Why does the BBC think we need a Today programme podcast?

Is there really room in the crowded market for a new podcast about politics, presented by two male Oxbridge graduates? The BBC thinks so: the team behind Radio 4’s Today programme is launching a new weekly podcast hosted by Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan. This is a ‘bold commitment from the BBC to continue to build the Today brand’, according to the, erm, BBC.

 In case you are waiting for the punchline or the big reveal, there is nothing different about The Today Podcast. Its presenters will ‘give their take on the biggest stories of the week’, though the audience is also promised a range of guests and ‘insights from behind the scenes at Radio 4’s Today’. Nevertheless, in a 56-second clip released on X (formerly Twitter) at the weekend, Robinson and Rajan took the challenge head-on and asked themselves what made the new show unique.

In Robinson, Rajan told us, we have a former BBC political editor of vast experience, who has travelled with prime ministers and knows the rhythm of British politics almost by instinct. Meanwhile, Robinson told us, Rajan is a former newspaper editor who understands how modern media works and is changing, ‘not old media-land’. Underpinning their complementary skills is the BBC, with all its ‘knowledge and expertise and experience’.

If Robinson and Rajan think the jostle of political podcasts lacks experience, eminence or star quality, they are wrong. Current BBC political editor, Chris Mason, co-presents the Newscast podcast, and Andrew Marr, who held the job from 2000 to 2005, appears on the New Statesman’s podcast, while his LBC show is also repeated in podcast form. As for former newspaper editors, it does not take long to find the opinions of Lionel Barber (FT), Alan Rusbridger (Guardian), George Osborne (Evening Standard) or, indeed, the same Andrew Marr, who edited the Independent more than 15 years before Rajan himself.

Relying on the BBC brand to sell this podcast is also unwise. I’m a fan of the BBC but there is a lot about the corporation which needs examining, not least its cack-handed senior leadership, obsession with diversity and inclusion and questions over its funding by a mandatory licence fee. Yes, it has produced and broadcast some of the best television and radio ever made, and the World Service, which reached 365 million people weekly, has an enviable global reputation for trusted and impartial reporting. But its image has suffered recently, with the chairman, Richard Sharp, resigning over his failure to disclose his involvement in a loan paid to Boris Johnson; its uncertain handling of accusations of impropriety against newsreader Huw Edwards; and a general feeling that the corporation has a fundamental London-centric, middle-class bias. 

Is Radio 4 just too late to the party with The Today Podcast? One of the most frequent criticisms of public-sector organisations is that they are unwieldy and slow to react to changes of direction. Because they are often bureaucratic and risk-averse, they cannot innovate and change at the rate of the private sector, often therefore lagging behind. The launch of this podcast seems like a perfect example of this phenomenon. What’s more, the BBC already has at least a dozen offerings in the field, including Political Thinking with Nick Robinson and, in recent years, Amol Rajan Interviews… But the strength of Today is surely that it is agenda-setting, that it is one of the major springboards for the day’s news, and taking away that immediacy from a weekly review of current events feels like tying one hand behind the back.

The field of political podcasts has a saturation point. Perhaps we have not yet reached it; we may not realise until it is too late, and there will be casualties. The mixed reception which greeted Political Currency with George Osborne and Ed Balls, both huge political figures and overseen by big producers Persephonica, suggests that the audience is at least approaching the stage of the fatal ‘waffer-theen’ mint. The danger for the BBC, and for its intrepid presenters, who will be given a can to carry if anything goes wrong, is not that the podcast will be bad. The trouble is that it needs to be much, much more than that for anyone to listen and care.

I’ve given up on my dreams… apart from the sports car

They say that, against all expectations, after the age of about 50 you actually get happier, and that much of this happiness is tied in with the merciful death of your dreams. Once over the hill – and I can vouch for this – you feel unrealistic visions that have guided you your whole life simply exit the stage, albeit with a few well-aimed parting kicks. You don’t lament their passing – young people may want an emotional switchback, but in maturity (well, relative maturity) you’ll happily (well, relatively happily) swap it for solid ground under your feet and a little stability of mind. Hope, thankfully, doesn’t always spring eternal. After your first half-century, it’s more like the stubborn dripping of a wonky tap.

One of the fantasies that has gone pop recently is owning a sports car. This has been on my bucket since about the age of seven. Sean Connery’s Aston Martin DB5, Purdey’s drophead MGB in The New Avengers, Roger Moore’s Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me: I collected nearly all of these in matchbox form as a child and wanted to own at least one of them when I grew up. Oh, for the open road, the roar of the engine, the needles on those dials which suddenly spring to pulsing life when you turn on the ignition.

Later, as I hit adolescence, there were the Brat Pack films of the 1980s where the late-teen characters often drove convertibles, as though you couldn’t really be fully, gloriously young without one. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the classic 1961 Ferrari California Spyder he and his friends manage to trash is essentially the film’s fourth character. The same goes for Andrew McCarthy’s Chevrolet Corvette C1 in Less than Zero. Both films would be gutted without these four-wheeled stars at their centre. Ferris Bueller would spend his day off waiting for taxis to arrive. Less than Zero would definitely be less than zero.

But in fact, my interest in luxury cars began even earlier. My grandfather was a self-made man, big in fertiliser, and had a succession of Daimlers to match. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in his Daimler Sovereign’s squashy leather interior – faintly scented with aromatic pipe-smoke – marvelling at the walnut dashboard and funny automatic gearstick, so different, so much nicer than my father’s Volvo. It was while taking the Daimler in for a service that my grandfather died of a massive heart attack, aged 76. Perhaps there are worse ways to go.

As I get older, all these cars seemed to have merged in my fantasies – the latest to have caught my attention is a Jaguar XK8. Produced from 1996 to 2006, it has a similar interior to grandpa’s Daimler, and a V8 engine to match anything driven by James Bond. It was the coupe version I lusted after, not the soft-top. Convertibles are so public and the gods would surely punish me for showing off so shamelessly. The coupe is still quite something – as gorgeous as an old Porsche, it can be picked up surprisingly cheap second-hand, and the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson – surely among the most beguiling women of our times – anointed the XK8 as her ideal motor. A slightly naffer man than me might well have snaffled one already and named it ‘Tara’ in her memory.

But I knew I would almost certainly never have the nerve to get ‘Tara’. Such a car must be earned, and earned morally, not just financially: it should be a reward to yourself for something marvellous you’ve achieved. I’d done little thus far to deserve an XK8, and nowadays you’d need a C02- offsetting gold card to flash at fist-shaking environmentalists as well.

And, I wondered, would I love the Jaguar just a little bit too much? There was a danger I might turn into a Swiss Toni figure, waxing it compulsively and telling fresh-faced acolytes that driving one was ‘like making lerv to a beautiful woman’. Would I end up buying one of those air fresheners shaped like a fir tree, swinging gonadically from my rear-view mirror? Such cars, I feel, should be scented with half-smoked Monte Cristos and Floris Santal, not synthetic pine.

‘You only live twice,’ goes the Bond song, ‘One life for yourself, and one for your dreams,’ and by the age of 50, you mostly know the difference. You’ll never own the Georgian mansion in the Home Counties, the pay rise of destiny probably isn’t coming, and Rachel Weisz is already married to Daniel Craig. But there is a little itchy part of you that still hankers after something opulent and enviable, at the top of its class. You want that walnut dashboard and to feel that V8 engine roar into life at your touch, perhaps want it even more as your own energies fail. ‘If not me then who?’ whispers a voice inside. ‘If not now, then when? Isn’t time running out?’

The trouble is, in some ways it already has. You’re more cautious and prudent at 50 and you see ahead – to huge insurance bills, credit-siphoning visits to the petrol pump, and the usual realisation that no material thing makes much difference to life as it actually feels. You dream less because you know your dreams aren’t reality in waiting. They’re simply the alternative existence of someone you are not.

So the usual formula applies. You want: a 1967 E-Type. You’d settle for: a ten-year-old Volvo. You get: a 1990s Ford Fiesta, bought from a local granny for its low mileage and the fact it’s never been driven over 30 mph. As for that Jaguar, it’ll just have to go into the very large file marked ‘Wonderful things that never happened.’ Perhaps I’d just have crashed the bastard anyway.

I hated counsellor training

In practically every respect, I’m a useless human being. This is not the vanity of false modesty – I really am worse than most people at most things. I’ve never picked up a musical instrument, a golf club or a foreign language; I can barely boil an egg and would find it almost impossible to paint a wall without stepping back and kicking two and a half litres of emulsion all over the carpet.

Yet I thought, in terms of life experience, that I’d make quite a good counsellor. I was one of five children with a father too sick to work. We lived on benefits, had free school meals and our clothes arrived in bin bags from the local church. It was a fairly bottom-rung start but I’ve since made a very decent living as a writer, including a stint doing some light counselling as an agony uncle for a women’s magazine. I’ve brought up two children and I’m still married to their mother. But more importantly, I wanted to help people. So when I signed up for an ‘Introduction to Counselling’ course, I was bursting with altruistic intent. Within minutes, however, all that enthusiasm had seeped out of me and I was visibly sagging in my seat.

The course was not for me or anyone remotely like me. In fact, it was all a bit public sector. The woman running it was perfectly nice but, as if reading from a script, the first thing she stressed was that the room we were in was a ‘safe space’ and that she would not tolerate racism, sexism or homophobia. Well, of course she wouldn’t. Any more than she’d tolerate murder, masturbation or playing the bagpipes. Why even say that? I could guess what was coming next and sure enough, it was something about ‘always respecting and never judging’.

It was then time to introduce ourselves. I have no wish to criticise the others in the class – they were good people with noble motives – but I did wonder whether some of them were properly equipped to assist those seeking emotional help and guidance.

Most seemed naive while others were clearly damaged, immediately talking about their own addiction and mental health issues. There were three or four whose first language was not English and one in particular struggled gamely just to make an introduction. There was a comedy moment when she said that, as a counsellor, she kept saying that she would ‘overlook’ the welfare of her clients when she meant ‘oversee’. I expected the moderator to gently correct her but of course she didn’t. All shall be respected; none shall be judged. And so it went on. And on. And on. I looked at my watch. It was 7.15 p.m. Three hours later, I looked at it again – it was 7.30. To accommodate its least able members, the pace of the class had slowed to a crawl.

The trouble was, I was at least 20 years older than anyone else and at a very different stage of my life. Put bluntly, I was in far more of a hurry. I wanted to work harder and faster. And given that this was just the introduction and full qualification would take about five years, I knew my career as a counsellor was over before it had even begun.

Now I know what you’re thinking; if I don’t even have the patience to sit through one class, how on earth would I have the patience to deal with vulnerable people who’d come to me for help? You may have a point but let’s not lose sight of a far more serious one: The BACP (British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy) approved courses simply aren’t designed for older, wiser, more grounded candidates. So the very people who might have made good counsellors are lost to the profession forever.

Instead, the courses seem to attract younger, quite troubled people, some of whom were plainly at a loss with what to do with their lives. They’ve undergone therapy in the past and clearly want to carry on receiving it.

But counselling is too important to be entrusted to the wrong people. It’s often the first port of call for those experiencing anxiety, stress or depression. A good counsellor can help solve these problems before they spiral into something more serious. From what I saw, the candidates who enrol for these courses are not going to be up to the job.

In the UK, there is a worsening crisis with mental health – especially as lasting damage of lockdowns becomes more apparent – and that needs to be addressed. The first step might be for BACP to design a fast-track course aimed at older people. And there has to be more rigour. If there were stricter entry criteria, including a proper interview, counselling may start to appeal to the people it so obviously needs.

The best thing about a counselling course is that it is, in the original sense of the word, inclusive – anyone can enroll. The worst thing about it is that they do.

My favourite restaurant serves rubbish food – and I still love it

One of my favourite restaurants of all time serves mediocre food, has a limited menu, and occasionally brings a dish containing none of the advertised ingredients.  Why do I love it so? Because the service and the ambience are both a delight. The warm greeting from the proprietor who always remembers his customers’ names; the attentive (but not fawning) waiter who immediately produces menus and water without being asked; and the sommelier who recommends a perfect aperitif before talking us through the wines in a matter-of-fact way that belies the usual ‘You can really taste the terroir,’ and ‘This one is like a summer’s day in Provence.’

The drinks and appetisers all arrive in exactly the correct order, and with the requisite 20-minute gap between courses. The cheese and dessert are properly paced, and if they have run out of sweet wine or port, someone will pop to the local store to pick one up without making a fuss. Water is topped up discreetly, but the wine bottle is left for the diners to help themselves, in a nice deep ice bucket within easy reach of the table.

The music is unobtrusive but adds to the calm but fun atmosphere, and the dining room is always at the perfect temperature. The linen is crisp and white, the tables big enough to hold the food (a rarity these days) and dinner is not served on square plates, shovels or flat caps.

When the bill is requested, it comes within a short space of time. There has been no ‘how is your food/are you enjoying your meal?’ interruptions.  They trust that you will send it back if you are not, and as I say, the food is mediocre, but it’s consistent and hasn’t yet poisoned me. When leaving the restaurant, there is always someone to open the door and bid you good night. That is why it is always packed with contented customers. Give me excellent service and a good atmosphere where you can sit back comfortably and know you will be properly looked after and want for nothing (except slightly better food, but you take the rough with the smooth).

Compare this to a very a la mode place I ate at recently and to which I will never return. The food was excellent. Sublime chicken liver pâté on the lightest fried polenta; garlicky croutons piled with silky, buttery field mushrooms; trout with smoked cod roe; slices of tender ribeye spiked with salsa verde, and a tiramisu that almost floated off the plate. But it was all soured by the poor service, bad attitude of the staff, and truly dire atmosphere.

On arrival, the maître d’ was nowhere to be seen and the front desk was empty. I was made to feel like we should get on our knees and kiss the floor of this sacred space. When we were eventually seated there was no sign of a menu so after 15 minutes I decided to go and look for them myself. ‘Sorry, madam, we are very busy,’ I was coldly informed when finally, somebody came to take our drinks order. Enough time had passed for us all to have made and changed our minds several times and so also began to order food. ‘My colleague will be coming to take your food order, madam,’ I was told, condescendingly.

The drinks arrived 20 minutes later, and by this point, I was raging. When permission was granted for us to order our dinner, he uttered the dreaded words, ‘There are no appetisers and main courses as such. The kitchen sends out the dishes as they are ready.’

I asked why. I wanted to know whether this was because they wanted to surprise the diners with the chef’s own experience of which dishes should follow the next. I wanted them to reassure me that this was in the plan and had something to do with customer satisfaction as opposed to merely convenience for the kitchen. I didn’t get an answer.

The music was too loud, the toilets were so far away that they had a separate postcode, and the waiters walked around with their noses so far in the air that I imagine they were all be wearing neck braces by the end of the night. During the meal, we were repeatedly asked if we were enjoying our food. It would have been a better use of the waiters’ time to ensure we were enjoying our evening. But where were they when you needed a top up of wine? Our bottle was left in a cooler a bus ride away from our table.

I would never go back to that restaurant again, even if they comped the entire meal. I felt patronised, dismissed, and unwelcome. The restaurant was run for the convenience of the management and no attempt was made to hide that fact. But the restaurant with the happy, smiling staff, brisk service, and mediocre/occasionally pretty bad food? I’m heading there this evening and can’t wait. It is true that they don’t have a great chef, but perfection is all in the mind.   

Kevin McCarthy ousted as US Speaker

Kevin McCarthy has been ousted as the House speaker after losing a vote 216-210, becoming the first speaker ever to lose his role through a vote and the shortest serving speaker to date.

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz had forced the motion to vacate, due to his dissatisfaction with the deal McCarthy struck at the weekend to avoid a government shutdown.

Seven other Republicans voted with Gaetz and the Democrats to boot McCarthy from his leadership position: Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana, who is currently running for Senate there.

Sunak set to scrap HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester

Rishi Sunak will tomorrow confirm he is scrapping the HS2 link between Manchester and Birmingham, Coffee House understands. The prime minister will make the announcement in his conference speech as part of an argument about responsible government. He will, though, try to soften the political blow by detailing alternative rail projects in the north of England using the money. 

The row about HS2 has dominated the Conservative party conference, with Sunak insisting only today that he wouldn’t be rushed into making a ‘premature’ decision about the future of the line. It seems he has now made that decision – or he has managed to stick to his own media grid which planned to announce the decision tomorrow, rather than rush it out when the news started to leak early. Sunak sees refusing to bow to the demands of the 24 hour news cycle as a virtue, but this does mean he has spent more of conference discussing what he isn’t doing than the things he wants the public to thank him for at the next election. A week of rumours about the high speed line hasn’t taken the pressure out of the political row, either. 

All eyes will be on West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who has refused to rule out resigning if the project is scrapped. Mayors are supposed to be an independent voice for their regions but Street has already framed the potential decision to scrap the northern link as being the end of levelling up and a snub to the future, undermining the party conference slogan about long-term decisions for a brighter future. 

Even Tory MPs who don’t really care one way or the other about HS2 are hoping that tomorrow’s speech gives their voters some sense of why they should stick with the Conservatives at the next election. They say that the mood on the doorstep in recent months has gone from anger to a desire for reassurance from the Tories as Labour has so far failed to entice voters. The big news tonight might be about what Sunak wants to scrap, but he also needs to give voters a vision of what he wants to do, too. 

Lee Anderson unleashed at Tory conference

Dogs bark, cows moo and Lee Anderson shoots his mouth off. The firecracker that is the Tory deputy party chairman took to the ConservativeHome stage on the Tory conference fringe this afternoon, and he certainly didn’t hold back.

Speaking to Anand Menon, director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, the plain-talking Anderson fired off his thoughts on a number of topics, ranging from how he went from Labour to Tory and from hating to loving Margaret Thatcher, to his famous moniker ‘30p Lee’.

Asked whether he would ever consider rejoining the Labour party, Anderson branded it a ‘ridiculous question’. He didn’t stop there though: ‘The working classes for the Labour party –  we were useful idiots.’ Later on, he added, ‘None of them have done a decent day’s work in their lives, not one of them.’ A one-time Labour councillor, Anderson recalled how his colleagues had wanted to open a book of condolences to the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro when he died in 2016. ‘I think the word that you use for these people is “nutters”.’

In unsurprising news, the GB News host said he agreed with the Home Secretary that ‘multiculturalism had failed’ but heaped praise on leader Rishi Sunak too for ‘sacrificing a nice, peaceful, rich life to come and put up with all this nonsense that he puts up with in this place and all these idiots all the time.’ Noble stuff Lee. Admonishing those MPs who will ‘say and do anything’ to get into power, he mused aloud that ‘a dictator is a good idea – if they’re a good dictator. But there’s no good dictators are there?’ Quite…

On HS2, he was blunt, branding the high speed rail network ‘a load of nonsense’. Jokingly, he then asked the audience ‘Is there anyone from Bradford here?’ before quipping to roars of laughter from the audience, ‘Would you want to get there any quicker?’ He had harsh words for benefits claimants too, telling them to ‘just crack on and get on with it. Stop whinging.’ Expanding onto the issue of food poverty, on which he claimed to be ‘speaking from a position of strength’, he said ‘We didn’t go on Facebook or TikTok and moan and say “I’ve got no food”, because my mum and dad’s philosophy was simple: they’re our kids and we’ll feed them.’ 

Addressing the cost of living more broadly, Anderson didn’t mince his words. ‘This is not an impoverished island. This is a wealthy country and the opportunities here are limitless in the UK,’ he said. ‘If you want something, you can go and get it. You need to get off your arse and go and get it for yourself.’

Quizzed about last week’s debacle featuring his GB News colleague Dan Wooton and Laurence Fox, Anderson claimed not to have seen the footage of them talking lewdly about the journalist Ava Evans because he was on holiday in Spain at the time. However, he called their actions ‘wrong’. Ever the showman, Anderson acknowledged that he knew he was ‘quite divisive’, but said it was all part of doing his job properly as an MP. ‘If I can’t say it, then you’ve not got a voice. So I’ll carry on being divisive.’

Does he know any other way?

Unequivocally Japanese: The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed

Who are you without memory? This is the question that sits at the heart of The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, best known for her 1988 novella Kitchen, which was a smash hit in Japan and adapted for film. The Premonition is a similarly slender work and one that casts a delicate spell.

Nineteen-year-old Yayoi has the perfect family – doting parents and a brother she adores – but she feels unsettled, as if she’s forgotten something vital in her past: ‘There, in the midst of such a beautiful evening, my heart must have been full of that premonition.’ Looking for answers, she goes to live with her eccentric aunt Yukino, who she feels is a ‘siren to those of us who had lost part of our childhood’, and the answers she discovers change her life forever.

Born Mahoko Yoshimoto, the author chose her pen name due to her love of banana flowers, which she thinks ‘rather cute’ and ‘androgynous’. For fans of Haruki Murakami, the gateway author to Japanese literature, Yoshimoto’s style is more linear and less labyrinthine. The texture of the world Yoshimoto builds is terrestrial; there are no parallel universes or talking to cats, despite a lead character with telepathic abilities. And yet between Yoshimoto and her translator, Asa Yoneda, there is something otherworldly. The language of The Premonition is heady (‘the greenery stood smoky in the dark’) and the narrative is peopled with oddballs who eat fruit curry and snow peas, drink whisky and stay up all night watching Friday the 13th movies on repeat. There’s synaesthesia (‘it smelled of darkness’), nostalgia, tragedy, heartbreak and waif-like Japanese women who eat a lot.

In a creative landscape that is increasingly homogenised by an Anglo-American style, it’s refreshing to pick up literature that has not lost its thisness. The world that blossoms from Yoshimoto’s text is unequivocally Japanese, in the aesthetic vein known as mono no aware, which roughly translates as ‘the pathos of things’ or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera’. But beneath the poetics, Yoshimoto’s books confront serious themes: suicide, prostitution, death, alcoholism and incestuous desire. The Premonition is about upbringing and nature vs nurture. As Yayoi says: ‘It’s kind of tragic, I thought, that we can never completely escape our childhood.’

The novel taps into anxiety about memory, childhood and the peculiar feeling that there’s a hidden truth about ourselves we’ve forgotten, and if only we took pains to find it we might finally feel at home.

What Britain owed to Gracie Fields

Simon Heffer is the supreme Stakhanovite among British writers. Where the original Stakhanov moved 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, within the past decade Heffer has produced four massive volumes of modern British history, each little less than 1,000 pages. Alongside them he has edited three equally voluminous diaries of the waspish socialite MP ‘Chips’ Channon, as well as writing regular reviews and columns. Hats off to the master!

In this latest and final volume of his tetralogy chronicling the British century between Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 and Neville Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on Germany in 1939, Heffer once more treats us to his vast knowledge and trenchant opinions on almost every aspect of the nation’s state, from high politics to crime and popular entertainment. It is an astonishing achievement of narrative history, and if it has an old-fashioned feel, it’s in the best sense of that phrase.

The author is a political animal with strong cultural interests, and while the bulk of this detailed work concerns the day-to-day struggle for control of the country at a crucial moment of change, he never neglects the parallel worlds of music and literature – devoting many pages, for example, to the fairly obscure writer Humbert Wolfe, and several more to one of his heroes, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Each volume of these histories has an overarching theme – the ‘arrogant swagger’ of the Edwardian era, for instance, masking a deep anxiety about the future of British power. The narrative arc of this book explores how the country was dragged kicking and screaming into fighting a second world war soon after the first had left a bereaved nation firmly wedded to pacifism.

Heffer peppers his prose with extracts from the diaries and letters of contemporary witnesses, including Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and the eccentric novelist John Cowper Powys. These illustrate how the statistics he marshals on every page affected people at the time, though members of the Bloomsbury set were hardly ordinary folk.

We usually view the interwar period as the roaring 1920s – girls with bobs dancing the Black Bottom – giving way to the grim 1930s: unemployment and hunger marches under the deepening shadow of war. Heffer presents a more nuanced picture, reminding us that for every Jarrow marcher beset by jobless near-starvation, there was a southern suburb enjoying ever-rising levels of prosperity and increasing leisure time filled with weekly visits to the cinema or lido.

The iconic figure who bestrides these two Britains is Gracie Fields, the Rochdale lass who sang her way from the music hall to the silver screen and ended her days in the lap of luxury on Capri. ‘Our Gracie’ not only gives Heffer his title, but epitomises for him the warm, resilient spirit of the common people who endured every hardship and injustice inflicted on them but managed to survive in some style.

Although Heffer writes from a High Tory perspective, he is more properly a classic Liberal. His 19th-century political hero is the upright anti-imperialist Gladstone rather than the slick chancer Disraeli. As such, he keeps a compassionate eye on the have-nots comprising the majority of the population, and deeply disapproves of unprincipled politicians such as Lloyd George, even when he successfully negotiates Ireland’s independence.

The book culminates with the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and the run up to war. In the great debate on appeasement – whether the high-minded PM was a far-sighted statesman striving for peace while preparing for war or a naive dupe who allowed Hitler to lead him by the nose – Heffer is scrupulously fair. Using aircraft production figures and the like he proves that Chamberlain followed a contradictory policy of rearmament while hoping against hope that the Führer could be persuaded to take the path of peace. In the words of one of his ministers, Chamberlain ‘walked into the thieves’ kitchen thinking it was the Carlton Club’. For his part, Hitler thought the PM a schlappschwanz (limp dick).

For those with the time and stamina to ascend this mountain of words, Heffer’s tetralogy offers a commanding view of a century that saw Britain at the summit and then beginning its descent. I think the word is ‘magisterial’.

What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?

When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds of collectors: normal people.

Most of us at some point have had a little collection on the go – stamps, pebbles, gonks, succulents, Pokémon cards. I remember at school there was always great competition for Panini football stickers: everyone seemed forever to be in search of the elusive Kenny Dalglish.

Of course there will always be hoarders of knick-knacks, old tools, novelty nut-crackers, Northern Dairies milk bottles and goodness knows what else. I know someone who collects toenail clippers and another who collects snow globes and embroidered slippers – a mini V & A in the making. My uncle Dave used to search for those Bell’s Whisky ceramic decanter things. Charles Kane he most certainly was not: Dave was a minicab driver from Basildon.

Paper ephemera is perhaps the most delightful and affordable stuff for the average person. It’s cheap, durable and doesn’t take up too much space. No need for your Hearst castle, or even a drinks cabinet or shelf above the sideboard: you can keep your collection of pre-war bus tickets in a ringbinder in a drawer. The curator Ingrid Swenson preserves her collection in a dozen black presentation folders.

Swenson has amassed other people’s shopping lists. Her book is a beautifully produced catalogue of this collection, though catalogue is perhaps too strong a word. It’s just a small, dense, thick book full of colour reproductions of the hundreds – in excess of a thousand – of shopping lists found by her at the Waitrose on the Holloway Road in London over a period of about ten years, plus a few pages of explanatory text. You might think such a book would be simply silly: at best, an early Christmas stocking filler. But in fact it’s unputdownable, like a series of notes towards Beckett’s short plays. I found it much more interesting than some of the novels on the current Booker shortlist.

‘Almonds, asparagus, chillis, wine in Whitstable.’ ‘Milk, bread, eggs, rolls, veg – green beans (org), TURK.’ ‘Scallops Sardines Bread Broc (2) Soup PorridGe.’ It’s not difficult to understand why this stuff appeals. There’s the obvious odd aesthetic value: the vast array of colourful Post-It notes, the index cards, the backs of envelopes; and the incredible range of handwriting on display. (One important lesson from the book: penmanship has gone to pot.) But there’s also that rare glimpse into other people’s private lives: someone’s entire world, in Swenson’s words, ‘captured in a single, modest entity’. It undoubtedly helps that Swenson refrains from offering any grand theory or set of interpretations in her commentary. There’s no mention of Walter Benjamin, tempting as that must have been, no pontificating about cultures of consumption and obsolescence, no banging on about our archives of the self. She suggests merely some of the information that we might wish to infer from the limited data that the lists provide: age, gender, dietary habits, profession. Who exactly is buying ‘moose bread pastries chicken vodka + fags’? Or ‘Salt Nibbles Milk Cherrios Bunnies Burger Buns’?

She may not labour the point, but hers is undoubtedly a heroic task. We all know that in the end most of us will leave no trace; there’ll be little or no evidence that any of us ever existed. And, besides, the written shopping list as a part of our everyday lives is disappearing:

As life becomes more digital, more efficient and more ecologically aware, the shopping list as a quotidian fact of life, like so many everyday items, sounds and smells, is gradually dying out.

Swenson has been gathering our remnants, in several senses.

Behind all collections one can catch a glimpse of the collector: even today, Sir John Soane seems to inhabit every inch of his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Swenson reveals in the final pages of her book that the shopping list project – begun in 2014 when she picked up her first crumpled note – ended last year, after she left her job of 23 years and embarked on life as a freelancer, and no longer found herself visiting Waitrose as often. If nothing else, Shopping Lists provides a reminder of a world that was – a time when ordinary Londoners could afford to buy, say, mozzarella and beer. Extraordinary.

The difficulties faced by identical twins

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see twins as a species apart. It was refreshing, then, to find that Viney is an identical twin, and approaches twins from the experience of actually being one.

Split into three sections, ‘Myth and Legend’, ‘Science and Progress’ and ‘Spectacle and Prophecy’, the monograph is interspersed with a comprehensive and well curated selection of twin-related art and artefacts, from Yoruban wooden masks to Hollywood movie posters. These are never intrusive, and instead form a subtle and sometimes comic commentary on Viney’s frequent insights into the cultural history of the subject. Admitting that ‘writing about twins means reconciling my own limited experience of being a twin with the vast diversity of twin experience in written and visual records’, he nevertheless has much to say on living in the world as a genetic copy of another human being: ‘Being a twin is a baffling and powerful combination of effort and ease… twins are always learning about what your curiosity looks like.’ What Viney sets out to do is explore exactly how this abiding curiosity arose.

Starting at the beginning of recorded history, he observes: ‘In many creation stories twins are deities… makers of life and the cosmos… They are mythology’s great catalysts. Everywhere, twins kickstart storylines.’ While the book reiterates the familiar tales of Castor and Pollux and Romulus and Remus, it also features less familiar pairings such as Apollo and Artemis, or the Ashvins, heroic horse-riding twins from the Rigveda. He suggests twin myths are often ‘products of political circumstances’, citing how Romulus and Remus are claimed by both Rome and Siena for their foundation stories, while the trope of the Evil Twin ‘represents a longer, more ancient dualism, which uses twins as bearers of cosmic wickedness and destruction’. Along the way, he addresses the deep-rooted ‘fears that twins are abnormal, kill the sick, pollute or damage livestock and crops, arise from adultery, are cursed and embody evil’, reminding us that their venerated status in certain cultures arose only recently.

In the second section, Viney laments that twins are used mainly as ‘monitoring instruments’ in science, while rarely being consulted on their attitude to this. While it’s accepted that ‘twin lives are a means to generate data’, he reveals that this is only a relatively new phenomenon, begun in northern Europe towards the end of the 19th century and ‘industrialised as a set of research methods at the beginning of the 20th century’. We learn some startling statistics and facts: there have never been more twins on Earth than now, with about 1.6 million twin pairs born each year. Also, that the creation of monozygotic identical twins (from a single cell that divides) is hardly seen in other mammals. ‘The nine-banded armadillo is the only other creature that produces twins in a similar way.’ Viney admits that twins offer a ‘rare form of experimental control’ and addresses the moral responsibility that comes with this, invoking the legacy of Mengele’s notorious experiments at Auschwitz. The consequences of twin studies are political as well as scientific: ‘They affect how twins and other human groups are respected.’

The book’s most compelling section explores how twins have been appeared in literature and film, covering the doppelganger trope in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the offensive caricature of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The lines Viney quotes from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (as Antipholus of Syracuse sets off in search of his brother) most accurately convey the existential experience of being a twin: ‘I to the world am like a drop of water/ That in the ocean seeks another drop.’ He also cites the Duke’s lines from the close of Twelfth Night (when Viola and Sebastian are reunited) that encapsulate how twins appear to singletons: ‘One face, one voice, one habit and two persons/ A natural perspective that is and is not.’ In his indignant discussion of films such as Dead Ringers and the Schwarzenegger-DeVito romp Twins, Viney stops just short of using the phrase twinface: ‘The history of cinema involves people pretending to be twins, single-born people without lived experience that strive to play up to what screenwriters, directors, executives and their audiences expect from twin characters.’

Twinkind is an impeccably researched visual treat, and one that is necessarily partisan. As the author laments: ‘Twins are often treated as two persons that occupy the social position of one being.’ Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, that their unique individual experience of being in the world was acknowledged too.

How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC. 

Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death. And there’s no reason to doubt the skeleton of Suetonius’s life: that Vergil was unmarried, with no children; both his brothers died when he was young; his father went blind; and he also had a half-brother, Valerius Proculus, through his mother, who is thought to have remarried after her husband’s death.

There are debates about Vergil’s background. Suetonius says he had lower-class parents; but some critics have suggested his father was from the grand equites class. And in later life Vergil certainly moved among the great and the good, including the greatest of them all – the Emperor Augustus.

Vergil assumed the toga of manhood at 15, went to school in Milan and studied philosophy in Naples rather than Athens (the usual gap-year destination for smart Romans), but his genius elevated him into elite circles. In Naples, he lived near other literary grandees, although he often withdrew to Sicily and Campania.

Suetonius also suggests that Vergil was gay. Not only was he unmarried but he was ‘of desire more inclined than usual towards boys’. Vergil was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (‘Virgin’), a pun on his name, which sounded like virgo, Latin for the Greek word parthenos, meaning a sheltered, unmarried girl. All in all, he comes across as a deeply sympathetic figure: gentle, shy, chronically ill and a genius, his intellectual powers increasing as he grew older.

The Appendix Vergiliana, a collection of his early poems – if they are all by him – has been much criticised, as Ruden shows in her careful analysis. But then came the Eclogues and the Georgics, showing his gift for singing about the pascua, rura – those pastures and fields. And then there was the masterpiece, the Aeneid, which Vergil was still polishing when he died in Brindisi in 19 BC, aged 50. On his deathbed, he asked for his scroll cases which contained the Aeneid, wanting to burn them. Luckily, Augustus overruled him.

Even though the Aeneid wasn’t finished, Vergil was already celebrated by the time of his death. Just before he died, he set off for Athens to finish the epic. There he bumped into Augustus and accompanied him to Megara, where he caught his final illness in the intense heat. He refused to postpone that fatal voyage to Brindisi, where he died on 21 September, when southern Italy can still be punishingly hot.

Ruden is a considerable scholar, who conveys the brilliance of the Aeneid concisely – although I could have done with more Latin. Even non-Latin readers like little chunks of the lovely language. She ably translates Rome’s paramount mission, as described in Book 6: ‘Sparing the conquered, striking down the haughty.’ But how much more stirring the Latin is: ‘Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.’ Ruden is also guilty of the great fault of modern academese – using too many Latinate words, one shared by classicists and non-classicists alike – and comes up with sentences such as: ‘The Platonic angle, the idealisation of impulses that were basically pederastic, also manifests.’

She lays out the known details of Vergil’s life clearly enough, but the problem comes with her attempts to fill the gaps. She declares: ‘As a translator of Vergil… I probably know better than anyone alive how it feels to spend time as he reportedly did.’ This belief in her genius sparks her into extreme conjecture (‘Perhaps the poet committed virtual suicide in a handy but discreet way, simply by sending his litter away or refusing a drink or a dip in cool water.’) So it’s hard to agree with her when she robustly says: ‘I would not push my own speculative reconstruction of events.’ She would – and she does, far too often.

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence.

Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.)

Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an honourable mention to the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, whose eruption in 1883 burst eardrums 40 miles away.)

Bees (playful). Frogs (ardent). Bats (unbelievably loud). Sounds of the cosmos give way to sounds of the Earth. Life follows, bellowing, and humanity comes after, babbling and brandishing bells. The 48 forays into sound that make up A Book of Noises are arranged with the sort of guileless simplicity achievable only after the author-compiler has been beating his head against a wall for some years.

Everything trembles. The world sounds and resounds. Elephants flee the noise of helicopter blades turning 80 miles away. The root system of the common pea will move towards the sound of water in a pipe. But there’s something missing. If ever a book cried out for an accompanying Spotify playlist, it’s this one. Maybe a kind reader will put one together. What the heck, maybe I will.

Ransacking A Book of Noises affords hours of listening pleasure, or at any rate bemusement. There’s Max Richter’s album Sleep to ease us in; then Sam Perkin’s ‘Alta for Two String Trios and Electronics’, capturing the ephemeral crackles that sometimes accompany the Northern Lights. There’s Dai Fujikura’s 2010 ‘Glacier’, which the composer describes as ‘a plume of cold air which is floating silently between the peaks of a very icy cold landscape, slowly but cutting like a knife’; and there’s Joseph Monkhouse’s soundscapes of the Somerset levels in the Iron Age. David Rothenberg’s quixotic saxophone duets with whales in 2008 stretched even Henderson’s famous generosity of spirit, and he writes: ‘It is hard to know how far, if at all, the whales are actually listening.’ Such grounding moments are important in a book chock-full of fancy.

The point is, the world makes sounds and we, at our best, make sounds of our own in response. For every natural wonder, there is probably an eccentric musical instrument gathering dust somewhere: for every frog, a flute; for every booming volcano, some variation on a horn. The sounds that humans make are rooted in a profoundly material soundworld. The extrapolated and bizarre soundworlds made possible by digital technology are still largely terra incognita, and there may be a good reason for this. ‘One is humbly aware that [this digital soundworld] will only be conquered by penetration of the human spirit,’ the composer Jonathan Harvey is quoted as saying, ‘and that penetration will neither be rapid nor easy.’  

Music itself, as a technology and as an idea, sometimes imposes too narrow a filter over our experience of sound. Henderson explains that the bells in Russian churches are meant to be voices, not musical instruments. For that reason, they are quite deliberately untuned, so that they produce as many over- and undertones as possible.

Humanity at its worst, meanwhile, makes a din that deafens whales and stresses birds out of their minds and mating patterns. Henderson cites the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause’s 20-year project to capture the sounds at Sugarloaf Park in California – a dramatic and frankly depressing record of environmental diminution and fragmentation, speaking to ‘a catastrophic loss of sonic diversity and richness worldwide’. The story of our scraping of the planet is also part of Henderson’s narrative. This is not an altogether happy book.

Is it a wise one? This is Henderson’s clear and laudable ambition. One of the perils of writing a book like this is that to make the contents readable in any order you have to carefully top and tail every one of those 48 seemingly disconnected microchapters. The effort throws up gnomic and occasionally ponderous capstones that are a gift to the mean and cantankerous critic. Here are some chapter closers: ‘Life calls to us even as we call to it.’ ‘If there is to be a future worth living in it will surely hold a place for re-enchantment.’  ‘While you live, shine.’

This sort of niggle only shows up on a fast read. Readers can and should take their time. It will be time very well spent.

Back-room boys: Family Meal, by Bryan Washington, reviewed

There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s murder.

There is also sex galore. Each of the novel’s three narrators – Cam, Kai and TJ – engages in ‘random hook-ups’, with Cam in particular using them to dull his pain. Working in a Houston gay bar, he takes customers to a back-room every few hours. His partners include ‘delivery guys and lawyers and dry cleaners and architects and engineers and college kids and kindergarten teachers and graphic designers and real estate agents and salesmen and house husbands and professors’. It’s no surprise when he says after an anonymous encounter that ‘niceness for the sake of niceness doesn’t fit into our transaction’.

There is no overarching narrative; instead, Cam, Kai and TJ tell their own stories of youth and early adulthood and, above all, their interconnections. They share many of the same concerns and speak in much the same voice, with Cam’s the most brutal and TJ’s the most appealing. If Washington offers any hope for these desperate lives, it lies in Cam’s realisation: ‘It takes all of these people to make one person’s life, okay. One person can’t do it for you by themselves… It’s our responsibility to take care of each other.’

Family Meal focuses on the web of relationships among a group of predominantly black, urban gay men. Its style is spare to the point of starkness, almost entirely devoid of adjectives and relative clauses. Eschewing literary flourish, the stripped-down prose is perfectly suited to the characters’ sex-and-drug-fuelled lives.

It is less accomplished than Washington’s previous novel, Memorial. There are too many short, discrete passages; at times, a one-line sentence stands alone on the page, giving the words a weight they don’t merit. In a book with so little descriptive prose, there are literally hundreds of references to skin colour, which become wearing, especially when, Kai’s murder apart, the different races live in harmony. But these flaws are transcended by the novel’s honesty, fluency and fearlessness. With its multicultural characters and gritty authenticity, Family Meal might best be likened to a mixture of fusion cooking and street food.

Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made famous by his role in A Room with a View and the father of her eldest son, Henry, went missing while hiking on a Californian mountain in January this year, not long before Hesketh-Harvey died. The actor’s body was not discovered until June.

It might therefore be understandable that Sands has been thinking a great deal about life and death and that she latched on to the poorly hedgehog she and her two-year-old grandson found trapped in the netting by her pond one day. They called it Horace until a hedgehog hospital worker mentioned Horace’s vagina and the problems she was having with it (‘vaginal flystrike’, apparently), whereupon the creature was promptly renamed Peggy.

Sands reads a lot into something she calls ‘hedgehog philosophy’, and sometimes this becomes too much: at one point, worrying that her father is restricted by old age and illness, she says: ‘It is surely a hedgehog philosophy that freedom is dignity.’ She also quotes such luminaries as Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Derrida and Philip Larkin on the hedgehog, and interviews people from Hugh Warwick, the ‘David Attenborough of hedgehogs’ to a pair of schoolgirl enthusiasts whom she calls the ‘Greta Thunbergs of biodiversity’.

She also takes her husband on a pilgrimage to Alderney, so they can see the famous blonde hedgehogs, allegedly first brought to the island in a Harrods carrier bag. The technical term for their whitish fur is ‘leucistic’ but this doesn’t stop Sands from describing them, with a journalistic flourish, as ‘the Marilyn Monroe of hedgehogs’.

Sands asks the former Conservative MP Rory Stewart why he thinks his most famous political speech is an ode to the hedgehog. His answer is that the animals are ‘magically appealing’, and that rare subject which won’t get you into trouble on social media. Indefatigably, Sands also discusses hogs with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who rather sweetly says: ‘I feel like the hedgehog’s job is the next thing to be done.’ They both decide that ‘sequential’ is a good word for hedgehog behaviour. Williams also mentions that when he chose ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ by the Incredible String Band on Desert Island Discs, his staff feared the BBC might confuse it with a Terry Pratchett song that features the bestiality-referencing lyric: ‘The hedgehog can never be buggered at all.’

Some of this is diverting and Sands’s writing is sharp and fluent. She does her best to place her interest in woodland creatures in a news context, noting that visitors flocked to the Beatrix Potter exhibition at the V&A on the same day that war broke out in Ukraine. She nonetheless quotes Ted Hughes as saying ‘I don’t know why I am so sympathetic to hedgehogs’, and I admit I hadn’t worked this out either by the end of the book. Perhaps I am heartless, but 159 pages of thinking about Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and her ilk feels slightly excessive.

Learned necromancers and lascivious witches: magic and misogyny through the ages

Curses, conjurations, magic circles, incantations, abracadabra, gobbledygook… Why would any serious historian want to write a history of magic books?

 Owen Davies issues a robust defence: magic is as old as human history, while a study of grimoires is a study of the book itself and its changing format over time. Through the lens of the grimoire (a book of magic spells and invocations), the parallel histories of religion and science are shown in an eerie new light. Perennial human desires, anxieties and aspirations for love, money and protection from harm bring people of the far past close to anyone today who reads a newspaper horoscope or consults the Tarot. At the very least, magic books continue to cast their spell over popular culture in countless films, novels, games and across the internet.

A professor of social history and the president of the Folklore Society, Davies has form. In 2009, his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books was published byOxford University Press, an entertaining yet scholarly title printed on indifferent paper with a limited, monochrome plate section. Art of the Grimoire could be seen as the coffee-table version with vastly expanded, colour plates and boiled-down text. It’s a far more beautiful production: a typographic and calligraphic treat as treasurable as a rare magical text itself. Almost every page is filled with wonder.

Davies begins his account with Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with protective formulae against sickness, demons and ghosts. Magic and medicine were not yet separate disciplines. Stone stelae inscribed with appeals to the gods were used in practical magic: water poured over the inscriptions was then drunk for health and good luck. Later, Neolithic axes were inscribed with spirits’ names, clay pots were decorated with demonic images, threatening boundary stones warned off intruders, soldiers scratched curses on lead tablets, while the wealthy sported gold amulets. The Chinese scratched their appeals on oracle bones and slips of bamboo. With papyrus, however, the potential of the magical text was vastly expanded and many examples from ancient Egypt survive. (At a later point in the story, this fabled wisdom of Africa was to provide solace to the descendants of slaves.)

Syncretism makes an appearance early on, perhaps because occult lore always gains more power by seeming to originate from some exotic source. A stunning 5th-6th century amulet in green jasper features an Egyptian cock-headed god with snake legs wearing Roman dress, below the names of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel. A papyrus scroll written in Greek contains a variety of spells: ‘To induce insomnia by means of a bat, win at dice, stop demons and apparitions, silence others, and provoke love.’ (Davies’s dry captions are a regular a delight.)

Though Davies wanders the globe in his survey, taking in Coptic charms, Islamic angels and jinns, yokai (Japanese demons), Hebraic and Arabic texts, the term ‘grimoire’ to most people invokes western mages such as John Dee and Doctor Faustus – whose final, despairing cry in Marlowe’s play of the same name is: ‘I’ll burn my books.’ Parchment heralds the arrival of the true grimoire. Davies presents impressive examples from illuminated manuscripts: a red-winged angel leading a man away from a bird-footed devil; intricate magical seals; carefully lettered talismans. The advent of printing, like that of the internet, democratised hidden lore, raising fears of the dissemination of dangerous material. Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia deplored ‘commerces of unclean spirits’ and ‘unlawfull charms’, but nonetheless provided useful details of sigils, kabbalah and angel magic.

The theme of repackaging recurs throughout Art of the Grimoire. Books promising revelations of ‘ancient wisdom’ are patchworks of old material with new inserts, frequently and wrongly ascribed to canonical authors such as Agrippa. ‘It is their falsity that makes them genuine,’ Davies remarked in his earlier book, citing the ‘bogus traditions that cling to real grimoires’. A book could become a grimoire against its author’s sworn intention. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) purported to deplore conjuration, yet included material such as the depiction of an elaborate magic circle to be marked out on the ground with the names of five infernal spirit kings, thus making his text a valuable magical sourcebook.

Sensational texts whipped up a widespread terror of the occult that led directly to witch trials throughout Europe, and ‘white’ magic was as offensive to the authorities as the more malevolent type. ‘The object of focus of these early demonologists was not male magicians and learned necromancers with their manuscript grimoires, but poor women,’ Davies observes tartly. A crude 16th-century ink drawing shows three Swiss witches bound and laid on a pyre. Equally calm, a supposed werewolf from Geneva exhibits a surprisingly patient demeanour while chunks are torn from its flesh with red-hot pincers.

Lack of literacy tended to bar women from text-based magic. However, an early visual link between lascivious witches and books is made by a Netherlandish painting of 1526, ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor’, with its semi-naked crone consulting a volume held by a satyr, along with more familiar images of women flying on broomsticks. With cheap printing, spellbooks containing crude woodcuts of demons began to circulate widely, while alchemical texts appealed to loftier readers. A typically esoteric example features a ‘divine hermaphrodite’, a snake, chalice and trees of the sun and moon. The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington was to draw deeply on this tradition in the 20th century.

The rational Enlightenment had its counter-current in occult studies, with London as a key base for practitioners. Davies reproduces a drawing of three jovial ginger demons from Francis Barrett’s influential The Magus of 1801, a volume which fed into the development of ritual magic later in the century, despite containing little original material. A coloured talisman from the book has distinct Hilma af Klint energy. The life of Barrett is more fully told in Davies’s earlier book. He was an enterprising, if not overly successful, balloonist.

A later character to match Barrett was the American huckster Lauron William de Laurence, who began as a plagiarist and posed as a swami. Other self-presentations took on the Egyptian flavour that appealed to the movement for African-American empowerment. Laurence’s catalogue of occult paraphernalia became a book of magic in its own right.

Davies has an entertaining chapter on the explosion of occult material occasioned by the advent of ‘pulp’ publishing. Again, new technology advances magic rather than wiping it out. Davies touches on post-colonial schlock such as the St Cyprian paperbacks of South America, and print advertisements offering impoverished Americans ‘Ancient Knowledge’ and ‘Esoteric Treasure’ for a few dollars. ‘Purchasers must have been very disappointed with their $3 spend,’ Davies sniffs of one rip-off pamphlet.

Final chapters deal briefly but suggestively with modern magical trends: downloadable spells, multimedia artworks, automatically generated sigils, manga and anime, Harry Potter, and TV shows, such as Charmed from the 1990s with its prop Book of Shadows. While much magical activity has now migrated online, Davies asserts that manuscripts and hand-copying retain their intrinsic power, with modern-day grimoires akin to personal records of self-improvement. The full panoply of pseudo-scripts, grids, mystic symbols and infernal portraiture feeds into works of contemporary art. It seems that grimoires, far from being consigned to medieval darkness, aren’t going anywhere.

Andrew Boff removed from Tory conference for heckling Suella Braverman

So much for a blue-on-blue ceasefire. The Conservative party conference is inching towards its close but not without some penultimate day drama. The Tory London Assembly chair was this afternoon dramatically escorted out of Suella Braverman’s speech today after heckling her comments on gender. After quietly remarking that the Home Secretary was talking ‘trash’ about ‘gender ideology’, Andrew Boff was forcibly dragged out of the hall in Manchester.

Speaking to reporters as he was led away, Boff said: ‘It is making our Conservative party look transphobic and homophobic. Our party has a proud record of standing up for LGBT+ rights and she is destroying it.’ He said he had been a member of the party for over 50 years and was a ‘proud member’. It’s all somewhat awkward given Boff’s standing and the fact that tonight is the LGBT Tory disco, usually attended by both MPs and ministers.

Sounds like Suella won’t be in attendance…

Jeremy Hunt: we underestimated the impact of money-printing

Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at Conservative party conference this afternoon, Jeremy Hunt reiterated once again that there would be no big tax cuts this year. ‘Debt interest payments have gone up so much in the past six months’, he told CPS director Robert Colvile, taking estimates for debt servicing payments over the £100 billion mark this fiscal year. The Autumn Statement, the Chancellor said, will lay bare just how dire the situation is: ‘It’s likely that our debt interest payments… are going to go up by more than £20bn pounds a year in the Autumn Budget compared to what was predicted in the spring.’ In other words: no tax cuts until inflation stops wreaking havoc on borrowing costs.

What triggered the inflation crisis that has caused so much damage to personal and public finances? There are many reasons cited, but some suit certain agendas better than others. Both ministers and central bankers have worked hard over the past year to point the finger at factors out of their control. In the government’s case, it tends to cite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the Bank of England’s case, it cites the war, as well as accusations of a ‘wage-price spiral’ (despite wages increasing for over a year well below the rate of inflation).

What’s often left off the list is what happened at the start of the pandemic: a mass money-printing exercise carried out by central banks to allow politicians to spend without limits. In Britain, the Bank printed more in the first year in the pandemic than it did in the ten years leading up to it. As inflation tends to be a monetary phenomenon, it makes sense that quantitative easing had a direct impact on price spirals, and some are willing to point this out.

Former chief economist to the Bank Andy Haldane was warning about the effects of money-printing on prices back in June 2021, when the rate of inflation was just starting to rise. Former Bank governor Mervyn King has been saying since last year that ‘too much money’ contributed to the inflation spiral. Economist Julian Jessop wrote on this topic for Coffee House last month, noting how the annual rate of inflation has roughly followed the growth rate of broad money. Yet it’s been in the interest of both ministers and central bankers to avoid addressing the role of money-printing directly: better for the crisis to be something they’ve been forced to respond to, rather than something they helped to cause.

But this afternoon Jeremy Hunt cautiously added his name to the list. Asked what he thought had contributed most to the inflation crisis – the war in Ukraine, money printing or a wage spiral – he said:

I hate ducking questions. I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as ranking them one, two, three. I’d definitely put Russia’s war in Ukraine at the top of that list. I think that quantitative easing…I think it is reasonable to say we collectively underestimated the impact of that. Although in fairness to the Bank of England they did start to raise interest rates before everyone else.

Threadneedle Street did move first to raise rates, but once other central banks like the Federal Reserve followed suit, they did so faster and more aggressively than the Bank of England: a move which is now thought to have helped get America’s inflation rate down to almost half that of Britain’s. Indeed one of Hunt’s predecessors – and now boss – Rishi Sunak was well aware of the possibility that QE could trigger an inflation surge: long before Russia’s invasion, chancellor Sunak was working to protect the UK’s finances from the prospect of even a small hike in the rate of inflation back in spring 2021. 

The evidence is there: while falls in energy costs have seen the headline inflation rate come down, inflation was more than double the Bank’s target months before Russia’s invasion. Furthermore, the huge rise in core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices) suggests the inflation crisis has been triggered by much more than energy costs: it has slowed from a peak of 7.1 per cent on the year to May to 6.2 on the year to August – still triple the Bank’s target. 

Tackling inflation remains Hunt’s priority. What are the prospects for tax cuts once that’s achieved? ‘All Tories want tax cuts’ he told the CPS’s audience. ‘But we need to focus on how we get there.’ For the chancellor, the answer lies in public sector efficiency gains. ‘If we want to stop taxes going up,’ he said, ‘we have to increase productivity growth in the public sector by half a per cent a year.’ For those with experience in the private sector, he said, the attitude is that ‘surely we can do that.’ Yet ‘those of us who have worked in the public sector know that’s a very big challenge… but we have to do it.’

If Hunt does find some fiscal headroom, what will those first tax cuts be? The ‘first priority’ he said, is ‘business tax cuts.’ It’s likely Hunt would look at the current ‘full expensing’ scheme to encourage more business investment, telling the CPS today that ministers ‘absolutely do want to make it permanent.’ 

On personal tax, the Chancellor expressed his hope that ahead of an election something could be done for ‘ordinary people’ to ‘show people our values and that we believe money is better when it stays in people’s pockets.’ Still, he insisted at the moment the Treasury is not in a position to have that discussion ‘or even to ask what if’. 

The clock is ticking.

Steve Barclay turns to AI to save the NHS

The NHS is struggling to cope with an ageing population. Disputes over pay have created a stand off between doctors and the government, while the crumbling social care system has seen bed-blocking reach record levels. So far, the suggested fixes have usually been calls for more money. But what about tech? That’s Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s big idea. 

Speaking to a large audience at The Spectator’s event ‘Can AI and innovation save the NHS?’ this afternoon, Barclay outlined why introducing AI into the health service is right. Chaired by The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman, Barclay was joined on the stage by Dr Sandesh Gulhane MSP, shadow Scottish cabinet secretary for health and social care, Simon Denegri, executive director of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Katherine Holden, head of AI at TechUK and Richard Torbett, CEO of event sponsors ABPI. 

Could AI help solve the NHS’s workforce crisis? Perhaps, by ‘enabling, not replacing’ the workers, Barclay hastily clarified, ‘because that’s the way, certainly for now, that I see AI has the most active role to play.’ Barclay is adamant that AI could help by handing ‘non-clinical tasks’, for example administrative ward work.

Efficiency is what Barclay’s vision is all about. The overarching theme of the Health Secretary’s speech was how quickly patients are treated: to push people through the service faster and tackle expanding wait lists. Barclay believes technological innovation needs to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of ‘getting early care to patients’, while delivering a service that works faster and improve disease prevention. The panel were generally in agreement that AI presents not a threat to the UK’s health service, but an opportunity. It could help rapidly treat strokes and scale up screening programmes, and help with procurement and management. Would this come at the cost of quality healthcare? 

On budgets, the Health Secretary deferred to his own experience in the Treasury. Barclay referred to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s comments this week about pressure on capital budgets for the health service, ‘principally because there’s often a need to respond to pay pressure. And of course that’s a very live issue at the moment given the industrial action that we face.’

And while Barclay didn’t shy away from talking about workforce, he was brief on the subject. It is after all an issue that, had it not been mentioned, might have been a rather large elephant in the room given Barclay’s troubles with the doctors’ unions – whose members were, that afternoon protesting outside the conference centre. Barclay expanded on a topic he’d briefly discussed yesterday evening: making changes to training programmes for healthcare workers to ‘make the NHS more vocational’. Reading between the lines, Barclay appears to be hinting at a marked government shift towards favouring associated healthcare workers, for example physician’s associates. This is likely to go down well with doctors who already feel undervalued by the government – the relatively new PA role has caused a lot of controversy, while whole Reddit threads exist to berate the increasing powers of ‘noctors’. 

Barclay’s argument is that there needs to be ‘more opportunities for people to take on advanced roles, not to be confined by where they were at the age of 21 when one left school at 15 without any qualifications at 16.’ He continued: ‘The NHS as a big employer should be giving people that ladder to progress.’ To qualify as a physician’s associate, people from non-medical backgrounds can undertake a truncated course that allows them limited responsibilities on the wards with the aim of stream-lining medical work to medical doctors the government convince voters that – with AI – it has an exciting vision for the future of the UK’s health service? Those opposed to the new roles say that they devalue the medical degree and complicate work on the wards. Will this drive another wedge between the medical profession and the government? Barclay’s plans certainly seem to indirectly ensure that the doctors’ unions have a little less bargaining power.

So can the government convince voters that – with AI – it has an exciting vision for the future of the UK’s health service? It may be early days but the mood at today’s discussion felt hopeful, and different from the usual doom and gloom that accompanies most NHS-related discussions these days. But while there is certainly an overwhelming desire to see efficiency introduced to the NHS, Barclay’s point – and the slogan of the conference – is that the health service’s tech revolution will be no quick task. The benefits of AI in healthcare will likely only be seen in the longer term – time that the NHS may not be quite able to wait.

Suella Braverman’s sex offender crackdown won’t work

It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at least some form of social security. This obviously defeats much of the object of having a sex offenders’ register, since it can in too many cases reduce the official record to something more like Gogol’s rentroll of dead souls.

True, it is already technically a crime for anyone on the register not to tell the police of any change of name, address, or other details. But enforcement can be tricky: in the year to March 2022 some 30 sex offenders a week were prosecuted or cautioned for omitting to do this, and it is a racing certainty that a great many more have quietly vanished from sight without being caught.

The Braverman plan has the advantage of at least making disappearing acts slightly more difficult, by doing something that should have been done long ago: integrating the offenders’ register with other departments such as the Passport Office, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Inland Revenue and thus increasing the chance that any surreptitious name-changes are picked up and passed on. It also promises to encourage extra vigilance from all these departments when they are asked to register an account for someone with a suspicious lack of history or a large hole in their CV.

For this we must be grateful. But will the effect be more than marginal, however? Despite the fact that this move is superficially popular and seems to have cross-party support – for example, it was immediately welcomed by Labour’s Sarah Champion – there is considerable room for doubt.

For one thing, many changes of name are informal. England is unusual in Europe in that as far as the strict law is concerned, a person over 16 is entitled to call themselves what they like without asking permission from anybody, or telling anyone in authority. Furthermore, it is possible to do this semi-formally by executing a deed poll (which means in effect a simple declaration) in front of two witnesses stating that one is changing one’s name. While one can have this officially registered if prepared to pay £42.44, a measure that that makes it more acceptable in practice to banks and other organisations, there is no requirement to do so.

For a registered sex offender, however, it is already illegal to do any of these things without immediately telling the police. One might have thought that prohibiting them from doing so even if they did notify the local station sergeant added rather little: indeed, it might have the perverse effect of driving yet more changes of identity underground.

Secondly, it is hard to see that this change will add very much to the protection of the rest of us. As it is, the public has no access to the sex offenders’ register; this is strictly limited to the police, who will pass on information at their discretion to those, such as neighbours, whom they consider to be at risk and able to be trusted with the knowledge. Allowing an offender to change his name provided he notifies the police, as we do at present, leaves the process intact: the neighbour will simply receive details of the new name rather than the old. Banning such changes, by contrast, will if anything cause confusion. There is little the authorities can do in practice about someone informally starting to using a different name: as a result, one suspects that an outright bar on changes of name may well, ironically, lead to the dissemination of yet more inaccurate and outdated information.

Thirdly, for all the headline-grabbing there will presumably have to be exceptions. Even the government recognises that, for example, name changes for religious reasons or following a conscientious decision to change gender would probably have to be allowed under the present human rights regime.

Is there anything further that could be done about the sex offenders’ register, to make it more effective? One possibility would be to make it open to anyone to inspect, as is the case in some US states. This would have the advantage of improving the protection of the public, and possibly also of helping to keep the register up to date through individuals reporting their suspicions of unauthorised name changes. But this would not only run counter to the tendency of UK public authorities to keep as much information out of the public’s hands: it would probably also infringe the human rights of offenders, who might find both their privacy and their safety imperilled. Of course, there is a possible cure for the human rights point too: but we can leave that argument to another occasion.