Ian Thomson | The Spectator columnists & writers

The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago

This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so impressed by the Turkish technique of ‘engraftment’ to prevent smallpox that in 1721, exactly 300 years ago, she arranged for the first such inoculation in England — and, even more controversially, had it carried out on her own three-year-old daughter. Smallpox pus from a sufferer was carried in a walnut shell and applied to a cut made in her daughter’s arm. She discovered the technique too late to use it on herself. As a young woman and court beauty, she had contracted smallpox during one of the frequent epidemics that swept London, leaving her scarred and without any eyebrows. This gave her what contemporaries described as ‘the Wortley stare’, a penetrating gaze which, allied with her fierce intelligence, made her a formidable proposition.

My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante

My book on Dante Alighieri was due to come out in Chinese translation later this year, but first I had to consent to sizeable cuts. Even by the standards of other authoritarian states the Beijing censors struck me as overzealous. It seems odd that the medieval Italian poet could cause such unease among modern-day totalitarians. A sanitised Chinese communist version of my book did not sit well with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321, and in the end I withheld permission. The cuts were the work of Beijing’s blandly named Institute for World Religions. The institute undertakes ‘book cleansing’ operations on behalf of the state. No book can be published legally in China today without being vetted. In their solemn appraisal the censors insisted that all references to Islam be removed.

The Edition

Battle royal: Harry and Meghan’s brand of revenge

36 min listen

The Edition

Battle royal: Harry and Meghan’s brand of revenge

36 min listen

CIA spies lose faith

With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The Estonian capital of Tallinn crawled with Russian money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’). The television in my hotel room was detuned from capitalist Finnish to Soviet channels, but I was able to pick up Miami Vice from across the Gulf of Finland. Guests were not allowed to visit the 21st floor, which officially did not exist. The KGB apparently had an office up there where they monitored Helsinki radio waves and the hotel’s 60-odd bugged rooms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the wallet-thin Minox camera had been invented in Tallinn (by one Walter Zapp, in 1936). It was a favourite with Cold War spooks.

Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell: Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost. Begun in the early 14th century, Dante’s poem is, for many, the greatest single work of western literature. With its dramatic chiaroscuro of hellish fuming mists and paradisal stellar regions, the poem is ‘awful’ in the archaic sense of the word (still valid in the Italian terribile), meaning to inspire awe.

City of dazzling mosaics: the golden age of Ravenna

When we refer to someone as ‘Byzantine’ we usually mean guileful or too complicated and labyrinthine in manner or speech. Perhaps the term is ill-applied: Byzantium, the medieval Greek city on the Bosporus which the Roman Emperor Constantine I renamed Constantinople, was not in essence an unfathomable, over-hierarchical or manipulative sort of place. It flourished for more than 1,000 years, until the Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century, by dint of its ‘extraordinary resilience and self-confidence’, says Judith Herrin, a leading Byzantinist. The northern Italian city of Ravenna, with its wondrous mosaicked churches and gilded mausolea that miraculously survived the aerial bombardments of the second world war, was manifestly also a Byzantine city.

Should we all be prepping for the end of days?

In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody believed Noah until it was way too late. Bunker: Building for the End Times, a hybrid of reportage and philosophical musing, considers contemporary survivalist culture in all its manifest craziness, from the doomsday realtors who sell bomb-proof, virus-free bunker space to the Bible-belt survivalists who pack their INCH bags (I’m Never Coming Home) and bug out to bunker encampments in Wyoming in anticipation of the Final Judgment. In the modern concrete bunker Bradley Garrett sees an extreme expression of our fear of nuclear, chemical, biological and climatic calamity. Never before in recorded history, he tells us, ‘has humankind faced such grave, and myriad, existential threats’ as it does today.

From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute after the handshake was considered fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him. He was on amiable terms with King George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated the dictator on his ‘wise leadership’.

Animation lends itself readily to propaganda

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by Saudi troops in a computer-animated film of the ‘liberation’ of Iran from Ayatollah rule. Saudi Deterrent Force was a six-minute fantasy released online by anonymous video-makers in Saudi Arabia in 2017. It was viewed over 750,000 times before Iranian animators struck back with Battle of the Persian Gulf II, in which the Great Satan and perceived Saudi lackey Donald Trump is humiliated in an imagined Gulf battle led by Soleimani. Now that Soleimani is, in Pentagon-speak, a ‘vaporised non-person’, Saudi Deterrent Force acquires added interest for us as propaganda. Large parts of the Sunni world loathed Soleimani and his Shia Muslim entourage and indeed celebrated his death by drone.

Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election

I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An air force helicopter ferried his remains from the Valley of the Fallen, where a gigantic stone cross marks the dictator’s grave as well as that of 34,000 Spanish Civil War dead. For four decades the dictator had lain beneath a 1.5 ton granite slab. No longer. As eight of his descendants shouldered the coffin to the helicopter, shouts went up of ‘Viva España! Viva Franco!’ from Falangist diehards behind a police cordon. Franco was reinterred the same day alongside his wife, Carmen Polo, in a family pantheon 20 miles away. The exhumation was a symbolic triumph for Spain’s socialist government under Pedro Sánchez, which has long argued that the Valley of the Fallen glorifies the generalísimo at the expense of the thousands in unmarked graves from the 1936-39 war.

A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’

No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per cent of its white male population to the Union armies, but that only confirmed its moral superiority over the money-grubbing Yankee. According to Susan Neiman, postwar Germans approximated the vanquished Confederacy in their inability to imagine their own defeat. Attempts were made to recompense the Jewish community, but most Germans, East and West, refused to accept responsibility for the war at all.

If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret

Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time he died in 1989, he had written nearly 200 novels, more than 150 novellas, several memoirs and countless short stories. His demonic productivity and the vast sales and fortune it brought him were matched by a vaunted sexual athleticism. Simenon claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. (‘The goal of my endless quest,’ he explained, ‘was not a woman, but the woman’ — which is French for wanting lots of it, very often.) It was not love-making, but a desire for brute copulation that drove Simenon to demand sex at least once daily of his wives, secretary and housemaid-mistresses. How he found the time to write the Maigret books is a matter for psychoanalysis.

Sicily Notebook

Northern Italians often speak of Sicily as a Saracenic darkness — the place where Europe ends. The Arabic influence remains strongest in the Mafia-infiltrated west of the island, where the sirocco blows in hot from the deserts of North Africa. When the Arabs invaded Sicily in 831 they introduced mosques and pink-domed cupolas, as well as the sherbets and jasmine-perfumed ices for which Sicily is renowned. The word ‘Mafia’ is said to derive from the Arabic mahyas, meaning ‘aggressive boasting’: for almost three centuries, until the Norman Conquest began in 1061, Sicily was an Arabo-Islamic emirate. The other day in the Sicilian resort of Taormina I watched the Normans oust the Saracens in a puppet show designed for tourists: amid a clatter of marionette armour the paladins triumphed effortlessly.

Native wood-notes wild | 20 June 2019

With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear cleaning’ exercises that might attune us beatifically to a hushed environment. Silence itself can be quite noisy, of course. Even in the countryside the thoughts in one’s head and the sound of one’s breathing can disturb the peace. Music, at least, may help to restore a sense of quietude. Vaughan Williams’s 15-minute meditation ‘The Lark Ascending’ conjures a pastoral idyll untouched by the clamour and carnage attendant on the Great War. In 1921, when the music was premiered, the green fields of Europe had been psychologically altered by the bloodiest battles in recorded history. Thousands of casualties had been left decomposing in the mud of the Marne, and rural Britain was disfigured by the destruction of woodland for rifle and ammunition-case manufacture.

Moving images of Christianity

The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of his life in around 1990 he determined to film Dante’s Inferno for national television. The brimstone poem appealed to Fellini for its comico-grotesque scenes of mass writhing human nudity amid firecracker detonations. He was not the first filmmaker to take on the work of the medieval Florentine poet. In the early 1970s, Fellini’s compatriot Franco Zeffirelli persuaded Dustin Hoffman to star as Dante Alighieri in his own version of the Inferno. Hoffman, dressed in a medieval coif hat and Tootsie-red robe, was supposed to wander through a sulphurous underworld accompanied by the Latin poet Virgil. Nothing came of either Zeffirelli’s or Fellini’s Inferno.

A tainted paradise

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘This, one of the great travel books, is published by John Murray at 25s’, proclaims a footnote in the first edition. Fleming was a friend of Leigh Fermor, so this is to be expected. Published in 1950, The Traveller’s Tree may still be the best non-fiction account of the West Indies. ‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about’, M tells 007, knowingly. But Paul Morand’s 1929 Hiver caraïbe comes a close second. The question is: why has it taken 90 years for this masterwork to appear in English? Morand (1888–1976), a pro-Vichy collaborator and occasional Jew-baiter, was made persona non grata in post-Liberation France, and was shunned by mainstream publishers.

A very big life

In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to Italy with the deplorable Lord Alfred Douglas. Sodomy, whether with man or beast, carried a sentence of servitude for life in Victorian Britain: prigs protested that Wilde had got off lightly. In Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, the Dublin-born outcast went to ground with Bosie in the Villa Guidice (now the Villa Bracale) at 37 Via Posillipo. Inevitably there was press intrusion. The English-language Naples Echo was quick to announce the arrival of Sebastian Melmouth: ‘Readers may know that this is the pseudonym of Oscar Wilde.’ Where to hide? To Wilde’s fury a journalist managed to inveigle his way into No 37: Signor Wilde cast me a glacial interrogative gaze.

Hypnotic threnodies

The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones and industrial kling-klang of difficult German bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Faust and Can. A British fear and loathing of Germany and the Germans informed numerous New Musical Express Krautrock articles. (‘Kraftwerk: the Final Solution to the Music Problem’, or ‘Can: They Have Ways of Making You Listen’.) The term was made semi-respectable by Julian Cope, the erudite jester of English pop, in his ironically entitled book Krautrocksampler (1995), which commended the strange new music that rose from the moral and material ruins of post-Hitlerite Germany. It is hard now to imagine how startlingly new Can must have sounded.

Of human bondage

Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the Harlem Renaissance. ‘Harlemania’ took off in jazz-age New York, as white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and enthused over so-called primitive art. Hurston made a ‘black splash’ of her own in 1920s Harlem. Among her admirers was the dance critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten, whose deliciously Firbankian 1926 account of life uptown, Nigger Heaven, gloried in blackamoor jungle dances and other Uncle Tom minstrelsy. (‘Period piece’ would be the most charitable description.) Hurston was careful not to mock the ‘Negrotonians’, as she called Van Vechten and his Fifth Avenue sophisticates, as she needed their patronage for field trips into the swamplands of Florida and the Deep South.

Time to lighten up

In parts of Africa and the West Indies women are so anxious to ‘whiten up’ that they use skin-lightening creams. The British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch sees this as a regrettable consequence of the aristocracy of skin colour as instituted by British merchant-capitalists during slavery. (Skin must first be bleached before it can be considered beautiful.) Of mixed Jewish-African parentage, the 36-year-old Hirsch is proud to call herself black. In this much-hyped book she sets out to question lingering obeisance to the idea of colonial Britain and to that ghost of the British Empire, the Commonwealth. Why does it persist so? Affection for Britain remains surprisingly strong in Commonwealth countries. West Indian pseudo-colonials of the sort portrayed by Sam Selvon in his 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners survive in the colonial-era law courts of India, in the Sandhust-educated echelons of the Jamaican army and in the Nigerian civil service.

Steamy encounters

With my friend Maurice, I have long frequented the Ironmonger Row baths behind Moorfields Eye Hospital. As married men, we appreciated the circumspect and respectful behaviour; for a few quid one felt properly laved and rejuvenated. Nakedness is a great leveller. City traders mingled with taxi drivers; a High Court judge might ‘testiculate’ (talk bollocks) with Maurice, a Labour peer. Afterwards in our robes we relaxed in the cooling-room over cups of tea; the steam induced a state of blissful lassitude. In 2012, after an ill-spent £16 million refurbishment, the baths were reopened as the Old Street Spa Experience. At a stroke, the local community was priced out: only transient businessmen and affluent Islingtonians can afford the exorbitant entry fee.

Italy’s road to ruin

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without. By the time Iris Origo’s Italian war diary opens in 1939, the racial laws have declared Italian Jews a contaminant akin to the Nazis’s Fremdkörper, an alien within the state.

The cult of Holy Bob

The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy Cliff as the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw amid the ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamaican capital of Kingston. The film’s director Perry Henzell, a ganja-smoking white Jamaican who had been sent to board at Sherborne school, was influenced by the gritty ‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed for a documentary immediacy off the street. The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in under a week, effectively introduced reggae to white British audiences. Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to say, reggae would not have taken hold in Britain in the way it did.

Redcoats and runaways

Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during President Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Maroons were hailed as forerunners of Black Power. Rastafari militants and back-to-Africa ideologues saw a nobility in Maroon descent. The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey had claimed Maroon ancestry for himself; as has, more recently, the British Jamaican hip-hop singer Ms Dynamite (whose debut album, A Little Deeper, remains a UK drum and bass masterwork). In Jamaica, at any rate, Maroons fought exclusively for their own liberty, not for the overall liberty of the island’s enslaved Africans. As a condition of their freedom (and in return for land and other privileges), they were obliged to return other fugitive slaves to the imperial British and even help put down slave revolts.

The new age of the refugee

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic abuse as they settled in cramped London streets north of Whitechapel Road.

Mach the Knife

The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded in Florence in 1397, operated like a prototype mafia consortium: it rubbed out rivals and spread tentacles into what Niccolò Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (‘high places’) of local power interests. Undoubtedly, Medici money was at its most arrogant under the dictatorship of the merchant-poet Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose supremacy was dramatically challenged in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. Amid a fury of dagger blows in Florence’s cathedral (of all places) Lorenzo narrowly escaped assassination by bravos in the pay of the rival Pazzi family. In retribution, 70 presumed conspirators were publicly torn alive from groin to neck.

The Ben and Clara affair

As a child in fascist Italy, Clara Petacci (known as Claretta) was dutifully adoring of Benito Mussolini and the cult of ducismo. She gave the stiff-armed Roman salute while at school (the Duce had declared handshaking fey and unhygienic) and sang the fascist youth anthem ‘Giovinezza’. Her father, the Pope’s personal physician, was a convinced fascist, for whom Mussolini was the incarnation of animal cunning — furbizia — and the manful fascist soul. Claretta herself would have to wait before she met the ‘divine Caesar’. One day in April 1932, while motoring from Rome to the seaside resort of Ostia, she caught sight of her idol behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo. ‘Follow him!’ she ordered her chauffeur. The cars drew level, and Mussolini pulled over to confront his pursuer.

Satirising the artful Hoxha

Blood, they say, is quick on the knife in Albania, where Balkan-style revenge killings, known as giakmarrje (‘blood-takings’), settle ancient scores and land disputes. The great engine of vengeance — the old idea of purification by blood — was explored by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare in his first novel, General of the Dead Army. Published in communist Albania in 1963, the novel told of an Italian army officer who returns to the Balkan outpost after the second world war in order to bury his fallen compatriots. It remains a magnificent allegory of life and death under totalitarian dictatorship. Kadare, 80, wrote his best books under the communist regime of Enver Hoxha (pronounced ‘Hodger’), a Muslim-born bigwig in the megalomaniac lineage of Tamburlaine.

Blackouts and white coats

In the cult Steve Martin film The Man With Two Brains, a doctor falls in love with a surgically removed brain. The object of his desire (fizzing, if I remember rightly, in a demijohn of formaldehyde) makes for an enduring gothic comedy of the mind. On the movie’s release in the early 1980s, neuroscience was still in its infancy. Men in white coats were cutting up monkey brains and their laboratories smelled of monkey urine. In recent years, however, neuro-imaging has changed the study of the human mind completely. Rainbow-coloured images on the scanner screen reveal our most precious and mysterious organ in all its alien complexity. Computer imaging may yet fathom the mystery of epilepsy. From the Greek ‘to capture’ or ‘to seize’, epilepsy is commonly viewed as a rather spooky disorder, associated at times with demonic possession.