish his career. It was not until six years later that the boys’ existence was revealed by Private Eye.

When Joe Haines arrived as Wilson’s press secretary at the end of the 1960s, the dynamics of No. 10 became even more complex. Haines was obsessed with the relationship between Marcia and the prime minister, writing early on that Wilson depended on her ‘practically, psychologically and intellectually’. Thirty years later he was vitriolic about her. But Bernard Donoughue, who became head of the Policy Research Unit, thought her ‘a much better politician than H.W. or most other MPs’.

Labour, defeated by Ted Heath in 1970, returned to power in the 1974 general election with a mere three-seat majority. It was then that Marcia’s behaviour changed from ‘bright and lively’, as Donoughue’s diary described her, to the hysterical outbursts for which she is remembered. She had been left by Terry, felt isolated, was exhausted by work and was bombarded by reporters, who thought nothing of banging on her front door at all hours and climbing on her windowsills to peer in. To keep herself alert she took Purple Hearts (Drinamyl) and handfuls of Valium to calm herself down and sleep, all prescribed by Wilson’s doctor, Joe Stone. At the time, doctors were unaware of the addictive power of these drugs and their effects on personality. McDougall, a successful television producer as well as author, writes of this period with great sympathy, admitting that she herself became hooked on Valium during a difficult period in her professional life, and that it took two years to rid herself of this addiction.

‘[Harold]… loves it when she shouts at him, corrects him, opposes him,’ wrote Donoughue in his diary. Wilson’s surprise resignation in 1976, followed by the Lavender List, ‘thrust Marcia into the spotlight as some kind of mysterious mastermind controlling the prime minister’, says McDougall. The truth was much simpler. With every typewriter in Downing Street packed up, Marcia had neatly copied the names – written on the various scraps handed to her by Wilson – on to a sheet of pink paper (so the leaker must have been slightly colour blind).

However Marcia and Harold’s relationship had begun, they were life partners in politics, says McDougall. Even Joe Haines had to admit ‘she was his manager and his political wife’.

Incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic: Netflix’s Bodies reviewed

Bodies is another of those ‘ingenious’ time-travel apocalypse mash-ups so tricksy and convoluted that by the time the ending comes you’re praying fervently that the nuclear bomb will go off and everyone will die as punishment for the hours of life you’ve wasted on this angsty, politically correct, humourless tosh.

The premise is initially intriguing: four detectives in different time periods – 1890, 1941, the present and the near-future – have to solve the same murder mystery. But it soon becomes clear, as is the way with these things – see, for example, the mind-bending irksomeness of Christopher Nolan’s Inception – that the solution will be simultaneously incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic.

It soon becomes clear the solution will be simultaneously incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic

What really lets it down, though, is the sanctimoniousness. It is based on a graphic novel by the late Si Spencer, which was published in 2015 at the very peak of the fad for comics that were more interested in pushing relevant, empowering social issues than they were in entertaining readers.

It opens – where else? – at one of those far-right demos that TV drama so loves. Luckily, feisty, no-nonsense but supremely fair and decent female Muslim detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) is on hand, taking great personal risks to ensure justice is done. No doubt such female Muslim detectives do exist but – apart from giving her a hijab and a lovely, educated, well-spoken dad who might be Somali – no effort has been made to contextualise her socially or explore the complexities of her religious background. She’s female and a Muslim and she’s flawless: deal with it!

Meanwhile, in 1941, the key thing you need to know is that the Metropolitan police is riddled with anti-Semitism. The Blitz, the war generally, the telling period detail (which mainly comprises people in a pub singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’) are all subordinate to the fact that Detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) suffers intra-departmental racial prejudice on account of Jewishness. This is a bit hard on the viewer/reader. Unlike the script, we don’t give a toss about his ethnic heritage. What we dislike about him is that he is a shifty, amoral spiv, like a much less endearing version of Private Walker from Dad’s Army.

Finally back to the 1890s. What with Jack the Ripper and all those pea-soupers, you might have hoped there’d be plenty enough local colour without the need to shoehorn in modern sexual politics. But no. Apparently happily married detective Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller), with his pretty daughter busily rehearsing on the piano for a church service, turns out to have a secret. We discover this when he meets a handsome, blond, cocksure photographer from a newspaper, who susses out his hidden desires instantly, and subsequently has sex with him.

My objection here is not that there was no homosexuality in Victorian England; we know – from Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book to Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith –  that there was. Rather, it’s that this trait seems to have been nailed on to a character and jemmied into the script for no better reason than to educate and improve the viewer. And I’m really not sure that when I’m watching crazy, gory, time-travel drama I want to be educated or improved. It feels far too close to the grisly and relentless right-on-ness of late-period Doctor Who.

All this might yet have been solved, I think, had it not been so clunkily scripted. It goes without saying that almost no one in TV drama these days is capable of writing plausible dialogue for any era earlier than about 2021. But at least if the commission had gone to someone irreverent and witty like Joe Barton, who always goes for the joke when he can, there would have been far less of the leaden earnestness. If you want to see how much more enjoyable Bodies could have been, check out Barton’s sci-fi time-travel thriller The Lazarus Project.

Pointless, the BBC quiz where you win by choosing the most obscure correct answer, used to be one of my favourite game shows. But I haven’t watched it since the departure of co-host Richard Osman, who left to spend more time writing bestselling novels. So now, remaining host Alexander Armstrong has to hold the fort with a rotating succession of co-hosts. I was lucky enough to catch it when it was the turn of Nish Kumar.

Where Osman played the role of genial, avuncular boffin who knows all the answers, Kumar does a superb though probably accidental impression of Amol Rajan presenting University Challenge. That is, he gets wildly overimpressed even by the most basic answers. So, for example, if the challenge is to find the most obscure word ending in ‘-uck’, Kumar will profess himself to be blown away with the genius of a competitor who says ‘duck’ or ‘truck’.  Whereas, back in the day, after a brief chortle over the obvious word they could have gone for, Osman would have drily congratulated all the viewers at home who came up with ‘blackbuck’, ‘stagestruck’ and ‘thunderstruck’.

Entertaining. Mostly: Dream Scenario reviewed

Dream Scenario is a high-concept dark comedy about celebrity and cancel culture. It stars our old pal Nicolas Cage who, blame it on what you will – tax bills, divorce bills, the price of butter – has appeared in some abominable dreck down the years but has never turned in a boring performance. Mad, yes. Reckless, yes. Maximalist, always. But boring? Never. And he is wonderfully not-boring here. It’s certainly the most Nicolas Cage film since the last Nicolas Cage film, whenever that was. Plus it is entertaining. Mostly.

The film is directed by Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, also a satire on social-media fame) and stars Cage as Paul Matthews even if, when I first glanced at the poster, I thought it starred Paul Giamatti. But no, it’s Cage, rocking the latter-stages-of-male-pattern-baldness look. (The other thing you can’t say about our old pal is that he lacks commitment.) Interestingly, Matthews is a boring man. ‘Not memorable,’ is how someone describes him. He is a professor of evolutionary biology who puts his students to sleep and wears half-zip jumpers, and whose career, through no fault of his own, has stalled. He yearns to publish a book on his specialist subject – swarm behaviour; or ‘ant-elligence’ as he calls it – but is too chronically passive to actually research and write it even though he pines for recognition. (Be careful what you wish for.)

He is grippingly not-boring playing this boring man, bringing all his Cage-isms but also soul

He is all ego and no action, yet does, somewhat inexplicably, have a lovely, supportive wife (Julianne Nicholson). Then something weird happens. This being a Nic Cage film, there would have to be weirdness, and it’s this: people start to do a double take at Matthews on the street. Why? He’s turning up in their dreams. Benignly at first: just standing there or walking through. An ex-girlfriend dreams about a horrible car crash and there he is, ambling past in his half-zip sweater. Or it’s his daughter, dreaming about a body falling from the sky, and there he is, in the background, raking leaves. It takes a lot to make me laugh. And? I laughed.

Why is this happening? It’s never explained. This is Charlie Kaufman-esque, in that it expects us to just run with the conceit. Family, friends, strangers, they’re all dreaming about him and soon it’s happening globally and he’s an internet sensation. He becomes ‘the most interesting man in the world right now’. His lectures are packed. His young daughters, who usually treat him with disdain, beg him to drive them to school. (‘I’m a cool dad!’) Branding companies want an in. (Michael Cera plays a talent agent who thinks Sprite is the right hook-up.) Having been aghast at first, he starts lapping up the attention. Young women who have intimate dreams about him even want to re-enact them, leading to a sex scene that is very funny but also embarrassingly pitiful and sad (oh, Paul). I don’t like fart jokes either. But I did here.

The film is produced by Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) and there are horror elements because, yes, people’s dreams turn bad, and they are frightened to go to sleep in case ‘they are abused by this man’ and it all turns horribly toxic. Why? Don’t ask. We’re just running with the conceit, remember? But where is the conceit going? Nowhere satisfying. Come the third act, this definitely feels like a film in search of an ending as multiple ideas are thrown around without any real focus. 

Ultimately, it fails to pin anything down or tell us what we don’t know already or add to what we heard at the outset in Matthews’s lecture on zebra camouflage: stand out from the crowd and you risk being picked off as prey. But while the film falters Cage never does. He is grippingly not-boring playing this boring man, bringing all his Cage-isms but also vulnerability and soul. It’s certainly the most Nicolas Cage film, until the next one, whenever that will be.  

Books of the year II: more choices of reading in 2023

Ruth Scurr

In Ways of Life (Jonathan Cape, £30), Laura Freeman channels the spirit of the art critic and collector Jim Ede. She traces the origins of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – not a museum, nor art gallery, more a cabinet of curiosities – through Ede’s own life, his work for the Tate, the other houses and countries he lived in and the artists he cared for and wrote about.

In Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster, £30), Simon Schama argues that ‘all history is natural history’, and introduces a rich cast of protagonists who pushed forward the frontiers of science for the good of humanity, regardless of national, territorial boundaries. ‘There are no foreigners, only familiars,’ Schama asserts: a powerful message for our troubled times.

Peter Parker

Why is it that women write such good novels about the two world wars? If Alice Winn isn’t yet quite in the league of Olivia Manning, Susan Hill, Shirley Hazzard, Jennifer Johnston and Pat Barker, her In Memoriam (Viking, £14.99) is nevertheless an extremely assured and engaging contribution to this genre. Two boys at a public school, fearful of admitting their love for each other, set off for the Western Front and find themselves in some of the worst battles of the war, described here in horrifyingly visceral detail. Having long ago written a non-fiction book about public schools and the first world war, I approached this novel with some scepticism; but Winn barely puts a foot wrong and has a remarkable feel for the complicated emotions of her two protagonists. Drawing upon the literature of the trenches and the pitifully short lives of those who marched away from Winn’s own alma mater, Marlborough College, this was easily the most affecting novel I read this year.

Roger Lewis

Many of us owe everything to an inspirational schoolteacher. David Wood, who appeared in the film If and on stage at Oxford in Doctor Faustus with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor before writing his classic children’s plays, gathers his 45-year correspondence with his own mentor, Frank Whitbourn, in Frank Exchanges, edited by Chris Abbott (Book Guild Ltd, £12.99). Whitbourn (1910-2005) taught at Collyer’s School, Horsham and was the director of a young people’s drama course in West Sussex, operated by an enlightened county council. There Wood met him, and ever afterwards they exchanged long letters about theatre and theatre folk. How many books find room for a mention not only of Professor Sir Christopher Ricks but also Eric Potts, who created the role of Big Ears in Noddy? Completely charming.

Graham Robb

The farcical catastrophe of Dien Bien Phu in the First Indochina War is the centrepiece of Éric Vuillard’s stylish and steely An Honourable Exit (Picador, £14.99) in which the Vietminh annihilate the French army but not the parasitic corporations it protected.

Jacob Mikanowski’s Goodbye Eastern Europe (Oneworld, £22) is a scholarly and intimate history of ‘a land of small countries wedged between great powers’, from ‘vampire Europe’ (the realm of fangless nuisances who ‘forgot to die’) to the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The saddest image in Stuart Maconie’s chatty and cheerful The Full English (HarperNorth, £20), which retraces J.B. Priestley’s English Journey of 1933, is the high-speed train racing north on the cover. At Bradford Interchange he fumes at the Johnson government’s scrapping of the eastern leg of HS2 and observes: ‘England’s seventh biggest city is more poorly served by rail in the age of the internet than it was in the age of steam. Some powerhouse.’

Andrew Lycett

No books have given me greater pleasure this year than Vaseem Khan’s lively, good natured detective novels set in India. In his ‘Malabar House’ series he has abandoned the folksy contemporary world of Inspector Chopra for a historical canvas presented through the lens of Inspector Persis Wadia, India’s first female detective, a beautifully realised character epitomising the hopes and struggles of a newly independent nation. Death of a Lesser God (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) abounds in Khan’s deft evocations of period and place (mainly Mumbai, but here also Calcutta).

Among many history books, Julian Jackson’s France on Trial (Allen Lane, £25) stands out – a meticulously researched, attractively written account of the trial of the first world war hero turned Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain and its woeful Vichy background. Excellent on Pétain’s legacy in modern right-wing French politics, Jackson adopts the requisite tone for a historian of our times, interrogating uncomfortable truths with objectivity mixed with lightness of touch.

Past or future for an additional novelistic pick? Robert Harris produced Act of Oblivion (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22), an absorbing novel about religious and related fanaticism in the 17th century, but Sebastian Faulks marginally trumped him with the sheer scope of his ambition in his forward-looking (c. 2030-40) The Seventh Son (also Hutchinson Heinemann, £22), which combines sophisticated intellectual enquiry (human consciousness, evolution, medical ethics) with typically well-engineered storytelling.

Michela Wrong

This was a strong year for non-fiction.A new book by the puzzlingly under-appreciated South African writer Johnny Steinberg is always an event, and his chunky Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (William Collins, £25) is the best yet. This account of the relationship between one of the most famous – and glamorous – couples in recent political history places a landmine under many of the myths cultivated by the left. While Nelson emerges as fundamentally decent, if all-too-human, Winnie comes across not as a revolutionary heroine but as a warped monster: a woman lucky to have escaped prosecution for the series of murders committed by her band of thuggish supporters. I’m not usually a fan of long books – this one is 576 pages – but was left wanting more.

Stuart A. Reid’s The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Alfred A. Knopf, £30) was another meaty read. The story of how Patrice Lumumba, independent Congo’s first prime minister, ended up in front of a firing squad in Katanga, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid, has been told before, as has the role the US and Belgium played in eliminating Lumumba from the scene. But not in this detail, with so much context, or with such nuance. Reid consulted hitherto inaccessible archives, cables, letters and tape recordings to give us this multifaceted account, in which we learn as much about the doomed UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld as we do about Lumumba, his nemesis the Colonel Joseph Mobutu and the CIA station chief Larry Devlin.

Finally, I savoured This is Not America by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic Books, £18.99), which succinctly puts into words what so many of us have instinctively felt since the Black Lives Matter movement saw the light of day. Owolade, whose parents are Nigerian, highlights the dangers of clumsily importing an obsession with racial injustice rooted in specifically US history and grafting it onto a society – ours – with a significantly different backstory. It’s a brave argument for a young writer at the start of his career to be making. We can expect more where that came from.

Rod Liddle

I have just reached 1964 in David Kynaston’s epic A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 (Bloomsbury, £30) which, among other things, details the horrific destruction of hundreds of our towns and cities at the hands of evangelistic planners and stupid architects. Down came the Victorian terraces, the clock towers and the stately warehouses. Up went hideous, antisocial tower blocks and in came the roads and carparks and bleak shopping centres, destroying the high streets. What struck me from Kynaston’s research is how much the public hated the change and were vocal in doing so. The public, as usual, was right. The planners, though, succeeded where Goering had failed, and our towns were laid waste.

Never was there a more timely publication than Israelophobia by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99), which came out shortly before the savages of Hamas started burning babies. Those dim-witted right-on kids in their keffiyehs with their (very recently created) Palestinian flags should be forced to read every word of it.

Swayed by the generous praise it received, I read Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (Granta, £20) about a group of radical eco-warriors and their battle with a psychotic American venture capitalist. It was every bit as predictable and one-dimensional as you might imagine. These days books don’t have to be any good to get published and win awards.They just have to be on the correct side.

Richard Ingrams

‘The most original, stimulating and impressive man I have ever met. My prediction is that he will be remembered as a philosopher long after his business achievements are forgotten.’ Andrew (now Lord) Roberts was writing in praise of the late and distinctly shady financier Sir James Goldsmith. So it is not surprising to find him in his very readable book The Chief (Simon & Schuster, £25) being equally laudatory about the inventor of the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe (‘a great man, a genius’), whose achievements are ‘inarguable’. What makes it difficult to share Roberts’s view is his comic account of how Northcliffe ended his days seriously off his rocker, since the crazy press lord seems just an exaggerated version of his former self. His response when told of rumours that he had lost his marbles was to ring up the night editor of the Mail and order him to put his best reporter on the story. Even in the afterlife, it seems, he continued to issue instructions to the hacks with the help of a medium: ‘Don’t chew your pencils when you write. Juicy figs are much better.’

Stephen Bayley

With synchronicity that Jung would have recognised, a pair of marvellous biographies exposed the busy demons who tormented two of our most influential myth-makers. Adam Sisman’s The Secret Life of John le Carré (Profile Books, £16.99) and Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming (Penguin, £30) reveal one to be a fornicator of demented energy, the other an elegant bon viveur with a taste for S&M as well as grande marque champagne. The internal distress of Le Carré and Fleming is revealed in their novels only in coded language. But thanks to Sisman and Shakespeare, we can now read Bond and Smiley again with new (and unsettling) insights.

Altogether different in the biographical mode is Donna Leon’s memoir, Wandering Through Life (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20). Leon is the prolific author of the pleasing murder mystery series featuring the philosophical Venetian policeman Guido Brunetti. Here she evokes hermetic Venice and its moods in masterly style. But her own story is an itinerant one: life on a farm, teaching in Iran and China. The writing is easy-going, even apparently slight. She confides in the reader with persistent, amiable interrogatives. It is a charming read which tells us little about her inner life. She remains a fascinating enigma. So apt that espionage and murder mystery authors have their own secrets.

Boyd Tonkin

Tom Crewe’s pitch-perfect debut novel The New Life (Chatto & Windus, £16.99) reanimates the high-minded English radicals of the 1890s as they campaign for the dignity of same-sex love: a tender, astute exploration of the pathos and confusion behind even the bravest causes. Javier Marías’s farewell novel, Tomás Nevinson, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton, £22), saw the late Spanish spellbinder leave us in a droll, delicious, thrillerish labyrinth, as a superannuated spy hunts a retired IRA/ETA bomb-mistress in a secretive riverside town. Gary Saul Morson’s wise, erudite Wonder Confronts Certainty (Harvard University Press, £33.95) enlists Russian literary titans from Tolstoy to Vasily Grossman to stage an enthralling dialogue between humanistic hope and doubt, and the murderous self-righteousness of the Russian ‘revolutionist’ tradition. Under Morson’s eyes, classic works illuminate still-burning questions of idealism, ideology and violence: criticism at its urgent, heartfelt best.

William Dalrymple

The Tree & Serpent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, New York was the year’s cultural highlight for me, along with its gorgeous accompanying catalogue by John Guy: Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India (Metropolitan Museum of Art, £50). The art of southern India that the exhibition showcased opened a window on a sophisticated courtly and monastic world previously known only to a handful of historians. It was a world where bare-chested rajas in elaborate turbans and cockades set off on elephant-back pilgrimages as casually as we might jump in a taxi; and one of ecstatic devotion, where a glimpse of the Buddha’s relics could drive a palace full of dignified courtiers into the ancient Indian equivalent of weeping Beatlemania. All this was set in a sacred landscape where the jungles were alive with wonders: lotus buds that spilled priceless jewels with the abundance of magical cornucopias; and eagle-beaked gryphons and many-headed cobras that competed to protect the turban of the Buddha or the dust of his disciples.

Empire-building is usually envisaged as the concern of nation states, but as Philip J. Stern convincingly shows in Empire, Incorporated (Belknap, £30.95), his brilliant, ambitious and often surprising new study, it was initially more often the entirely privatised business of Tudor commercial corporations. With clarity and remarkable archival reach, Stern convincingly argues that it was joint-stock ‘venture colonialism’ that financed and drove the earliest attempts at establishing colonies from Ulster to Spitsbergen, Virginia to ‘Cathay’, and even a Puritan republic of the Bahamas, as ruthless and often violent slavers, privateers and merchant adventures sailed off to establish outposts that blurred the line between commerce and conquest. It was these trading posts, Stern argues, that eventually grew to be the ‘cornerstone of a British Empire’, made up of charters, concessions and contracts that were ‘never fully owned or operated by Britain itself’. Empire, Incorporated is a remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire and a small masterpiece of research.

Born in Bengal, Nandini Das is a professor of Early Modern English Literature at Oxford and is as sure-footed and knowledgeable about the politics and arts of Jacobean London as she is about those of the Mughal court. As she puts it in her remarkable book about Sir Thomas Roe’s 1616 embassy to Jahangir, Courting India (Bloomsbury, £30) ‘in practical terms, Roe’s embassy achieved very little. To the Mughals, the English were hardly worth a mention.’ The embassy may have been a failure, but Das’s superb book about it is a triumph of writing and scholarship.

Finally, I loved Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (Headline, £12.99) and Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther (I.B. Tauris £24.99). At a time when relations between Iran and Israel have never been worse, it is good to remember that Persians and Jews were once peacefully and productively intertwined in a single cultural world and that a book of the Old Testament provides one of our best sources for ancient Persian court culture.

Mark Amory

I have been interested in Uganda ever since I went there just before independence in 1962. Mark Leopold’s Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil (Yale, £12.99) explained in persuasive detail that this legendary monster did many, but not all, of the ruthless acts attributed to him, sometimes, but not always, having a good reason. The only time I met him he was charming and offered to lend us his helicopter.

In libraries across the land there are sets of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time with the first and perhaps second volumes showing signs of wear, the remaining ones apparently untouched. The solution is to read and listen to the work in tandem, skipping from sight to sound and back, and occasionally rereading. My version in book form is the revised and updated edition of the Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin edition of 1992.I listened to it read by Neville Jason on Naxos Audiobooks.

Julie Burchill

This Is Not America by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic Books, £18.99), Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities by Rakib Ehsan (Forum, £16.99) and It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth by Remi Adekoya (Constable, £14.99) were rays of light in a very dense year for political thinking. They need to be on the school curriculum, and on television as documentaries, to educate us all.

Claire Lowdon

Knowing my love of both gardens and words, my family furnish me with at least one plant-based book at Christmas: think A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners by Peter Parker, or my perennial favourite, James Fenton’s A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed. This year I’ve already treated myself to Modern Medicines from Plants, edited by Henry Oakley (CRC Press, £16.99) a quirky, accessible compendium of familiar plants with surprising backstories. The entry for liquorice includes the plant’s fascinating etymology and ancient medicinal uses; its cultivation by Benedictine monks and the resulting Yorkshire liquorice industry; its chemistry and clinical applications; and the construction worker in Massachusetts who died after eating a bag and a half of black liquorice every day for a few weeks. Intuitive formatting allows the lay reader to dive only as deep into the chemistry as they wish. A treasure chest of botanical trivia for the doctors, historians, scientists, and gardeners in your lives.

Sam Leith

Two new books I’ve read very recently have impressed me enormously. One is Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harvill Secker, £30). The author’s stupendous research into Fleming’s life establishes that as well as creating a fictional spy, Fleming was a real one – and at the highest possible levels. His nicotinous fingers were in half the secret pies of the 20th century, from the creation of the CIA to the plots against Castro, from Operation Mincemeat and the smuggling of Belgian bullion to the formation and secret missions of the crack commando squad 30AU. Nor was he any stranger to the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue. We’re nearly two thirds of the way through Shakespeare’s long book before our man sits down to write Casino Royale, and it’s all the better for it.

The other book I loved is Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel (Atlantic Books, £20), which returns, 20 years after his Fortress of Solitude, to the gentrifying-but-not-quite-gentrified Brooklyn of the author’s 1970s childhood. If you try to describe this looping, loopy piece of work, with its plethora of time-frames and its many nameless characters – Non-fiction novel? Psycho-geographical put-on? Metafictional ethno-graphy? – it sounds like the sort of thing to give readers a throbbing migraine. But it’s moving and funny, artful and delightful, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Mary Beard

The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton, £20) is Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, set in 19th-century England, and starring the failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and  his housekeeper Eliza Touchet, with a memorable cameo role for Charles Dickens. The story unfolds against the background of the notorious and long-running trial (the Tichborne Case) which tested the claims of an Australian butcher to be the rightful inheritor of the Tichborne baronetcy. (The butcher lost.) This, in Smith’s hands, becomes a wonderful meditation on truth and falsehood, and the boundaries between fact and fiction. It makes a great read; but it is a splendid audio book too. Smith delivers it herself, and is a surprisingly convincing Eliza Touchet, complete with Scottish accent.

Francis Wheen

Second only to my spouse, my most cherished bedtime companion in recent months has been NB by JC (Carcanet, £25), a selection of the diary paragraphs by James Campbell that appeared in the TLS between 1997 and 2020, when a new editor decided to save a few bob by sacking him. JC’s weekly column was an erudite, perambulatory stroll through literary oddities and quiddities, with many laughs and occasional harrumphs. To pick an item at random: why did the director of public prosecutions instruct the police in 1926 to find out ‘who and what Dr F.R. Leavis is’? NB by JC reveals all.

Francesca Peacock

I read Lalla Romano’s A Silence Shared (Pushkin Press, £10) back in January, and its disconcerting, wintry quietness has stayed with me all year. Telling of wartime occupation, the lives of resistance fighters and a bleak, snow-covered countryside, its domestic and political tensions rival the best of Natalia Ginzburg. Indeed, it’s been a good year for eerie fiction. Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) is a story of love, lust and appetite – with violent sex and killer carbs – and is also a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Funny, faithful and inventive: Scottish Opera’s Barber of Seville reviewed

A violinist friend in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra used to talk about an orchestra’s ‘muscle memory’; a collective instinct that transmits itself, unspoken and unconscious, among the members of the ensemble. The occasion was a return visit from Sir Simon Rattle, a good decade and a half after he’d left Birmingham. At that point, perhaps only one third of the musicians had been present when Rattle last conducted this particular work. No matter. ‘You know how we play this,’ said Rattle, and sure enough they did, slipping as one into the exact articulation and dynamics that Rattle had instilled all those years ago. As with the human body, cells are replaced, but the individual remains the same.

The most articulate, consistently beautiful orchestral-playing in the UK is found in Manchester

So when Sir Mark Elder steps down as music director of the Hallé Orchestra next summer, to be succeeded by Kahchun Wong, it might not be the end of the story. We might still, on occasion, get to hear Elder and his orchestra responding to each other as naturally as they did in Manchester last week. I’ve written before about the effortlessness (like a couple finishing each other’s sentences) that comes when a conductor and orchestra have lived with each other for a very long time indeed. Twenty-four years is an epic tenure these days and the players, by all accounts, are more than ready for a change. But you can also bet that within 18 months they’ll be reminiscing during the morning tea break about what a legend Elder was; and how well he understood them.

 And they’ll be dead right. It’s the little things: the opening phrase of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, for example. It’s just four notes, grouped in two pairs, falling then rising. Brahms marks them to be played at a uniform piano but a string player’s instinct would be to insert a discreet crescendo as the phrase rises. The Hallé violins did the opposite; falling gently, swiftly away even as the melody strove upwards. It sounds like nothing much, but the collective discipline involved in a detail like that, and the refinement in making it sound so unforced, is not nothing – and the emotional impact, at the start of Brahms’s tragic journey, was like a gentle stab in the heart. It’s not Elder or the orchestra that takes the spotlight at moments like these, but Brahms. 

 The first half comprised the suite from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and Ravel’s Mother Goose ballet, both performed with surtitles so you could follow the plot and realise, for example, that Rimsky’s spangled roulades of woodwind and bells depicted ‘The squirrel cracking golden nuts’. Both these scores live on orchestral colour, but of very different kinds, and the contrast was ravishing: plump cushions of horn sound in the Rimsky became washes of pastel-tinted mist in the Ravel. The finesse, the tenderness, the sense of each melody as a singing, speaking presence; well, anyway, this is what I’m talking about. If you want to hear the most articulate, consistently beautiful playing of any full-time UK symphony orchestra in recent years, you have until June to catch Elder and the Hallé as a live partnership. Then it’s time for a new chapter – no bad thing in itself. But I hope they’ll get occasional chances to exercise that muscle memory.

 Scottish Opera offered only one main stage production this autumn, and what used to look (to English operagoers) like the unhappy spectacle of a venerable company starved of respect and resources by a philistine regime now seems like a vision of the future south of the border, too. But the quality remains high – the company’s recent Puccini Trittico is up for an International Opera Award – and there was a capacity crowd in Edinburgh for this revival of The Barber of Seville. The production dates from 2007 and is directed by Sir Thomas Allen. Yes, that Sir Thomas Allen, and no, productions by singers who decide to have a late-career stab at directing (how hard can it be?) have not always delivered the goods. 

 This one does. It’s funny, faithful and inventive, with designer Simon Higlett’s sun-baked Mediterranean street opening up to reveal the fabulously decrepit interior of the Bartolo residence (Rosina sat glumly under an umbrella in the Act Two thunderstorm). The decrepitude stopped there: it was exuberantly sung and with Samuel Dale Johnson as a raffish Figaro, Anthony Gregory playing Almaviva as a silver fox and Simone McIntosh as the kind of Rosina who lights up the whole show, it absolutely bowled along. It was sung in English, so the jokes landed and the audience roared. Stuart Stratford conducted a modern orchestra with period-instrument zip, boosted by a true comedian on the piano continuo (Fiona MacSherry was credited). In short, this was everything you could want from a Barber of Seville – and lots of it. 

This recreation of Dylan’s Free Trade Hall concert is supremely good

In May 1966, Bob Dylan toured the UK with The Band, minus drummer Levon Helm, and abrasively pulled the plug on any lingering notions of his being a mere folk singer. Playing two sets every night – the first acoustic, the second electric – even the solo numbers were wild, lysergic, unravelled. The electric ones whipped through the tweed and tradition like the howl of a strange new language. The crowds booed and one chap famously cried ‘Judas!’ (though presumably many of those present also enjoyed it). Dylan muttered and swore and was unbowed. The fast-moving currents of pop culture changed course almost perceptibly. 

Give Power the right lines and she will do something extraordinary and unexpected with them

In 1998, one widely bootlegged date from that tour was finally officially released as the fourth instalment of Dylan’s exhaustive and ongoing Bootleg Series of archival albums. Known as the ‘Royal Albert Hall’ concert due to an early and inaccurate claim on its provenance, it was actually recorded a week or so earlier, at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, on 17 May 1966.  

Last November, American singer Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, recreated the entire Free Trade Hall concert – at the Royal Albert Hall. In other words, her aim was to engage with the mythology of the show as much as the music. A year later, that performance of a performance is being released as an album. Musical history is never linear. It folds layer upon layer. 

What is the point of her doing this, you might reasonably ask. Well, there’s a couple of things. The first is that the original Dylan concert progresses like a terrifically compelling 90-minute play. It has its own internal drama, its own seesawing dynamic, and a climactic third act in explosive versions of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. You might as well ask why anyone would bother staging Waiting for Godot after opening night. 

The second point is that Marshall is a supreme interpreter. She has made her mark principally with three albums on which she has recorded other people’s songs, ranging from Mae West to the Pogues. Her voice is spare, sultry, twilit. She understands the power of restraint and emptiness. Give her the right lines and she will often as not do something extraordinary and unexpected with them.

Here, she has tamped down a natural inclination to play fast and loose, being more faithful to the ‘text’ than she might usually be. Dylan, and perhaps also the venue, tends to bring out an artist’s reverent streak. This album is on the one hand simply a souvenir of a historic recreation. The same songs played in the same order; even the same cry of ‘Judas!’ ringing out from the audience, this time to guffaws rather than uproar. ‘Jesus,’ Marshall responds. 

But it is also an act of creative reimagination. Marshall possesses the same still, stoned, mesmeric quality in her presence as Dylan (sometimes) did at the time, but she also brings a deep devotional energy to the songs that wholly changes them. Her phrasing is as idiosyncratic as Dylan’s, only more nuanced. She has great musicians backing her – on acoustic guitar and harmonica in the first half, and a full electric band on the second half. 

The acoustic set is slow and beautiful, a reminder of how deeply strange and yet brilliantly crafted songs such as ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’ are. If this part feels as though Marshall is trying to tiptoe back inside venerated history, the second set is more raucous and good-hearted. It lacks any whiff of the rancour of the 1966 show, which means the original play is shorn of much of its contemporary drama. That piledriving rock’n’roll swirl – new and shocking at the time – long ago became the cultural default. Revolution becomes fond celebration. We all know these lines. Nevertheless, Marshall has done a fine job in making them sing anew. 

The same can be said of Mickey Dolenz. On his new EP Dolenz Sings R.E.M. (one nice thing about both these records is that their titles tell you precisely what is on offer), the last Monkee standing has done rather wonderful things to four songs by the disbanded American group. 

It’s an inspired fit. R.E.M.’s melancholic melodicism, rich harmonic sensibility and occasional bubble-gum tendencies owed an obvious debt to the Monkees. Here the circle of influence is completed with great joy, care and no little invention. The version of ‘Shiny Happy People’, in particular, feels as though it has brought the song home. In common with the three other tracks – ‘Radio Free Europe’, ‘Leaving New York’ and ‘Man on the Moon’ – it hits like a hefty dose of unfiltered sunshine.

Joni Mitchell, in her own words

There’s always been something at once girlish and steely about Joni Mitchell, the stellar Canadian whom Rolling Stone called ‘one of the greatest songwriters ever’. As Radio 4’s Verbatim programme in honour of her 80th birthday reminds us, a stubborn hopefulness has carried her through turbulent times. Perhaps growing up in Saskatchewan, where winter temperatures drop to –30°C, put an early stiffener in her soul. When she contracted polio, aged nine, her mother braved the hospital ward in a mask to bring her bedridden daughter a small Christmas tree, but little Joni made a promise to the tree that she would walk sufficiently well again to be allowed back home for Christmas. This she managed. Before hitting ten, she took up smoking.

The joyous and irritable Mitchell has rarely seemed to care much what anyone else thinks

At 20, while a penniless art student, she realised she was pregnant by an ex-boyfriend: a disastrous event in the days when, in her words, an unmarried mother was seen as ‘a criminal, a fallen woman’. She didn’t tell her parents, but instead gave birth to her baby daughter – later put up for adoption – in a Toronto hospital surrounded by disapproving staff, where ‘a lot of human ugliness came at me’. A doomed first marriage to a fellow folk singer, Chuck Mitchell, was forged and broken in just over a year. All was grist to the songwriting mill. ‘Pain is a teacher,’ she says here. ‘One of the best actually.’ She translated its lessons expertly: so many of her most famous songs – ‘Little Green’, ‘A Case of You’, ‘River’, ‘Coyote’ – are threaded with shimmering melancholy.

Mitchell’s story is largely told here in her own words, assembled from various interview clips spliced together and interspersed with songs. The effect is compelling but slightly disorienting, as the lighter, clean-cut tones of young Joni jostle with the more gravelly reflections of older Joni, without the listener having much idea of the shifting contexts of recordings. Still, the format succeeds in sketching a vivid portrait of this doggedly independent character, who from an early age was acutely attuned to music and its emotional vibrations. The first time she heard Edith Piaf on the radio as a child, she said: ‘I had goose bumps, I think I probably dropped my cake fork.’

In contrast to today’s young stars, terrified of cancellation, the joyous and irritable Mitchell has rarely seemed to care much what anyone else thinks. She was never a feminist, she said bluntly, because so many seemed to be ‘man-haters’ and ‘I was constantly in the company of men, usually large entourages of men’. One gets the feeling that was how she liked it. Mitchell seemed as keenly attuned to male erotic signals as key changes, and wrung a similar amount of music out of them. Her most frequently discussed romances were with fellow musicians Graham Nash, James Taylor, David Crosby and Leonard Cohen: all generated memorable songs. While recording Court and Spark, she asked the studio to set her up opposite the drummer John Guerin. The ensuing relationship went on for years.

‘Society has changed all around me,’ she says. ‘People’s nervous systems are shot.’ Her own, remarkably, has survived severe depression, and health complications that included a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015. Fans feared she would never play on stage again. But then she suddenly appeared at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, her voice deeper but still melodic, her expanse of white teeth intermittently bared beneath her broad, high cheekbones in flashes of joy. Fellow performers clutched their hearts. The scene was oddly moving.

As the escalating agonies of war in the Middle East dominate the headlines, The Shadow: Hamas’s Hidden Commander goes to the heart of the matter, investigating who within Hamas organised the horrifying 7 October attacks upon Israel, and how much others knew about it. The host Chloe Hadjimatheou points at a hardened but elusive figure called Mohammed Deif, the commander of the organisation’s military wing, who hasn’t been seen in public for almost 20 years but has attained almost mythic status among militant Palestinian youths. On Hamas TV in the aftermath of the attacks, Deif – represented by a shadow – announced that ‘the rage of our people and nation is exploding’. An earlier Israeli strike left him permanently injured and killed his wife and two children. Now, it’s said, he is so paranoid that he will eat only  food prepared by his own mother.

The assault on Israel – which broke through security at the heavily fortified Erez crossing – took considerable planning. So why didn’t Israeli intelligence services see it coming? It seems that only a very small number of Hamas military commanders knew the full details; publicly, Hamas had recently seemed to turn away from militancy and towards consolidating power in Gaza. A Gazan professor of political science here says that events took him completely by surprise: ‘Hamas has succeeded in deceiving everyone.’

There was, however, also a worrying complacency on the part of the Israeli government. An Israeli intelligence officer said they had noted Hamas using drones and gliders, practising invasion from sea and land, but believed any attack would be easily containable. Deif has now beckoned in unimaginable misery for civilians in both Israel and Gaza. But what is his end game? On that, no-one has a clear answer.

The rise of Christian cinema

Author Matthew Vaughan spent much of his life in the church – and even preached the gospel in Pakistan – but never considered himself a fan of Christian media. ‘To be honest, most of the films I saw were pretty corny,’ he tells me over the phone from his home in Birmingham.

For Vaughan, that changed when he came across an American box-set drama about Jesus called The Chosen. ‘It kept getting recommended to me by American missionaries,’ he says. ‘They said it was like a Jesus movie for the Netflix generation – well written, well acted and with a good budget behind it.’

Christian viewers vote on which projects should get the green light, then invest their money in them

Vaughan is far from alone. Since 2019, more than 100 million people have watched The Chosen. Many have gone further, and donated to fundraising campaigns to have the show dubbed into new languages and pushed on social media. The reliably secular New York Times calls it a ‘crowdfunded miracle’.

The man behind much of that success shares its assessment. ‘We would be remiss if we didn’t say there was at least some revelatory help with the whole crowdfunding idea,’ says Neal Harmon, the co-founder of Angel Studios, appearing over Zoom (in piercing HD quality) from his studio in the Mormon heartland of Utah.

Harmon, a devout believer and serial entrepreneur of varying degrees of success, first stumbled across the crowdfunding idea behind The Chosen after the dramatic collapse of his previous venture VidAngel – a special ‘filter’ service that would remove unsuitable scenes from shows and films on Netflix and Amazon.

VidAngel might have been just the ticket for God-fearing families across middle America. But unsurprisingly, the Hollywood studios weren’t so keen. After a long-running court battle pitting copyright law against free speech, Disney finally sued VidAngel for $62.4 million in 2016 (later negotiated down to $9.9 million).

Faced with bankruptcy, Harmon and his co-founders (which include three of his nine brothers) had one last card to play. VidAngel had partnered with an evangelical film-maker who had been looking to make a series about the life of Jesus, and trying to raise money for the project.

Given that preview episodes of The Chosen had been well received, Harmon had an idea: let people pay for advance copies which they could then gift to friends and family. The original idea was received well, but there was something Harmon didn’t anticipate: people weren’t just willing to pay for copies for their friends, but for total strangers too.

Four years later, the company now known as Angel Studios has refined the model that it calls ‘pay it forward’. Unlike other streaming platforms, the studio gives much of its content away, via an app that can be downloaded in any country. If viewers like what they see, they are encouraged to donate to spread the good word.

But there’s another twist. Angel Studios also recruits viewers to join what it calls its Angel Guild: essentially, a giant focus group of Christian viewers who can vote on which projects should get the green light, and then invest their money in bringing those films to market. Unlike ‘pay it forward’, the intention isn’t just philanthropic; if the films do well, their backers will share the windfall.

As of this autumn, Angel’s followers have ploughed some £50 million into more than 20 projects. Successful ventures (at least in terms of funding) include Biblical epics such as Testament, nature documentaries celebrating creation, Christian-inspired sci-fi and even a profanity-free stand-up comedy show. Its crowdfunders regularly hit their targets.

‘Angel’s model has given a lot of Christian film-makers real hope,’ says Paul Syrstad, a 31-year-old actor-turned-director from Bromley in London. Syrstad directed and produced Testament: The Parables Retold, one of the first feature films to get funding from the guild. He has just raised another £700,000 for a follow-up project.

Yet for all Angel’s popularity among the faithful, Neal Harmon bristles at the idea that the project is a religious venture. ‘The industry likes to call us faith-based, but we don’t really use that term ourselves,’ he says. His interpretation is that Bible stories have been central to Hollywood for decades.

‘Think about films like The Ten Commandment with Charlton Heston,’ he enthuses. ‘Those movies were the Marvel franchises of their time.’ Rather than creating niche content for church-going audiences, Harmon says, Angel’s mission is to bring these ‘timeless stories’ back to mainstream cinema.

The studio backs non-religious content too, provided it meets the Angel tagline of ‘stories that amplify light’. If the leadership team is satisfied that a proposed film meets that test – namely that it doesn’t contain pornographic or harmful content – then it can go to the guild for their verdict. Ultimately, it will be their choice whether the film gets made.

For Harmon, it’s this deliberately democratic bent that defines the Angel ethos. ‘We wanted to have a libertarian model where people could make their own choices about what kind of content they want to see,’ he says. If viewers can prove there is a market for Angel’s content, they should be able to make those films happen.

The model isn’t without its controversies. Earlier this year, guild members invested $5 million to fund a cinema release for a film called Sound of Freedom – a gun-toting thriller about a former government agent inspired by his faith to liberate victims of child-trafficking – which had been dropped by Disney. The film went on to gross $200 million in cinemas, although not without triggering another chapter in America’s long-running culture war.

To its opponents, Sound of Freedom was dangerous agitprop, stoking the online conspiracy theory that America’s political elites turned a blind eye to child abuse. When the film became an internet sensation, mainstream news outlets tasked reporters with debunking its claim to be ‘based on a true story’.

After the film received the endorsement of Donald Trump, some more fervent MAGA activists accused mainstream cinema chains of suppressing it – posting photos of empty seats in theatres that had been described as ‘sold out’ as proof. Ironically, the problem was partly the result of the ‘pay it forward’ campaign: Angel donors had paid for so many free tickets that some went unclaimed.

Despite the inevitable controversy that comes with a film about sex-trafficking, Harmon remains unabashed in his support for Sound of Freedom. ‘Obviously it’s not a movie for the whole family,’ he concedes. But it is, he maintains, a film that brings light. He is currently working with the director on a second movie: a biopic about the first American to be made a saint in the Catholic Church.

Closer to home, Sound of Freedom also became the first Angel feature to have a West End première and a UK cinema run. Throughout September, more than 200,000 people saw the film in cinemas across Britain. When Jeffrey Harmon, Neal’s brother, came to London, he claims to have been stopped on the Tube by fans who noticed his Angel Studios T-shirt.

Just how many followers does Angel have in the UK? While its app has been downloaded ten million times globally, the company doesn’t provide a detailed breakdown on which countries have driven that number. Harmon tells me that Angel has ‘tens of thousands’ of donors on this side of the Atlantic.

In the meantime, the Angel catalogue is growing quickly. Last month, it released After Death, a documentary about near-death experiences. Next month, it has the cinema launch of The Shift, a sci-fi thriller inspired by the Book of Job. Both will likely be on the Angel app, including in the UK, after an initial theatre release.

Then there’s The Chosen, which continues to make in-roads internationally. Last month, a Sussex-based Christian publisher launched ‘The Big Church Binge’ – a marketing campaign encouraging churches across Britain to organise free screenings of season three. Two hundred churches signed up to the launch event.

Expect a flurry of publicity, too, around the fourth season, which will land early next year. One person close to the project predicts there will be a celebrity-studded Leicester Square première. To date, The Chosen’s most famous UK fan is Nicky Gumbel – founder of the Alpha Course.

For the Harmon brothers and Angel Studios, it’s all a long way from the controversy of their last venture – the ‘sanitised streaming service’ shut down by Disney.

Back then, the secular streaming platforms took fire at Angel Studios for pinching its content. Now the Harmons are setting their sights on something much more valuable altogether: their viewers.

To destroy Hamas, Israel must continue bombing Gaza

Israel has no other choice but to carry on bombing Gaza if it wants to destroy Hamas. Its campaign of relentless air strikes and long range artillery barrages has so far been effective at eroding Hamas’ military capability and limiting the Islamist group’s capacity to kill more Israelis.

Hamas has been unable to respond in any meaningful way since Israel’s offensive began. It has been limited to hit and run attacks, inflicting only relatively light casualties. Israel’s unrelenting bombardments, combined with the internet and mobile phone outages, will have caused chaos within Hamas’ command structure.

Palestinians are dying because Hamas attacked Israel and killed without mercy

But the bombing campaign has come at a huge and terrible cost. Along with the catastrophic damage to residential neighbourhoods in Gaza, the latest figures suggest that up 10,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed, of which 4,000 are children. Earlier this week, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Gaza had become a ‘graveyard for children’.

Thousands more innocent people have been wounded and are waiting for treatment in conditions which doubtless defy imagination, proving once again that war is hell. But what would be the alternative? 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly ruled out a ceasefire. The other option would be for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to suspend airstrikes and instead send in its ground troops without the protection of air cover in the knowledge that Israeli soldiers would be sacrificing their lives in an effort to save those of the Palestinians. But in the wake of the heinous 7 October attacks which left more than 1,400 Israelis dead, and saw over 240 taken hostage, asking Israeli soldiers to die so that Palestinians can live is a trade-off that Israel will never make.

Another possible alternative would be to halt or abandon the ground campaign and air strikes and instead only conduct precise surgical strikes against positively identified Hamas leaders. They would do so only when there was zero risk of so-called collateral damage – killing civilians – in one of the most densely populated areas of the Middle East.

But such a strategy, even if it worked, could take months, possibly years. In the meantime, Hamas would rearm, rebuild and recruit, all the time celebrating its ‘victory’ over Israel.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations to both US republican and democrat secretaries of states, spelt out the enormity of the problem. He told the BBC:

How do you pursue, in the wake of the brutality and savagery of Hamas’ terror surge on 7 October, a military campaign to eradicate Hamas as a military organisation in a densely populated urban area where Hamas assets are embedded, without killing civilians? How do you pursue both of those objectives without causing an exponential increase in the taking of innocent Palestinian lives? I’ve talked to so many military experts and nobody has come up with an answer.

The brutal reality of this current episode in the war with Hamas is that Palestinians are dying because Hamas attacked Israel and killed without mercy. They chose the softest of targets – the elderly, the disabled, babies, young people attending a peace concert – and then celebrating their depraved acts online.

Hamas would have expected such a response from Israel. The group’s leaders have repeatedly stated that Palestinians are prepared to be martyrs in the war against Israel and despite civilian losses, the group may even be preparing for a counterstrike.

Adeeb Ziadeh, a Palestinian expert in international affairs at Qatar University who has studied Hamas, said the group must have had a longer-term plan to follow its assault on Israel.

‘Those who carried out the 7 October attack with its level of proficiency, this level of expertise, precision and intensity, would have prepared for a long-term battle. It’s not possible for Hamas to engage in such an attack without being fully prepared and mobilised for the outcome,’ Ziadeh told Reuters.

Washington now expects Hamas to try to bog Israeli forces down in urban combat in Gaza and inflict heavy enough military casualties to weaken Israeli public support for a drawn-out conflict. But the IDF is making progress. It has now completely encircled Gaza City and divided the besieged coastal strip in two. In the coming days, Israeli ground forces will begin the next stage of the ground operation and start clearing the captured area house by house and street by street. 

Much will depend on what Hamas decides to do. If the terrorists remain in the area hoping to trap the IDF in a series of bloody sacrificial street battles then the fighting is likely to be intense. Some reports suggest that up to 300,000 civilians have remained, either under duress or by their own accord, and so the death toll will, tragically, rise again.

But what remains clear is that the IDF will not alter its ‘bomb, clear, hold, contain’ strategy. That is despite the enormous civilian cost which comes with it, and the accompanying international criticism of their offensive.

Do churches and cricket clubs really need anti-terrorism training?

One problem clearly emerged after an Islamist fanatic blew himself up at a major pop concert in the Manchester Arena in 2017, killing 22 other people. This was that no one there had a clue about how to react to events of this sort. The government promised action. Action we now have, in the form of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill announced in the King’s speech.

Unfortunately, as with many well-intentioned ‘something must be done’ measures, this Bill, aimed at requiring a degree of terrorism preparedness at events like this, could well go too far the other way. If enacted as suggested, the cure could end up being worse than the disease.

The cult of allowing the small platoons to muddle along without instructions barked from on high is well worth preserving

We can just about live with what the Bill says about major venues – that is, any building or space with a capacity of more than 800. These would require registration, updated to reflect any changes in arrangements; an annual detailed terrorism risk assessment; a formal security plan; anti-terrorism training for all concerned; and observance of all practical security measures to prevent terrorism or mitigate its effects.

But most such institutions are fairly substantial businesses, run either commercially or by public authorities. Therefore there is likely to be a substantial bureaucracy already in place to push the necessary paper.

The difficulty comes with smaller venues. All premises with a capacity of 100 or more are covered if regularly used for almost any non-domestic purpose whatsoever. That includes business, religion, amusement, sport and study.

This needs to give you pause. Most churches of any size can seat more than 100 – so too can many libraries, museums, art galleries and university lecture halls. So too, for that matter, can numerous church and village halls, not to mention local football or cricket clubs throughout the kingdom, assuming that they have over 100 seats for fans.

The fact that many such institutions are run on a shoestring by volunteers, entirely uncommercially and as a service to one’s fellow man, does not matter. Nor, it seems, is it relevant that most of the time the actual number attending is closer to 20 than 100, as in the case of many churches. All are included.

The duties on these places, while less onerous, would still be substantial. Every single such place faces compulsory registration; a legal requirement to produce a detailed ‘standard terrorism evaluation’ and a need to give compulsory ‘terrorism protection training’ to every single person, volunteer or otherwise, who works there. Any breach of these duties could see an order land from a civil servant to put matters right or an immediate fixed penalty of up to £10,000.

If none but a tiny handful of these premises will ever experience terrorism, this sounds like a very big sledge-hammer being used to crack a very small nut. A hammer, moreover, likely also to cause a good deal of collateral damage.

For one thing, assume that terror comes to the parish church of Walmington-on-Sea during the sermon in the shape of a machete-wielding maniac or a misfit in a suicide vest. The idea that anything much could be done by the vicar swiftly carrying out an anti-terrorism plan and sidesmen relying on their faultless memory of earlier counter-terrorist training is pretty fanciful.

But it’s not only that. Risk assessments, terrorism evaluations, building registrations and similar documents cost time. If they’re so complex as to be beyond the capacity of a volunteer, they cost money too. For an institution run by a small number of volunteers that extra time may not be there.

What’s more, if you are thinking of stepping up, it’s hard to see a better way to discourage you than demanding that you sit in a draughty hall to be compulsorily ‘trained’ in anti-terrorism techniques you face an infinitesimal chance of ever having to use. And if the volunteers can’t manage, the fee of a few hundred to have the paperwork professionally seen to might, in many cases, be more than the institution can afford. A fair number, it seems certain, will simply give up the effort and close, to the enormous loss of the local community and to no, or no perceptible, gain in the fight against terrorism.

It is very hard to see any justification for this. After all, at the moment, users of premises like church halls or sports clubs presumably know about the risk, albeit very small, of a terrorist attack and are nevertheless happy to run it.

Just think of the woman in the NADFAS decorative and fine arts society meeting at the village hall, or the man cheering on his town football team from the rickety stands at Newtown AFC. If you were to ask them whether they want the state to take this choice from them and call for anti-terrorism measures that are almost certainly unnecessary and may deprive them of their amusement, you are likely to get a very dusty answer.

There is also a more subtle social point. Much of Britain’s attraction lies precisely in its embrace of non-professionalism: in its acceptance of entrusting the running of local institutions to amateurs. Even if they don’t do so as well or perhaps as safely as a trained specialist, they show their goodwill by volunteering to help the community as best they can. To swap this for a marginal increase in safety as calculated by some pen-pusher in Whitehall is not wise government.

By all means tighten up the rules for big venues, and thereby vindicate the Manchester Arena victims. But leave the small ones alone to do their own thing in their own way. Even if there is a small risk to human life, the cult of allowing the small platoons to muddle along without instructions barked from on high is well worth preserving. Who knows: it might even get Rishi the odd rural vote.

Spaniards are horrified by an amnesty for separatists

When has a government ever offered an amnesty to fugitives from justice in order to stay in office? That’s what’s happening in Spain at the moment. Following July’s general election the only way in which the caretaker prime minister, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, can cling to power is by cutting a deal with a hodgepodge of small parties, including two Catalan separatist groups. Their price includes a general amnesty for those indicted for their involvement in the illegal referendum on independence for Catalonia in 2017 and the subsequent unilateral declaration of independence.

In July’s election Sánchez’s left-wing party, PSOE, won just 121 seats. The support of the radical left party Sumar (31 seats) only takes that total to 152 – still well short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat parliament. To get over the line, Sánchez also needs the backing of five small regional parties, four of which want to secede from Spain. They include Bildu, heir to the political wing of ETA (the former Basque terrorist organisation), as well as those two Catalan parties, ERC and Junts.  

Junts is the party of Carles Puigdemont who was the Catalan premier in 2017 and so ultimately responsible for the referendum and declaration of independence. While other Catalan leaders went to prison for their part in that episode, Puigdemont escaped, hidden in the boot of a car and has spent most of the last six years living in some style in Belgium. Now it looks like there will be an amnesty for him and for hundreds of other politicians and activists facing prison or fines for enabling the unilateral push for independence or for their involvement in the violent street protests against the Spanish state.

Unsurprisingly polls show that most Spaniards are scandalised. They brush aside as self-serving Sánchez’s argument that the amnesty will promote concord and further reduce tensions in Catalonia – where support for independence is now only 33 per cent. Instead, the facts that seem to stand out clearest to a majority of Spaniards in the whole affair are that Sánchez repeatedly swore that he would never under any circumstances grant any such amnesty and that he is now breaking that promise in order to cling to power.   

Opposition to the amnesty throughout Spain – many Catalans are also opposed – is fierce and shows no sign of abating. Even senior figures in Sánchez’s own party are outraged; Felipe González, socialist prime minister of Spain (1982-1996), has pointed out that an amnesty – as opposed to a pardon – suggests that the ‘independentistas’ were right all along and the Spanish state wrong. Meanwhile José María Aznar, the right-wing former prime minister (1996-2004) has described the proposed amnesty as ‘a threat to democracy in Spain’ and called for everyone everywhere to do whatever is in their power to stop it. There have already been numerous street protests and a nationwide demonstration against the amnesty will be held this Sunday at noon.   

If Sánchez isn’t re-elected prime minister by 27 November then new elections will have to be held in January. So the lawyers are now working against the clock to draft the amnesty law, knowing that any loophole they leave will be seized on. Indeed, challenges in the courts seem assured: many judges and legal experts have suggested that a general amnesty will be unconstitutional, some describing it as the beginning of the end of democracy and the rule of law in Spain.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Having so flagrantly broken his promise not to contemplate any amnesty for the ‘independentistas’, Sánchez’s chances of winning any repeat election seem slim. Instead, after a January election Spain would probably be governed by a coalition of the right-wing Partido Popular and the even more right-wing Vox.

Meanwhile, after joining a street protest against the amnesty, Esperanza Aguirre, a prominent figure in the Partido Popular, has been accused of blocking traffic. In her defence the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, pointed out that at least she hadn’t burned rubbish containers or thrown stones at the police unlike the separatists. Asked if permission had been granted for her demonstration, he replied that apparently in Spain it no longer matters if you have permission or not.

Will Germany’s ‘Rwanda-style’ migrant plan ever materialise?

Germany’s chancellor is cracking down on asylum seekers – but he is not doing so willingly. The country’s federal government is weighing up a system – similar to the UK’s mooted ‘Rwanda plan’ – for asylum applications to be processed abroad. But Olaf Scholz, who was essentially cornered into the announcement following a marathon session with regional leaders from Germany’s 16 state governments, is sceptical.

‘There are…a whole series of legal questions,’ Scholz said after emerging in the early hours of Tuesday morning from an acrimonious meeting with state leaders. The plan, a 17-page agreement, is an attempt to counter the rise of far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). If put into place, it will mark a further shift away from Merkel’s ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘We can do this’) declaration in 2015, when Europe was gripped by a huge influx of migrants. But many Germans are sceptical as to whether its measures – including the proposal to use ‘third countries’ to house those waiting to hear the status of their asylum applications – will ever see the light of day.

Scholz’s announcement marks a big shift in Germany’s debate about refugees

The ‘legal questions’ Scholz mentions are a big obstacle: as the UK has found with trying to put in place its ‘Rwanda plan’, such schemes can easily risk falling foul of the courts. Any deal must, as the agreement sets out, comply ‘with the Geneva Convention on Refugees and the European Convention on Human Rights’.

But while the hurdles will be difficult to overcome, Scholz’s announcement marks a big shift in Germany’s debate about refugees: the possibility of processing asylum claims abroad is now on the table and will be subject for further discussions inside the German Bundestag.

The agreement between Scholz’s government and the state leaders also includes a plan to fast track asylum applications in Germany. The federal office for migration and refugees is now tasked with responding to applications in six months or less. Applications filed by asylum seekers from countries with a success rate of less than five per cent, which includes Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and Kosovo, ought to be processed within three months, according to the document.

This increasingly tough stance towards immigration is widely considered to be a response to the rising popularity of the AfD. But it is also intended to combat the proposed foundation of a new far-left, anti-immigration party led by Sahra Wagenknecht. Prolonged asylum application processes are ‘constant munition for the AfD’, as Reiner Haseloff, the Christian Democratic minister-president of Saxony-Anhalt, put it.

The AfD lost some of its steam during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. It’s soft stance on Russia during the war in Ukraine also cost it support. However, recently, the far-right party has scored wins at the ballot boxes even in western German states, such as Hesse, where the AfD had a hard time gaining acceptance in the early years. The party’s newfound popularity can in part be attributed to an overall dissatisfaction with Scholz’s government among Germans, because the three coalition parties regularly engage in infighting and seem ineffective in producing new legislation.

On top of that, the first nine months of this year saw 230,000 people request asylum in Germany – more than in the whole of 2022. Scholz, just like many other European leaders, is trying to show the electorate that he is able to tighten the grip on immigration.

Whether this strategy will pay off for the chancellor remains to be seen. Leaders of his Social Democrats, including Stephan Weil, the powerful head of the state government of Lower Saxony, had opposed the ‘Rwanda model’ as suggested by Britain before the meeting on Tuesday. Weil and others could easily return to their previous position if they feel it would help their political survival. Many Germans also think Scholz has overcooked his announcement somewhat: the chancellor called the outcome of the meeting ‘a historic moment’. But using those words before any real legislative changes are made risks damaging what is left of Scholz’s credibility.

Flavour of the month: November – Celebrity homes, the Tube and Disney romance

This month’s crop of trivia includes a secret about the Tube map, the US state that’s named after Elizabeth I and something Jimi Hendrix had in common with Winston Churchill… 

• 1 November 1947 – birth of Nick Owen. The television presenter and Luton Town fan has a lounge named after him at the club’s ground – to which he was once refused entry. ‘You can’t go in,’ said a steward. ‘It’s packed.’ Not being a ‘don’t you know who I am?’ type, Owen simply walked away. He heard someone say to the steward: ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ ‘Haven’t a clue,’ came the reply. ‘His name,’ the steward was told, ‘is in bloody great capitals above your head.’
• 2 November 1889 – North and South Dakota are granted statehood in the US. The Dakota Building in New York, where John Lennon lived and died, got its name because when it opened there were few other buildings on the Upper West Side, so it bore the same relation to the rest of Manhattan as the Dakotas did to New York State.
• 4 November 1890 – the City and South London Railway, forerunner of the Northern line, opens between King William Street (now part of Bank station) and Stockwell. It was the city’s first ‘deep-level’ line, dug by a tunnelling machine that stayed underground the whole way – the first two lines (now called the Metropolitan and the District) were built by digging up the road, laying the tracks then replacing the road. Obviously this means they are much nearer the surface, a fact reflected on the Tube map: whenever one of those two crosses a deep-level line (for instance near King’s Cross and Euston), the line on the map goes over rather than under the other line. 
• 5 November 1913 – King Otto of Bavaria is replaced by his cousin Ludwig III. Otto had never actually exercised power, because of severe mental illness (Ludwig and his father Luitpold had served as regents). Every morning Otto’s servants indulged his desire to shoot a peasant by taking it in turns to disguise themselves as one, then collapsing in the distance after Otto had ‘hit’ them. Unknown to the king, the bullets in his gun were blanks.
• 6 November 1893 – Tchaikovsky dies. In a school exam, Peter Ustinov answered the question ‘name a Russian composer’ with the answer ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’. He was told that the ‘correct’ answer was Tchaikovsky. He queried this, and was then chastised in front of the entire school for ‘showing off’.
• 8 November 2016 – Donald Trump is elected the 45th president of the United States. He was actually the 44^th man to do the job – because Grover Cleveland’s two terms were separated by that of Benjamin Harrison, he is counted as both the 22^nd and 24^th presidents. This presumably means that were Trump to regain the White House next year, he would be the 45^th and 47^th presidents. During his first term he had shirt cuffs monogrammed with ‘45’ – might he have shirts made with ‘45’ on one cuff and ‘47’ on the other?

Otto’s servants indulged his desire to shoot a peasant by taking it in turns to disguise themselves as one, then collapsing in the distance after Otto had ‘hit’ them.

• 13 November 1955 – Whoopi Goldberg is born. The star (originally Caryn Elaine Johnson) gained her nickname as a child because she suffered from flatulence: ‘People used to say to me, “you’re like a whoopee cushion.’
• 14 November 1922 – the BBC begins its radio service. The first transmission was a news bulletin, read twice, first at normal speed and then more slowly so that listeners could take notes. The list of subjects about which comedians were banned from making jokes in the BBC’s early years included ‘Scotsmen, Welshmen, clergymen, drink or medical matters’. The entertainer Norman Long responded with the satirical song We Can’t Let You Broadcast That. The BBC promptly banned it.
• 17 November 1558 – Elizabeth I begins her reign. The US state of Virginia would later be named in her honour, as she was the Virgin Queen.
• 18 November 1928 – release of Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon starring Mickey Mouse to be distributed. One of the actors to voice the character in the 1980s was Wayne Allwine. He began a relationship with, and eventually married, Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse. Disney were reluctant to publicise the union, as they have always stated that Mickey and Minnie are just good friends. Allwine and Taylor’s pairing became known as ‘the love that dare not squeak its name’.
• 20 November 1947 – wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten. By marrying the future queen, Philip took himself out of the line of succession: because he was descended from Queen Victoria, he had a place on the list (well into three figures), but by becoming Elizabeth’s husband he renounced that claim.
• 27 November 1942 – birth of Jimi Hendrix. The guitarist’s death certificate lists his address as the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch. He had a regular room on the fifth floor, and used the hotel’s stationery to write the lyrics to ‘Look Over Yonder’ and ‘Suddenly November Morning’. It was at the Cumberland that he gave his last interview, six days before his death. The hotel now has a guitar service in which you can order one of several ‘axes’ to your room, while the mirror in the Star Suite is marked with the heights not just of Hendrix himself (5’10”), but of other performers from Ariana Grande (5’0”) through Bob Dylan (5’7”) to Buddy Holly (5’11”). It’s fitting that Hendrix died in London: it was there that he had achieved fame and felt at home – he became a fan of Coronation Street, particularly of the character Ena Sharples. His body was embalmed by the same man who had done George VI and Winston Churchill. Question from the mirror – there is a seven inch height difference between Lady Gaga and Adele. Who is taller? (Answer below.)

Nothing beats the Great British caravan holiday

Air travel isn’t what it used to be. I think we can all admit that. Those of us who don’t fly British Airways on a regular basis understand the true pandemonium of trying to get to Luton Airport at 3am with an Uber driver half asleep at the wheel. We understand what it means to sit on the tarmac for two hours with the smell of faecal matter and burp being pumped around by a broken air-conditioning unit. We understand what it is to pay £10 for a bath-warm Coke and a pressurised packet of pringles that will inevitably explode into the aisle. 

So, what can we do about it? Well, without the dosh, I’m afraid not very much, Son. Though we can look inwards. 

Enter the caravan holiday. They’ve been around for a while: since before air travel commercialised, before morning pints and Full English Breakfasts on the Costa Del Sol, before Ayia Napa and a clingy case of gonorrhoea, before Brits began swarming the coasts of European countries and filling them with back tattoos and a steely determinism to come home far sicker than they left.

Now, I know that caravan holidays get a bad rap. They conjure up images of tiny television sets and fathers who look like Rab C. Nesbitt. But there’s more to them than that. I had some of my best holidays in caravans – I just didn’t know it. 

We like to think the world has moved on from corrugated iron and huddling by the radio with the whole family to listen to The Archers. It hasn’t – at least not in the world of caravans and wet British summers. Much of the joy to be gleaned from caravanning comes from its old-worldly feel. The whole thing can feel a bit like The Blitz experience at The Imperial War Museum.

Or so I thought. It seems caravans have come a long way since I was last in one. In today’s world – a world obsessed with technology and progress – the humble caravan has needed to catch up, and catch up it has. Most of the caravans on Haven Holidays’ website boast flatscreen televisions, Wi-Fi and built-in Bluetooth speakers. These caravans are a far cry from the metal and plastic tombs I remember from the early 00s. I just hope they’ve retained that heady smell of wet dog and Grandma’s favourite slippers. That was my favourite. 

And unlike Airbnbs and villas along the Amalfi Coast, caravanning brings with it a sense of community, of camaraderie. Children fight in the machine-gun rain, parents get drunk together and shout at seagulls, uncles and aunties lose most of their life savings on the in-house slot machines.

Price aside, caravans are a weird concept. We drive across the country to escape the monotony of our daily routine, only to sit in one of a thousand mini-homes and do the exact same things we’d be doing at home. It doesn’t matter that you’re in Devon. You could be anywhere. You don’t care. There’s a pub on site and the television still gets repeats of Michael McIntyre’s aneurism-inducing comedy sets. 

That’s another thing: the entertainment. There’s nothing like it. Two wrestlers oiled up and being heckled with pejoratives by a crowd of thirsty alcoholics? Tick. Weekly bingo? Tick. Evenings reminiscent of Phoenix Nights? You bet!

I remember one poor soul who came out as the evening’s host/singer. Out he ran, plastic-diamond tuxedo and top hat adorned, heartfully singing ‘The Gambler’ in his dulcet Northern tones. I was only seven but I’ll never forget the shock horror on his face as an audience of five people stared stupidly back. But our local Kenny Rogers prevailed, and the night was a blast.

There’s no room to be snotty. If you want to be snotty, take your Land Rover glamping

This is what I’m getting at. You have to be willing to take caravanning for what it is – scars and boils included – to have fun. There’s no room to be snotty. If you want to be snotty, take your Land Rover glamping. 

And to give credit where it’s due, caravan parks are often a stone’s throw from some of Britain’s most striking beaches, cliffs, and natural parks. If you want to break the status quo and walk outside the resort’s parameters, you’ll find a whole new world out there. A world of breathable air. A world where the sound of fruit machines no longer haunts your dreams.

I love caravan holidays. They’re ridiculous and awful and that’s what makes them great. They’re slices of a bygone era that are trying desperately to keep up with the modern world, albeit unsuccessfully in most cases.

Enough with being turned back at Gatwick because the pilot isn’t a fan of rain. Enough with paying Ryanair just to check in. Enough with the Stansted Express and the poor souls who have to ride it into Liverpool Street station. Enough, at least for a while, at least until airlines and holiday companies stop shafting the little man. In the meantime, why don’t we all head down to somewhere provincial – Bognor Regis? – and see what the rest of Britain has to offer. If you hate it, you can always drive home.