George orwell

Saturday

Mick Hume

No, thank you, Officer, I will not think before I speak

As my daughter was preparing for her AS level exam on 1984 this week, George Orwell’s dystopian classic loomed back into a news headline: ‘We are not the Thought Police, Chief Constable Tells Government’. Leicestershire chief constable Simon Cole, who’s in charge of the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, told the press that the Government’s new counter-extremist and safeguarding bill risked asking the police to dictate “what people can and cannot say”. The top cop was adamant that “We absolutely don’t want to be the thought police.” Well, (to borrow from another literary classic, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop): Up to a point, Lord Copper. The police may feel uncomfortable about being tasked with

Thursday

Tristram Hunt

Labour’s England problem

In the window of a council house on a working-class estate in Exeter was a sticker bearing the cross of St George and a simple warning: ‘If this flag offends you, why not consider moving to another country?’ For some canvassers working on Labour MP Ben Bradshaw’s 2015 campaign, such a symbol naturally meant the dreaded ‘A’ on the canvas sheet: ‘Against Labour’. In fact, it was a household of solid Labour voters — supporting a party far too often offended by the flag. The truth is that the Labour party has an English problem. While members might just about embrace Britishness, too many feel queasy about Englishness — with

Saturday

Toby Young

It will take more than Labour’s ‘inquiry’ to deal with the left’s anti-Semitism problem

Anyone concerned about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party should welcome the appointment of Shami Chakrabarti, the former head of Liberty, to lead an internal inquiry into the matter, but it’s a little late in the day to be addressing this issue. And will the inquiry’s terms of reference allow her to investigate the leader of the party? The Jewish Chronicle drew attention to Jeremy Corbyn’s links to a rogues gallery of “Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites” back in August of last year. Among other dubious acts, Corbyn donated money to an organisation run by Paul Eisen, a self-confessed Holocaust denier who boasts of links to the Labour leader

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Polly’s pleb adventure

Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari, the underclass minibreak, the sojourn on the scrapheap that inspires a literary monument. Orwell’s first book was turned down by Faber boss T.S. Eliot, who received the script under its original title, Confessions of a Dishwasher. New Diorama’s dramatisation brilliantly captures the raffish sleaziness of Paris in the 1920s. Orwell’s crew of thieves, parasites and drifters come across as comradely and charming in this magnificently squalid setting. The austere lighting and the ingenious stage effects are done with tremendous economy. There are flashes of bleak humour too. Orwell’s anvil-faced landlady

Thursday

Toby Young

Long may we laugh at our absurd demagogues

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority whenever strong divisions prevail,’ he wrote. He compared demagogues to ‘court favourites’ — gifted at exploiting the -insecurities of the powerful, whether the people or the monarch. For Burke, the risk of democracies being captured by demagogues then degenerating into tyrannies was a good argument against universal suffrage. The multitude would always be susceptible to being swayed by feeling rather than reason; they could no more be

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The winged rabbit who made me a Tory

His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite toy: they tried to tempt him with Meccano, but fate had struck’. Trench is a dentist, trapped by his chosen profession in a godforsaken Central American hellhole. Greene ponders the way, when we are very young, that chance events, objects or people may become father to the man. ‘We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.’ Too true. Pookie made me a Tory. My new copy of Pookie Puts the World Right has arrived. I’d lost the old

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Among the snobs, slobs and scolds

The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope, Plato, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and millions of others — but not, alas, my former next-door neighbour, the wonderfully controversial Brian Sewell. Crammed in alongside George Orwell’s ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy’ and H. L. Mencken’s ‘Literature always thrives best in an atmosphere of hearty strife,’ the author’s own views often hit hardest.

Thursday

Bob Fischer

Mr Spock and I

For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’ is celebrating its 50th anniversary, although, as Marcus Berkmann’s entertaining and irreverent history points out, things could have been very different. Roddenberry’s initial idea was for a troupe of disparate 19th-century adventurers to explore the undiscovered corners of the New World in a grand airborne dirigible. While the prospect of Leonard Nimoy arching an eyebrow in a flimsy, flying gondola is irresistible, it’s hard to imagine such a concept proving as enduring as Roddenberry’s eventual brainchild. Would Balloon Trek: The Next Inflation have carried its fanbase into the 21st century

Andrew Lycett

A good editor and a good man

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew. Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement. The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and

Thursday

Jude Cook

The heavens are falling

The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre, and Clare Morrall’s astute and vigorously imagined novel follows on from the best of them, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and (most recently)Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship. Intriguingly, the future that Morrall imagines very much resembles the past. Following 50 years of climate catastrophe, and the spread of the population-depleting Hoffman’s disease, the only hope for humanity’s survival is to find ways of ‘living with the weather’, or learning ‘skills that don’t depend on failing technology’. Her heroine, the 22-year-old Roza Polanski, ekes

John Jolliffe

Putting Germany together again

The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities of Germany after 1945 (though no politicians were directly involved). The chief needs of the shattered population at the time were, of course, practical: food, water, sanitation and the reconstruction of buildings. But a vital supplementary effort was made to address what was left of German culture and history after the crimes and falsifications of the Nazis. The idea was that the arts should revive an alternative, peaceful and civilised way of life in the ruins of the country. It is surprising that no mention is made of the reform

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

Scratching a living

John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for anyone set on a life of writing about books, was intentionally truncated, ending its chronology before Gross’s own time of eminence. Two decades after the book’s publication in 1969, Gross explained in a new afterword that he had not wanted to comment on his peers and colleagues, for fear of misunderstanding or offence. A perfectly justifiable approach, but it made the book uncomfortably tantalising for those who prefer their gossip to be at the expense of the living. The Prose Factory is dedicated to Gross, and partially overlaps with The

Tuesday

Dan Hitchens

British universities have a duty to defend the ‘unsafe’ space

In the ever-noisier debate about campus censorship, one party has been noticeably silent: the universities themselves. Last week, the journalists Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos were forbidden to debate (on the topic of free speech) by Manchester Students’ Union. Manchester University made no comment. The week before that, Oxford’s SU banned from Freshers’ Fair copies of a student magazine designed to ‘publicise ideas people are afraid to express’; again, the university stood back. Nor did Warwick University intervene when the secularist Maryam Namazie, in the same week, was disinvited by Warwick SU. (After an outcry, they shamefacedly un-disinvited her.) Universities seem to assume that students should be left to sort

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Fighting talk | 17 September 2015

If there’s one thing scarcer than hen’s teeth in serious choreography nowadays, it’s a light heart. When was the last time we had something jolly created in the artform that brought us La Fille mal gardée, Coppélia and Les biches? Still, the first week of the start of the dance year was all good stuff, if sombre (and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are over from New York at the Peacock right now, thank heavens). English National Ballet’s Lest We Forget bill of new ballets was made last year for the start of the first world war centenary, but deserved repeating as a demonstration of serious ballets by accomplished

Kate Chisholm

Eastern airs

On Private Passions this week the writer Amitav Ghosh gave us a refreshingly different version of what has become a Radio 3 staple. No Mozart, Mendelssohn or Monteverdi for Ghosh, who speaks five languages including Arabic and Bengali, was born in Calcutta and has lived in Delhi, Oxford, Alexandria, Brooklyn and Goa. Instead, his musical choices were all about fusion and cultural exchange. Perhaps most surprising was an ‘Oriental Miscellany’ from the late 18th century, played on the harpsichord and sounding initially quite baroque until you realised that the fingering was much more complex, more layered, infinitely more interesting. The composer William Hamilton Bird had for the first time given

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why I left

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss the death of the left” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for

Thursday

Mark Mason

The perfect pub

Whenever one of those news stories appears about how many pubs have been forced to close in the last year, I always think of George Orwell. He would have had the correct reaction: lots of pubs are forced to close because they’re terrible. Yes, the pub is a wonderful British institution, with a long and noble history — but that doesn’t mean that any individual pub has a God-given right to stay open forever. If a landlord waters down his beer and scowls at his customers, as plenty of them do, they’ve only got themselves to blame when the bailiffs come knocking. We know Orwell had strong opinions on the

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Isis aren’t the only ones guilty of censoring the past

Aside from reports about terrorism, war and the Vatican cosying up to Naomi Klein, few news stories this year have upset me as much as the ones about TV Land cancelling re-runs of The Dukes of Hazzard. TV Land, an American cable channel, announced this week that it will stop showing the oh-so-1980s TV show about the Duke boys and their sheriff-dodging antics in the state of Georgia, because the car they drove — a 1969 Dodge Charger — had the Confederate flag painted on its roof. And following Confederate fan Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black worshippers at a church in South Carolina, the Confederate flag has become object non grata, verboten,

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 2 July 2015

How to fix Detroit Sir: When I last flew over my native Detroit five years ago, vast tracts of it still resembled Machu Picchu. From the ground, it was little better; in what had been a prosperous Italian-American neighbourhood when I lived there in 1964, there were only five houses left standing. Stephen Bayley (Arts, 27 June) marvels that ‘You could buy an entire house for $10,000’ — but in truth the taxes needed to support Detroit’s notoriously corrupt governments are so high that you can’t give them away unless they are in one of the few islands colonised by the middle classes. Indeed, the city filed for bankruptcy in

Thursday

James Runcie

Diary – 7 May 2015

I am writing a play about Dr Johnson and his Dictionary. It will be performed in Scotland later this year. Five out of the great man’s six helpers were Scots (the only Englishman, V.J. Peyton, was considered a fool and a drunkard) and it’s timely to think of all those Scotsmen working away to consolidate the English language while their descendants try to define the general election. As a fully functioning Willie (‘Work in London, Live in Edinburgh’), I am startled by the zeal with which the SNP plans to take its revenge on Westminster after a decisive ‘no’ vote in the referendum. The Scottish rugby team is often accused