Like an episode of Play School: Dr Semmelweis, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene, set in the 1860s, presents the harmless old doctor as a charming oddball who adores playing chess with his happy, clever wife. This is code: Semmelweis is an intellectual and a feminist whom it’s safe to like.

We flip back to 1837 and meet Semmelweis as a student at a Viennese maternity hospital where the male doctors kill three times as many patients as the female nurses. How come? Well, the males sport filthy aprons spattered with their victims’ blood while the nurses wear freshly laundered habits. So the high mortality rate is caused by germs. And germs can be treated with bleach.

Of course the audience knows this already but it takes 80 long minutes for the characters to catch up with 19th-century science. En route, the show delivers a series of distractions and delaying mechanisms which clutter the stage and try to disguise the script’s dramatic inertia and psychological blandness.

In one overloaded scene, a mime artist conducts an autopsy while a handful of clueless doctors pore over his every move. Meanwhile a quartet of string players grind out some Schubert while a troupe of ballerinas in diaphanous cladding mimic the horrors of childbirth through the medium of expressive dance.

At the same time, a lot of beds are being trundled around with their mattresses occupied by doomed mothers screaming blue murder as they give birth to dead babies. There’s so much to watch here and so little to care about.

The surfeit of effects makes the production look like the graduation show at a drama school where the students display their skills in acting, mime, dance, musicianship and public recital. Virtually everything in Tom Morris’s production lacks originality. A ballet display is illuminated in blue and gold – the lazy choice of every half-asleep designer.

The only interesting character, apart from Semmelweis, is a wise auld Oirish midwoif who knows the darkest secrets of the hospital but who dares not breathe a word to anyone. The stage is fitted with a twirling mechanism (‘a revolve’ as it’s known), which is used to lend an air of dynamism to static, wordy scenes. Sadly, the ‘revolve’ always seems to emphasise the vice it seeks to conceal.

The crowning platitude is the presence of Rylance in the title role. He bumbles, frowns, hesitates, backtracks, stammers and stutters through his lines, and generally dodders and potters about like a forgetful janitor trying to find his way to the broom cupboard. Rylance is great on stage but his greatness never varies. It seems a shame to criticise this well-intentioned and attractive-looking history lesson but seriously, lads? Give us a show, not an episode of Play School.

Dumbledore Is So Gay is a propaganda piece aimed at homophobes (even though they form a tiny fraction of the play-going public). The show follows the tribulations of Jack, a homosexual, who grew up in a bigoted London suburb. He hated hearing the word ‘gay’ used as a slur in the playground and he bridled at the rhetoric of his subnormal parents who were so dim they couldn’t differentiate ‘pronouns’ from ‘proteins’.

In his neighbourhood, apparently, it was normal for the homes of suspected queens to be attacked with missiles. When Jack found a soul mate, Ollie, they kept their affair hidden in case Ollie’s gay-bashing brother beat them both to death. The levels of prejudice appear to belong to the 1950s but the play is set in 2012. Were things really this bad a decade ago? Jack took refuge in London’s gay scene but he quickly learned that spiked drinks and unwanted assaults on the dance floor were commonplace.

At every turn, he and Ollie suffered abuse and humiliation. Their female friends fared no better. A straight girl, Gemma, rejected marriage because she considered it a form of captivity. ‘Having his babies and feeding him till he dies,’ was her summary of life as a wife and mother. Who on earth taught her to speak fluent doormat like that?

Part of the blame lies with their teachers who encouraged them to believe that ‘the most important thing is who you are’. Like virtually every school initiative, the gender studies programme isn’t intended to expand the horizons of the pupil but to lighten the workload of the staff.

Teaching children to study ‘who you are’ reduces the lesson to a set of subjective impressions which, of course, can never be incorrect. All members of every class become star pupils. And there’s no homework to mark which leaves extra time for the teachers to study think-pieces in the Guardian about the war on learning.

Fast cars, minimalist design and en suite bathrooms: the real Rachmaninoff

The train from Zurich to Lucerne tips you out right by the lakeside, practically on the steamboat piers. A white paddle-steamer takes you out of the city, past leafy slopes and expensive-looking mansions. Tribschen, where Wagner wrote the ‘Siegfried Idyll’, slides away to the right as you head out across the main arm of the lake. At the foot of Mount Rigi, shortly before the steamer makes its whistle-stop at the lakeside village of Hertenstein, is a promontory where – if the sun is coming from the west – a yellow-coloured cube shines among the trees. This is the house that Sergei Rachmaninoff built between 1931 and 1934: Villa Senar, his last attempt to make a home outside Russia in Europe.

It isn’t what you expect; at least, not if your idea of Rachmaninoff is shaped by the lushness of his music. You approach Villa Senar (the name comes from the first two letters of his and his wife Natalia’s names and the r of Rachmaninoff) along a curving driveway through a miniature arboretum. Every tree was chosen and placed by the composer; a lilac hangs over the path and if you know Rachmaninoff’s songs, that’ll prompt a smile of recognition. But the house at the end of this romantic vista is starkly modernist: a low, flat-roofed assemblage of right angles and plate glass whose ochre walls can’t disguise the influence of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. In fact, it was designed by local architects, but the specification was Rachmaninoff’s, right down to the sole ornament – the initials SR in slim deco lettering on the front door. Other Tsarist emigrés recreated little Petersburgs of velvet plush and bubbling samovars. Rachmaninoff – a man routinely described as ‘a ghost’ in his own lifetime – built himself a sleek new machine for living.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as such a jolt. Since his death (1943, in Beverly Hills) we’ve had eight decades to get past the outdated critical orthodoxy – expressed most notoriously in the 1954 Grove’s Dictionary of Music – that ‘he can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all’. Rachmaninoff’s response to his time is audible to anyone with ears to hear. Listen to the opening of the Piano Concerto No. 3, composed in 1909 when he was still the squire of a country estate south of Moscow. The orchestra is soft and dark, the piano’s melody rolls endlessly away to the horizon. Then try ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’, the first work he wrote entirely at Villa Senar in the summer of 1934. By now his career was an unending cycle of concert tours by sleeper-train and liner. The ‘Rhapsody’ is brusque, hard-edged: assembled from fleeting episodes, glimpsed and left behind at often breathless speed. It’s music of clean lines and glinting chrome.

It turns out that Rachmaninoff was always a bit of a speed demon. A new book by Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile digs beneath his public persona as the last of the Romantic keyboard lions, detailing his enthusiasm for Art Tatum and American automobiles (Packards seem to have been a particular favourite). It’s a myth that he travelled with his own piano, but he regularly shipped his latest car across the Atlantic, and after concerts in Paris he’d oust his chauffeur and set speed records on the road down to Switzerland. The boathouse at Villa Senar housed a high-powered motor launch, in which he would race the lake steamers. His London agent Robert Ibbs had a go at the wheel and nearly drowned them both. ‘Don’t say anything to Natalia,’ said Rachmaninoff after a capsizing was narrowly averted. ‘She won’t let me go boating any more.’

Composer anniversaries are a gift to unimaginative concert planners, but they have their uses: and in this double anniversary year (150 years since his birth, and 80 since his death) it does feel like our perception of Rachmaninoff is evolving. There’s been an overdue reckoning with his time in exile, and with the disarming truth that the composer of the Piano Concerto No. 2 was also recognisably a man of our own time, with a taste for fast cars, minimalist design and en suite bathrooms. It’s no bad thing. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 was completed at Villa Senar in 1936: a glowing, bittersweet musical memoir that somehow fuses jazz-age ebullience with the melancholy (faded, but still potent) of a lost Russia. Fifteen years ago it was difficult to find a conductor who wanted to perform it. Now you can take your pick: Rattle, Jurowski, Hindoyan, Nelsons, Wilson – they’re all doing the Third.

In Lucerne, where the city’s Festival has been building to the anniversary year for a while now, Riccardo Chailly conducted the symphony with the Festival’s own super-orchestra shortly before Covid. You sense that after decades under the spell of the other genius-in-residence (the one at Tribschen) both Festival and city have finally taken ownership of the composer across the water. There’s an exhibition, Rachmaninoff in Luzern, at the city’s Hans Erni Museum. ‘Composed in Hertenstein,’ noted the programme book, proudly, when pianist Beatrice Rana, conductor Andres Orozco-Estrada and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra performed this year’s homage: a glistening, thrillingly physical account of the ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’, played with the accelerator pressed very much to the floor.

A homecoming? Yes, and no: this music belongs here. Fiona Maddocks points out that Rachmaninoff was in the audience at the opening concert of the very first Lucerne Festival in August 1938. Framed on the wall at Villa Senar is a poster for another Lucerne Festival concert on 11 August 1939, this time with Rachmaninoff as soloist.

A few days later, as war loomed, he left Villa Senar – and Europe – forever. The Swiss Army requisitioned his speedboat and the house eventually went to his grandson Alexandre, who painted it white and died in 2012, leaving a nightmarish legal mess. At one point it was reported that Vladimir Putin wanted to buy the villa for Russia.

‘That was mostly a rumour,’ says Andrea Loetscher, managing and artistic director of the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation, which now runs Villa Senar. In one respect, Lucerne certainly has taken ownership: the Canton of Lucerne bought the house last year and registered it as a historic monument. It’s been open to the public since April, and the foundation is beginning the delicate work of conserving its contents while trying, as far as is practical, to preserve its aura – the sense that Rachmaninoff has only just left.

The plan is to host concerts, talks and masterclasses with small audiences in the villa’s music room; to try and impart something of the spirit of the place and bring the man to a new generation. It’s a noble ambition, and Rachmaninoff’s music is so beloved – his presence at Villa Senar still so potent – that it’s possible to believe the plan might succeed. Yuja Wang, Lukas Geniusas and Daniil Trifonov have already participated.

Meanwhile you can see Rachmaninoff’s piles of sheet music, his monogrammed bath towels, his desktop calculating machine (he was always an early-adopter) and his framed photographs of friends from the world he lost – Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Chaliapin – as well as the life he remade in exile. Steinway & Sons sent him a grand piano for his 60th birthday: it’s still here, and in good condition. Ask politely and you might even get to play a chord.

And scattered throughout the chic, airy rooms are personal objects that soften the cubist austerity and hint at a private man that his vast global public rarely saw. Stravinsky called Rachmaninoff ‘a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl’, and his official portraits rarely show a smile. But on his composing desk – turned so that only he could see them – there are different photos, unfamiliar ones. Rachmaninoff holding a grandson and a teddy bear, pulling a funny face for the little boy; Sergei and Natalia together, looking tired, but each with an expression of unforced warmth. The atmosphere of a place is a fragile thing, but for a few years in the 1930s it seems that the exiled master really did find some sort of peace among his trees and his loved ones on the shores of Lake Lucerne. ‘These are not exhibits,’ says Loetscher. ‘This is not a museum. We want to welcome people into Rachmaninoff’s home.’

The truth about the backlash to France’s abaya school ban

The intellectual infirmity that has laid low much of Europe’s left this century had been painfully exposed this week in France. On Monday, the country’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced that when pupils return to the classroom next week none will be permitted to wear the abaya, a conservative form of Islamic dress that is worn to preserve one’s modesty. Justifying the interdiction, Attal said the abaya contravened France’s strict rules on the wearing of religious symbols to school.

‘Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,’ Attal explained. ‘You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the students’ religion by looking at them.’

France first took a stand against the growth of Islamic conservatism in 2004, when it banned the Islamic headscarf (along with other religions’ accoutrements), and it has been forced to act after thousands of pupils began arriving to school in the long and baggy abaya. 

My wife, a teacher in a state school in a deprived suburb of northern Paris, tells me that until the start of this year she had never seen an abaya in her classroom. Within weeks they became commonplace. In some cases they were worn by body-conscious girls, a way of concealing anxieties about their weight. 

But religion is the main reason the abaya has taken off. Its popularity spread on TikTok, as part of a campaign aimed at challenging the Republic’s secularism. Jean-Éric Schoettl, secretary general of France’s constitutional council from 1997 to 2007, wrote in Tuesday’s Le Figaro: ‘To dismiss the abaya as a mere ‘cultural’ fad, or to put it down to an adolescent crisis, is to deny that it is an expression of adherence to a political Islam that pursues a hegemonic goal.’

Those radicals who are said to be behind the campaign also rely on the self-loathing of elements of the French left; ironically, it was the left that was the driving force behind the passing of the ‘laïcité’ law in 1905, which separated the church and the state and enshrined the Republic’s secularism. More than a century later, the roles are reversed and the French right – who were broadly opposed to the 1905 law because Catholicism was the primary target – uphold the country’s secularism, while many on the left attack it, in the name of Islamism.  

Although a handful of prominent figures on the left supported the government’s decision to ban the abaya – notably Fabien Roussel, the leader of the French Communists, and Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist MP – most were outraged.  

Clémentine Autain, a member of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise party, described the move as the ‘policing of clothing’. One of her party colleagues, Manuel Bompard, said it was ‘dangerous’ and ‘cruel’; he has also floated the idea of challenging the interdiction in court. 

Twelve months ago, Autain supported the brave young women of Iran who cast off their headscarves in protest after one of their peers was beaten to death by police for incorrectly wearing hers. Autain should be supportive of the government ban. For the endgame of Islamic conservatives, be they in Tehran, Toulouse or Tottenham, is to have women hidden away under an abaya or a hijab. In recent decades they have relied on Europe’s Useful Idiots to endorse this strategy, so the French government is to be applauded in showing that the intolerant will not be tolerated. The decision to ban the abaya in schools is not, contrary to what Autain says, the ‘policing of clothing’.

Autain and her ilk are out of step with public opinion on the issue of Islamic dress. In a survey this summer, only 23 per cent of people expressed support for the wearing of such garments in schools. Even among left-wing voters, there was widespread opposition to the abaya, with 60 per cent of La France Insoumise supporters expressing their disapproval and three quarters of Socialists believing it should be banned. 

This isn’t the only issue on which the French left and its voters don’t see eye to eye; it’s rare to find any left-wing politician who believes there are too many illegal immigrants in France; yet when the question was put to the public earlier this year the results were revealing. Not surprisingly, right-wing voters believe there is an immigration crisis in France (97 per cent in the case of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally), but even among voters who identified as Socialist or Green, more than half expressed their belief that illegal immigrants were too numerous.  

Recently, Europe has moved to the right, a process that has accelerated in the last year with Italy, Finland and Greece voting in governments of that persuasion. Additionally, Le Pen is now a major force in French politics and the AfD is on the rise in Germany. A senior EU diplomat attributed this phenomenon to the ‘Meloni effect’, referring to Italy’s prime minister. The diplomat added: ‘On migration, on climate, there has been a move towards the right, undoubtedly.’

But this ideological transition has been facilitated to a large degree by the feebleness of the left in confronting the challenge of mass immigration and the rise of an aggressive and assertive political Islam. The right is not so reluctant and, as a result, they have reaped their reward at the ballot box.

The exception is in Denmark, where the Social Democrats are in power because they were honest enough to admit the country had an immigration crisis and they were then bold enough to do something about it. 

The French left will never taste power again until they can summon up similar courage.  

How Macron is preparing for Trump’s return

We are still fifteen months away from the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but much of the world is already busy trying to decipher the results. With a second Donald Trump presidency in the realm of possibility, governments around the world are holding strategy sessions and informal conversations about how such an event would change U.S. foreign policy, impact their relationships with the United States and, just as importantly, what they can do to mitigate whatever shock to the system that may ensue.

For Europe specifically, Trump wasn’t just a shock – it was a lightning bolt to the skull. For a continent accustomed to getting what it wanted from Washington, enjoying relatively harmonious trade ties and complacently living behind the wall of U.S. military protection, Trump’s worldview was almost alien. Here was a man who simply didn’t buy into the notion of the so-called transatlantic relationship. Alliances most American politicians viewed as sacred were seen by Trump as a rip off. Why, he constantly asked, was the U.S. providing Europe with protection when it wasn’t pulling its weight and allowing its defense budgets to wither? 

European politicians, like most U.S. foreign policy elites, hoped these views would magically disappear the moment Trump stepped into the Oval Office. They didn’t. Trump used tariffs liberally to push for better trade terms. He lambasted the Europeans during international conferences that were meant to solidify transatlantic ties. He flirted with leaving Nato, or at least used the threat of leaving Nato to push European governments into increasing defense spending in line with Nato’s 2 per cent of GDP guideline. Germany, the wealthiest country in Europe, was Trump’s favourite target – during one infamous episode at the 2018 Nato summit, Trump asked point blank why the U.S. should be protecting Germany from Russia when Berlin was buying Russian natural gas at a heavy clip.

Given this history, it’s understandable why many in Europe are wary of Trump possibly returning to the scene. European policy elites have been griping about what it could all mean. ‘For most European governments, it is almost too upsetting to think about, let alone debate in public,’ Steven Erlanger, the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent, wrote this month.

Griping, however, is a waste of time and energy. And it’s not great for problem solving. While nobody can say with any degree of certainty how the 2024 U.S. election will turn out (that’s for the American voter to decide), policymakers have to prepare for every eventuality. The only head-of-state in Europe who seems to grasp this elemental fact is French president Emmanuel Macron.

Macron is a man with extreme self-confidence. He likes to think himself as a philosopher-in-politician’s closing, someone who carries big, conceptual ideas on his shoulders as well as the intellect and persuasion power to effectively convince the masses. Whether one buys into Macron’s magic is beside the point; the point, rather, is that he’s at least consistent about what he wants Europe to become: a pole of the international system in its own right with the military, economic and diplomatic resources to project its power when needed. 

‘Strategic autonomy,’ or the notion that Europe should lessen its dependence on the U.S. instead of following Washington like blind sheep, is a controversial topic on the European continent. Eastern Europe, Poland and the Baltic States in particular, view Macron’s harping about European independence as a smokescreen for French power. Germany may sympathise with the idea, but multiple generations of policymakers in Berlin have been taught to keep the Americans as closely wedded to Europe as possible. Making strategic autonomy a success requires ambition, responsibility, and putting your money where your mouth is – and let’s face it, Germany hasn’t been especially great at any of this.

For Macron, however, this is the best policy choice available. While the French leader may not have coined the phrase ‘strategic autonomy’, he is arguably its greatest salesman. In September 2017, months after he won the presidential election, Macron delivered an address at the Sorbonne about why Europe needed to get its act together, heal its internal divisions and become a serious actor on the international stage. 

‘In Europe, we are seeing a two-fold movement: gradual and inevitable disengagement by the United States, and a long-term terrorist threat with the stated goal of splitting our free societies,’ Macron said at the time. Those problems, he added, can only be remedied with greater self-sufficiency and self-confidence as well as the investment to carry it out.

Nearly six years later, Macron delivered pretty much the same message this week in his annual remarks to French ambassadors. The days of relying on the Americans for everything are over. Therefore, ‘we must strengthen our technological and military autonomy, produce [a] more, standardised…European defence industry and think more about our defence.’ Europeans, he insisted, have been slowly coming around to his position, aided in no small part by the war in Ukraine.

Of course, we shouldn’t give Macron too much credit. The Europe he describes in his speeches often doesn’t square with the Europe we see today. If you want proof, just take a look at Nato’s latest defense expenditure report, in which a majority of European members are still below the 2 per cent spending benchmark. For all the talk about a Europe being reawakened to the new geopolitical reality, the fact is that U.S. still composes two-thirds of Nato’s total military spending.

In short, Macron still has a lot of work to do on his pet project. But at least he has a project, unlike most of his colleagues. 

Ulez could mark the end of the road for Sadiq Khan

The metropolitan bohemian Withnail, played by Richard E Grant in the film Withnail & I, is so appalled by life away from inner London that he declares: ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’

Among the metropolitan bohemians who run the Tory party in the capital, the selection of Susan Hall as mayoral candidate was regarded with similar abject horror. Only in their case the sentiment was: ‘We’ve chosen a real Conservative by mistake.’

One of their usual more-liberal-than-the-liberals types was supposed to have glided to the nomination. But Dan (Daniel Korski) and Moz (Mozammel Hossain), called up from the open-necked shirt brigade of smooth talkers, both self-immolated during the campaign. The last person standing was Hall, a woman in late middle-age from Middlesex, that outer-London land of white vans and light industrial estates.

Worse still, she was an out-and-out right-winger who spoke up for people accused by Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan of being from the ‘Far Right when the campaign against his Ulez extension was gathering momentum in the Spring. 

A longstanding friend of Hall’s tells me: ‘All this Far Right stuff is just nonsense. Susan is no further to the right than the likes of Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman.’ That formulation will hardly assuage the kind of Zone One Tories who continue to believe there is a Rory Stewart-shaped hole in the political life of the capital. But it does mean that Hall, former leader of the Conservative group at City Hall and an expert at getting under Khan’s skin, is a good fit for the politics of the moment.

Because outer London is in full-scale rebellion against Khan. The uprising is not only focused on the Ulez expansion – though that was at the core of the Tories surprising victory at the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election a few weeks ago. There is a more general rejection of his mayoralty in full swing. His failure to get a grip on law and order in the capital also looms large, as does his predilection for a remorseless identity politics focused on stoking grievance among minority groups. There is a widespread feeling that whoever it was in his office who recently captioned a photo of a white nuclear family ‘does not represent real Londoners’ just said the quiet part out loud.

As the veteran actor Nigel Havers recently put it: ‘Sadiq Khan is the worst possible thing that could happen to London. I don’t think he should be allowed to have a third term.’

Given that the Government has dumped proportional representation for the mayoral election and restored first-past-the-post, Hall is the one person standing in his way. With the Lib Dem and Green candidates bound to score at least a ten per cent vote share between them, even amid a campaign squeeze from the big parties, Hall could win with a 45 per cent vote share. Should Jeremy Corbyn throw his leftist cap into the ring, as is rumoured, that winning post would come even further within reach.

Khan has, meanwhile, resisted all pressure from within Labour ranks to postpone his Ulez extension and many London Labour MPs are now reduced to crossing their fingers that the political blowback will abate in time for the mayoral election in early May.

Theoretically, people will have had time to sell their old diesel cars and vans and learned to love their clean and shiny new vehicles. But the financial pain of doing so is likely to linger, as is the high-handed approach of a mayor who has all but accused them of choking infants to death.

In Hall, the daughter of a garage mechanic from Harrow, the residents of the outer boroughs – who after all outnumber those of the inner ones covered by the old Ulez – have one of their own to vote for. Out in travel zone four and beyond, social attitudes tend to be conservative. For instance, in Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Havering, Hillingdon and Sutton many voters backed Leave in the 2016 referendum – as did Hall – and several other outer boroughs came very close to doing so.

Were mass migration-sceptic, pro tax-cutting, lock ‘em up Hall to prevent Khan from winning a third term in London just six months out from a general election, it would surely be a game-changing moment for Rishi Sunak. Authentic Conservatism, of a type that would be recognised by a time traveller from the 1980s, would have prevailed again. And it would all have happened by mistake.

Why this year’s Edinburgh fringe was so obsessed with death

The Edinburgh Festival is finally over, but why was this year’s event so obsessed with dying? Death is the new Black, at least according to the artists at the fringe where our mortality has been eviscerated, diced, disembowelled, deconstructed and fed back in a torrent of death shows to an army of avid theatre goers ever hungry, it seems, for new interpretations of our predictable demise.

Death Suits You, When We Died, You are All Going to Die, The Last Show Before We Die, Hello Kitty Must Die, and the Dead Dad Show are just a few of the catchy morbid show titles proudly performed in defiance of the usual theatrical sales logic that death is a stinker.

The official Edinburgh International Festival got in on the death act too, with the unremittingly grim National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s production of the Trojan Women, staged in Korean. During this bleak show, the last female survivors of Troy are told to willingly accept their future fate as slaves, concubines and play toys of their Greek conquerors after the murder of their husbands. ‘Anyone who claims to be happy before death is a damned fool,’ explains one of the subtitles.

There were so many death shows that even Death on the Fringe, an outcrop of the Scottish Palliative Care Association, that normally curates a mini-death festival at Edinburgh has given up counting. ‘Undoubtedly Covid made us all think about death in a very different way. But it’s a mixed message. For some it’s: ‘We had two years of that and it’s enough’. But for others, artists and audiences, it’s something they want to explore, even if it’s just a stand-up show and a few jokes about dying. And it’s a tenner well spent,’ says organiser Mark Hazelwood.

Topping the fringe death-themed bill was Belgian director Alexander Devriendt’s sold-out Funeral show where, in a Covid-inducing rush of fear, audience members enacted out their allotted roles as mourners shaking hands with scores of their fellow ticket buyers as fellow bereaved call out the names of their own personal dead. Funeral’s symbolic but powerful evocation of loss and grief left many of its audience in tears.

More art installation than a conventional theatrical staging, Funeral was inspired by Devriendt’s father’s death and a sense of alienation in a God-disbelieving world. ‘I was so busy organising my father’s funeral that I did not have time to say goodbye. But I also saw that every funeral is a performance. Many of us don’t believe in God any longer but we still need rituals, their beauty, to make sense of our experience. We need to recognise and value them.’

Across the rest of the fringe, Death came in all shapes and forms. Sam Hooper’s Death Suits You was a musical comedy where Death, as the main character, berates the audience for failing to appreciate his true talents as the ultimate showstopper. He proudly boasts of the intricacy of the methods of dispatch, including the poor waitress who tripped and impaled her forehead on the food order docket spike.

A far darker but intriguing work, When We Died by Alexandra Donnachie, juxtaposed the intimate violation of the funeral embalmer’s mortuary slab with the main character’s revelation that the corpse was her rapist. In churning detail, we learn the secrets of the embalmer’s trade, from the insertion of spiky contact lenses to keep the eyes closed, alongside the devastating trauma of sexual assault.

‘Death is definitely a theme this year. Sometimes, it’s like I have a perfect audience. Just in total silence watching me. We don’t talk enough about death but my character, the embalmer, is very proud of her work. There is also the intimacy of the act of embalming, the contrast in his lack of consent to what she is now doing to him and her lack of consent about what he did to her,’ says Donnachie.

Edinburgh being Edinburgh, the legacy of the Enlightenment was never far beneath of surface as American playwright Duane Kelly explored the final hours and death thoughts of the 18^th Century Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume. Enquiry Concerning Hereafter, magnificently staged in Smith’s own restored 18^th century home Panmuire House, just off the Royal Mile, delved into the bedrock of our anxiety over dying once we have overcome our fear of a vengeful Creator.  ‘If you take God off the table it makes many people unsettled, anxious, insecure and fearful. It also raises another big question. Then what is the basis of morality,’ says Duane Kelly.

Edwin Flay’s remarkable one man show Quality of Mercy explored the far more personal morality of England’s greatest mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman on the eve of his suicide in his prison cell. ‘I have the power of life and death. And I don’t believe in just letting them go on and suffer,’ says the avenging Shipman.

In the maelstrom of the fringe’s 3500 shows and millions of ticket sales finding any common artistic thread, even one themed around our common mortality, is all but impossible. But the sheer preponderance of death related material at this year’s fringe is proof that Covid-style death thoughts are never far away. And there is far more death anxiety production to come. Our Covid traumas are far from over. Death is indeed the new Black.

Kevin Toolis is the author of My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die

The betrayal of Wrexham AFC

For political nerds, the revival of Wrexham AFC, under the ownership of Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, has eerie echoes of the history of New Labour. A historic organisation, strongly connected to working-class communities, looks defeated and deflated. A clique of talented smoothies comes along and offers a better tomorrow. Tired of disappointment, the rank and file are persuaded to back radical reform. Internal democracy is swapped for charismatic leadership, drab self-reliance for corporate funding. A couple of years later, the strategy seems vindicated: on a balmy spring evening, the organisation enjoys a stunning victory. Things can only get better. And Wrexham, having beaten Boreham Wood, could now rejoin the English Football League. 

However, like Old Labour stalwarts in the 1990s, not all Wrexham supporters were starry-eyed about regime change. Wrexham is an earthy, egalitarian city with a historic suspicion of patronising elites – hence its 58 per cent support for Brexit in 2016. Given that fans had already rescued the club from property sharks in 2011, before re-founding it as a supporters’ trust, some were uneasy about handing it over to well-heeled actors from California. Now, two and a half years later, their fears are being realised.  

As Neil Clark pointed out in the magazine earlier this month, one of the great draws of lower-league football has been its relative cheapness and ease of access. Yet, at Wrexham, such things are now the stuff of nostalgia. Via the club’s membership scheme, fans can now pay £30 a season for privileged access to merely trying to get a ticket; and most of those who try normally fail.  

At 9 a.m. a few weeks ago, a long line of grizzled supporters could be seen in the club car park, patiently waiting for the ticket office to open an hour later. By 10.15, all but a handful were informed that the tickets had been sold to online purchasers and that remaining tickets were for ‘international supporters only’. For those turned away, it was small comfort to hear that new fans from Colorado were flying over to see their first-ever match. Or that Ryan Reynolds would soon be escorting Hugh Jackman into the directors’ box (hot on the heels of those other Wrexham diehards, Blake Lively and Will Ferrell). 

Such disregard for lifelong supporters was just the latest sign that, after the success of their Disney documentary, Reynolds and McElhenney were losing the knack of intelligent ownership. Back in July, while other English Football League clubs prepared sensibly for the new season, Wrexham jetted off to the USA for glitzy fixtures against Chelsea and Manchester United – an expensive jolly facilitated by the owners, but one that did not seem to enthuse the team’s experienced manager, Phil Parkinson. The imperatives of branding, it seems, now trump the nitty-gritty of football management.   

This trans-Atlantic jaunt prompted outrage from the eco-lobby and was at odds with the zany-yet-progressive image Reynolds likes to burnish. Worse still, the matches were a footballing disaster. United, regarding Wrexham unworthy of their senior squad, fielded a youth team that included a rather clumsy goalkeeper. The gauche stopper duly inflicted a shocking injury upon striker Paul Mullin, thus denying Wrexham their talisman for the first month of the new season: a classic example, perhaps, of hubris and nemesis in lower league football.        

After a mixed start to the new campaign, with one win in five league matches, it is no surprise that some are now questioning the rescue narrative routinely peddled by Wrexham’s owners. It is also worth recalling that, far from being a basket case prior to their arrival, Wrexham under its supporters’ trust amassed 98 points in 2011-2012 and reached the promotion play-offs on a further two occasions. As such, Wrexham’s era of common ownership was not a tale of endless humiliation; and neither did promotion necessitate Hollywood saviours. Chesterfield, after all, was in the running for promotion last season, and was only denied it by a penalty shoot-out in the play-offs final. Yet Chesterfield FC remains a community trust, proudly owned by locals, and in thrall to no one outside the town. So Reynolds et al had better enjoy themselves while they can. In the long season ahead, it may not always be sunny in Wrexham. 

There’s nothing scarier than a panic room

It’s not crazy to worry about getting home. It’s not crazy to lock your doors at night and check that the alarm is set. It’s not crazy to avoid the man who keeps gurning at you on the bus every time you look his way. It’s not crazy to worry. But is spending £50,000 to £500,000 on a bespoke panic room a little… crazy? Probably. But who am I to judge? I still find it hard to answer the phone to a withheld number.   

I could only find one advert from a panic room installation company in the UK. The video shared on the firm’s website is set in London and has a B-movie feel to it. Two men with guns enter a flat as an electronic voice does the narration. The video cuts to a mother and her children running to their panic room for safety. The voice says that I should take my family’s security seriously. It told me that with a panic room, I could ensure the survival of my loved ones, that I didn’t need to be afraid anymore.

The video ends with the family safely in their panic room as noxious gases flood the apartment and choke the assailants. The voice speeds up and says that the gases made the conditions unbearable for any human to endure. It then offers strobe lights, sound barriers, and integrated fog systems for additional safety. I turned my phone off. I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I was more scared of the voice than any potential intruder. And what if these things malfunction, I wondered. What if your poor cat sitter was feeding your tabby just as your panic room decided to spray chlorine gas all over the place? How do you explain that to the police? 

But more than that, I wondered who needed these rooms. Who out there has one of these things? Celebrities? People of interest? But then why market these steel tombs to us common people? Who’s mad enough to buy one? The websites that sell them are as secretive as the people who own them. Prices are never listed. There are dropdown lists of what these panic rooms offer. ‘Ballistic protection up to FB7 (assault rifles).’ ‘Doors that blend in with the walls.’ ‘Fireproof for up to four hours.’ These rooms are nothing less than mini-fallout bunkers. They conjure up images of a world where neighbours shoot your pets and kill your grandmother for sustenance.  

I was getting nowhere with my online shopping so I decided to call a couple of companies. The first receptionist I spoke to was as laconic as a disgraced celebrity on BBC Newsnight. I found another company that was a little more talkative. The saleswoman told me about the different types of rooms: the four-wall, the five-wall, and the six-wall. It took me a second to realise the fifth and sixth walls were the floor and ceiling. She couldn’t give me a price on the rooms but she did say that a door started at £7,000. What am I supposed to do with a door, especially if there are two walls on either side of it that aren’t 13 inches of concrete and steel? If I was a killer, I’d probably start on them. I wouldn’t bother with the door. 

The saleswoman also explained that panic rooms – or ‘sanctuary rooms’, as they call them – are all about preference. She spoke about how they dealt with high-profile clients and that every room was tailor-made. Some even have floor-to-ceiling LCD screens that show you computerised images of the outside world. Others have smart TVs and snack dispensers. I explained that I lived in a flat. I think that crushed her a little bit. Already, I was a low-level client; living in a flat just meant less commission. 

Going to see one of these things is near impossible. You can’t just walk into a person’s home and say, ‘Show me where you’d hide if I was to come in wielding an axe and a flamethrower.’ Even if I could, I’m not sure I’d go in. I’d be too scared that the door might close behind me and I’d be left with … well, myself. Your very own hypogeum. 

When I think of panic rooms, I think of my demise. I’m also reminded of a school trip I took to Berlin when I was 17. We visited a Cold War bunker where the bunkbeds were stacked half a dozen high and every room was suicide-proof. The tour guide told us, just as we were coming to the end, that the promise of salvation was a lie and that the authorities never had any intention of saving the people inside the bunker. The bunker was the last stop. Panic rooms might seem like an escape, but to me it just feels like pulling the covers over your eyes in your childhood bedroom because your chair looks like a monster in the moonlight. When faced with danger, aren’t we supposed to choose between fight or flight? In a panic room, you can’t do either. You’re stuck. If I had £500,000, I think I’d spend it on something a little more life-affirming. But, again, what do I know? I’m not interesting enough to need one.  

Forget the Cotswolds, try the Forest of Dean for a weekend break

The roads around Monmouth are quiet but have their attractions; they cut through valleys and woods, past castles and churches. My host, soignee interior designer Neil McLachlan, explains that this part of the world is a well-kept secret, popular with minor gentry and Londoners in the know but protected from the crowds that flush in and out of the Cotswolds.  

Keen to stretch our legs after the drive from Lydney station, we stopped at Tintern Abbey and met with the medieval reenactors camped on the lawns before heading on to Woofield House in Newland, a village in the Forest of Dean on the River Wye so pretty it could come out of an American advert for quaint English villages. To some, Newland is known as the ‘Chelsea of the forest’ – but it lacks the hordes of red-trouser wearers. Instead, we met a young woman seeking refuge from a jet-set life; a dog-loving couple from Birmingham and, of course, us – self-styled metropolitan connoisseurs, my boyfriend born and bred in south-east London and me firmly from north of the river.

Woofield House is extremely grand (and flashy, opulent, and fun), with a suite of impeccable and reasonably priced guest accommodations in the back of the main house. It is set to begin offering immersive interior design weekends involving hands-on seminars with McLachlan and his business and romantic partner Raymond Roche, an Irishman and also an interior designer. These will begin ‘when the house is completely refurbished’, with plenty of G&Ts all around. Woofield is a Grade-II listed house that was once a residential home for men with learning disabilities; it was then bought by McLachlan and Roche. McLachlan is a genteel and genial New Zealander who made a name for himself over there as a screen designer for Changing Rooms. He is also an interior designer for hotels and restaurants, as well as private clients, and is known for a strong, playful, and somewhat bling style. The result in his new abode is quite spectacular, though not for the faint of heart.  

The vast house has been painted ‘coral heritage pink’. Two giant stone dogs guard the glossy black door and inside there are marble floors in black and white diamonds, a stained-glass window in the ceiling of the kitchen and eye-popping wallpaper of parrots in tropical shrubbery. There are glamorously appointed nooks, numerous staircases, themed period bedrooms, and a stunning upstairs living room, complete with a grand piano, 18th-century dog bed and a real palm. McLachlan and Roche have designed the whole place with a gentleman’s sense of space and order, so that each has his own dressing area and ‘toilet’ table (in the Victorian sense) quite separate from the bedroom. There is a serious study too on the ground floor, full of samples of wallpaper, paint colours, drawings and photographs – including those depicting what the house looked like before the gents began work on it in 2021 as a kind of turbo-charged Covid project. Their task was enormous.  

The grounds include a large greenhouse that Roche and McLachlan built, where I was helplessly drawn to the chaise longue under yet another palm. As for the guest accomodation, we didn’t manage to book the ‘palm house’, the two-bedroom cottage whose sitting room walls are covered with palm wallpaper; but ours had a stained glass partition between the bed and kitchen-living area, and a cute gothic window at the end. A fire and wood pile makes it a cosy option for winter. But it was sunny and warm when we arrived, so we grabbed the waiting bottle of prosecco and packets of crisps and nuts, and sat on the terrace, admiring the double whammy of fields and Newland’s 13th-century church. 

If sitting at the pretty Ostrich pub up the road or with a bottle on the Woofield terrace isn’t enough, there is much to do. There are walks, meandering through pastures dotted with sheep and wildflowers, over fords and old railway bridges – it’s the sort of landscape that makes one feel the pricklings of jingoism. My favourite walk was an hour’s ramble to The Boat Inn at Pennalt in Monmouth. The pub was built from local stone in the 17th century and sits right on the banks of the Wye in a sort of tropical microclimate.  

Nearby are the Clearwell Caves, mysterious with an industrial edge and used for hundreds of years by ‘freeminers’ – a Forest of Dean custom whereby a miner can claim an area and work it for iron ore, coal, stone and other minerals. The caves were opened to the public in the 1960s and are packed with geological and historical details.  

More athletic types can book paddle boarding, kayaking, rock climbing, golfing and cycling. But for those looking for the kind of low-key, quietly fashionable weekend break one used to have in the Cotswolds, there are pleasures aplenty in simply drinking and eating local fare in old stone pubs by river, field, and castle.  

Where to stay 
Woofield Accommodation. From £120 per night. Design weekends to start next spring and will be ‘reassuringly expensive, unlike the competitively priced Woofield Accommodation’. 
woofieldaccommodation.com 

Tudor Farmhouse Hotel, Coleford, tudorfarmhousehotel.co.uk. From £147 per night. Chic refurbished old buildings, lots of exposed brick and a snug spa. The restaurant is described by Tatler as a ‘culinary oasis’. tudorfarmhousehotel.co.uk

The Boat Inn, Monmouth. One nicely appointed two-bedroom apartment above the riverside pub, from £100 per night, with a minimum two-night stay. theboatpenallt.co.uk

What Prigozhin’s clandestine funeral says about the Kremlin

For the past week, the arrangements for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral have been shrouded in secrecy. Now it has been confirmed that the leader of the mercenary Wagner group was buried today in St Petersburg – just under a week after he was killed in a plane crash outside Moscow.  

According to a statement released by Prigozhin’s press service, his funeral took place in private at the Porokhovskoe cemetery this afternoon. According to one anonymous cemetery worker, between 20 and 30 people attended the ceremony, which lasted approximately 40 minutes. Now the ceremony is over, anyone who wants to pay their respects is welcome to do so, the press service’s statement said. 

Following a flurry of activity at several of St Petersburg’s graveyards yesterday, speculation had been mounting that Prigozhin and those killed with him would be buried today. Despite the lack of official information, the increased presence of security guards and metal detectors at the Northern, Beloostrovsky and Serafimovsky cemeteries this morning further fuelled suggestions that Prigozhin might be buried at one of those locations. Just before lunchtime, it was confirmed that the funeral of one of Prigozhin’s fellow passengers and Wagner colleague, Valery Chekalov, had begun at the Northern cemetery. 

It appears that the authorities were perfectly happy to stoke confusion about when, where, or indeed if, Prigozhin’s funeral was taking place. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said this morning that they had ‘no information’ about the funerals, but did manage to confirm that whenever the funeral did take place, Putin would not attend.  

Meanwhile, security guards at the various cemeteries refused to disclose what events they were hired for. Reports that no fresh graves had been dug in at least one of the cemeteries, along with what was later suspected to be a decoy funeral convoy arriving at another cemetery, meant the St Petersburg authorities successfully managed to guard the details of Prigozhin’s burial until after it had taken place. 

This strange clandestine behaviour suggests the Russian authorities, and therefore the Kremlin, were reluctant to allow public mourning at Prigozhin’s funeral. Potentially the reason for this was a nervousness that, following the Wagner leader’s aborted coup in June, any public grief or outpouring of support for him could be seen as a challenge to the president’s authority. At the time of his death, Prigozhin was still popular and had amassed a loyal following amongst certain Russians – no doubt the Kremlin will have wanted to avoid giving these like-minded individuals an opportunity to gather.  

With this in mind, the sort of funeral Putin would allow Prigozhin to have was always going to be a strong indicator of how he might attempt to stage manage the Wagner leader’s posthumous legacy. In July, photos of Prigozhin’s home, taken in a police raid after his coup, revealed that he was in possession of a ‘Hero of Russia’ medal. The award of this medal meant that, in theory, Prigozhin was entitled to a funeral conducted with military honours, complete with a guard of honour and military band. Protocol for the funerals of ‘Heroes of Russia’ also dictates that they are buried at the Federal Military Memorial cemetery at Mytishchi on the outskirts of Moscow – something Prigozhin has also been denied. 

Curiously, according to an unnamed source who spoke to the local Russian newspaper MSK1, Prigozhin’s funeral was held in private ‘in accordance with the wishes of relatives’. That the Russian state media has been at pains to emphasise this speaks volumes. Additionally, the decision to bury Prigozhin at the Porokhovskoe cemetery was reportedly made so that he could be buried alongside his father – a man the Wagner leader reportedly barely knew. Conveniently, then, the official line is that decisions around Prigozhin’s funeral had nothing to do with the circumstances in which he died (quite likely on Putin’s orders) or his damaged relationship with the Kremlin following his aborted coup in June. 

It has now been several hours since the funeral service, and several Telegram channels report that Prigozhin’s gravesite is still cordoned off. Members of the police and Russian national guard are reportedly patrolling the cemetery with anti-drone guns and a demining machine.  

Prigozhin’s clandestine burial suggests that the Russian authorities, and by extension the Kremlin, have been impatient to scrub him and the events of earlier this summer from Russia’s memory. But the legacy of the man who posed the biggest challenge to Putin in his 20 years of power might not be forgotten so easily.  

Gove is right to tackle EU pollution laws blocking housing

Michael Gove has announced today that the government will scrap EU-era pollution laws which are preventing homes being built. The move to liberalise the so-called ‘nutrient neutrality’ rules – which say that any new development can’t add additional nutrients into the environment – is designed to ease some of the bottlenecks around building and comes with the bonus of sweeping away EU-era regulation. 

The current position for nutrient neutrality is a complex one. A combination of EU law, strict judicial interpretation and cautious domestic implementation has turned a well-intentioned piece of regulation into a millstone around builders’ necks. The original rules began with a drive to protect vulnerable species and habitats from run-off pollution, but now mean that you can only build near protected sites if you demonstrate nutrient neutrality across a project.  

The zealous application of this principle means that development has become almost impossible in 62 local authorities. Even a minimal increase in pollution has been able to kibosh construction, while demonstrating compliance with the neutrality scheme has created significant costs and delays for developers. Housebuilders say that the rules have held up the building of more than 150,000 homes, while the government believe their change will mean 100,000 more homes can be completed before the decade is out.  

Inevitably, Gove’s proposals have drawn ire from environmental groups. The Wildlife Trust and Greenpeace have attacked the plans, as have the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Yet the proposal is about more than simply scrapping regulation. 

Under the new proposals, Natural England will be given more than a quarter of a billion to offset the impact of the scheme. It will also be paired with other rules toughening environmental requirements for farmers and water companies, as part of a broader ‘Plan for Water’ that aims to create cleaner rivers.  

It’s a subtle approach from the government. Tweaking these regulations might unlock housing and it avoids a head-on fight with local Nimbys, as decisions are still made by councils. As an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill, which has already been drafted to please MPs concerned about housing, it is also likely to have a smooth ride through parliament. Whether it will yield political benefits, however, remains an open question. 

The houses enabled by this rule change will take time to be built, and it will only mean an extra 20,000 homes a year over the next half decade or so. This comes nowhere close to clearing the 4 million shortfall of homes campaigners say the country needs. The reforms may not be enough to appease younger voters either, especially as Labour look increasingly bullish on building with plans to create a raft of new towns.  

Any weaking of restrictions might also harm the Tories. Many of their voters don’t believe we need more housing and are worried about environmental protections. In typically Conservative shires, the party has found new rivals, at the local level at least, in the Greens while the Lib Dems are also resurgent in areas where they can punish the party for allowing construction. Measures like this may make it harder to retain older, homeowning environmentally conscious voters in key seats.  

There is much to admire in the policy. It is a smart, deregulatory way of encouraging new housing. It also gives the Tories a chance to bash EU regulation and show that they are gradually rolling back legislation from Brussels. In many ways it is a typical Goveian move. Given how close the next election is though, it’s unlikely to have much political impact.  

A tribute to Alf Ramsey, football’s forgotten hero

No better book about England’s victory in the football World Cup of 1966 and what followed it has ever been written. Duncan Hamilton’s Answered Prayers has the authority of a work of history and pulses with the narrative power of fiction. Its unlikely hero is Alf Ramsey. He emerges as a curiously complicated character through whom Hamilton tells his story.

This is not a tale of the glory of that sunny day. It is instead a kind of melancholy eulogy. England won despite English football’s powers that be – ‘unpleasant men’ such as the FA’s Sir Harold Thompson, a distinguished professor of chemistry and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who ‘had the eyes of a dead fish’ and ‘was the kind of snob who looked down his stubby, patrician nose at anyone who didn’t possess either a title or a fortune’. 

Players and coaches were treated more or less like chattels. The Football League’s Fred Howarth, who ‘imprinted his dour personality on the League the way a fossil imprints itself on rock’, had opposed abolishing the maximum wage for footballers, and didn’t much care for floodlights or Europe or television (‘the idiot box’). These attitudes were broadly shared by chairmen and boards throughout the country. They were what Ramsey (whose childhood had been one of genuine poverty) and his players had to overcome – a challenge as great as that presented by teams from Brazil, Portugal and West Germany.

At Ipswich Town things were different.  Having retired from a playing career at Spurs and for England, Ramsey was appointed manager of the Third Division club in 1955.  He found in the chairman, the eccentric John Cobbold, heir to the Tolly Cobbold beer fortune, an enthusiastic supporter, who gave him everything he wanted, most importantly freedom and respect. By 1962 Ramsey had made Ipswich champions of England. He became the obvious choice to replace the hapless Walter Winterbottom following another lacklustre England showing at the 1962 World Cup in Chile.

Ramsey lacked the presence of Bill Shankly or Matt Busby or Brian Clough. He was diffident in speech, especially after losing his cockney brogue, often sounding like ‘someone from an amateur dramatic society wrestling with his lines in a Noël Coward play’. Hamilton writes that ‘Ramsey regarded how he “felt” as no one’s business apart from his own’. This takes us to a sizeable difference between now and then, and not just in terms of the way we think, or indeed feel, about football. Ramsey said of himself: ‘They say I’m remote. Difficult to get to know. I think this is fair.’ It is hard to imagine anyone with a public profile saying such a thing today.

Names to conjure with: Banks, Cohen, Wilson, Moore, Charlton J., Stiles, Ball, Peters, Hunt, Charlton R., Hurst. It wasn’t easy putting that famous team together. Ramsey was less concerned about results than with finding the perfect combination of talents, ‘like a poet struggling for a rhyme’. He used dozens of players, and insisted on playing friendlies against serious opposition.  A stickler for detail, he reassured his players that he knew what he was doing and that there was nothing arbitrary about his decisions. They were devoted to this apparently cold, unfeeling man, and one of Hamilton’s footnotes helps illustrate why. In the semi-final of the 1968 European Championship, against a brutish Yugoslavia team

Alan Mullery had one last chance to reciprocate – and so he took it, swinging his right boot into his assailant’s groin. In the dressing room afterwards, he expected Ramsey’s condemnation for his lack of discipline, but instead was congratulated for giving back to ‘those bastards’ a taste of their own cruelty. Ramsey paid the £50 fine that the FA – blind or ignorant to the injustice – handed to Mullery, denying him an appeal.

One player was perhaps less devoted. Possibly the deadliest finisher in English football history, Jimmy Greaves was ruthlessly left out of the final team. He famously descended into alcoholism, perhaps as a result of his disappointment, and as famously pulled himself out of it to become celebrated as an idiosyncratic and entertaining TV pundit. His subsequent success was in ironic contrast to most of those who did play.

The final whistle in 1966 comes a little after half way through the book. It is by no means all over. Hamilton takes us to Dudley town hall for ‘An Evening with Sir Geoff Hurst’ last year. The venue is a quarter full, mostly men of a certain vintage. Hamilton sinuously weaves the fates of Hurst’s 1966 team mates in and out of an event both celebratory and poignant.

There is a sad, downward trajectory of many of the players concerned. Six were to suffer from dementia. Moore, Ball and Cohen all died before the age of 65. Gordon Banks lost an eye in a car crash. After Ramsey’s sacking in 1974 following England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, ‘people regarded the men in charge of the FA as an unpleasant, vengeful and ungrateful bunch of heartless incompetents’, and Hamilton is in no doubt people were right. Ramsey, when subsequently attending matches at Wembley, always chose to sit as far away from the FA grandees as possible. He was a man who ‘could not fake sincerity and lacked the stagecraft to learn it’. He died in 1999, suffering from dementia like the majority of his players. Of the 92 invitations to his memorial service in Ipswich sent to Premier League and Football League clubs, only five were accepted.

Despite this sad end, Answered Prayers is a feast of a book, constantly engaging, and a proper contribution to the history of the period. The World Cup was as big as the Beatles. Names from the age dot the text –David Bowie, Philip Larkin, Mary Quant, Twiggy, George Best, Harold Pinter, A.J. Ayer. Through it all there is a distant suggestion of the author’s own approaching mortality, which may contribute to what makes this marvellous book genuinely affecting.

A potent seam of violence: The Wren, the Wren, by Anne Enright, reviewed

The Irish novelist Anne Enright is now in her sixties. Her deceptively modest new novel, The Wren, The Wren, opens with a long section narrated by Nell, a woman in her early twenties living in contemporary Dublin. Nell scrapes by, ‘writing content non-stop’: travel pieces about places she’s never been to, stories for a wealthy ‘actress/eco-influencer’. Adrift and vulnerable, she falls into an on-off relationship with a man called Felim, who is emotionally cruel and photographs her naked without her permission.

With this extended portrait of a much younger woman, Enright quietly establishes her excellence. Laid against similar endeavours by writers of her generation – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023) – Enright demonstrates a rare fluency in the language of youth. This doesn’t mean that Nell’s narration sounds like it was written by a 23-year-old. We get to have it both ways: Enright articulates certain insights better than a younger writer might be able to, yet Nell still convinces as a millennial (or possibly even Gen Z-er).

Her voice alternates with third-person sections filtered through the perspective of her mother Carmel. From Carmel, we learn about Nell’s famous grandfather, Phil McDaragh, a womanising poet who left Carmel’s mother, struggling with breast cancer, when Carmel and her sister were still in their teens. Carmel has led a tightly independent life, raising Nell alone (the pregnancy was the result of a fling). As a teenager, Nell looks round the spotless bathroom and wonders: ‘Was there a woman on the planet more boring than my mother?’ But the reader, with privileged access to each woman’s view of the other, has a different understanding of what the quiet, stable home with its carefully curated interiors represents for Carmel.

This duet between the generations and Enright’s facility in these two contrasting idioms lend the novel its unique texture. Enright is wonderfully funny and nuanced about the way the two women engage with technology. Here is Nell, belatedly realising that her consciousness has merged with her phone: ‘I put on some toast, check the app to see have I got my period yet. Seriously. I think my phone will know this before I do. I set it down on the counter like, I just did that.’ And here is Carmel, doing battle with WhatsApp: ‘Perhaps she could try for an emoji. Aedemar was big into emojis, though Carmel found them hard to understand. She sent an image of the sun wearing dark glasses. What did that mean?’

In fact this novel is trilingual. About two-thirds of the way through we are briefly plunged back into Phil McDaragh’s rural childhood, in counterpoint to the modern Irish cityscape. This section climaxes in a gripping description of badger-baiting – a formative episode for Phil, and the motherlode of a potent seam of violence that ripples through the novel.

Phil is long dead by the time we meet Nell and Carmel. But his poems and his presence haunt the narrative, in Carmel’s slippery memories of her complicated love for her father, and in the form of a clip of an interview he gave in the 1980s. Both Nell and Carmel stumble across the video and grapple, in their different ways, with their heritage, with Phil’s charm and with his unmistakable aura of danger.

Multiple voices serve Enright well; she expertly arranges echoes and juxtapositions to achieve both psychological depth and formal beauty. This is why this new book and The Green Road are my favourite of her novels, as compared to the lone narrators of The Gathering, Forgotten Waltz and Actress. If The Green Road, which channels the four Madigan siblings and their difficult mother Rose, is a full chorus, The Wren, The Wren sings a sparer song, composed of just a few intertwining strands.

The present-day plot is minimal. Nell gets bruised by Felim, chafes against her mother’s love, does some travelling and achieves a kind of resolution. But there is a lot distilled into this simple vessel: a coming-of-age novel by an older woman, told with a swooping, intergenerational perspective; a complex portrait of a changing Ireland; an intelligent commentary on shifting sexual norms (the novel’s various sex scenes are highlights, handled with honesty and humour); a muted meditation on the environment.

And then there is the language. The text is studded with Phil’s poems – but the real poetry is to be found in Enright’s prose, which is on sparkling form throughout. Her narrators notice everything. The call of the nightjar is ‘a distant sewing machine, shifting down a gear and then up’. In the prissy bathroom that occasions Nell’s contempt there’s ‘a wicker bin with a compostable liner that billows under one yellowed cotton bud, shiny at the tip’. Carmel’s mother’s bandages have ‘dreadful, stiffening stains’. And there’s her adult speculation that her father’s breath must have been terrible, thanks to his meaty diet – ‘though she never noticed it when she clambered up into his lap to put her fingers in his mouth, and pull, and let the gum spring back. Flup. Flup.’ Details like these are more than just details. They are the haemoglobin pulsing through the arteries of Enright’s characters in this shortish novel that is long on real people.

How much does Britain still ‘love’ the NHS?

‘Of course I support the NHS. Everybody supports the NHS, or says they do,’ poked the comedian Frankie Boyle in one of the many campaigns promoting the health service. To admit you don’t believe in this national institution is as taboo as not caring about Britishness, about goodness, about people. The public is keen to find evidence for this collective belief. Nigel Lawson famously said that ‘the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a national religion’ – words which tend to be heard as praise. But his comment was laced with criticism. He continued, ‘with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.’ As a Conservative chancellor of the exchequer in the 1980s, Lawson was clamping down on perceived overspending. He might have been of the mind that, like religion, the NHS had become the opium of the masses: soothing for our pains and fears, but also a significant liability for reckless use and unfinanceable demand.

Everyone knows it’s the 75th anniversary of the health service, due to the number of opinion pieces and new books about what it means to love the NHS, who ruined it and how to save it. As Isabel Hardman’s brilliantly written and engrossing biography of the NHS shows, it has never been on a firm economic footing nor enjoyed a golden era of running smoothly. In the first nine months after its inception on ‘the appointed day’, 5 July 1948, the NHS went 60 per cent over budget. Unmet need far exceeded predictions. Charges were swiftly introduced for dentures, hearing aids and spectacles, as well as for prescriptions in England. But the founding principles remained: a nearly comprehensive service, free for all when needed and funded through general taxation.

These principles were a deep bow in front of the randomness of life, which the destruction of the world wars had shown to be unbearable. Hardman underlines that the NHS was created not because world-leading healthcare didn’t exist in Britain – it certainly did for the rich – but because so many were unable to access it. Aneurin Bevan, the health secretary under Clement Attlee and founding father of the NHS, envisaged that ‘in place of fear’ the new service would remove the financial sting of falling ill. Thirty-two million people signed up and were suddenly eligible to have their chronic hernias and prolapses repaired, receive antibiotics and vaccinations and see a doctor who would come to know them.

The NHS grew in scale, complexity and admiration. ‘Britain’s “love” for the NHS is stated too often but examined too rarely,’ writes Ellen Stewart, a social scientist at the University of Strathclyde, whose deeply thoughtful book analyses what the NHS actually is, beyond just another way to fund healthcare delivery. The idea for How Britain Loves the NHS came to Stewart during Covid, when she felt a ‘dissonance’ shared by many as escalating crisis was accompanied by rainbows and all that clapping. She examines the ways in which the public has campaigned and volunteered for, donated to, and rationed its use of services in order to ‘protect the NHS’. What emerges is an institution requiring care as well as providing it.

As Stewart emphasises, though, the NHS is not a unified system. It’s a nationally devolved network of disjointed organisations with their own managers, standards, practices and outcomes. Sometimes trusts have little to do with each other besides their Pantone 300 blue branding. Private companies dovetail in, as do online offerings, research institutes, charitable bodies and social care. Stewart’s work brings to life this patchwork and stresses that the overarching NHS brand has proved resilient despite failings in local trusts. While ‘satisfaction’ with the NHS dips in reaction to scandals and media headlines, ‘solidarity’ remains strong. Last year, nine in ten Brits still believed in, and were committed to, its founding principles.

The firewall between solidarity and dissatisfaction is evident in Critical, a manifesto of sorts by Julia Patterson. No longer a practising doctor but a devoted advocate, she shares her journey from frontline worker to campaigner, radicalised in the fires of the first junior doctors strikes of 2016. She founded EveryDoctor, which gained visibility during Covid for its important work highlighting PPE shortages and helping hundreds of clinicians to cope with the ‘moral injury, stress and trauma’ of the pandemic.

For Patterson, ‘the NHS is broken’, having been ‘wilfully dismantled’ by Westminster and private companies. To her mind, there have been ‘no bounds to the betrayal’ by politicians over the past four decades. She blames the Conservatives for introducing an internal marketplace to the NHS in the 1980s, while Labour is called out for seeking private financing of NHS facilities which led to spiralling debt in the early 2000s that has yet to be paid off. Patterson is unhappy that ‘many leaders in UK healthcare have also stayed silent when they could, and should, have spoken up about poor policy decisions’. She calls for full public ownership of the NHS, free from private interests, no volunteers, and a ban on outsourcing (for example to Specsavers, which gets an unexpected roasting). Critical is polemical but not unreasonable, though it falters in its lack of illustrative stories and strategic analysis.

While Patterson has lost faith in politicians, Hardman thinks they’re largely well-intentioned. She challenges the widespread idea that the Tories can’t be trusted with the NHS, using examples that include Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell. Fighting for Life is far more compelling when standing up for patients, from the appalling abuses of unmarried women forced to give up their babies in the mid-20th century, to the elderly, ‘left sitting in their own faeces’, with food placed out of reach and their cries ignored, during the early 2000s in Stafford Hospital. Of particular power is her retelling of James Titcombe’s tenacity after his baby son Joshua died, owing to clinical failings at Morecambe Bay in 2008. Thorough investigation by the trust was refused. Hardman perfectly captures the way NHS management tends to engage with those they disagree with: ‘He was treated as though he was merely a father driven mad by grief, not someone who had a point.’

Whether you agree with Patterson’s political disenchantment or Hardman’s even-handedness, it’s clear that when Labour left office in 2010, patients and employees had a service that was flawed but functioning. This cannot be said of the NHS’s current crisis. Waiting times for 7.6 million in England are the longest they have been since records began. Five hundred people are dying every week due to delays in urgent and emergency care. South of the border, NHS vacancies stand at 130,000. Medics in England are committed to indefinite strikes. The official winter plan this year seems to be ‘suck it and see’. AI rescuing the NHS from these struggles is a fantasy. (If you listen very closely at 8:01 Monday to Friday, you may hear thousands of desktops in NHS facilities across the country loading retired versions of Windows.) Private healthcare is booming, with 10 per cent of all UK adults seeking their services last year. This is the Conservatives’ legacy.

When we say the NHS is unaffordable, we mean that the better off think supporting the healthcare of poorer people is too expensive. It feels good to say we love the NHS, but it’s unearned comfort unless we are willing to invest in it. Good healthcare will cost more than the UK has been used to paying, significantly less than the G7 average, 20 per cent less than France and 36 per cent less than Germany.

All three of these books want the NHS to recover (and don’t seem to be saying that just to keep their readers happy). But they have very different visions of what recovery will look like. For Patterson it’s non-negotiable public ownership with a ‘Make the NHS Great Again’ nostalgia. Stewart is optimistic that affection tempered with realism could be a force for change. Hardman is focused on outcomes, wanting a service that serves patients rather than promises. Writing about the NHS is itself an act of care, helping to inform the public about a different NHS that we could demand from our leaders, and that we would be willing to trust with our lives.

A tale of cruelty and imposture: The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, reviewed

‘Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?’ So asks the bewildered author of Old St Paul’s, The Lancashire Witches, The Tower of London and three dozen other forgotten blockbusters stacked with costumed folderol. In Zadie Smith’s sixth novel, William Harrison Ainsworth disapproves, in 1871, of hiscousin-housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, reading a nameless story of dull village folk with ‘no adventure, no drama, no murder’. It can only be George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

The Fraud alights briefly on this quarrel, as it does on many Victorian topics. Yet Smith’s triple-pronged tale of imposture and masquerade, public lies and secret truths, often reverts to fiction’s role either as gaudy stage for the ‘human comedy’ or mirror for the hidden spirit. A person, muses Eliza, may be ‘a bottomless thing’, and ‘12 lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul’. To find ‘ultimate reality’, ‘the door opened inwards’.

But such a character as Arthur Orton, a.k.a. Tom Castro – the obese Wapping butcher who in 1866 returned from Australia claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a grand title and estate – might elude even Eliot’s subtle pen. His door opens on to a void. Fleshly but hollow, that gross actor may demand the antic theatricality of the predatory ‘vampire’ who stalks this novel – Charles Dickens. Since her debut, White Teeth, Smith has sought in fiction and essays to embrace both Eliot and Dickens people: layered souls and painted marionettes. In this, her first period novel, each claims a day, or year, in court.

Seen through the caustic gaze of the Scots, Catholic (but discreetly bisexual) Eliza, Ainsworth’s career makes up one suit in Smith’s deck. It runs from his prodigious heyday as a Kilburn celebrity in the 1830s, outselling Oliver Twist with his footpad romp Jack Sheppard, to his decline into a ‘whiskery, jowly, dejected, old man’, his fustian romances mocked and his female household – Eliza, three daughters and pert second wife, Sarah – mutinous.

The unfolding of the Tichborne Claimant’s case, as this ‘tragicomedy of obscene length’ transfixes the public and improbably channels a people’s revolt (‘He’s for us and we’re for him’, adds another). Crucially, Smith deals a third hand. Its ace is the historical figure of Andrew Bogle, an inscrutable Jamaican servant of the Tichbornes, born enslaved, who became the Claimant’s manager. Bogle, too, has felt like a ‘well-fed fraud, with a home and a hearth’ in Tichborne service. Yet his island’s ‘trough of blood’ washes through his tortured dreams.

‘People lie to themselves all the time,’ as the Claimant’s cockney crowds of true believers prove. To Bogle, Victorian Britain appears as a fraudulent pantomime built on the cruelty and theft of slavery and empire. He remembers Little Johanna, a herbalist and prophetess on the Hope Estate in Jamaica. Punished on the plantation treadmill, she came to see that manufactory of fear and pain as ‘the secret engine of the world’. For all its ebullient mood, The Fraud agrees.

The novel spans a century, from Bogle’s family backstory in the 1770s through 1830s’ literary feuds to the ‘comic carnival’ of the Claimant’s marathon trials. Smith, though, shuffles her cards skilfully. She lays them out in brief, mostly shortwinded chapters. No prolix exposition, Ainsworth-style, here (cheekily, she quotes the old bore’s blether). These narrative gyrations keep the pace brisk but can confuse. Saturnine, charismatic Bogle, meanwhile, threatens to commandeer the ship. His nightmarish Jamaican recollections, or observations of raucous England with its ‘wild struggle of factions’, have the pulse and heft to fuel a novel of their own. Eliza, the ageing outsider ‘with no definition in the world’, inevitably tries to befriend the multiply estranged Bogle – a fathomless enigma with a life in ‘cipher’. Wisely, Smith refuses any sentimental, ‘inter-sectional’ handshakes.

One of Dr Johnson’s lawyer chums tried to be a philosopher but ‘cheerfulness was always breaking in’. Even in slavery’s shadow, that goes for Smith’s fiction. The Fraud has big-hearted fun from first to last: with Ainsworth himself, a ninny and fusspot but a lovable soul; with the bitchery and flattery (‘butter me and I’ll butter you’) of the early Victorian literary scene, its port-swilling popinjays mostly doomed to penury and oblivion (that bloodsucker Dickens aside); with the Tichborne courtroom farce and the superbly shameless Claimant. ‘Wouldn’t a fraud make more of an effort to convince?’ Eliza thinks. So did Orton-Castro’s legion of champions.

‘I draw; it becomes reality,’ boasts the caricaturist George Cruikshank during one of Ainsworth’s bibulous evenings in idyllic Kilburn. In The Fraud, that’s not quite so. Smith wants us to admire the artifice and artistry behind her period decor. She relishes the gags and greasepaint of this antique drollery and knows full well that most fiction springs from ‘worn cloth and stolen truth’. Then Bogle and Eliza remind us of the mystery behind the puppetry. Smith’s work often swings between those poles. Here, again, two kinds of fictional people tug her talent in rival directions. Despite, or because of, this inner tussle, she remains – in all respects – the real thing.

Rooms with little left to view: the queer spaces of E.M. Forster and others

In this intriguing and idiosyncratic book, which aims to present ‘a new history of queer culture and identity over the past 125 years’, Diarmuid Hester recalls how he went to look at E.M. Forster’s former sitting room in King’s College, Cambridge. This once ‘intimate space’, filled with possessions accumulated over a long life, in which Forster wrote and entertained many notable guests from 1946 to his death in 1970, had been repurposed as the college’s ‘grad suite’, filled with battered furniture from Ikea, a football table and a television set. The only remnant of Forster’s residency was a large mantelpiece designed by the writer’s father.

In his search for queer places and what they meant to individuals and the wider community, Hester experiences other disappointments. Someone who now occupies the former house in Jersey of the surrealist photographer Claude Cahun ‘seems affronted’ by Hester’s interest in the property, while the remaining walls of James Baldwin’s 300-year-old farmhouse at Saint-Paul-de-Vence have been absorbed into a modern housing complex that can only be viewed through an imposing steel gate. An attempt to maintain the cluttered Lower East Side apartment of the underground film-maker Jack Smith as a museum was thwarted because, after a long legal battle, everything passed to his estranged and disapproving sister, who sold it all off to a gallery.

Although Hester doesn’t mention it, Forster had never wanted his room to become a place of pilgrimage. In a letter written a few weeks after the writer’s death, the college’s provost wrote: ‘There can be no intention of turning Morgan’s room into any kind of antiquarian “shrine”. He himself took care that this would not happen. All the pictures and personal oddments in the room have been left to individual friends.’ Even the mantelpiece was on offer to the V&A, who presumably refused it. The important thing about these queer spaces, however, is not their survival but the fact that they existed at all. They provide Hester with a novel way of considering the life and work of his subjects, tying them less to the times in which they lived than to places that, in their very different ways, they either created or escaped to.

He starts and finishes at Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the shingle at Dungeness, the one site in the book that has in fact been preserved as a shrine to its former occupant. In between he ranges far and wide in pursuit of his subjects. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the woman’s place was generally deemed to be in the home, the lesbian actor and suffragist Vera Holme invaded the traditionally male spaces of London’s streets. She also adopted male attire: astride a horse leading delegations to Parliament, or in full chauffeur’s livery driving the Pankhursts’ car, she was a striking and highly visible queer figure in the capital.

Claude Cahun, who was challenging gender identity way back in the 1930s by insisting that she was neither masculine nor feminine, found her adopted country of Jersey particularly sympathetic because, Hester suggests, it is somewhere that is ‘between England and France, that’s neither in England nor in France’. The bisexual Josephine Baker, born dirt poor and disadvantaged in America because of her colour, discovered in Jazz Age Paris a city that embraced her and didn’t give two hoots about her race or who she slept with. The exotically furnished homes she created there mirrored her exuberant character. 

Paris was also where James Baldwin came in 1948, hoping, like Baker before him, that his race and sexuality would become less of an issue, and it was here that he wrote his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, in which the protagonist is both white and gay. For Hester it is significant that the room of the book’s title drives the two lovers apart, since Baldwin was prevented by his sexual desires and his sexual shame from ever settling down: ‘He fled from fixity as he fled from his home, from Harlem, from all the claustrophobic little rooms he found with the windows shut, which prevented his escape.’ Whereas Baldwin never believed that sexuality ‘should be the basis for a community’, in San Francisco the writer Kevin Killian’s ‘life and work were dedicated to using spaces – online, offline, literary – to bring people together and cultivate a sense of belonging among them’.

There have been other books about the way gay men have inhabited their own spaces – notably John Potvin’s Bachelors of a Different Sort and Matt Cook’s Queer Domesticities, both published in 2014 – but Hester’s book not only embraces many kinds of sexual difference but is unashamedly personal. He places himself and the journeys he has undertaken at the centre of his narrative, drawing many parallels between his own experiences and those he writes about. This approach will not suit all tastes, but it makes for a very lively and readable book that shows the ways in which outsiders have created interfaces, of variable permeability, with the society in which they lived. 

The many lives of George Weidenfeld, legendary publisher and ladies’ man

‘You can go ahead,’ said the voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘The DPP has decided not to prosecute.’ It was the call that allowed the publication of Lolita, one of the greatest gambles of George Weidenfeld’s career.

The moment George – it is impossible to think of him as anything other than George – had read this controversial book, available from the Olympia Press in Paris, known for its pornographic list, he had wanted to publish it himself; but as the law then stood, it would have been pulped immediately, owing to its story of a middle-aged professor who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl and kidnaps and sexually abuses her. The only glimmer of hope was that a new obscenity bill was being piloted through parliament, which proposed that if a work could be proved to have literary merit, it could be published and sold freely.

Finally, in August 1959, it was passed, and 20,000 copies of Lolita were printed and shelved to await the verdict of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Would there be a prosecution and, if so, who would win the court case? The DPP remained silent, the copies stayed on the shelves and the uncertainty was agonising. Finally, in November, came the fateful telephone call, and seemingly within minutes all 20,000 copies had flown out of the bookshops, to be followed by edition after sell-out edition. The thumping profit set the fledgling firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson on a secure financial footing as well as being a personal triumph for George.

He was in every way an extraordinary man. Clever, ambitious, steel-willed, ferociously energetic, idiosyncratic and so gregarious that one of his four wives later complained that they only had two tête-à-tête evenings during their marriage. Virtually everyone who knew him had a George story, the commonest being that if you sat next to him at dinner at some point he would turn to you and ask you to ‘do a book’ for him. (Here I must add that my own arrival in the Weidenfeld stable was through more conventional means.)

From a flat with no running water in a poor quarter of Vienna, this amazing man rose to a seat the House of Lords, with a heap of awards and an address book filled with the great and the good of three continents. His sumptuous Chelsea apartment was so crammed with wonderful pictures that some had to be hung on the curtains draped proscenium-wise over the dining room windows because there was no space for them on the walls.

Thomas Harding’s account of George’s life is not a straightforward, cradle-to-grave biography but an episodic story, with each chapter hinging on a different book, mostly published by W&N. Alternatively, it as a history of the golden age of publishing from the perspective of one man and, as this, it is fascinating.

It begins with George’s mother’s diary in a chapter entitled ‘Arthur’ (George was born Arthur George Weidenfeld in September 1919), and his flight to London as an 18-year-old after the Anschluss in March 1938. Then comes ‘The Goebbels Experiment’, the title of his first published book, covering his wartime work as a translator at the BBC; the change of his name to George at the behest of a producer; his desire to become a publisher, and the securing of the necessary paper by bringing out a turgid tome, A New Deal for Coal, by the future Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

Here, too, is the seminal meeting (over lunch; entertaining was for George an essential tool from the start) with Nigel Nicolson, the son of two famous parents and with enough money to launch a publishing firm. The pairing of Jewish refugee and quintessential English gentleman would later be caricatured in Private Eye as Snipcock and Tweed. ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ announces the arrival of Antonia Pakenham (later the writer and historian Antonia Fraser) as an editorial assistant. George had sat next to her mother at dinner. 

The heading of another chapter, ‘The Group’, is the title of Mary McCarthy’s famous novel, but it could just as well refer to George’s women, an aspect of his life perhaps too lightly touched on by Harding. After numerous youthful conquests (there is no mention here of the ‘pretty Swedish au pairs’ he once spoke of), he married Jane Sieff, the daughter of Marcus Sieff, of Marks & Spencer fame, then aged 20 to George’s 32. The marriage lasted just four years but it left George established in Chester Square, one of London’s grandest addresses.

Then came Barbara Skelton. The advent of this farouche, green-eyed houri, at the time married to Cyril Connolly, launched a cat’s-cradle tangle of husbands, lovers and authors. Barbara was an aspiring writer, and Connolly was published by George; Barbara and George fell obsessively in love; Connolly divorced Barbara, citing George; George married Barbara, then divorced her, citing Connolly.

Later she recounted the whole saga in her devastatingly frank memoir Tears Before Bedtime. Just before it came out, I interviewed her for a newspaper. George, who had somehow got wind of this, rang me. ‘What did she say about me?’ he asked nervously. Not having the heart to tell him, the only words that sprang to my lips were: ‘She said you had a very hairy back.’ There was a groan and the sound of the receiver being replaced. (Another of George’s quirks was dispensing with the formality of farewell once he had learned what he wanted.)

In July 1966 came a very different marriage, to the pretty American heiress Sandra Payson Myer, aged 38 (George was then 46). He later described her as ‘a tall, imperious blonde with a Vanderbilt face and marvellous cheekbones’. But her bone structure was not enough to save the marriage; with three teenage children, she necessarily had to spend a lot of time in the US, and this, with the long hours George worked, spelt the end.

Between Sandra and his fourth and final, happy marriage (in 1992) to the beautiful Annabelle Whitestone, 26 years his junior, came a liaison with Barbara Amiel (now Lady Black), an affair made famous in Amiel’s no-punches-pulled memoir:

He was… exceptionally clever, with an extra-ordinary sense of humour embellished by a wonderful ability to mimic anyone… Unfortunately, he was also very short, plump and with eyes that could protrude rather alarmingly, especially when upset. And he became alarmingly obsessed with me… The minute I heard George’s suggestion ‘Let’s spend a cosy evening’, I went into semi-paralysis with dread.

Here Amiel gives rather too intimate details of the encounter – not that you will find them in this book.

For Harding sticks, as his subtitle and chapter headings suggest, to the world of publishing. By the 1980s, biographies or memoirs of the rich and famous had become a staple of W&N’s business, bringing in handsome profits. Princess Margaret’s authorised biography became a bestseller, as did Henry Kissinger’s memoir of his White House years. But we also hear about the one that got away, the mega-disaster of Mick Jagger’s ghostwritten autobiography, with its £2 million advance, that didn’t make it into print after being pre-sold worldwide. The manuscript wasn’t fit to publish, said both W&N and the American firm, Bantam. Jagger’s response was: ‘I just said I can’t be bothered with this, and gave the money back.’

With his reputation badly damaged, it was time, George felt, for New York and Ann Getty, the red-haired wife of Gordon Getty, son of the super-rich Paul. They had met at a dinner party – where else? – and in 1985, after the Jagger debacle, they set up a joint publishing company in New York. But after several years of haemorrhaging money and with no great counterbalancing successes it had to be sold.

With the failure of the New York operation, the finances of W&N hung in the balance. What saved things was its purchase in 1991 by Anthony Cheetham, the founder of Orion Books, with George staying on in the emeritus position of chairman. Now rich and as deeply engaged as ever on the international front, the 72-year-old had no intention of slowing down. Days were packed with meetings, travel and a full social calendar. His own (ghostwritten) autobiography, Remembering My Good Friends, was a flop, but George sailed on until, towards the end of 2015, his health began to fail. His final illness was mercifully brief. His death the following year brought eulogies from all over the world. ‘He was the last great example of the vanished world of liberal, cosmopolitan, cultured Europe,’ said the Times. More simply, he was a legendary publisher.

The phoney mystics who fooled the West

In recent years when we’ve talked about the relations between India and the West, we’ve gone back to stressing the impossibility of interchange. A hundred years ago, E.M. Forster ended A Passage to India with the certainty that Aziz and Fielding could not be friends. Forster thought things would be different after Indian independence, but the spectres of cultural appropriation and the assertion of ongoing imperialist guilt have discouraged equal exchange. 

That may explain why the excellent story Mick Brown tells in The Nirvana Express has hardly been covered in the past. How western travellers to India went from sober, interested inquiry to a weirdly content-free fantasy existence, and how some sharp-minded Indians saw an opportunity to make a lot of money and garner a good deal of vulgar status are questions that don’t always show the participants in the best light, and writers have stayed clear. 

In the first stages, western (principally British) observers of Indian culture were driven by scholarship and sustained by responsible investigation. Although it would not be true to say that the British were primarily responsible for an understanding of Indian culture (some maharajahs maintained scholars in their households in the same way as they provided for artists and poets), they certainly took things a step further. Sir William Jones’s researches into Sanskrit resulted in an unprecedented understanding of relationships between the Indo-European languages. Francis Buchanan, an East India Company official, surveying Bihar in 1811, rediscovered the long forgotten site of the Emperor Ashoka’s shrine at Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s first enlightenment. These men were discoverers of truth in another culture, though of course a place must also be found for orientalists such as Charles Wilkins, who in 1785 produced a translation of The Bhagavad Gita and introduced the West to a then unfamiliar culture.  

Serious investigation by western scholars continued, but Brown’s interest moves entertainingly to those whose idea of India was less rigorous. Through Edwin Arnold’s long poem The Light of Asia (1879), the Victorian general reader became acquainted with the Buddha’s teachings. This poem was less a sumptuously oriental Fitzgerald-type Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam than an attempt at a kind of Essay on Man about an eastern religion:

Life runs its rounds of living, climbing up
From mote, and gnat, and worm, reptile, and fish,
Bird and shagged beast, man, demon, deva, God,
To clod and mote again, so are we kind
To all that is… 

The Light of Asia was immensely popular (in 1902 the first westerner, an Irish migrant worker, was ordained a Buddhist monk), and from it sprang the richly amusing line of charlatans, mountebanks, gulls, knaves and opportunists that provide the meat of Brown’s book.

Indians had been coming to the West for generations – Dickens met Rabindranath Tagore’s moneymaking grandfather Dwarkanath – but now a wave of mystics arrived. Among the first was Swami Vivekananda, an honourable and sincere man whose appearance at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 unleashed mass hysteria. Annie Besant, the theosophist, was swept away; Mrs Roxie Blodgett, an Indiana businessman’s wife, was thrilled to see ‘scores of women’ besieging him. He was signed up immediately by an American speakers’ agency. Other theosophists spread the word, including the glamorous Madame Blavatsky, aiming to link all the world’s religions. 

It is easy to be amused by the overheated and slightly vacuous content of the theosophists and other enthusiasts for Vivekananda. But this was a period of intense intellectual ferment when all sorts of new movements were being touted. Some, like women’s rights and vegetarianism, flourished; others, such as theosophy, spiritualism and nudism, quickly found their natural limits. More gurus started to be promoted. It is around this time that E.F. Benson produced the deathless episode in Queen Lucia when a swami teaching yoga arrives in an English village – who of course turns out to be a cook at a London Indian restaurant, ordering brandy on Daisy Quantock’s account. Some of these characters were intelligent people, talking to other intelligent people; some were brazen chancers, seeing, with Vivekananda’s triumph in mind, an opportunity to exploit rich, naive westerners. 

In 1930, a failed London bookseller and publisher, an associate of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, set off for India in search of spiritual enlightenment. Paul Brunton came across a mystic, Meher Baba, via a recommendation from a fellow Crowleyite. Meher had taken a vow of silence five years earlier and communicated by means of an alphabet board. He informed Brunton that he was preparing to convey a spiritual message to the world. In 1931, aged 37, he announced: ‘Love calls me to the West. Make preparation.’

In London and then more profitably in America, Meher impressed his hosts with his spirituality, often reducing them to tears. He knew everything. Not that he read the newspapers – ‘he places his hands and fingers on the printed words’ – or even books. It was really only when he hit Hollywood that doubts began to surface. Much of his spiritual energy started to be devoted to engineering a meeting with Greta Garbo and persuading the studios to make a massive movie about his life. 

In these circumstances, decent, honourable Indian thinkers grew baffled by the lack of engagements. Another of Brunton’s finds, Sri Ramana Maharshi, emerges as a thoughtful person, slightly perplexed by the questions of his strange visitors and giving them the politest brush-offs. By now Meher had taken to adopting madmen for a week or two until they bored him, including a man who ate coins, waited until they emerged in his faeces and then ate them again. Brunton asked whether Meher was, as he claimed, the avatar of a god. ‘Everyone is the avatar of a god,’ he was told. The situation is gloriously dramatised in Half a Life, a late novel by V.S. Naipaul, in which the search for meaning by rich westerners creates a moneymaking guru. 

At a certain point, the enthusiastic quest for not very meaningful pieties got overtaken, and was combined with a wider enthusiasm for drugs. Quite what the taking of industrial quantities of LSD had to do with the proponents of eastern philosophy ought to have been asked more often than it was. The Beatles’s famous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi put up with a lot for the sake of his famous followers and lost no time in advertising them in order to drum up more business. The song ‘Sexy Sadie’ on the White Album goes: ‘What have you done?’ But it should have been ‘Maharishi, what have you done?’ The lyric had to be changed for fear of the Maharishi’s lawyers descending with a defamation suit. 

Some of these versions of Indian culture and thought were remote indeed from the original. Jack Kerouac planned to start a Buddhist monastery in Mexico dedicated to ‘pure essence Buddhism… that would be, I ’spose, no rules’. Brown wryly comments that this ‘would have made it unique among Buddhist monasteries throughout the world, which generally have more rules than the British civil service’. When such followers went to India, they generally saw only what they expected to see. ‘Everybody in India is religious, everybody on to some sadhana,’ Allen Ginsberg wrote, which might have surprised the argumentative lawyers and dandy litterateurs of Calcutta. Sometimes this led to real conflict. One mystic, Rajneesh, declared himself the ‘rich man’s guru’ and encouraged sexual libertinism. The locals living near his ashram found the sight of westerners dressed as monks or nuns copulating in the street difficult to deal with. 

Increasingly, the problem was solved by creating a sort of Indian spiritualism which was basically run by westerners in their own projection. Hare Krishna was invented by a pharmacist on New York’s Lower East Side in 1966. In a sharp novel, John Updike has a charismatic guru turn out to be one Art Steinmetz from Massachusetts. This is far from implausible. A Buddhist philosopher, Anagarika Govinda, was a German called Ernst Hoffmann. Krishna Prem turned out to be a Ronald Nixon from Cheltenham. Madhava Ashish was in reality a former RAF engineer, Alexander Phipps, with a disconcertingly unmystical style of banter. ‘Aren’t you the chap who got bounced from Harvard?’ he asked one seeker after knowledge.

The Nirvana Express is a drily amusing book on a subject that would make many writers nervous. It describes some startling stupidity as well as some very sharp behaviour without forcing the point, and includes fierce assertions by followers on both sides. It is interesting to compare Brown’s well-documented narrative of Meher Baba’s life with the breathlessly reverential account on Wikipedia.

I strongly recommend paying attention to the book’s footnotes where some of the more knockabout material is buried. The best of these is a spirited exchange between Brown and a representative of Bhagavan Das, who is set on extracting hundreds of dollars for a conversation. It makes one realise that this character had for years probably only dealt with people all too ready to pay large sums in return for almost nothing. A lot of sharing of knowledge has taken place between the best minds of India and the best minds of the West, but those minds are not, to our considerable entertainment, represented much in Brown’s book.

Scottish politicians have neglected serious economic policy for too long

Economic growth is a taboo subject in Scottish politics. Throughout a succession of administrations, of all shades and stripes, the focus of government in Scotland has been almost wholly on social policy. To the extent economic policy has been widely considered, it is in the context of how yet more money can be squeezed from an increasingly compressed and constricted tax base.  

The consequences of this inertia are now evident in abundance. Scotland’s GDP growth rate has lagged significantly behind the rest of the UK over the last decade – a not inconsiderable achievement given recent circumstances – while productivity remains stubbornly low, below the national average. Meanwhile, Scotland also faces significant structural challenges, not least its rapidly ageing population. In short, without significant and sustained economic growth, Scotland and its public services are on course to fall into an ever darker, ever deeper, black hole.  

Despite increasingly urgent and apocalyptic warnings from business and industry about this looming crisis, Scotland’s politicians remain reluctant to act (if you are kind) – or incapable of acting (if you are not). Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s ailing First Minister, is likely to announce plans to increase Scotland’s already significant income tax rates further, but in this instance at least he is not the only culpable party. 

For years it has been perfectly common – indeed, almost accepted – that party political manifestos for Scottish parliament elections need not be costed. This not only betrays the lack of seriousness among the Scottish political class when it comes to economic policy, but also its distinct lack of vision. After all, if you are not going to bother to cost your manifesto, there is no reason why you should not promise to, quite literally, pave the streets with gold. Instead, an absence of ambition and imagination leaves Scotland with bizarre policy pledges about the banning of the use of wild animals in travelling circuses or the creation of a fleet of mobile abattoirs – unrelated proposals, I should add.

In fairness to the Scottish Conservative party, they are now trying to right this considerable collective wrong. In a speech in Edinburgh on Tuesday, opposition leader Douglas Ross outlined his plan to ‘grasp the thistle’ and get economic growth back on the agenda in Scotland. 

This makes good political sense for the Scottish Tory leader given his party’s diminished popularity among voters. A poll by Survation this week showed a majority of people in Scotland believe they do not get value for money from public services, despite the highest tax burden in the UK. A similar number, logically if unsurprisingly, agreed that the SNP-Green government’s policies are actively making Scotland less competitive and, by implication, a less attractive place to do business.  

With the threat of Scottish independence receding in voters’ minds – at least for now – it is shrewd of Ross to fill a void that has emerged not just in the last few years, but since the dawn of devolution itself. Across Scotland, there is a cohort of frustrated taxpayers and bemused business leaders who are growing increasingly tired of paying more and more and getting less and less.  

This is obviously natural territory for the Tories to occupy, but it is also an issue that seemingly transcends the often deeply entrenched party-political loyalties found in Scotland. One of the reasons why Kate Forbes’ eye-catching but ultimately ill-fated campaign to become SNP leader garnered so much attention was her evident desire to refocus the Scottish parliament on economic rather than social policy. The necessity of her argument, and the forcefulness with which it was articulated, won her a considerable number of admirers in Unionist parties as well as the SNP.  

Of course, while he talks a good game, Ross’ plans as they stand are light on detail while he also – understandably if absurdly – ignores the issues in Scotland’s economy created by Brexit. But we can live in hope that the detail and delivery will come later. For now, at least, Ross deserves credit for talking about a vital subject that has otherwise been ignored for far too long in Scottish politics.  

Meet the soldiers clearing mines for Ukraine’s counteroffensive

Nearly three months into their counteroffensive, the Ukrainian army has finally found a way to breach the first line of Russian defence. Ukraine has moved through minefields, ‘dragon’s teeth’ defences and swarms of drones. They have retaken the village of Robotyne which lies on the highway to Tokmak, the next objective on the way to Melitopol (one of the main Ukrainian targets for blocking the land corridor to Crimea). Russia is trying to reinforce its defences, while Kyiv is anticipating a much-needed breakthrough.   

Russian forces have built some of the most extensive battlefield fortifications seen in Europe since the second world war to defend those borders it has managed to establish. To date, approximately 1,500 mines have been planted per square kilometre in the south of Ukraine. The Ukrainian army now has to face a layered Russian defence north of the village of Novoprokopivka, one that is manned by Russian reserves, an extensive artillery, and the same mine density as on the path to Robotyne.

In June, Russian mines destroyed many Western vehicles and caused massive casualties amongst Ukrainian personnel. Ukraine is the most heavily mined country in the world with a third of its land now deadly to walk on. It is mainly for this reason that it took the Ukrainian army ten weeks to overcome the first line of Russia’s defence and capture the first village on the road to Tokmak. 

Kyiv’s strategy has improved since then. Now, the path for the Ukrainian infantry is cleared by combat engineers, or ‘sappers’ – only then do heavy armoured vehicles follow. Armed with metal detectors and mine-clearing kits, sappers hunt for mines under heavy Russian fire. ‘We go ahead of the infantry, ahead of the intelligence – we go ahead of everyone’, says Varan, sapper platoon commander for the 108th brigade. 

Varan commands a ten-member sapper team searching for possible routes for troops through the grey zone between the Ukrainian and Russian sides. He says the parameters of the grey zone change constantly as both armies install new mines and unexploded shells scatter the terrain. 

Sappers work in bulletproof vests, but without heavyweight suits. ‘It would severely hamper your mobility,’ says Varan. ‘In a combat situation, we can be either mobile or heavily-armoured. We can’t be both.’ In the open fields and steppe of the Zaporizhzhia region, the likes of Varan are easily exposed to enemy. So they often crawl, supervised by drones or covered by artillery fire, wearing light body armour, helmets and knee pads as they approach the areas they are demining. Bad weather plays into their hands, as it makes life harder for Russian spy drones. 

The Kremlin’s strategy in the field has been to create a buffer zone ahead of their front line with so many explosives that the ground becomes virtually unpassable for ground troops. A sapper needs about 15 minutes to remove one mine. In heavily mined areas it can take them up to four hours to clear about 100 meters. They are in it for the long haul if Ukraine needs to cover 18 miles just on the route to Tokmak.

The sappers do have some tools for detecting mines at their disposal, such as minesweepers, mine probes and even aerial reconnaissance. Some mines heat up from the sun during the day and emit a glow visible on thermal imagers at night, making it easing to spot them. This advantage will disappear with the onset of cold weather, and even now it doesn’t always help. ‘It works only for mines with a metal case. The ones with plastic or that are buried in the ground don’t heat up, so we have to walk and find them visually,’ Varan tells me. 

Then there is the mine-clearing line charge: a small rocket carrying a rope of explosives. Fired about 400 metres ahead of the sappers, the idea is that the explosives attached to the rope will all detonate, clearing the mines and leaving a safe passage wide enough for troops and vehicles. Additionally, anti-mine trawls installed on vehicles decrease the chances of explosives detonating under military equipment and personnel when convoys are on the move. Shelling Russian positions with artillery also helps detonate part of the explosives.

The goal of the demining team is to clear a narrow path so the infantry and vehicles can advance. Then, on their way back, sappers broaden the trail further, using minesweepers and mine probes. 

This work is made harder due to the fact that soldiers are encountering the kind of anti-personnel landmines banned by international law. Recently, a gruesome video circulated of a Ukrainian soldier who jumped from a truck and was instantly blown up. He survived but lost a leg. ‘It was a forbidden anti-personnel high-explosive mine’, Varan says. ‘Its hard to spot. It has very few metal objects inside, so the minesweeper may not react to it. You also can’t poke the ground with a metal stick to check every centimetre of land while Russians fire at you,’ he explains. So even when sappers clear a path, there is still a chance of stepping on something and being blown up. 

Russians have widely been launching prohibited ammunition, in particular phosphorus bombs. ‘If there is heavy shelling, you lie down and crawl before the mine probe’, Volodymyr, a sapper of the 108th brigade, tells me. ‘The Russians are employing similar tactics, donning suits that block heat to evade detection by thermal imagers as they advance towards us.’ 

He says that before the start of the counteroffensive, the war in the Zaporizhzhia region was fought by sabotage-reconnaissance groups on both sides. ‘Neither side had the strength to seize the land, to break through. So they crawled with a sapper ahead of them and had small fights in enemy trenches before coming back. Even if you won, you could not keep that position – you must take several others and cover all approaches to secure the liberated area.’ 

While the Ukrainian army is making advances, recaptured territory is still filled with mines and self-made explosives. Often ‘surprises’ that have been left behind are torn apart during shelling or a fire that started due to shelling – burning bushes and trees can trigger the mines. All of this increases casualties. 

This also doesn’t discount the potential for a breakthrough in the opposite direction: Ukrainian sappers must deploy mines to impede Russian forces. ‘It is very heavy. One mine weighs about 10 kilograms, you must run with at least four on you, plus equipment, then quickly install everything and run back,’ Vitaliy, another sapper of the 108th brigade, explains. He adds that several hundred mines are needed to cover five to six kilometres of land. Following the war, these mines shouldn’t pose an issue, as the locations where they have been planted have all been noted down; there are significant doubts that the Russians are doing the same.

Over the weekend, Volodymyr Zelensky said that once the Ukrainian army reaches the administrative border with occupied Crimea, there could be the opportunity to politically pressure Russia into returning it with ‘fewer casualties’. Earlier, he said he was not sure Kyiv could talk about the military de-occupation of Crimea in public at the moment. This softened diplomacy might help Ukraine in maintaining Western support, especially if the impending autumn mud and winter cold hamper the Ukrainian army’s progress. Nevertheless, the possibility remains for Ukrainian forces to shift the momentum of the fight – as the last week has shown, chances for a big breakthrough are still high.