Lumpy, bulgy, human: Threads, at Arnolfini Bristol, reviewed

Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited to robots. But this summer the cavernous lobbies of two City buildings – 99 Bishopsgate and 30 Fenchurch Street – have been humanised by To Boldly Sew, an exhibition of wall hangings by the winner of this year’s Brookfield Properties Crafts Award, Alice Kettle.

As the owners of Renaissance palazzi and Jacobean mansions understood, wall hangings bring warmth and colour to a cold interior: once more prized than paintings, they doubled as decorations and draught excluders. Now, dignified with the name of ‘fibre arts’, fabrics are back in the fine-art fold and most of the artists working with them are women.

Time was when every girl knew how to sew, before fast fashion and Ikea curtains. Alice Kettle grew up in an old-fashioned household where ‘the sewing machine was always out’ and, after studying painting under Terry Frost at Reading, she returned to her first love: thread. Astonishingly, her embroidered hangings are made on a sewing machine from which she conjures marks as fluid as brushstrokes – in a film of her in action, the sinuous figure of a swimmer emerges magically from under a clattering needle as she pushes a swathe of fabric back and forth.

Shoals of these brightly coloured swimmers ply the waves of her eight metre wall hanging ‘Sea’ (2018) in Bishopsgate, while a procession of planes crosses the skies of ‘Flightlines’ (2022) in Fenchurch Street. Her images describe a world in flux. The colours and textures are rich – there’s plenty of gold thread – but the drawing is naive: it’s ‘raw art’ tapestry with an opulent touch. Her compositions, she admits, are ‘very unstructured’; like the stories, mythological or topical, that inspire them they follow ‘a fluid process of development’.

‘Sea’ is a companion piece to ‘Ground’ (2018), the hanging greeting visitors to Threads: ‘Breathing Stories into Materials’, the new exhibition Kettle has co-curated at the Arnolfini Bristol: both were made for her 2018 Whitworth Gallery exhibition Thread Bearing Witness and incorporate drawings by refugees. Easily loaded on to a camel, textiles are a traditional nomadic medium but – as our English metaphors ‘weaving tales’ and ‘spinning yarns’ suggest – their association with storytelling crosses cultures. ‘Warp’, ‘weft’, ‘spin’, ‘knit’, ‘stitch’: the techniques these old English words describe are universal, and the artists in this show are international.

The imagery on Welsh-Ghanaian Anya Paintsil’s figurative rugs draws on a mix of West African folk tales and Celtic mythology: ‘We both fall over that’s the trick’ (2023) depicts Rhiannon from the Mabinogion, falsely accused of murdering and eating her infant son, then sentenced to carry strangers on her back for seven years. The interior of Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh’s parasol-cum-tent ‘From Dawn to Dusk’ (2019) is embroidered with the ‘microhistories’ of Arab women, ancient and modern, who defied convention – from Sayyidah Aisha Bint Talha, wife of one of Mohammed’s companions, who went unveiled so people would recognise God’s grace in her beauty, to a Beirut housewife who, after her husband was killed for his politics, taught her sons to help in the kitchen and make their own beds. Of such things revolutions are made.  

Not all the narratives are sequential. The carnivalesque figures in fibre artist Anna Perach and ceramicist Anousha Payne’s hybrid installation ‘As She Laughs’ (2021) are inspired by the surrealist game of exquisite corpse, while the show’s token male contributors – four out of 21 – eschew narrative altogether. Richard McVetis’s hand-embroidered ‘Variations of a Stitched Cube’ (2017) are speckled with tiny stitches like a collection of square birds’ eggs. Will Cruickshank’s ‘Wound Frames’ (see above), loaded with varicoloured thread using a hand-winding machine powered by a repurposed cement mixer, resemble giant wooden bobbins.

Upcycling is in: Nigerian artist Ifeoma U. Anyaeji has used a West African hair-threading technique to construct her ongoing installation, ‘Ezuhu ezu’ (In[complete]), from non-biodegradable plastic bags. Committed make-do-and-mender Celia Pym, meanwhile, has practised a woolly form of Japanese Kintsugi on a child’s Fair Isle sweater once belonging to her mother Hope, ravelling up its moth holes with lilac wool. ‘Hope’s Sweater’ (1951, 2011) has a strangely touching presence, as do the ‘Mended Paper Bags’ Pym embellished with stitching during the pandemic. After accidentally tearing a potato bag and applying one of her ‘small acts of care’ to it, she went on to bestow similar TLC on a whole series of bags that now stand self-supported, stiffened by stitching, in rows, as delicate as Edmund de Waal’s porcelain vessels and rather more interesting.

Containers that once held things have history. There’s something haunting about the way the hanging crocheted forms of Turkish artist Esna Su’s ‘The Burden II, My Trousseau’ (2017-23) preserve the shapes of their previous contents, like string bags of ghost shopping. They’re lumpy, they’re bulgy, but – like everything in this exhibition – they’re human.

Our great art institutions have reduced British history to a scrapheap of shame

Let’s indulge in some identity politics for a second: I am from Hong Kong, born as a subject of the last major colony of the British Empire, minority-ethnic, descended from Chinese refugees, now living here in exile. This summer, both the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain are presenting new displays that are meant to reflect the ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ identities of Britain. Supposedly, I fit nicely among their target audience. In reality, as an immigrant looking to be included in this nation, I am perplexed by my visits. For two publicly funded museums tasked with telling the story of this country through the portraiture of its eminent figures and its art, their curators seem unsure if this is a nation worth being a part of, and if there’s a fair story to tell about it.

The National Portrait Gallery has recently reopened after a three-year, £41 million refurbishment and reworking of the building. The architects Jamie Fobert and Purcell have done an excellent job. No longer does the structure feel like a poky afterthought tacked on the National Gallery’s backside. There’s a much-needed new entrance, and the beauty of Ewan Christian’s original features have been carefully uncovered, from the mosaic floors and lost spaces to the generous roof lights. The artwork has never been seen in a worthier setting.

A shame then that the wall texts think so little of the artwork itself. Portraits of the long-dead are chided for their connections to colonisation and slavery. John Locke’s anti-slavery liberal theories, for instance, are caveated by his involvement in Carolina’s constitution. William Gladstone’s democratic reforms are negated by the existence of his father’s slave plantations. It’s hard to figure out what this scattershot approach to history adds to the understanding of visitors, other than serving as a nagging sign of the curators’ moral high ground. I am reminded of Mao’s Red Guards digging up the remains of historical figures to denounce them as counter-revolutionary.

The centrepiece of the relaunch, the newly acquired Joshua Reynolds portrait of Mai, a Polynesian visitor to Britain, is billed as the ‘first British painting to depict a person of colour with dignity and grandeur’. Yet the NPG already owns an earlier portrait of Mai by Reynolds’s student, William Parry, also painted with dignity and grandeur. There is, too, a curious image of Pocahontas visiting England in 1616, portrayed magisterially in Jacobean court dress.

Instead of celebrating Reynolds’s Mai portrait for its technical mastery – how Reynolds captures Mai’s pose, the structured drapery of his robes, the detail of his tattoos – the work is hollowed out and reduced to a racialised gaze.

The NPG boasts that ethnic-minority sitters now form 11 per cent of the display (up from 3 per cent). This is representation by bean-counting. The wall text speculates on the African ancestry of George III’s wife Queen Charlotte, even though the curators admit it’s circumstantial. Is this a ploy to bump up the numbers?

The older work receives the brunt of the historical revisionism. The odd modern piece interrupts the chronological flow, such as when a 1980s protest placard featuring Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution, is placed among 19th-century works. Yet the reverse doesn’t happen. Why not? With a collection dating back to the Tudor period, the NPG has a rare opportunity to explain how Britain became the most tolerant, multicultural democracy in Europe. The curators take this as an inevitability. But we immigrants – who vote with our feet – know that this is not a given. Wouldn’t it paint a fuller picture of the country’s diversity if the narratives of successful minority Britons today were in dialogue with the historic pioneers who helped make embracing difference part of Britain’s story? Perhaps centuries-old portraits of those working towards Catholic emancipation have something in common with the equality campaigners of today?

The curators seem to want to tell only the obvious story: that British history is a scrapheap of shame, with the odd salvageable episode. Abolitionist figures feature as a moment of national pride in the room dealing with late 18th- and early 19th-century reformers, yet they are treated as if they were uniquely enlightened, rather than being the culmination of several historical tides. (The Christianity of John Wesley and William Wilberforce, still shared by many of Britain’s minorities, is mentioned as a mere coincidence.) The values against which history is condemned today seemingly emerge out of a vacuum and not from this very history itself. Would the gallery’s pantheon of modern Great Britons be there if not for Britain’s complex history of conflict and conciliation between pope and king, king and parliament, parliament and people, nation and empire?

There is at least a vague acknowledgement at the National Portrait Gallery of ‘complex histories’ and how the work might ‘open up conversations’. The collection has always been more about the sitters than the art, so a focus on social history is somewhat forgivable. Tate Britain has no such excuse for the first rehang of its permanent collection in a decade.

The display opens with a declaration of original sin: its eponymous founder, Henry Tate, a sugar tycoon, taints the gallery with the miasma of slavery and forced labour. I suspect the curators would rather flog the lot to pay for reparations, but legally can’t, so instead have chosen to do battle by means of  zealous reinterpretation. Joseph Van Aken’s genteel portrait of Georgians drinking tea, for example, is accompanied with a finger-wagging warning of the colonial baggage of these ‘global commodities’. As a Hong Konger, my very existence was created by the geopolitics of Sino-British trade. Do I also need to come with a health warning?

The introductory video explains that art can say something ‘about the world we want to live in’ – and there are some clues as to the world the curators want you to live in. The Glorious Revolution is chided for not being revolutionary enough by Nils Norman’s mural of unrealised utopias. The ideas of the French Revolution are pined after in a piece by Ruth Ewan (born 1980) that hangs among late 18th-century works: a clock with ten hours alluding to the Jacobins’ introduction of decimalisation and wishfully titled ‘We could have been anything we wanted to be’.

Occasionally the curators remember why people visit galleries in the first place. One room recreates an 18th-century-style exhibition, every surface crammed with paintings, and no room for labels: a George Stubbs of a lion devouring a horse; a rare indoor scene from Turner, illuminated by candlelight; a John Hoppner showing sailors mooring in a gale. Here the eye is briefly allowed to delight in composition, chiaroscuro, kineticism. Filling the soaring central Duveen Galleries, meanwhile, are works that are as alluring for the nose as the eyes – Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly, tectonic plaster cast of a staircase’s void and the chiselled undulations of Vong Phaophanit’s monumental ten-tonne pile of rice. Lest anyone denounces the curators for frivolity while the world starves, however, the latter work comes with an apologetic clarification: the ‘ten tonnes of fresh rice will be donated to local food banks’.

Even the flame-haired figures by avowed aestheticists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones – who believed beauty, not morals, should be art’s defining focus – have to be bookended by displays on the Chartists and William Morris’s socialism. Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet’ is rebranded as a ‘socialist’ portrayal of ‘Jesus’s labour’. The long march through the institutions even tramples through the Via Dolorosa.

Elsewhere, in centring underwhelming artists for political reasons, Francis Bacon’s triptychs are shoved into a corner or made to bunk up with Henry Moore’s large-scale bronzes in a room that is too small.

The parting shot is in Tate’s Art Now room for emerging artists. Before us sits an empty acrylic glass cube, a work by Rhea Dillon that’s meant to represent everything from ‘imprisonment’, ‘breath lost stolen and from Black subjects’ and ‘environmental racism’ to ‘the link between the climate crisis and the birth of the transatlantic slave trade’. This credulity-stretching moment is a sign of a profound crisis within the arts: these national institutions have succumbed to the ever-fracturing logic of identity politics, and given up on the possibility of creating any sense of commonality through culture.

You don’t need to ‘Queer’ the Mary Rose

I have an idea for the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. My idea is for a Mary Rose Ultimate Experience – a funfair ride which replicates the experience of those 500 young boys and men as they sank with the great Tudor warship. There’ll be no need for expensive visuals because it would have been dark down there below deck and I’m hoping the passengers on my ride will be flung violently from side to side because first aboard will be the director and trustees of the museum and there they will have to stay until they promise never again to publish anything remotely like the piece that has just appeared on the museum website.

The blog is prominently displayed on the site and its title is: ‘How can we understand the Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a queer lens?’

The answer to the question is that we can’t, of course, because you don’t ‘understand’ anything through a lens, queer or otherwise. Nevertheless, the author gives it a go. On the subject of a small, wooden octagonal mirror frame dredged up with the ship she writes: ‘Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people… For queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.’

What has this to do with the original mirror fame? Isn’t this supposed to be a platform for drowned Tudors? Is this is what history dysphoria feels like?

Of a gold wedding ring found on board the author writes: ‘In England, Wales and Scotland, same-sex marriages became legal in 2014… Today, same-sex couples cannot be married by a minister of the church of England, the church that Henry VIII established.’ Try to excise from your mind, the image of the 16th century sailor that ring once belonged to, his bride and perhaps his children, left behind. Who cares for him, when there’s propaganda to copy and paste.

Then there’s a nit comb. Nit combs were the personal objects found most often on the Mary Rose, says the author. She adds, ‘These nit combs would have been mainly used by the men to remove nits.’ I actually find this sentence delightful. It speaks of the sort of desperation we all feel when confronted with a word count. But how will the author manage to understand nit combs through a queer lens? I felt almost eager to find out. The answer was a word association game. Nit combs are not for styling hair, she writes. However, having introduced the idea of ‘hair styling’, she’s off to the LGBTQ+ races. ‘For many queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity. Today, hairstyles are often heavily gendered, following the gender norm that men have short hair, and women have long hair. By “subverting” and playing with gender norms, Queer people can find hairstyles that they feel comfortable wearing.’ Maybe the author is a time traveller from the 1950s. She sure doesn’t live in Hoxton.

Whoever she is though, she won’t have to suffer the Marie Rose Ultimate drowning experience. However awful the piece, it’s clearly not her fault. She’s almost certainly just an intern, or perhaps a young member of the social media team with the usual Gen Z passion for Queering. The people who should suffer are the people who should know better: the ‘Collections’ team who should love their objects more than this and the directors who read the piece and, fearing ‘transphobia’, didn’t take it down. They know what a terrible disservice it does to the poor crew of the Mary Rose, and to the young writer too.

Why aren’t we more afraid of China?

Electric cars made in China could be turned off remotely, immobilising them instantly and crippling the West. That terrifying prospect was highlighted by Professor Jim Saker, president of the Institute of the Motor Industry. ‘The car manufacturer may be in Shanghai and could stop 100,000 to 300,000 cars across Europe thus paralysing a country,’ Saker warned. Yet few people seem bothered.

Nor was there much reaction to Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith’s claim on LBC this week that Beijing may have used a hidden device in Rishi Sunak’s car to track the PM’s movements. If this allegation involved another country it would likely have lead the headlines for days. But, because it’s China, nobody is alarmed. 

During the height of the Cold War, it was hard to escape from the ‘Red Scare’. Films and TV during the 1950s and 60s were bristling with sinister communist spies and agents, fiendish Russian plots and defections and men meeting on park benches whispering ‘the swallows are flying backwards over Prague this year’. This time around, the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushed into the margins.

Isn’t it weird how we don’t care much about China? Our pop culture and discourse is obsessed by prison camps and dictatorships. We’re fixated with standing up for those mysterious values of inclusion, diversity, and so on. Yet there is, right now, a totalitarian regime that, on clear evidence, has imprisoned people in labour camps on ethnic lines. You’d think more people would notice, that it would be a hot topic. Maybe if we really cared about our ‘values’ – enough to make us overlook the convenience of a pipeline of cheap stuff – it would be more of a talking point. 

China, of course, was also the origin of a virus that caused an estimated seven million deaths and unleashed economic destruction and concomitant immiseration on a mass scale. And our reaction now is a shrug of ‘oh well’. 

We talk all the time about climate catastrophe and the race towards the enormously expensive goal of Net Zero. But when it comes to taking action against the biggest polluter – China – we’re not particularly bothered. 

Perhaps this apathy is because reports of hidden Sim cards and viruses escaping from labs sound ludicrous. Like Hollywood clichés, it’s hard to take them seriously. The Western entertainment industry did too good a job predicting this stuff, making us smirk when it turns up in real life; the sinister hidden ‘extra’ microchips in consumer electronics goes back at least as far as a 1968 Doctor Who story where the Cybermen were the rotters behind it; by 1982, and Halloween III: Season Of The Witch it already felt a bit old. Now that it might actually be happening, it’s hard to know how to react. To those of a certain age the coming of Covid was so exactly like the plague scenario depicted in the opening titles of the BBC’s 70s drama Survivors – a masked Chinese scientist dropping a flask (butterfingers!) and then hopping on a plane – that it seemed almost comical. 

Another reason we bury our heads in the sand about China is that we just cannot help being parochial. Chinese names can be hard for Westerners to remember or pronounce. In the last days before the national curriculum, my school put us through an O Level module on twentieth century Chinese history. Everyone got hopelessly confused. It was impossible not to muddle up Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat-Sen and Wang Jingwei. I can’t help thinking that if the current CCP was filled with people called Oliver or Angela we might be more interested. 

Even the eco lobby – the likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion – are turning a blind eye to China. They target mums on the school run in south London, but shy away from direct action against Beijing. What are they afraid of? Whatever the reason, their lack of engagement with mega-polluting China reveals their actual motive: to annoy fellow Westerners that they don’t like. This isn’t because of denial or unconscious bias on their part, just that China’s polluting factories seem so far away to our feeble, evolved-for-locality human minds. It’s too much trouble to think about problems elsewhere. We are rarely prepared to make the effort.

One person who did call out China was Donald Trump, and look where that got him. Trump’s appellation of Covid as ‘the Chinese virus’ made Western politicians and the media wince: it sounded a bit racist, and brought back uncomfortable memories of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu or Ming The Merciless. But if Trump’s phrase made us uneasy, it wasn’t only because of his language: he was one of the few Western politicians willing to stick it to Beijing over Covid and the botched cover-up of what really happened in Wuhan in 2019.

Trump is gone, for now – and few politicians are willing to confront Beijing. But perhaps we shouldn’t worry that the threat posed by the CCP isn’t more of a talking point. Hopefully, someone somewhere is aware of the actual dangers posed by president Xi and his acolytes and is taking the necessary steps for our protection. Maybe MI5’s hilarious rebranding as an inclusive employer is a cunning smokescreen, behind which it remains a ruthless, well-oiled counter-espionage outfit that doesn’t make such silly considerations a priority.

Let’s hope so. But in the mean time, we ought to pay more attention to the threat posed by China’s leadership, and trust less to the highly scientific probability index known as ‘you never know, something may turn up.’ Or maybe it’s one of the increasing array of things that will only strike us – right in the kisser – when it’s too late.

Talk of a civil war in France is overblown – for now

Is France at war? Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most popular and respected – if controversial – intellectuals in France, appears to think so. Finkielkraut recently made further enemies by joining a growing set of French intellectuals, writers and politicians who say that France is in the midst of a desperate battle. To Finkielkraut, the rioting and looting that ripped across France earlier this summer was part of an ongoing conflict between two groups: those who respect Republican values and those who hate the French Republic. 

What Finkielkraut fears above all is that the French Republic might buckle under the strain of this fight. What has been happening in France, he said in an interview in the latest issue of Causeur, ‘is the inexorable ‘Lebanonisation’ of France.’ This ‘internal war’, he goes on to say, is far from over. 

Philosopher Michel Onfray shares Finkielkraut’s troubling assessment: he argues that ‘a civil war’ has been happening in France for a long time, but that it is taboo to say so in ‘civilised, liberal’ political discourse.

Talk of war is spreading out of intellectual circles. In the aftermath of the June riots – triggered by the killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk at the hands of a policeman in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre – the two French police unions openly described themselves ‘at war…with vermin’. This statement echoed the so-called ‘Lettre des généraux’, an open letter from retired generals and more than 1,000 French soldiers, published in April 2021, which said that ‘hate-filled, fanatical partisans seek only racial war. They hate our country, its traditions, its culture and want to smash it into pieces.’ 

The letter concluded that ‘a civil war will bring an end to the growing chaos, and the dead, for which you (the government) will be responsible, will be in the thousands’. Politicians like Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen have joined Finkielkraut and Onfray’s ranks, too. Le Pen said in 2021 that conflict was ‘brewing’. Zemmour claimed that this summer’s riots were the ‘first throes’ of civil disorder.

The novelist Michel Houellebecq has said that he is sure that a ‘civil war’ in some form or other will happen in France in his lifetime, and the right-wing author Laurent Obertone, much admired by Houellebecq, is certain that this verdict is correct.

Obertone predicted as much in his best-selling trilogy of novels, Guérilla. The first book was published in 2016 with the sub-title ‘Le jour où tout s’embrasa’ (‘The day that everything exploded’). The book begins with a shootout between drug dealers and the police in the cité Taubira, a fictional council estate to the north of Paris. Several dealers are shot and killed by a single panicked policeman, who is terrified that he is about to see his young colleague sliced into pieces by a machete. 

The cité in Obertone’s novel explodes into violence which, driven by social media and the mainstream media, soon spreads through the whole of France. Within days, the conflict is out of control and looks exactly like a real civil war. All of this is watched over by colonel Fourreau, an old-style right-winger and patriot who is the only person who seems to see what it is at stake: the very existence of the French Republic.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this summer’s riots in France was the way in which the violence specifically targeted symbols of the French Republic. Police stations, schools, tax offices, town halls, post offices, prisons and elected politicians all came under attack. Until now, although a best-selling writer, Obertone has been a marginal figure in France, the darling only of the far-right. But, in the wake of the riots, he said he could see that his ideas were now entering the mainstream.

On the other side of the battle lines, the rhetoric has been equally inflammatory, although couched in different terms. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, refused to call for calm at the height of the disturbances, blamed police, and said it was ‘the poor who were rioting’.

This was too much for his partners in the shaky coalition he has built with other left-wing parties, who all distanced themselves from his position. But it didn’t stop the Libération newspaper jumping in with the headline: ‘The people are rebelling!’ This, of course, plays into one of the oldest French, and specifically Parisian, myths that ‘the people’ are virtuous and all on the same side. Libération’s view, that the French state was waging war against the public, was not shared by the ordinary people whose shops, businesses and services were wrecked and ransacked.

‘If this is a war,’ lamented Belaid, an Algerian shopkeeper in my own working-class quarter of Paris, ‘It is a war against us – the people who work hard.’

The French left, or at least a wing of it, continues, however, to romanticise nihilistic riots as war against the French state. As recently as 2022, a Netflix film called Athena, directed by Romain Gavras, was based on the premise of a civil war between immigrants from the banlieues ‘rebelling’ against state oppression in the form of the police (again the trigger for the violence is the death of a young boy at the hands of the police). This film is, of course, a precise mirror image of the dystopian fantasies of Obertone.

For now, talk of the ‘coming civil war’ in France remains, happily, a chimera. As all military historians and military professionals know, however, there is always a dangerous moment when, quite suddenly and without warning, the language of war can become the real thing.

I’m cancelling rat girl summer

Rat girl summer is a typically absurd TikTok meme that most women –indeed, most humans – born before 1990 would probably struggle to understand. But it’s a thing. And here’s what it means, according to the Washington Post: it is ‘a TikTok movement that emphasizes living like a rat: scurrying around the streets at all hours of the day and night, snacking to your heart’s delight, and going to places you have no business going to’. After a content creator called Lola Kolade encouraged followers to ‘embrace the rodent energy’ in June, #ratgirlsummer has been shared over 25 million times on TikTok. 

Last Friday saw the first in-person meeting of the ‘mischief’ of rat girls at a big Brooklyn party. Rat girls as far afield as the home counties were disappointed not to be able to attend. Liza Blackman, 26, of Bedfordshire, said the hashtag appealed to her because, in the cost of living crisis, ‘like rats, we are foraging for whatever food we can get our grabby little hands on’.

On the surface, then, being a rat girl seems pleasingly anarchic. Its golden rules are: spend most of your time out, with two days a week to ‘decay’ while scrolling social accounts in bed – any more than that and you’re ‘rotting’. Then: be ruled by whimsy rather than embarrassment. Finally: no overthinking. Rats don’t worry about stealing a slice of pizza and scurrying across an underground track, so why should rat girls? And, as Kolade, aka ‘Rat Girl-in-Chief’ says, being a rat girl is about ‘playfulness, spontaneity, and living in absolute freedom from diets, workout plans, aesthetic content or any kind of external pressure’. 

But as with anything Gen Z, scratch a little deeper and the pleasingly anarchic exterior turns out to be hiding that queasy mixture of the self-regarding ‘wellbeing’ narcissism with a performative hostility to capitalism that can only be described as woke, hypocritical and… deeply lazy.

For the rat girls are not actually attracted by the promise of scurrying and scavenging, growing fat and being as unhealthy and ugly as they like. As a 23-year old Philadelphia-based tech worker put it, rat girlism is a license to be completely selfish – in the name of fighting the patriarchy. ‘As women, we are taught to cater to others’ feelings, and the rat girl concept rejects that and asks you to prioritize yourself’.

It’s not just patriarchy that ‘makes’ women subjugate themselves to the needs of others: it is – of course – capitalism too. Trevor Boffone, a Houston-based academic and Tik Tok scholar, explained that the ‘rat girl summer trend is exactly about not doing something because capitalism told us to do it, and only doing things you genuinely want to’.

Rat girlism, in short, is a license to ignore, or play at ignoring, the needs or sensitivities of others in the name of a hazily righteous politics; yet another attempt to channel not ‘rodent energy’ but a very 21st century, Gen Z  ‘you do you’ energy.

#Ratgirlsummer put me in mind of another TikTok craze this summer– #lazygirls – also aimed at women who don’t want to do anything or be imposed upon. 

Lazygirls on TikTok boast about having snagged jobs that pay them well to do almost nothing. They brag about how they only have to send three or four emails a day, and how this leaves them time to go on break after break. These are not women explaining how, having freed up time on the job, they can now spend it all self-teaching physics or dress-making. For them, success is exploiting their workplaces, earning them the pleasurable sense of doing ever less, with more and more freedom to spend time exclusively on personal wellbeing and time-wasting. A typical boast, liked hundreds of thousands of times: ‘I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one, take breaks whenever I want & be the office baddie’.

Together, rat girls and lazy girls begin to look like a funeral march for female ambition (to say nothing of more personal qualities like duty and discipline, which all humans should aim for).

It is extraordinary that the blockbuster Barbie movie appeared in the same universe inhabited by these Gen Z #nightmaregirls. Barbie, for all its cartoonishness, represents a world in which women mind about being successful, holding supreme court positions and science degrees: in Barbieland, successful and powerful women are the norm. The whole film turns on the horribly comic realisation that, in the real world beyond Barbieland, it’s men who have the power and the big jobs – and the Barbieland setup was just a beautiful and temporary dream. Unlike the Barbies, this new breed of lazy Gen Z girls would do absolutely nothing to fight back against a world of loutish Kens being in charge. They’d shrug and keep scrolling Instagram.

If girls want to be lazy or ironically imitate rats then let them. But the narcissism, the half-baked therapy speak, the even more undercooked woke political posturing, and above all the sheer indolent rudeness at the heart of both trends points not to a new era of freedom, but to a decline in women’s prospects. 

So long, Crooked House: a guide to Britain’s oddest pubs

Farewell then, the Crooked House. The 18th-century pub, in the West Midlands village of Himley, hasn’t just stopped being a pub – it’s stopped existing, full stop. Just days after its sale to a private buyer for ‘alternative use’, the famously wonky building – where coins and marbles appeared to roll uphill – was gutted by fire and has now been demolished. Unsurprisingly this has given rise to suspicions aplenty, but we’re taking it as a chance to celebrate Britain’s oddest pubs. Step this way for underground tunnels, pubs without bars – and some very single-minded landlords…

The Temple of Convenience, Manchester

The clue’s in the name: this place used to be a public toilet. Head down the steps and you’ll find a bar that’s, yes, compact, but also welcoming and well-stocked with all the drinks you’d expect, plus a few foreign beers you might not. The jukebox is a point of pride too – everything from Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones to Elbow. Which is appropriate, as Guy Garvey is such a fan that he even mentions the Temple in the Elbow song Grounds for Divorce – ‘a hole in my neighbourhood down which of late I cannot help but fall’.

100 Great Bridgewater St, Manchester M1 5JW

0161 278 1610

The Ship and Shovell, London

The only pub in London with a street running through it. Well, a small street – Craven Passage, with lies in the delightfully hidden-away territory between Charing Cross station and Northumberland Avenue. The two buildings on either side of the passage were built in the 1730s and used to be two different pubs, called (you’re ahead of us here) the Ship and the Shovel. The building on the south side, nearer the river, had a window which allowed dockers to see approaching ships that might need their services. In 1998, an underground tunnel was built to link the buildings and contains the cellars and kitchen. At the same time the spelling of Shovel was changed to commemorate Sir Cloudesley Shovell, the 17th century admiral. Whichever half you’re in, count on a friendly welcome and speedy service.

1-3 Craven Passage, London, WC2N 5PH

020 7839 1311

www.shipandshovell.co.uk

The Dyffryn Arms, Fishguard

A reminder that ‘public house’ is just what pubs once were – people’s homes that were opened up to serve beer. This one has been in the same family since the 1850s and is known locally as Bessie’s after the woman who served here for several decades. Now in her nineties, Bessie Davies has handed over duties to her granddaughter Nerys, but the procedure remains the same – the beer is poured from the keg into a jug and handed to you through a serving hatch. You have to take your glass back as they don’t have a dishwasher. There’s only one room, which feels like a living room rather than a pub. Conversation is the only music and there’s no food. All in all, it’s a throwback to centuries past – rather appropriate for a corner of Wales so remote that they still celebrate New Year on 13 January.

Pontfaen Rd, Fishguard SA65 9SE

01348 881863

The Nag’s Head, London

This Belgravia institution is on two levels, a quirk of its mews architecture meaning that the back half of the building is lower than the front, although one bar serves both. This, however, isn’t the reason we’re listing it here. The true oddness of this pub is the way in which its landlord, Kevin Moran (not the Manchester United footballer) runs the place. He’s – how shall we put this? – idiosyncratic. Mobile phone use is banned, as are swearing and putting your coat on a chair rather than hanging it up. Moran does sandwiches, but no hot food: ‘Why does anyone go to a pub for fish and chips?’ His manner with customers can be forthright, but as he says, ‘I make the rules and I don’t have to give you a reason’. Now into his fifth decade of stewardship, Moran would seem to have little need to change his approach. You can savour the Victorian pottery pump handles and memorabilia-lined walls (Edwardian ice-skate, anyone?) – or, like us, you can savour the landlord’s response when an American tourist fails to hang up their coat. An added reason to visit is that the pub is right opposite 44 Kinnerton Street, the house once owned by Ghislaine Maxwell, where a certain picture of Prince Andrew was taken.

53 Kinnerton Street, London SW1X 8ED

020 7235 1135

Canny Man’s, Edinburgh

A Morningside equivalent of the Nag’s Head. The décor is similar (old typewriters, trumpets, fish in glass-fronted cases) and so is the customer service. As one sign puts it: ‘This is not a Burger King. You’ll have it as we like it.’ Abandon your credit card, mobile phone and camera, all ye who enter here. You write your food order on a betting slip, unless you’re a backpacker, in which case you’re barred. Over 250 whiskies to choose from and the Bloody Mary is the stuff of legend.

237 Morningside Road, Edinburgh, EH10 4QU

0131 447 1484 

www.cannymans.co.uk

The Nutshell, Bury St Edmunds

This East Anglian pub measures 15 feet by seven, leading some to claim it as Britain’s smallest. Which brings the phrase ‘couldn’t swing a cat’ to mind – fitting, as the ephemera on show includes a dead one. The dried corpse of the unfortunate animal was uncovered during renovations – in centuries gone by builders would brick a live cat in behind the chimney, a move seen as good luck (for the property if not the cat).

As is often the way of these things, however, the title of ‘Britain’s smallest pub’ is disputed – the Little Prince in Margate and the Lakeside Inn in Southport have also claimed the crown. And with room for only three bar stools, the Signal Box Inn (guess what it used to be?) on the Cleethorpes Coast Light Railway also has a good shout.

17 The Traverse, Bury St Edmunds, IP33 1BJ

01284 764867

www.thenutshellpub.co.uk

Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, St Albans

This is often cited as Britain’s oldest pub, though others (for instance Nottingham’s Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem) dispute that and Guinness World Records have retired the category because they can’t decide. But its true oddness comes from the building’s shape – octagonal, because monks once used it as a pigeon coop. The pub’s name, on the other hand, derives from the fact that it staged cockerel fights. Oliver Cromwell spent a night here and Inspector Morse visited in a 1990 episode. When it reopened after Covid, a local vicar blessed the pub with a meditation from St Brigid: ‘I’d like to give a lake of beer to God. I’d love the heavenly host to be tippling there for all eternity.’

16 Abbey Mill Lane, St Albans, AL3 4HE

01727 869152

www.fightingcockssa.com

The Lion, Llanymynech

Finally, a mention for a pub that’s no longer with us, but whose geography gave rise to one of the oddest situations of all. The Lion sat right on the border between England and Wales, with two of its bars lying in the former and one in the latter. Shropshire magistrates and their Montgomeryshire counterparts disagreed about alcohol on the Sabbath – which meant that on Sundays you could drink in the English bars but not the Welsh one.

On the death of a pilgrim

John Brierley, who died last month, was a legendary pilgrim that you’ve probably never heard of. Admittedly, these days most people aren’t familiar with any pilgrims. Just going to Sunday mass is unorthodox.

The vast majority of us who respected Brierley never met him and probably, like me, never saw a video clip of him or even heard him talk. We knew him only from his series of Camino de Santiago guidebooks. But that was enough. Having been translated into numerous languages and sold around a million copies, his books shepherded countless pilgrims like me on their long travels across continental Europe toward the remarkable city of Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain.

On the last Camino I walked this June, assisting a group of rambunctious seminarians, one of the deacons announced that Brierley was gravely ill. He’d heard about it from an online Camino pilgrim forum full of concerned peregrinos, both past and present.

At midday, the group broke from the Camino trail to say mass beside the Roman bridge spanning the Verdugo River at the village of Arcade, the scene of a historic battle to liberate Spain from French occupation in 1809. A prayer was offered for Brierley wherever he was. Of course, in a way, Brierley was there with us: the deacon had placed a photo of him from the back of a guidebook on the altar.  

I’ve done a lot of Caminos and most of them have been with a Brierley guidebook. I tried one Camino with another guidebook company – never again. Such shoddy mapping. Having spent most of my army career being lost, I appreciate the value of a good map. Thanks to his skills from a career as a surveyor, Brierley’s daily route maps were renowned for their clarity and helpfulness.

Following what amounted to a mid-life crisis in his forties, Brierley turned his back on a successful career that he felt had made him ‘materialistic and chauvinistic’. He went on to lead the surging popularity of the Camino pilgrimages that started in the 1990s. As he himself noted, despite the increasingly modern and secular times that we live in – and which Brierley vociferously criticised in his books – millions of people took a break from their jobs, or quit them entirely, to don rucksacks and walk hundreds of kilometres to the proclaimed resting place of Saint James the Apostle.

It was hard not to feel strong affection for him. This was partly because his guidebooks were such a lifesaver: in addition to the good mapping, they helped you to find accommodation and a place to eat and get water. But it was also because his books contained a strong spiritual component, with personal reflections from Brierley himself.

That was why he labelled his guidebooks A Practical & Mystical Manuel for the Modern Day Pilgrim. He understood the spiritual journey of the Camino, a form of searching for meaning in life and resolving our place in the universe. He also wasn’t shy about addressing God – though never in a hectoring, preachy way – or about using the wisdom of others who have searched similarly.

‘Look at every path closely and deliberately,’ Brierley writes in one guidebook, quoting The Teachings of Don Juan. ‘Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question, ‘Does this path have a heart?’ If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.’

Well said, Don. Such exultations were followed by a paragraph exploring the ‘mystical path’ that accompanies the physical one on a Camino. The priest overseeing our Camino, a scholar and a wiser man than I will ever be, expressed reservations about these more New Age-y elements of the guidebooks. But I can’t deny that such reflections, along with everything else the guidebooks offered, helped enrich my Caminos as I grappled with transitioning from the noble, upstanding world of the British Army to the free-for-all sharp-elbowed melee of Civvy Street.

A Brierley guidebook is about the same size as the standard magazine clip for an SA-80 rifle. Both share reassuring qualities and there is no denying that clip of ammunition came in handy if you found yourself in a spot of bother in Iraq or Afghanistan. But I need not tell you which one I would choose if I could only take one.

Thank you, John Brierley, for helping show the Way to all those who had lost direction in their lives. All the best on the final stage of your Camino.  

Humza Yousaf will be judged on Nicola Sturgeon’s mistakes

We must hope Nicola Sturgeon’s remaining supporters are, right now, judging her. That’s what she wanted, after all. In a speech back in 2015 — the year she led the SNP to its third Holyrood election victory — Sturgeon said education would be her priority during her time in office. ‘Let me be clear,’ she said, ‘I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to. It really matters.’

Of course, it was easy for Sturgeon to demand she be judged because she knew she wouldn’t be. None of her supporters was willing to rock the boat by pointing out the many ways in which the SNP had failed teachers and pupils. That same blind loyalty meant Sturgeon could also state her intention to close the attainment gap between teenagers from the wealthiest and poorest backgrounds ‘completely’ — and her followers took her seriously.

Sturgeon may be gone from office, but she cannot deny responsibility for her abject failure in this area. The results of this year’s Scottish high school exams (National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers) are out and the picture isn’t great. The pass rate has fallen and the attainment gap between results obtained by kids from affluent backgrounds and their poorest peers has widened. Education Secretary and master of pathos Jenny Gilruth points out the attainment gap is narrower than in 2019 — but only just, and it is undeniable that things have got worse every year since. 

Throughout her time in office, Sturgeon could be heard insisting she was driven by the need to ensure young people from the least prosperous backgrounds could enjoy the same advantages she had as a schoolgirl from a working-class background. This stuff might have thrilled those nationalists fully gripped by the fantasy that Sturgeon is a uniquely moral and wise political leader but anyone paying the slightest attention could see it was hogwash.

The SNP’s stewardship of the Scottish education system has been overly cautious. There has been not serious attempt at reform which suggests either a lack of imagination or the fear that to rock the boat might delay the journey to the promised land of independence. I suspect it is a cocktail of both in this instance.

And it is not just on education that the SNP failed to take action to ensure the service was fit-for-purpose. A similarly managerial approach to the NHS has seen the service decline, with some doctors warning that it is on the verge of collapse. Thanks to the baffling number of Scots voters whose obsession with independence allows them to overlook or square away catastrophic SNP failures, Sturgeon was able — for a long time — to outrun any consequences for her inadequacy. 

Her successor as SNP leader, Humza Yousaf, doesn’t enjoy the same levels of goodwill that Sturgeon did with the rank and file. Nicola Sturgeon was never judged on her failure to close the attainment gap. Humza Yousaf, on the other hand, may find that even SNP members are happy to hold him accountable for the ongoing failure of this mission.

SNP splashes taxpayers’ cash on ‘How to run a government’ book

As if there aren’t enough questions about the SNP’s spending habits, it turns out the Nats have been using £55,000 of taxpayer’s money to fund their library collection. An investigation by Labour has unearthed some rather amusing revelations about the SNP’s reading list, not least that the party has been busy educating itself with books on, er, ‘How To Run A Government’. That might have come in useful 16 years ago…

Public funds were used to purchase 22 copies of the book – almost enough prints for every member of Humza Yousaf’s cabinet. Mr S allowed himself a chuckle at the irony of the book’s tagline, which reads: ‘…so that citizens benefit and taxpayers don’t go crazy’. Try telling that to the swathes of independence donors who don’t know where their money has gone. Or, indeed, the taxpayers who funded these very purchases.

In another transaction, £4.19 was spent by one genius on a copy of the party’s own independence white paper from 2014. The move is more than a little embarrassing given that it can be downloaded for free from the Scottish government’s website…

The party’s self-obsession doesn’t end there, however. The full list of books reveals that Sturgeon-mania remains rife: six copies of Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Selected Speeches of Nicola Sturgeon made the cut. Do the nationalists know no bounds for their narcissism?

Astonishingly, they might. Mr S was heartened to see that other purchased prints included ‘Why Does Everything Go Wrong’ and ‘I’m Not Good Enough’. Perhaps at long last the SNP is becoming self-aware. How very refreshing!

After today’s bemusing reports, First Minister Humza Yousaf has called for an investigation into his government’s credit card spending. While using public funds for reading material seems more than a tad unnecessary, it can’t be said that the books won’t come in handy. Perhaps ‘Overcoming Relationship Problems’ will even help the Nats stop all their rotten infighting — but don’t hold your breath…

Will Brits feel richer if inflation halves?

The government’s objective to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of the year seems to be back on track – for now. Last week’s interest rate hike was delivered with an updated inflation forecast from the Bank of England, showing the rate slowing to 4.7 per cent by the end of the year, just below Rishi Sunak’s target. The better-than-expected fall in the headline rate last month has forecasters thinking things are finally moving in the right direction. As Ross Clark reports on Coffee House, Capital Economics is expecting another major fall in the rate next week – down to 6.9 per cent on the year – when July’s figures are released.

But what is the government’s real aim: to technically meet its target of halving inflation, or for people to notice the difference in their spending power? If the inflation rate stays on track – and that’s a big if – the former may be feasible. But this second aim is going to prove much more difficult, as pointed out by the Bank’s Huw Pill in a public Q&A session this week.

Speaking about food prices, Pill was candid that any kind of meaningful dip in cost may still be a long way off. The Chief Economist warned that cheaper food costs are ‘something we may not be seeing for a while yet, if in the future at all,’ as the Bank predicts overall food prices will by rising by 10 per cent by the end of the year: down from a peak of a staggering 19.2 per cent this winter, but still rising at a fairly rapid pace.

Pill cited supply chain issues due to Russia’s war against Ukraine as one of the big factors keeping food prices high – and largely out of the control of the UK’s politicians and bankers. But labour shortages will be a factor too: supermarkets are no exception to the rule of surging costs across the services sector, which has led to higher prices for consumers.

According to the Bank’s current forecasts, the rate of inflation for food will roughly halve from its peak by the end of the year – the same as the trajectory for the headline rate. But will consumers understand what this means? According to polling from Survation at the start of summer, there is widespread confusion about what ‘halving inflation’ really means, with over 60 per cent of respondents making the wrong assumption that cutting the rate of inflation means prices either stay the same or drop from where they are now. Only 32 per cent of respondents correctly assessed that prices would continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate.

This misunderstanding of ‘halving inflation’ may play well for the government for a while, as the headline numbers drop and a good news story seemingly emerges. But it’s going to be impossible to cover up what these figures really mean when consumers see their bills – like their weekly shop – continue to rise next year. Who will they blame when this grim realisation hits? That same polling would suggest that more fingers will be pointed at Whitehall than Threadneedle Street, with 40 per cent of respondents convinced that the inflation target is the remit of the government, edging the 39 per cent who said the Bank of England. 

It’s easy to forgive people for thinking the tools to control inflation are in the government’s hands, as No.10 and the Treasury have been insisting since January that the rate of inflation is something that is within their control: a claim which became tricky when the rate of inflation wasn’t dropping as quickly as predicted earlier this year, and one that could get trickier, even if the headline rate is technically halved. For all the talk of wage increases recently, and the effect of higher salaries on inflation, average wage hikes have still not overtaken the rate of inflation, meaning that in real terms, workers have been experiencing a wage hit month on month. 

No doubt they’ve clocked the ways in which they are poorer – and will continue to do so when prices keep going up next year.

Sadiq Khan takes a pop at Lee Anderson over asylum seeker comments

Has Lee Anderson finally gone too far? Still reeling after finding out his son turned vegetarian at university (‘shocking, absolutely shocking’), the Tory party deputy chairman told the Express that illegal migrants who don’t want to be housed on barges should ‘f*** off back to France’.

‘I think people have just had enough’, he told the paper. ‘These people come across the Channel in small boats, if they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France or better not come at all in the first place.’

Anderson’s remarks have predictably riled up the usual cast of characters. ‘A new low even for the Tories’, tweeted Labour MP Diane Abbott last night. Anderson was trying to ‘make ignorance and bigotry mainstream Tory policy’, said LBC’s James O’Brien.

‘Language matters. This lot have been in Government for 13 years. After their abject failure all that’s left is stoking up more division and hate’, added London Mayor Sadiq Khan. 

Mr Steerpike can’t help but wonder that if Khan thinks Anderson needs a more welcoming attitude towards asylum seekers, why the Mayor didn’t volunteer to house a barge on the Thames, where they could’ve enjoyed access to London’s world-class amenities? Back in June, the Home Office considered using the Royal Docks, in East London, as a mooring, but the Mayor said the location would be ‘unsafe and unworkable’.

‘Vulnerable people fleeing appalling circumstances would not have access to the support they need’, Khan said at the time. It doesn’t quite add up.

Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge

The first problem about decolonisation is the word itself. Colonisation is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonisation? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

In New Zealand, this attitude to truth has led to a revised school syllabus in which Maori folk beliefs about the world are to be treated as if they were just as valid as the body of empirical knowledge that is called science everywhere else. However, we do not need to go to New Zealand to see intellectual decolonisation in action. University faculties in Britain are all expected to publish ‘decolonisation statements’ filled with guilt and angst about the western origin of so much modern knowledge.

Oxford University’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division may seem an unpromising candidate for decolonisation, but its decolonisation statement attacks the whole concept of knowledge. ‘As we work towards greater inclusion’, it declares, ‘we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes scientific knowledge.’ Among other things, this is said to involve ‘challenging western-centric ideas of “objectivity”, “expertise” and “merit” ’, and ‘removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others’. The instinct behind statements like these is not scholarly or scientific. It is political. It devalues knowledge by redefining it, as a way of protesting against the endemic sense of racial superiority which is said to characterise British society.

Doug Stokes is based at the University of Exeter, an institution whose history department proclaims on its website that ‘the very ways we are conditioned to look at and think about the past are often derived from imperialist and racialised schools of thought’. His new book, Against Decolonisation, is a powerful protest against this kind of stale cliché.

Stokes challenges the dominant cultural and political narrative which portrays Britain as endemically racist. Racial prejudice is too natural to human beings to be eliminated entirely, but statistical studies suggest that by most measures Britain is one of the least racist societies in Europe. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Mayor of London all come from minority ethnic groups. British universities, including the most selective, have a student population in which ethnic minorities are well represented at every level of academic attainment.

Stokes digs deeper into the figures, to show that ‘ethnic minorities’ is too large and varied a category to serve as a useful instrument of analysis. There are significant differences between racial groups. And all of them do significantly better than the category that persistently loses out on university education, namely poor white males.

These points have been made before, notably in the March 2021 report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. The report concluded that economic geography, socio-economic background and family values were far more significant determinants of outcomes than racism. As it pointed out, the life chances of the child of a Harrow-raised British Indian accountant were very different from those of the child of a Bradford-raised British Pakistani taxi driver. Both of them had better prospects than ‘low income white boys, especially those from former industrial and coastal towns’. The Commission’s report was received with howls of outrage by those who felt that they were being deprived of their victimhood. But the objectors rarely engaged with the detailed supporting data on which it was based.

Although the points which Stokes makes are not new, they have rarely been made with such verve and force as they are in this succinct demolition of modern decolonisation theory. He is particularly critical of the reports of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which he accuses of dodgy statistical analysis, and Universities UK, the representative body of vice-chancellors, which has uncritically imposed a decolonisation agenda on the whole university sector.

How did we come to this pass? Stokes argues that the narrative of embedded (‘institutional’) racism in western societies was adopted to fill the intellectual gap left by the decline of Marxism. Cultural control replaced class oppression as the mechanism by which the capitalist West was said to maintain its dominant role in the world. The chief prophets of this doctrine were the French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and the Palestinian-American historian Edward Said. Foucault taught that the structures of power determine what is generally perceived to be true. What we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by our invisible control over schools, universities, publishers and museums and other cultural institutions in our own interest. It followed that to change the world, it was necessary to take control of those institutions and impose a new intellectual consensus. Said took this idea further. The notion of the inherent superiority of western science and culture, he argued, was a new form of colonialism. It enabled the West to maintain its dominance long after it had shed its colonies. Yet western ideas, western science and western history had no objective claim to authority. They were simply the products of western power structures.

These ideas have never had much traction in France, the land of their birth. But they have taken root in Britain and America in the minds of many who have never read Foucault or Said. In Britain, race theorists such as Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University, have argued that the claims made for western culture are a form of racial prejudice. They are an assertion of the inherent superiority of whites over people of colour which is hardwired throughout British society. This kind of thinking, says Stokes, is what lies behind the obsession with race that is currently transforming British universities.

The problem about postmodernist theories is the same as the problem about other forms of determinism. They underestimate the originality of the human mind. They also ignore the universality of abstract ideas. The fact that Aristotle or Einstein first articulated an idea does not make it a ‘western’ idea. If some statement about the world is true in New Zealand or Africa, it must be equally true in Britain or America, or it is not true at all.

However, the main objection to decolonisation is not that it is false but that it is narrow-minded, obsessive and intolerant. People will continue to disagree about the prevalence and the origin of racial prejudice. Error and discord are inevitable hazards of the free market in ideas. But the decolonisers are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them. This is a natural consequence of their approach to intellectual inquiry. For those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs there is no point in debate. Alternative visions of the world are just the product of social conditioning. Social change and suppression of dissent are the only answers. Schools and universities must be the battlegrounds. Hence the obligatory decolonisation statements, the imposition of a highly controversial agenda on the syllabus, the no-platforming of opponents and the real fears of so many academics that if they step out of line their careers will be blighted.

These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world, even in the citadels of the mind which should be its foremost defenders. Perhaps books like this one will encourage more academics to summon up the courage to resist the bullying and to challenge the new conformity. Not everyone will agree with them. But everyone who truly cares about truth will welcome the opening up of a debate which the universities have largely foreclosed.

Violence in Silicon Valley: The Wolf Hunt, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed

‘I believe it’s the writer’s job to force the reader to look where they usually avoid looking,’ Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has said. The Wolf Hunt, her fourth novel translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, shines a light on racial tensions in America.

Israeli-born Lilach and Mikhael Shuster live in Silicon Valley with their 16-year-old son Adam. Like many men in the community, Mikhael works in tech, although rather than developing apps his company makes weapons. Having given up an academic career to follow her husband, Lilach works as a cultural coordinator at a retirement home. ‘Most of the women here coordinated something,’ she observes wryly.

When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of ‘one of the greenest, quietest, safest cities in America’ is shattered. The anti-Semitic attack leaves four people injured and one person dead – a college-aged girl who was the only one to intervene. Tensions in the community escalate further when Jamal Jones, a black Muslim classmate who had bullied Adam, dies of an overdose and Adam is accused of having drugged him.

In response to the terrorist attack, Adam, prodded by his parents, signs up for a self-defence class taught by a former elite IDF officer, rumoured to have ties with Mossad. A charismatic teacher, Uri, idealised by his students, embroils himself with the Shuster family. Lilach is his advocate at first, suggesting Mikhael recommend him for a job at his firm, but becomes increasingly wary.

As focused as we are on protecting our children, The Wolf Hunt questions our certainties about who and what we want to protect them from. Lilach makes astute observations about the rarefied microcosm of the Valley, the heartbreaking mystery of adolescents and the threat of violence in the US vs Israel. ‘Just don’t tell me later that it’s saner to raise children there,’ her mother tells her.

The risk with novels of ideas is that they can verge on the didactic, with the characters serving as mouthpieces. A practising clinical psychologist, Gundar-Goshen has crafted complex characters in her previous work. With the exception of Jamal’s grieving mother, however, those in The Wolf Hunt lack the animating breath that makes them feel real. We are primed to expect high stakes in this book, pitched as a psychological thriller. But while the plot delivers some twists, the ending is not only inconclusive, the characters haven’t quite coalesced enough for us to care.

A trip down Ronnie Lane: from child busker to international star

Thirty years ago, I worked for a while in a shop in Soho selling vintage newspapers and magazines. The holy grail for some customers might be the 1955 Playboy featuring Bettie Page or the 1976 Daily Mirror with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Filth & the Fury’ headline. But those of a born-again Mod persuasion were usually looking for 1960s publications with the Small Faces on the cover – preferably the August 1966 copy of the teenage music and fashion bible Rave, showing Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott from that most style-conscious of bands, complete with a double-page poster of the group inside.

Now, nearly six decades after their formation, there is, arguably, an even greater interest in the Small Faces, who, after the singer Marriott left, evolved into the equally well-regarded Faces, teaming up with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. There have been various books about the Small Faces, and also Marriott, while the keyboard player Ian McLagen and the drummer Kenney Jones both wrote autobiographies. But this is the first work devoted to the bass player Ronnie Lane.

This may sound like an overcrowded market, when certain million-selling performers deliver a smoothly polished and utterly sterile ‘live’ experience by miming to backing tracks onstage and one of the biggest shows in London relies on holograms of a group which split up 41 years ago. But the reading public’s appetite for stories about the times when music still had rough edges and no safety net seems ever greater.

Anyone looking for the last characteristics would find no shortage of them in Lane’s career, and Caroline and David Stafford display the same dry wit and careful research that informed their previous excellent biographies of figures such as Lionel Bart or Kenny Everett. They trace Ronnie’s life from East End beginnings to stardom in the mid-1960s beat boom, and the decades-long progress of the hereditary multiple sclerosis which eventually claimed him.

Born in 1946 and a youthful fan of Hollywood singing cowboys, Lane was given a ukulele by his father at the age of six and was soon earning pennies busking for passengers at a nearby bus stop. His trajectory resembles that of many British musicians of the 1960s – the fledgling teenage bands, dead-end jobs, then the big break, but with the spectre of illness already waiting in the wings throughout the years of fame. Despite the tragic elements of this story, it is also frequently very amusing, as witness the authors’ description of how in those days a typical act might fare in the music business:

The band loses all its money to bent managers and dodgy coke dealers, then one day the bass player finds the drummer in bed with his wife, or the lead singer finds the keyboard player in bed with her husband, or everybody finds everybody else in bed with members of Fleetwood Mac and the whole thing explodes. These events are usually described as ‘musical differences’.

McLagen once remarked ‘I think we all enjoyed a drink first, playing second’, and excessive alcohol intake certainly plays a key role in many of the events described here. Lane’s final days with the Faces sound particularly grim, with onstage fights, verbal abuse and members locking themselves in separate dressing rooms. Denied almost until his death the royalties to the Small Faces million-sellers he had co-written, Ronnie had also severely depleted his own finances by quitting the Faces in 1973 and sinking much of his wealth into the Passing Show. This was his ambitious travelling circus with folk music that toured the UK with the best of ideals, yet haemorrhaged money in all directions. Some of his own musicians also had complaints, such as the sax player Jimmy Jewell, who departed mid-tour after a dispute about wages and conditions, leaving a note which read: ‘Goodbye cruel circus, I’m off to join the world.’

Through it all, Ronnie remains something of an unknowable character, despite the testimony from many who were close to him. By the early 1980s, his ability to perform onstage, and sometimes even to walk, was becoming seriously compromised, although people often assumed that drink was the cause. Long before his death in 1997, he had moved to America, initially for experimental snake venom treatment, which failed, although, as he wryly commented: ‘If any mosquito bites me it dies instantly.’

This is a thoughtful study of how Ronnie coped both with fame and encroaching illness, which doesn’t shy away from his contradictions, but is written with genuine fondness, a sentiment apparently shared by many who knew him. As John Peel later recalled of the Faces:

I saw them disappear into their dressing room that was full of scantily clad women and so forth and the sound of breaking glass and curries being flung against walls and so on, and I thought to myself: ‘Actually, these people are having a much better time than I am.’

For a while there, they probably were.

Russia’s long history of smears, sabotage and barefaced lies

Russian politicians often refer to something called the Dulles Plan. This document purports to capture the future CIA chief Allen Dulles explaining, in 1948, the US strategy to destroy the moral foundations of the USSR and bring about ‘the death of the most intractable people on Earth… the definitive, irreversible dying out of its self-consciousness’. If this sounds like a fictional villain’s expository monologue then that’s because it is. The text was taken from an antagonist’s speech in a 1971 novel, Eternal Call, which itself recalled a much earlier Russian forgery, the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The ‘plan’ was written and disseminated in 1993 in an attempt to explain the collapse of the communist system, but its debunking has not prevented it being invoked to justify such ‘defensive’ measures as the invasion of Ukraine.

The dissemination of fantastical plots in phoney documents is a legacy of the KGB. Though the agency was dissolved in 1991 its methods endure under Vladimir Putin, who served it for 16 years. Phrases such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ may feel new, but, as Mark Hollingsworth explains, the KGB was dedicated to creating ‘a climate of chaos, fear and pervasive uncertainty in which nobody could be trusted’.

Hollingsworth’s subjects are not John le Carré spies, with missions and handlers, but ‘agents of influence’ who operated in a more informal, deniable fashion to shape policy and spread disinformation: what the KGB designated ‘active measures’. A 1964 Foreign Office report argued that such an agent ‘may be even more dangerous than a spy who is selling military secrets’. The thrillerish shadow world of spooks and honeytraps sometimes distracts Hollingsworth from his own premise (a couple of chapters are nothing more than Cold War yarns), but when he’s on track he spices familiar tales with new tidbits from government archives and interviews in order to emphasise the continuity between the KGB and Putin’s FSB.

In one form or another, the Russian secret police is as old as the tsars, from Ivan the Terrible’s murderous, black-clad Oprichniki through to the Okhrana under Nicholas II. Their dirty job was taken up with relish after 1917 by Lenin’s Cheka, which mutated into the OGPU, the NKVD, the MGB and, in 1954, the KGB. These agencies were lionised by the state – ‘every Bolshevist should make himself a Chekist,’ said Lenin – and by popular culture. Putin once said of his first attempt, aged 16, to join up in 1960s Leningrad: ‘My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories.’

The KGB’s allure extended to many in the West. Some agents were ardent communists but many were driven by a less principled combination of greed, vanity, spite and thrill-seeking. Recruits included a few politicians, such as the Labour MP Bob Edwards, and numerous journalists. At one point in the 1970s, according to the KGB defector Stanislav Levchenko, ten out of 12 foreign correspondents for the Japanese newspaper New Times worked for him.

Some star assets enjoyed illustrious careers. In 1949, George Orwell correctly identified the Times correspondent Peter Smollett OBE as ‘almost certainly an agent of some kind’, but the full story of his collaboration with the spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess while working for Churchill’s Ministry of Information would not emerge until after Smollett’s death in 1980. Meanwhile, the Moscow-born Victor Louis thrived as a journalist on ‘scoops’ provided by Soviet intelligence. A 1981 Foreign Office report described the job of ‘Louis the Leak’ as ‘to sow confusion, plant lies, peddle fraudulent or stolen manuscripts and smear the reputations of dissenting Soviet intellectuals’.

The KGB became the world’s most industrious conspiracy-theory factory, forging documents and placing false stories in sympathetic newspapers and journals. Quantity trumped quality: if one story didn’t stick there was always another. Agents were cavalier about the consequences of this epistemic chaos. Operation Denver, the lie that Aids originated in a US biowarfare laboratory as a means to kill black and gay people, was simply another dart to throw at America in the 1980s, but it outlived the USSR and contributed to setting back Aids prevention, especially in South Africa, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

By contrast, most of the KGB’s targeted attempts at smears, blackmail and election subversion were damp squibs. Sometimes they even fell for their own fictions. Shortly before he became Soviet leader in 1982, the KGB chief Yuri Andropov launched Operation RYAN, a massive effort to ‘prove’ that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were plotting an imminent nuclear strike, and believed it himself before ruefully admitting that he had ‘considerably exaggerated their aggressiveness all along’. As Putin likewise demonstrates, the architects of paranoia often become its victims.

The hole in Hollingsworth’s entertaining story is the reason why so many KGB fabrications seemed plausible. He only fleetingly acknowledges that when KGB forgeries accused the CIA of ‘organising a coup, infringing on sovereignty and abusing human rights’, they were elaborating on proven skulduggery. The point is not that both sides were equally bad but that Soviet disinformation grew in fertile soil: if the CIA had done this, then why not that? The KGB was also adept at exploiting the West’s homegrown conspiracy theories. Wild claims about the origins of Aids were circulating in the US before the Soviets weaponised them. Effective disinformation agents are opportunists.

The Russian word vranyo describes a species of lie that Hollingsworth defines as a brazen indifference to the truth, scorning the notion that one can identify it, or that it matters. This, more than espionage, is the FSB’s modus operandi – the lesson it learned from the KGB’s hits and misses. It is not just the internet that has made this job easier. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR were radically different societies; but Donald Trump’s Republican party, with its intense distrust of science, the media and government institutions and its extraordinary appetite for magical thinking is in the vranyo business. Today’s FSB agent, bent on spreading disinformation and destabilising western democracies, has the wind at his back.

Tales of the Midwest: The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, reviewed

Jo Ann Beard has said that one of the stories in this collection, although she does not specify which, took her more than 20 years to write and that there was a gap of eight months – during which she was working on the piece five days a week – between two of its sentences. It is true that her writing is remarkably condensed, not least in ‘Cheri’, the story of a real woman who had a particularly hideous case of terminal cancer (exacerbated by the fact that all pain medication made her vomit). Cheri Tremble contacted Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia expert sometimes nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, so that he could help her end her life. As she begins to die, Cheri, in Beard’s version, wryly reflects: ‘The fear of dying tonight is nothing… compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning.’

Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her ‘a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of’.

There is a warning in the introduction to her collected works: she thanks Tin House magazine’s editorial staff, who had previously published some of this collection, for printing her work ‘without undue fretting about genre’. Beard has not always been exact about which of her work is fiction and which memoir, so it seems best to consider it autobiographical fiction or creative non-fiction. 

‘Cheri’ is included in this collection but is also simultaneously published as a stand- alone novella and is based on a story that did not occur in Beard’s own life but one she has extensively researched. She has taken the same approach with ‘Werner’, about a man who jumped from a burning building and survived; and in ‘The Fourth State of Matter’ she writes about a shooting that took place at the University of Iowa, some of whose victims she knew. 

What unites the collection is that for the most part these are stories of the Midwest. A typical detail mentions an ‘old floor-to-ceiling down coat I bought in Ann Arbor in 1992 when I was having a midwestern-style nervous breakdown’. There are plenty of appealingly spirited middle-aged women enraged by husbands who have decided to leave them. One of these, the narrator of ‘The Boys of My Youth’, feels like a ‘rabid dog’ and says of the arrival of feminism in her life in 1976: ‘I’ve always had a tendency to be mean to men; now there’s a reason for it.’

There is plenty of violence and death in these pages – a dog is euthanised in ‘Last Night’ and a woman confronts an intruder in ‘The Tomb of Wrestling’ – but there is also hard-won, transcendent joy. This is perhaps most striking in ‘Cheri’, as the titular character, realising she will die, is overcome by the beauty of the world. It is not an uncommon sentiment, but here it is strikingly expressed:

And this, of course, is when the world turns glamorous. Her daughters look like movie stars in their low-slung pants and pale autumn complexions. The trees on her street vibrate in the afternoon sunlight, the dying leaves so brilliant that she somehow feels she’s never seen any of this before – fall, and the way the landscape can levitate with colour, and even her simple cup of green tea in the afternoons, with milk and honey in a thick white mug. Warm. Her hand curled around it, or the newspaper folded beside it, or a halved orange on a blue plate sitting next to it.

The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic

Odysseus is tossed on the sea when he notices a rock and clings to it. ‘As when an octopus is drawn out of its lair and bits of pebble get stuck in its suckers,’ says Homer, ‘so his skin was stripped from his brave hands by the rock.’ There is such elegant tricksiness in that simile.

Homer still sits at the apex of western literature thanks to the beauty and influence of his verse. Robin Lane Fox has been teaching the epics for 50 years and studying them for many more. His lifelong fascination with the texts has bred a sort of feverish passion in him that makes him declare Homeric poetry to be ‘beyond us’ today (he is probably right) and without equal anywhere in the world, except perhaps in the books of Tolstoy (who is surely still inferior).   

In Homer and His Iliad he offers a close-reading celebration of the elder of the two epics and a bold reassessment of how it came to life. In the reassessment part, the book feels less like a wilful provocation than a throwing down of the gauntlet by a 76-year-old with nothing to lose. Lane Fox writes less with hope than bardic omniscience that his book will become a landmark in Homeric studies.    

First, the celebration. His extended engagement with the poem yields observations that will have passed many other readers by. I had not noticed, for example, how frequently characters in the Iliad use the word ‘always’ of each other’s actions to indicate habitual behaviour. Hera says that Zeus always delights in making plans behind her back and, according to Agamemnon, Achilles always finds pleasure in strife. Nor had I taken in that there are three sets of divine horses in the poem, two on the Trojan side, one on the Greek. We tend to remember only Achilles’s talking horse.

Even fewer readers will have appreciated that the Iliad contains dialogue by seven different women. Lane Fox is emphatic on the prominence of female voices. Do we detect some irritation on his part with the explosion in fiction marketed as ‘finally giving Homeric women a voice’? Yes, he says, Chryseis and Briseis remain silent, but that is ‘not because Homer belittles women but because they are enslaved girls and have no agency in what happens’. Three goddesses, by contrast, do speak, because their words shape the narrative. The enslavement of Troy’s women, dramatised so well by Pat Barker, postdates the events of the Iliad and is not simply passed over. Women make choices, though many would argue that Helen’s ‘elopement’ with Paris was not her choice, as Lane Fox states, but rather that of Paris.

An appreciative commentary on the poem occupies the final two-fifths of the book. The first three-fifths are dedicated to Lane Fox’s hypotheses and are necessarily more controversial.

The consensus among most scholars now is that Homer was not one person but many. The theory that ‘the Greek peoples were themselves Homer’, as advanced by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in 1730, gained momentum in the past century following the realisation that the epics were composed orally and preserved for generations by performing bards prior to the rediscovery of the art of writing in Greece in the 8th century BC.

Lane Fox does not accept the idea of many Homers. He disagrees with those who argue that the Iliad is a patchwork of preserved poems, or ‘a rolling snowball’, which grew through the contributions of the various poet-performers, like a ‘house built upon a plan comparatively narrow and subsequently enlarged by successive additions’, as the historian-banker George Grote put it. For Lane Fox, Homer was not plural; he was a man.

His most creative arguments are adduced against the theory of the poem as a patchwork. If the Iliad was assembled in parts, he asks, how would it have such a carefully calibrated sense of time, with some days compressed and others expanded upon? It is difficult to imagine a succession of poets foreshadowing Achilles’s early death in such a gently building and consistent manner.

Details in descriptions of the flora and fauna also suggest to Lane Fox the presence of one man in the landscapes of the Troad. Drawing on his horticultural expertise – he is the gardening columnist for the Financial Times – he identifies the ‘yellow crocus’, ‘hyacinth’ and ‘lotus’ watered by Zeus and Hera’s lovemaking with Crocus gargaricus, scillas and a form of clover.

His Homer was an illiterate man living in western Turkey or the eastern Aegean in the mid-8th century BC. He had practised composition-in-performance since boyhood and had honed the technique of revising his work while rehearsing it over and over prior to his first official performance, which might have been at a religious festival. The work caught on, and eventually he dictated it to a scribe, ensuring its survival.

One has to wonder what would have prompted an illiterate poet to take this major step. Did he not share the faith of his characters in the immortality of song? Did he recognise that writing was the future? Or was it simply a case that the poem had become too complex and unwieldy to pass down any further? A performance of the Iliad would have taken at least three days.

There is no way of proving the theory of a single Homer right, but there is also no way of proving it wrong. The romance of a solitary genius is as likely to repel scholars as it is to appeal to readers in our age of AI. Rather like Adam Nicolson’s Why Homer Matters, which proposes a peculiarly early date for the poems, the impossibility of verifying the hypothesis does little to detract from the fascination of Lane Fox’s book. 

How the barbarians of the steppes shaped civilisation

It’s boom time for nomad history. It started some eight years ago, when Bloomsbury published a study of central Asia from an Oxford academic. This might have been a fringe book, but the author’s breadth of knowledge and analysis was exceptional, the narrative was gripping, the cover was beautiful and the publisher had high hopes, in spite of my quibbling review. Their punt paid off. Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads has sold more than two million copies and counting. It has also helped renew interest in central Asia, which had mostly been the preserve of travel writers and niche historians, including the great René Grousset.

Interest has been further stoked by politics, first China’s Belt and Road Initiative and now the Russia-Ukraine war. Since 2017, a series of books has included Warwick Ball’s dry but insightful The Eurasian Steppe, Nicholas Morton’s The Mongol Storm and my own Nomads. Bloomsbury now offers us another beautifully wrapped work, Empires of the Steppes.

The author, Kenneth W. Harl, is a professor of classical and Byzantine history in New Orleans. An expert on Roman coins, his plan is to present the steppe people from their own perspective, show how their empires came together and how, in the process, they changed their world and shaped ours. The narrative covers some 4,500 years, ending with the death of Timur, or Tamerlaine, in the early 1400s.

This is rich terrain that has been covered in some way or another by historical narratives since before Edward Gibbon put pen to paper. What has changed in recent years – and this was something that Frankopan recognised – is our understanding of the early steppe nomads and their empires, in part because the internet has made Russian, Chinese and other sources more accessible and, perhaps more important, because of ongoing archaeological work. Nomads tend to leave few physical traces and even fewer written records, but examinations of their burial mounds have provided revelations, as the British Museum’s 2017 Scythian exhibition showed so beautifully.

The Scythians and their contemporaries, the Saka, Sogdians, Xiongnu and others, are the jumping-off point for any narrative of the steppes, because the material on earlier steppe people is still too thin. The Greek historian Herodotus gives us a good grounding in Scythian manners and customs, including their penchant for alcohol and what seems to have been marijuana. But these were powerful people who defeated and killed the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great and then stared down his successor Darius. Harl brings in recent work on linguistics to show the spread of Scythian influence.

The notable characters of steppe history remain the same as in the 18th and 19th centuries: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur. The Mongol ruler Genghis Khan created the greatest empire the world had seen and it was maintained and enlarged by his sons, among them Kublai Khan of ‘Xanadu’ fame. One of the standout passages of the book relates not to Kublai but his father, who besieged Xanadu, or Zhongdu as it is more properly known, for almost a year. When the city of a million people finally fell, the Mongol leader ordered it to be destroyed. Harl calls this the Khan’s first large-scale civilian massacre. Among the casualties were some 60,000 virgins, who reportedly jumped to their deaths to escape the barbarians. What is not explained so well is that such extreme violence was an attempt to avoid similar sieges. Every nomad fighter travelled with several horses and these had to be fed: long sieges made fodder hard to find. The massacres were intended to terrify other cities into surrender.

There is no doubting the range and depth of Harl’s knowledge of steppe history, nor his eye for the telling detail, as, for instance, the reason why horses from the Ferghana Valley (which lies mainly in present-day Uzbekistan) were so coveted. The Chinese called them ‘heavenly horses’, and Harl explains that the valley was rich in muscle-building selenium. The book also looks beyond the trilogy of Attila, Genghis Khan and Timur to describe the range of other steppe powers that rose and fell over the centuries.

The bulk of the material comes from a successful online lecture series that Harl has created. It makes for a solid and occasionally inspired textbook. But readers of historical narratives need compelling threads to keep their attention over, in this case, more than 500 pages. We want an understanding of the motivation of the main characters, some showing alongside the telling, and analysis to draw out the meaning of the story. All that is in short supply. I was hoping to love this book and was looking forward to riding across the steppes and through the centuries, but for much of it I found myself longing for the journey to end.

Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?

Whether you’re left, right or just somewhere vaguely in between, wherever you’re coming from you may well have a sense that things are somehow not quite right, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that our various problems and crises seem to be multiplying. You may well have concluded that this is because our institutions have been taken over by an out-of-touch elite who run the government, the judiciary, the media and goodness knows what else, and that the only way to discover the real truth is to do your own research, which involves scrolling through the internet because you no longer trust the ‘mainstream media’.

If so, without knowing it, according to James Ball, you have been infected by QAnon. In this brilliant, wide-ranging, if rather uneven, account, Ball argues that all sorts of conspiracy theories, originally bred in the depths of chat rooms, bulletin boards and what he calls ‘digital reservoirs’, have gradually found their way into everyday mainstream culture, and that – unless prevented from spreading – they will continue to cause massive damage to our democratic system. The Other Pandemic is essentially a history of some recent bad ideas brought to us by the internet.

Ball is a journalist who spent a lot of his teens on 4chan, a collection of online forums founded in 2003 by a 15-year-old American, Christopher Poole, known as ‘moot’. For those who might be unfamiliar, 4chan is essentially a message board like, say, Mumsnet, which guarantees anonymity to users and which Ball describes as ‘just a ridiculously fun place to hang out’. The anonymity has also meant that it’s a place which has enabled and encouraged the sort of loose talk, bullying and idiotic pranks that might once have been restricted to school playgrounds, pubs, public toilets and the privacy of one’s own home. Thus, 4chan brought us harmless memes, lolcats and Rickrolling, but also trolling, doxing and revenge porn. Ball sums up the early days of the site as a place where ‘bored, online-literate misfits’ used ‘their excess energy on whatever crossed their minds, with no particular target’. And then they found their targets.

The first serious one was the Church of Scientology, which became subject to online attacks in 2008 by a group of 4chan users who called themselves Anonymous. These attacks soon became real world protests involving the picketing of Scientology centres by people wearing Guy Fawkes masks. In other words, with Anonymous, the online world began seeping into the real one.

Things got worse. Various pranks, scams and trolling eventually led to something known as Gamergate, again spawned on 4chan. This particularly sorry episode in internet history was essentially a harassment campaign against women which provided plenty of fuel and impetus for incel online subculture, the alt-right and the many useful idiot YouTube hucksters and social media influencers who like to peddle hokum, hogwash and hate in order to boost likes, subscribes and views. From this roiling hot digital stew eventually emerged Pizzagate, in 2016, the first big viral conspiracy theory, which suggested that Hillary Clinton led a human trafficking and child-sex ring, centred on a pizzeria in Washington DC.

And then came Q. Q is a term for a high level of security clearance in the US Department of Energy. In 2017, a 4chan user with the name ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ began posting. Q may or may not be Ron Watkins, the son of Jim Watkins, who happens to be the owner of something now called 8kun, and which, in Ball’s words, is ‘essentially 4chan, but worse’. Whether Watkins or not, Q’s posts gathered quite a following. As Ball explains, ‘the QAnon conspiracy is a hard one to fully define’, but the essentials are that ‘the world is run by a satanic, paedophilic elite’ and that Donald Trump is waging a heroic battle against these dark forces. The attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, represented QAnon in action.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, Ball goes on to explain how QAnon conspiracy theories then merged with ideas about the ‘Great Reset’, the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown movements, quickly becoming ‘the conspiracy theory that has eaten all other conspiracy theories’, underpinned by various fantasies, nostalgic longings and an all-pervasive belief in a morally bankrupt elite ‘other’.

It’s difficult to see how to cope with this ongoing tidal wave of online misinformation and disinformation. Rather overextending his metaphor, Ball suggests a ‘Digital Public Health System’ to counter the threat of ‘digital pathogens’. Whatever the cure – and let’s hope there is a cure – The Other Pandemic presents a detailed and disturbing diagnosis.