Death

Thursday

Sean Mcglynn

The Teutonic King Arthur

Hitler, ever seeking to emulate strong German hero types (especially if their Christian name was Frederick), unsurprisingly named his great invasion of Russia ‘Operation Barbarossa’. It is in this context that the name — meaning ‘Redbeard’ — is best known today. Apart from that, a rather clunky eponymous Italian film from 2011 and a presence in the underground heavy metal music scene, awareness of the medieval German emperor outside of Germany and Italy is very limited. This owes much to the fact that John Freed’s biography is the first in English for half a century. A 700-page doorstopper, this impressive, learned book certainly makes amends for this previously serious oversight.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Accentuate the positive | 7 July 2016

Fifty years ago on Monday the World Service programme Outlook was launched as an innovative news and current affairs programme presented ‘magazine style’ with live interviews featuring ‘star’ guests. Such ‘soft’ journalism was highly suspect back in 1966, as England won the World Cup, Russia landed the Lunar 9 mission on the moon and China embarked on its Maoist cultural revolution, because it relied not so much on factual truths or reportage but on the emotional truth of what it felt like to be there in that place at that moment in time. Over the years, though, the guests on Outlook have taken over from the news content precisely because

Wednesday

The Spectator

Barometer | 22 June 2016

Big game hunt Wales beat Russia 3–0 to finish above England in their group at the European Football Championships. Which is bigger in Wales, football or rugby? — The Football Association of Wales was founded in 1876, five years earlier than the Welsh Rugby Union. However, rugby then took off rapidly in south Wales while football remained stronger in the north. — Wales lost their first matches to England in both football (2–1) and rugby (8–0). — Rugby and football matches have both filled Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium (capacity 76,000), though in a recent Wales Online poll, rugby was still reckoned more important, by 56% to 44%. Tall poppies A group

Thursday

Paul Levy

Loved and lost | 2 June 2016

Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey Fitz’, became mayor of Boston, and Patrick J. Kennedy was a saloon-keeper and failed senatorial candidate who sent his sons to Harvard. ‘Kick’ was the fourth child, nicknamed for her ebullient personality, but born just as her mother, Rose, was thinking of leaving her serially unfaithful husband, Joe Kennedy Snr, who made his huge fortune from Hollywood studios and booze. Kick spent her early years schooled at, and confined to, convents, except when the whole family escaped to Hyannis Port or Palm Beach. So when her father managed to wangle

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Memories, dreams, reflections

Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love and dogs, with particular reference to her and her late husband’s (Lou Reed, who died in 2013) beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle (who died the same year). It follows no linear logic. It’s a visual collage, a cine-poem, a dreamy documentary essay that was screened in London earlier this week to owners and their dogs — to rave reviews. ‘It’s great!’ said a golden retriever, but as he said the same of ‘a ball’ and also ‘a pizza crust’, he may not be the most reliable of critics. (This is why

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Death and the Bard

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Dr Daniel Swift discuss how Shakespeare died” startat=1008] Listen [/audioplayer]How did the Bard kick the bucket? The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death reignites interest in a great literary mystery. All we know for sure is that he was buried on 25 April 1616 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, and it’s a fair assumption that he died a couple of days earlier, around his 52nd birthday. A dearth of evidence compels us to sift the plays for clues to his lifestyle, which may, in turn, help with the autopsy. Historians condemn this kind of detective work but their reasons seem pretty unfair. Imagine that the biographies

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Communism kills

I went to Budapest last year and did the usual touristy things. I climbed up the hill to the fantasy castle walls in Buda. I took a boat ride. I went to the Turkish baths — edging cautiously into scalding hot water and then summoning up the courage to tip a bucket of cold water over myself. Finally, I reached the grim end of the tourist trail: the so-called House of Terror. On the outside, it looked like every other Hungarian house on the boulevard. Inside, it was a museum set up in the actual place where first Nazis, then communists, inflicted imprisonment, terror and murder. Visiting it was a

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 February 2016

Matters of life and death Lord Lucan is now officially presumed dead. How do you have someone declared dead? In England and Wales, under the Presumption of Death Act 2013… — Anyone can apply to have anyone else declared dead, but if the applicant is not a spouse, civil partner, parent, child or sibling of the presumed deceased they must show they have a significant interest. — The person should have been missing for at least seven years, but it is possible to have someone declared dead earlier if the court is convinced they have died. — It costs £480. — An order can be revoked if the person later

Thursday

Anil Bhoyrul

Death on the NHS

I’ve never understood the phrase ‘died peacefully’. Two weeks ago I watched my mother die, in the very same NHS hospital where I watched my father die almost ten years earlier. There was nothing peaceful about it, at least from my unwanted ringside seat. The end — acute pneumonia providing the final nail in a soon-to-be purchased coffin — was painfully slow. It dragged on and on and on. She struggled for her last breaths and appeared distressed, confused and frightened to the end. The last time I had been to St Helier hospital in south London was September 2005, as my father slowly slipped away. Naturally the memories came

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Chance encounters

Some might say that Jeremy Corbyn is cloth-eared, tone-deaf, socially inept but on Monday morning, as the death of the pop artist David Bowie scrambled the agenda on Radio 4’s Today programme, he was as graceful and twinkle-toed as Bowie himself. The opposition leader had been invited on to the ‘big slot’ just after the eight o’clock bulletin to talk about his ‘shock’ reshuffle last week. David Cameron and the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, had already provided their rent-a-quote verdicts on Bowie’s life and death. Nick Robinson asked Corbyn for his thoughts. Quick as a flash, he responded, ‘Does that mean I’m joining the great and the good…?’ Before

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality – a masterpiece of nothing

It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing? Patrick Barlow’s new spoof, Ben Hur, must answer ‘No’ on all four counts. The show takes aim at two principal irritants: vain actors and the Hollywood epics of the 1950s, whose titanic scale was offered as bait to audiences besotted with their cosy new TV sets. Old Hollywood is a spent ogre these days and the foibles of the acting trade are hardly a threat to civilised life, so the show can’t embrace our immediate concerns. But the execution is compellingly assured. The cast is led by John Hopkins, an

Thursday

Peter Jones

Why do we assume our western good life will last for ever?

The slaughter in Paris is a catastrophe for the victims and their families, but the usual hysterical response across the media reminds us, yet again, what an extraordinary achievement it is that we Westerners simply assume the world owes us a life lived to the full, in comfort and security. From the ancient world until relatively recently, there was little sense that the world owed us anything. About half of Romans would not make the age of five; probably a third would not make three months. War was commonplace, as deadly for civilians as soldiers, as were disease and famine. The destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius was greeted with relative indifference. Ancients simply

John Laurenson

Death watch | 19 November 2015

At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene set in and by 1 September he was dead. He’d been on the throne for 72 of his 77 years. A new exhibition at Versailles looks at the elaborate rituals that followed. The Sun King died as he had lived — in public. Despite his illness, he carried on his daily routine until two days before his death, a decision made easier perhaps by the fact that he’d always conducted a good part of the affairs of France from his bedroom. It was no ordinary bedroom, and what went on

Thursday

Joan Collins

Diary – 5 November 2015

I had only experienced great loss when my mother died. It was desperately harrowing, but not as harrowing as the news that my sister Jackie had passed away. My mother had suffered a long lingering illness but Jackie only told me about her cancer two weeks before she died. It was a shattering, heart-breaking blow that I still haven’t assimilated and I don’t know if I ever will really get over it. I expect one learns to live with loss but she remains as vivid in my heart and my mind as if she were still alive. Jackie was a special woman, not because she was my sister but because

Thursday

William Cook

What is it about Bill Viola’s films that reduce grown-ups to tears?

Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage daughters to his studio in Los Angeles, she tells me, they both cried when they saw his films. I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff, but when she leaves me in the Sculpture Park’s Underground Gallery, where Viola is on show, after a few minutes in there on my own I’m blubbing like

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 September 2015

Suicide and assisted dying Sir: As a mental health practitioner, I am grateful to Douglas Murray (‘Death watch’, 29 August) for his incisive commentary on the impact of legalised euthanasia on people with psychiatric conditions. Supporters of assisted dying argue that a permissive act would be tightly framed, but the scope would inevitably widen, as has occurred in Holland. Although Lord Falconer and fellow travellers would bar people of unsound mind from the intended provision, this would soon be challenged as discriminatory: because effectively, a person would be punished for losing decision-making capacity. If proponents of euthanasia are really so rational, while their opponents are blinded by emotion or faith, how

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Dying for attention

Not content with Facebooking our every foible, Instagramming the births of our children and live-tweeting our daily lives, more and more of us are now making a public spectacle of dying. We’re inviting strangers not merely to ‘like’ expertly filtered photos of our breakfasts, but to admire the way we peg out. Nothing better captures the death of privacy than this publicisation of death. It began with the literary set. It’s a rare writer these days diagnosed with a terminal illness who doesn’t get a book out of it. Jenny Diski is the latest public dyer. She’s giving readers of the London Review of Books a blow-by-blow account of her death

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 21 May 2015

Soldiering on Sir: Max Hastings’s article about demobbed army officers trying for a job after the war struck a chord (‘Demob unhappy’, 16 May). The problem prevailed. I left as a captain many years later in 1978. The local vicar asked what I was going to do with myself, adding scornfully, ‘Go into commerce, I suppose. Well, even that might be a struggle for someone who knows little else other than to play cowboys and shoot Indians!’ Somewhat bemused, I asked where his Sunday collections came from if — either directly or indirectly — it wasn’t commerce. He wasn’t pleased with this. Luckily, a few months later I was hired

Cressida Connolly

Throw away the Valium and start bragging instead

This is not a book to be read in solitude. Not for the obvious reason that it’s frightening, but because every few lines some fascinating or unexpected fact forces you to exclaim: ‘Blimey! Listen to this …’ The three authors are American psychology professors. As young academics they were much influenced by the work of the anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose final book, The Denial of Death, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. This work struck them as a most important and potentially fruitful area for further investigation. Over the past 30 years, between them, they seem to have invented a new area of research with the unpromising name of Terror Management

Wednesday

Daniel Jackson

Dying Without Dignity: a report on end-of-life care that shames the NHS

The name says it all. ‘Dying Without Dignity’ is the parliamentary health ombudsman’s report into over 300 complaints of the neglect of terminally ill patients by the NHS. The BBC this morning highlights two horrible examples. One mother had to call an A&E doctor to come and give her son more pain relief because staff on the palliative care ward he had been on had failed to respond to her requests. A 67-year-old man’s family learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis through a hospital note – before he knew himself. This ‘failed every principle of established good practice in breaking bad news’, says the report. Julie Mellor, the ombudsman, uses uncompromising language: ‘Our investigations have found