Home/Men's Lifestyle/The Critic/October 2024/In This Issue
The Critic|October 2024WHAT IS TORYISM FOR?A CENTURY AGO TORY PARTY CONFERences reliably had motions deploring the “unbalanced” constitution. Even two decades after the 1911 Parliament Act the complaint was still this: what matters about the House of Lords is not its composition but its powers. This urge to do something about an act specifically intended to be a temporary expedient reflected a concern now completely absent in modern Toryism. Put simply: where once the constitution was the central purpose of Toryism — defending it, maintaining it, justifying it — this tradition is now effectively dead. Tories, as now constituted, just don’t care. “Reform” of the House of Lords is the perfect illustration of contemporary Conservative indifference to the constitution. The new Labour government intends to sweep away the remaining hereditary peers. We could laugh at…6 min
The Critic|October 2024The new diversity barIN SEPTEMBER, THE BAR Standards Board, which regulates barristers in England and Wales, quietly announced a consultation on amending the core duties it requires all barristers to perform. Currently, Core Duty 8 only requires barristers to not “discriminate unlawfully against any person”, a redundant but perfectly sensible rule. The BSB seeks to replace it with a requirement for its regulatees to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion”. In addition, all chambers and solo practitioners will be required to promulgate an equality, diversity and inclusion policy and to meet mandatory EDI outcomes. Barristers who run foul of the new rule will face disciplinary action. The predictable outcry aside, few seriously think the duty will not be amended. As anyone who has been involved in these things knows,…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Death by a thousand cuts“NEVER MISS A BEAT! THE PROMS! ON IPLAYER AND BBC SOUNDS!” Through July, August and September, this promotional message was ubiquitous on BBC Television. But it was subtly misleading. Every one of this season’s 73 Proms from the Royal Albert Hall was indeed broadcast live on Radio 3, and can be heard again on BBC Sounds. But on the iPlayer, you will find just 26 of them. Only one concert — the Last Night — was televised live. Another half dozen were recorded on the night and transmitted after a delay, allowing the interval to be excised. The others were recorded for later broadcast — days or weeks after the event, some even after the end of the season. Just six Proms featured on BBC One (part of the Last…10 min
The Critic|October 2024CALM DOWN, DEARS!I MUST LAY BARE MY COMMITMENTS. I THINK IDEAL GOVERNment is something severe, elite, and aloof. The brief rule of the Thirty receives a favourable notice in my book; I think the Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire were both grand arrangements. I suppose that this smacks of Platonism, Leninism, or worse, but it is what it is. I am, however, also an American, Chesapeake-born, and go at things as I have taught myself — and one of the first lessons learned in These States, even for an autodidact, is that ideal government is so much gossamer and fairy-dust. There’s a consolation: The American democratic circus is one of the stupidest, most delightful spectacles ever to grace the modern world. This season’s show is no different.…8 min
The Critic|October 2024How the Tories can win againOH MY PARTY, WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YOU? I have always been, through temperament, birth, instinct and enquiry, a Conservative. A member since my youth, I remember being dragged along to constituency events by my parents. At times it feels like being a Church of England congregant, something I also am, as part of a decreasing number of the faithful — ageing participants supporting a leadership cadre of increasingly disconnected views. Just as many C of E members have trod toward Rome, many Tories have turned to Reform. Both are reassured and reanimated by the certainties preached. Yet here I remain, a Conservative Party member and one about to sniff the air at conference. Some might feel this minority pastime a sad indictment of my outlook and social life. I…7 min
The Critic|October 2024Free speech is fascistWHAT DID ADOLF HITLER, BENITO MUSSOLINI, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin and Caligula have in common? That’s right: they were all able to speak. This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept, one that can lead directly to murder, terrorism, genocide and — worst of all — misgendering. And so it is a relief to see that one of Keir Starmer’s key priorities as prime minister is to crack down on online speech. Already he has ingenuously granted early release from prison for drug dealers, sex offenders and violent criminals to free up space for bigots who have said nasty things on social media. The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet.…2 min
The Critic|October 2024DON’T PLAY POLITICS WITH MOTHERHOODI KNOW THAT ON SOME LEVEL, I OUGHT TO BE GRATEFUL. At least I’ve not been categorised as “one of those”. When vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s 2021 complaint that his country was being run by “childless cat ladies” recently resurfaced, I could rest assured that none of the insult applied to me. I don’t have cats, whereas I do have children. According to Vance’s worldview, the future should belong to me and mine. So why don’t I feel more flattered? It is always slightly mortifying when a right-wing politician makes comments of this nature, at least if you are the kind of parent who does not wish to be co-opted into some phony battle between breeders and the child-free. Who can forget Andrea Leadsom’s abortive Tory leadership campaign, in which…7 min
The Critic|October 2024The real cost of public sector payTHE 2020S HAVE DEMONstrated, yet again, that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. After the Bank of England overreacted to the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020 with needlessly large asset purchases, the increase in the quantity of money (on the M4x measure which the Bank itself favours) reached 15 per cent in February 2021. Although many people seem to be baffled by the processes which connect money and the price level, double-digit inflation became very likely. Somewhat absurdly, the Governor of the Bank of England has denied that money was relevant to the recent inflation episode. Andrew Bailey used a recent speech — to fellow central bankers, at a get-together in Jackson Hole, Wyoming — to blame it on the Ukraine war and other alleged shocks from abroad.…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Farewell to Larry SiedentopI FIRST MET SIR LARRY SIEDENTOP IN JUNE 2015. One year before Brexit and 800 after the signing of Magna Carta, a rather serious panel led by Dominic Grieve was convening to discuss the latter’s relevance to the modern world. Invited at the last minute by my doctoral supervisor, the man in the chair beside me finally introduced himself as “Larry. Larry Siedentop.” “The author of Inventing the Individual?” “The same. Do you write?” “Yes, I’m finishing my doctorate in law.” “Why aren’t you practising?” “I interned at a law firm last year. The work was dull, the culture soulless, and the people repellent. Never again.” “Good for you, good for you. Here’s my number and address. Visit next time you are in London.” And with that he was off.…7 min
The Critic|October 2024Folly, fantasy and Britain’s defence crisisWHEN ASKED WHAT HE WANTED, the veteran American trade union leader Samuel Gompers replied “more”. The authors of this timely book on Britain’s defence strategy, or lack of one, also want “more … more of everything”. They want more money, for more men, more tanks, more aircraft, and more ships. Above all, they want more understanding of what Britain’s strategic aims are and how they can be realised. Both authors are well qualified to write this book. David Richards is a former Chief of the Defence Staff with a long and distinguished military record. He is well known for his intellectual curiosity; I served (full disclosure) on the strategic advisory panel he set up in 2010. Julian Lindley-French is a well respected professor of defence strategy at the Netherlands Defence…5 min
The Critic|October 2024The right-on, leftwing oppressorsLIBERAL AUTHORITARIANISM IS IN THE ascendancy. From Brazil banning X over concerns about “disinformation” to Keir Starmer’s early release of violent prisoners in order to lock up people for intemperate social media posts following the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport, not to mention the proposed resurrection of “non-crime hate incidents”, the global liberal left is in full prosecutorial mode. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that he had bowed to calls to censor non-compliant posts on Facebook during Covid also reveals what many of us already know. Luke Conway’s Liberal Bullies is therefore timely. If anything, I wish it had appeared earlier as authoritarian states and vigilante citizens persecuting vendettas against political enemies are already far advanced. But we are never without hope, and Conway’s book serves as both a careful…5 min
The Critic|October 2024The age of reason, sliced and dicedOCKHAM’S EPONYMOUS RAZOR IS STILL as incisive as it was when first wielded by the English friar and scholastic philosopher six centuries ago. William of Ockham (1287–1347, below) was a pioneer of the theory of knowledge and the great proponent of nominalism, arguing that universal concepts were merely names, not realities. No historian wields Ockham’s razor more effectively than J.C.D. Clark. Clark upholds the Peterhouse High Tory view: the inextinguishable influence of Christianity on “public doctrine” is denigrated or ignored by a secularised scholarly establishment. Hence the latter deserves to be dispatched without mercy. If Cowling was the Sweeney Todd of the historical profession, Clark has raised the dissection of progressive priggishness to an art form. In his last book, Clark demonstrated that Tom Paine, hero of progressive causes on…7 min
The Critic|October 2024Tragedy, comedy and an Italian parableIT’S SOMETIMES SAID THAT THE DIFFERENCE between a short story and a novel is that a story contains a moment — often a moment of change for the protagonist — while a novel has a broader sweep. Certainly stories which try to do more can feel cramped and airless (allowing exceptions for genius, such as Borges), and novels that restrict themselves to a single moment tend to try the reader’s patience by shrinking to internal inaction. But what a novel can do is capture a moment of change for a society, and that is what the three novels in this month’s column seek to achieve, with great success. David Peace is one of the most distinctive, and distinguished, British novelists now writing. His work blends interest in the fabric of…7 min
The Critic|October 2024Norman Lebrecht on MusicSTARS HAVE BEEN FALLING OUT of opera like apples in late summer. Jonas Kaufmann, a serial drop-out, now has a second career as a festival manager. Anna Netrebko is blacklisted for past Putin affinities. Vittorio Grigolo was fired for harassment. Roberto Alagna is over 60. Renée Fleming is 65. The box office has almost run out of lights. With one singular exception. Lise Davidsen commands the art in a way no dramatic soprano has done since Birgit Nilsson and, before her, Kirsten Flagstad. That all three are Nordic may be more than coincidence, but hold that thought. Davidsen, 37 years old and six foot two, is the shining star on whom the opera world has hinged its future. THE METROPOLITAN OPERA IS CASTING a Wagner Ring around her. This season…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Michael Prodger on ArtMANY ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY THE more callow ones, like to feel that their calling gives them licence to indulge in a bit of transgressive behaviour. But high jinks in the Groucho Club or a bit of drunkenness on television are small beer when compared to the misdeeds of their ancestors. The Soho coterie of the postwar years did their bit. Francis Bacon liked to be beaten up by his rough-trade pick-ups and was once thrown through a plate-glass window; the “Two Roberts” — Colquhoun and MacBryde — were violent in their cups, pounding one another, and MacBryde once, under the guise of a handshake, crushing a glass into the palm of the poet George Barker; while Lucian Freud consorted with the Krays and stole the gold coins his father had secreted…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Adam LeBor on TelevisionIN THE SUMMER OF 2013 I WAS talking to a senior French diplomat about the Syrian regime’s slaughter of more than 1,400 of its own citizens, including many children, in a nerve agent attack on Ghouta, eastern Damascus. President Obama had declared that chemical attacks were a red line and crossing it would bring “enormous consequences”. The world waited expectantly for America’s response. France was the only major European country to pledge support for the expected airstrikes. Its military and navy were primed. But my French contact was incredulous. Word came through: stand down. A nervous Obama, fearful of the potential blowback, had cancelled the strikes. Episode 8 of Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? examines the Ghouta attack and its aftermath in forensic detail. There were indeed…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Charles Saumarez Smith on ArchitectureONE EVENING IN THE HIGHSUMMER, I found myself bicycling through Canary Wharf. Although in the 1980s, we lived in view of its rising towers, I seldom visit. I think of it as a business district and I have never been to any of its offices. Recently, the press has been very negative about the future of Canary Wharf, greeting the news that HSBC is moving its offices back to the City with disproportionate glee, as if Canary Wharf might have been a failed experiment. So, I was surprised to find its streets full, the waterside restaurants and bars packed. I had thought it would be empty, but it felt energetic, full of life, a contrast, as it happens, to my recent experience of the City. I have realised that Canary…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Just the tonicWHEN HE JOINED PENFOLDS to promote its fortified wines, John Rogerson was described, good naturedly I think, as a “traitor” by someone in the port industry. Rogerson was born and raised in Porto, speaks English with a slight Portuguese accent and has, as he puts it, “lived and breathed port my whole life”. So why move then? Well, it’s not very well known in Britain but Australia has a fortified wine heritage which is almost as rich and long as Portugal’s. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century the country’s vineyards churned out Empire “ports” and “sherries” for the British market. One Barossa valley producer, Yalumba, was known as the “Oporto of Australia”. Housed in what looks like a huge castle, it had its own distillery and cooperage. Penfolds…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Is this just fantasy?AT THE CELTIC CAFE, ON Market Street in Aberaeron, I sat down to scrambled eggs on toast. Except for a table of old sheep farmers, the place was almost empty. “Shooting today, boy?” one of them called across, switching from Welsh to English. I guess he had noticed my breeks and socks. “Yes,” I replied. “Start of the duck season.” I don’t go to rural Wales very often, but when I do I’m reminded of how friendly it is. I often think the countryside in Britain varies massively in terms of how keen people are to chat. In Norfolk they seldom manage more than four words; in Scotland they do a sort of happy-cum-grumpy thing; in Yorkshire they tend to be rude while telling you they’re just saying it as…3 min
The Critic|October 2024Bursary schoolHAD DINNER WITH MY FRIEND Sophie last night, who kept going on about some flyer that one of the big West London private schools had pushed through her door advertising bursaries, a bit like those bloody cards from Savills. She lives in Kilburn, so the school is presumably stuffing these flyers indiscriminately into every average looking terrace — but she was clearly taking it as “a sign” that her ten-year-old Wilf should apply. Wilf is currently at some state primary you have to live opposite to get into, where they make a big deal of not setting homework. Even madder, her husband Alex is convinced it’s a Big Brother situation and that the school must “know” that they have a child of Year Six age on the premises, probably via…3 min
The Critic|October 2024BLUE-COLLAR BRILLIANCETHE NEW NFLSEASON MARKS THE golden anniversary of perhaps the most iconic dynasty in the game’s history. The PITTSBURGH STEELERS team which won its first Superbowl in 1975 didn’t just kick off a run of four titles in six years, a strike rate unparalleled to this day: it also stood for principles which showcased the best of its city and country alike. Hardscrabble northern industrial cities — Green Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland — are the game’s heartland both literally and metaphorically, and never was this more true than of 1970s Pittsburgh. It wasn’t just a steel town: it was the steel town, all mills and soot, smoke and dust. Ever since the war the Steelers had been amiably useless, reaching only one play-off game in more than three decades and…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Post-truth medicineGender clinics offer a charade that relies on the symbols of evidence-based medicine, trading on the trust hard won by the medical profession at large BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, DOCtors were feared rather than trusted. Their brutal, ineffective methods earned them nicknames like quack, leech and sawbone. Their ignorance of how infections spread meant they carried illness and death wherever they went. That changed with the discovery of microorganisms and the invention of vaccines, antibiotics, anaesthetics and all the other weapons with which doctors now fight disease, save lives and ease pain. Few women die in childbirth any more; most children survive into adulthood. And doctors get the credit. Polls around the world routinely rank them as the professionals people trust most. Underpinning this trust is the scientific method, especially…7 min
The Critic|October 2024Woman About TownDrain the swamp VENETIANS WHO HAD LEFT THEIR PHONES untouched during the summer exodus returned to the welcome if unsurprising news that the city mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, is finally being investigated for corruption. A dawn raid by 600 officers of the Guardia di Finanza resulted in 18 members of Brugnaro’s council being arrested for money laundering, false invoicing and misuse of public funds to the total sum of €150 million. The allegations are so vast and varied that the case has been nicknamed “Operation Swamp”. Despite protests, including being pelted with tomatoes whenever he appears in public, Brugnaro himself has yet to resign, but residents are hopeful that his grip on Venice, which has been abandoned to a monoculture of hypertourism since his election in 2015, might at last be…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Wanted: a real plan to reform the NHSFOR DECADES, THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY has had a simple NHS strategy: concede every important premise, exempt it from any attempt to cut public spending and hope that’s enough to win a hearing from the public on other issues. Over one or two electoral cycles, such short-term tactics can work. The Tories briefly eked out a lead on health under David Cameron. But in the long run, they’re doomed — and for proof, look no further than last week’s Darzi Report into the state of the NHS. Not only does it highlight how the Conservatives will never be able to do enough to avoid the charge that they have starved the NHS of funding, but his proposed remedies (in a situation where even Labour has no extra cash to offer) illustrate…10 min
The Critic|October 2024When the music stoppedPICTURE, IF YOU WILL, A PROFESSOR’S OFFICE in Oxford. You will no doubt imagine a sumptuously appointed room with a sofa and armchairs, floor-to-ceiling books, perhaps some priceless art, and sash windows overlooking a carefully manicured lawn. This office, however, was at the city’s other university, so it bore no resemblance to stereotype. Perhaps six-feet-by-eight, there was barely space for a desk, a filing cabinet and two plastic bucket chairs. But for 19 years it was my work “home” and good things happened there. Books were written, undergraduates guided through their dissertations, PhD students coaxed over the finishing line. I arrived at Oxford Brookes University as a music lecturer in 2005, steadily working my way up to being made professor in 2019. The School of Arts was in a 1990s…9 min
The Critic|October 2024In defence of hereditary peersTHE LAST REMAINING hereditary peers are to be thrown out of Parliament. Good, you might say. What place does heredity have in our legislative process? Britain is finally moving into the modern era, you might add. Reforming the House of Lords has been a low-level objective of all three parties of government over the last 20 years, finally Keir Starmer is getting on and doing it. Well before you sans-culottes start burning your breeches, I think someone should make a defence of the House of Lords in general and the hereditary principle in particular. First the easy argument: it works. It works for what we want it do in our constitution. We want the upper house to be a revising chamber, including among its number a sprinkling of experts, to…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Don’t bet on green energySMALL MISPERCEPTIONS OF VALUE create opportunities for those seeking to profit from eventual market corrections. Such minor prospects are common. But extraordinary opportunities are offered by gross misperceptions. However, they are very rare. Nevertheless, they do exist, and we are living through one now: a deep, widespread error in global understanding of investments in and policies relating to the provision of fuels. This has resulted in a drastic overestimation of the viability of renewable energy, and an undervaluation of fossils and nuclear. Contrary to popular opinion, renewables have no future free of subsidy, and, paradoxical though this seems, they are harming worldwide climate policy. Conventional energy remains essential for the creation and maintenance of human wellbeing, and thus there is a strong case for a green short, driven by individual…7 min
The Critic|October 2024The Critic ProfileShiva NaipaulHE WAS A PRO-COLONIALIST AND misogynist. That’s the not-inaccurate line on V. S. Naipaul nowadays. A less established writer would find it a hard charge to shake. But Naipaul won a Nobel Prize, which will always ensure him a readership. The books of his little brother Shiva, on the other hand, have never had the acclaim they deserve. The association with V. S. could put readers off entirely, but they would be missing out. In his obituary for Shiva, who died in 1985 aged just 40, Martin Amis wrote, “The moment I finished his first novel, Fireflies [1970], I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer … there are many people with whom I can initiate a long train of quotation — and laughter…6 min
The Critic|October 2024Out of power for half a centuryAFTER BEING IN OFFICE FROM 1710 TO1714, the Tories spent the next 46 years in opposition as the Whigs ruled the roost under George I and George II. During Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), Toryism’s meaning was clear: the defence of the national interest, the Church of England and social stability. England had been at war with France from 1702 to 1713, and the Tories advocated a “blue water” policy of focusing on the navy and being cautious about excessive commitment to alliances and to European interventionism. In contrast to the Whigs, who were heavily committed to both, the Tories pushed through peace and the Treaty of Utrecht — to the annoyance of the Elector of Hanover, soon to be Britain’s George I. The Tories were pushed into opposition by George’s…10 min
The Critic|October 2024STUDIOAT ÉGLISE SAINT-NICOLAS, A GLORIOUS GOTHIC church in Caen, Britain’s greatest living abstract artist, Sean Scully, is opening his latest one man show. There are loads of people swarming round him — liggers, journalists, local bigwigs — but he seems to tower over them. He’s a big stocky bloke, with the bearlike gait of a nightclub bouncer, but it’s not just his bulk which sets him apart. He looks like a villain in a British gangster movie. Bald and muscular, with a broad grin and a steely stare, you can tell he’s an artist from the wrong side of the tracks. No other artist divides opinion quite like Sean Scully. He’s renowned on several continents, he’s had acclaimed solo shows in many of the world’s greatest galleries, he’s been showered…9 min
The Critic|October 2024The Bezos behemothWHAT’S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT AMazon? The company brings the world’s goods to our door, at ever lower prices. We may grumble, but can’t resist. As president, Donald Trump regularly goaded Amazon from the Oval Office, but when the pandemic struck, his White House was obliged to order the FEMA agency to buy $13 million worth of thermometers from the online giant. But behind the logistics miracle are some troubling stories, which the Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli tells in a new book, The Everything War. Amazon is a subject as vast and hard to map as the rainforest itself, and so much of what it does is out of sight. It’s a giant logistics network, a movie studio, and provides the computing infrastructure that underpins a million and…4 min
The Critic|October 2024An intelligent book on AI? Very nearlyOVER THE LAST YEAR, CHATBOTS WRITing half-decent poems and a series of apocalyptic pronouncements regarding AI have plunged us into a civilisational moment. Two main concerns have emerged from a mixture of panic and hype fed by everyone from Rishi Sunak to Elon Musk. First, will it take my job? And second, will it really eventually wipe us all out? Probably not, is the answer given by Cambridge’s inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning Neil D. Lawrence. The Atomic Human is his grand attempt not just to explain what AI is, but to use it as a means to better understand human intelligence. His mission is quasi-religious: “As machines slice away proportions of human capability,” he writes, we will come to be left with a “kernel of humanity”. It’s this…5 min
The Critic|October 2024A beguiling star who loved melodramaIF THE DEFINITION OF A MOVIE STAR IS AN actor you’ll watch in anything, Elizabeth Taylor was the most stellar star of them all. In a career lasting more than half a century she made just one picture which would be worth watching were she not in it. As for the fifty-odd others, the bulk of them can be endured only because of Taylor’s beauteous, bestial presence. Even the most moribund of her films — The V.I.P.s, say, or The Only Game in Town — crackle to life whenever she enters the frame. She was a Klieg light on legs. Not that her gams were great. As Taylor’s fifth (and sixth) husband, Richard Burton, rather ungallantly pointed out, “She has wonderful eyes, but she has a double-chin and an overdeveloped…6 min
The Critic|October 2024Is Cheltenham beyond parody?SOME TIME AGO PRIVATE EYE produced a quite funny parody of that year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival programme. The distinguished literary journalist John Walsh would be interviewing A.N. Actress about her latest memoir, Ghostwritten. Sir Michael Palin would reminisce about yaks he had befriended on the road to Tibet. The very last entry ran: “‘My Interesting New Novel’ with Barry Witter (cancelled due to lack of interest)”. The Secret Author remembered this entertaining burlesque as he sat down to contemplate The Times’s announcement of this autumn’s roster. “Dench among treasures at Cheltenham book festival” declared the headline, above the revelation that “Richard Osman’s murders, Dame Judi Dench’s Shakespeare and Sir Geoff Hurst’s goals are among the highlights”. We were further informed that “in a show of support for Britain’s literary cultures,…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Robert Thicknesse on OperaAMONG OPERA’S MANY FAILURES, one of the feeblest is surely the way it wilfully ignores the most rewarding of all areas of aesthetic endeavour: I refer of course to its inexplicable neglect of vampires, while fannying about with all manner of half-arsed sub-vampire behaviour that simply begs to be taken that extra sanguinary mile. Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place, and you could plausibly chart the whole shebang as a coterie of baleful figures (and not always men, forsooth: look at those hard-eyed hooker vamps Carmen and Manon) draining the life out of the saps who make the mistake of falling in their way. Indeed, if opera houses really want to pack the joints out with halfwit children of confused sexual identity,…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Anne McElvoy on TheatreTOM STOPPARD IS THE SIMONE BILES of playwrights: the star performer who has brought more exhilarating twists, puns and dimensions to stage language than any writer since Harold Pinter. Of his works, The Real Thing is the most complex and twisty in word and deed. Some mental orienteering is required from the audience from the first scene onwards to get a handle on the complex factual and fictional intellectuals in the early 1980s and the multi-layered entanglements of the core quartet. The Old Vic’s revival under Max Webster’s direction comes more than 40 years after middle-England’s heartthrob Felicity Kendal first starred as the siren Annie, whose serial infidelities obsess her anguished writer husband, Henry A host of stage luminaries have since channelled Stoppard’s witty, gritty explorations of the fragility of…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Michael Henderson on RadioERAS END LESS FREQUENTLY than we are encouraged to believe. But a curtain is falling at BBC Sport, where Jonathan Agnew is approaching the last over as cricket correspondent. Although he will carry on as the lead commentator on Test Match Special, “Aggers” signed off in England after the final Test of the summer at the Oval. Only a tour of Pakistan remains. It has been an assured innings, and a long one. Since he assumed the job in 1991, taking over from Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Agnew’s well-modulated voice has been a friendly feature of the British summer. Once a cricketer himself, for Leicestershire and briefly for England, he has represented the game with distinction. Who will follow him? The corporation will obviously look to appoint a woman, or a non-white…4 min
The Critic|October 2024The same old songBIKINI SEASON MAY BE OVER, but Arlington isn’t so much a restaurant as what the Sidebar of Shame calls a “revenge body”. In case anybody missed it, in 1981, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin opened a restaurant on Arlington Street. Le Caprice served a mixture of polished gents’ club classics alongside dishes that riffed brilliantly between things smart people only ate in private and spritzy innovations such as the “legendary” bang bang chicken, a Home Counties take on satay. At the time, it was audacious to the point of being revolutionary — a fashionable restaurant that was relaxed, informal and unchallengingly delicious. Everybody went there and everybody who couldn’t read about it in another Eighties innovation, the lifestyle pages of the colour supplements. Then, in 2005, it was bought by…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Splashing the cashTHE ART MARKET HAS COME to value artists who have had to endure personal hardship and suffering, as if that was a key element of their creative process. Thus we have lionised the hero artist standing against the world, especially twentieth-century figures such as Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Giorgio Vasari, in his sixteenth-century The Lives of the Artists, gave us a near-divine image of them working alone and inspired by innate genius. Money and commerce were hardly considered alongside their brilliance and innovation. Stretching from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, the same hero figure is found in Vincent van Gogh, who may have formally sold only one painting in his lifetime and died by his own hand. Yet most artists are deeply commercial and…3 min
The Critic|October 2024Risks and rewardsGRAHAM LEE IS THE ONLY JOCKEY to have won both the Grand National and the Ascot Gold Cup. His unique status is hardly surprising given that so few top jockeys make the switch between jump and flat racing — not least because having managed to climb to the top in one code, it takes monumental self-belief to start all over again in another. More often the switch comes through force of circumstance, such as when a flat jockey finds it too difficult to keep the weight off: the maximum flat weight is 10 stone, which is the minimum jump weight. Jim Crowley was one exception. He had ridden over 300 jump winners before making the reverse switch to the flat at the relatively old age of 27 — a hugely…3 min
The Critic|October 2024NO AVERAGE JOEIT WAS MIDWAY THROUGH THE AFTER-noon on the first day of the fourth Test in Nagpur in 2012 and England were in a pickle. Leading the series 2-1, Alastair Cook’s side needed a draw in the last match to secure a first win in India for 28 years. Inevitably, the home team’s spinners had them in knots. Four good batsmen had been dismissed and Kevin Pietersen, who had passed 50 on what he called “the toughest pitch I ever played on”, would not last much longer. Out jogged England’s 21-year-old debutant. If he felt nerves, he did not show them. Flashing a huge grin, one which fans would see often over the next dozen years, JOE ROOT greeted Pietersen, a man of such confidence and ego that his nickname among…4 min
The Critic|October 2024HOOP DREAMSMY PASSION FOR FOOTBALL CAME relatively late in life. As a child, I was a Chelsea fan, God help me, but rarely went to games and lost interest in my teens. The first time I got properly into it was in my late twenties when England did surprisingly well in Italia 90. On holiday in France, I watched the games on a portable black-and-white television and as the national side progressed the players seemed to grow in size until, by the time we reached the quarter-finals, it was like watching a team of giants. I remember talking to my late father about this and he told me he’d had the same sensation about Churchill during the Second World War. That made me an England fan, but I didn’t develop an…4 min
The Critic|October 2024LettersPOLICY MATTERS Your article (CRITIC ONLINE, 5 SEPT) about the Oxford Chancellor election criticises me for defending Ukrainian oligarchs in court. I will never be embarrassed about defending unpopular people. Nobody chooses the country of their birth, and everyone has a right to a fair defence. More to the point, if you wanted to besmirch the Stratton family name, you should have started with the client who allegedly decapitated her husband before serving up his head with some vegetables. I would rather you focus on the substance of the election, because I am not just the only left-wing candidate, but the only candidate offering any policies of substance. That includes a £15 minimum wage for all staff; abolishing 100% final exams to ease Oxford’s mental health crisis; and opposing any…3 min
The Critic|October 2024SUE GRAY’S INBOXFrom: Morgan McSweeney Subject: Desk Look, I take your point about the shortage of space, but the place you’ve got me now isn’t even in the same postcode as the boss. Any chance of a rethink? From: Robespierre1789@gmail.com Subject: To the barricades! We, the special advisers of the Labour Party, seek justice! Did we slave for years in opposition, delivering victory through our policy papers and press releases, only to have to starve once we were in power? We demand: • A Living Advisers Wage across Government • Work From Home Fridays • Better Coffee in the Basement Machine • The Banishment of the Traitor Gray Aux armes! Liberté, égalité, un peu more pay! From: Ken.McCallum@mi5.gov.uk Subject: Re: Gmail trace Very simple, yes. Just send me the email address. From:…2 min
The Critic|October 2024Eric FogeyDR ERIC FOGEY TEACHES MODERN English Literature at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges. He is a short, stout man with a red face, luxuriant muttonchop whiskers and an unfortunate habit of seeming to appear many years older than his actual age. In bad light, or in one of his more extravagant get-ups (the suit of plus-fours, say, in which he can be seen sauntering along King’s Parade, or the corduroy knee-breeches brought to the Vice Chancellor’s garden party), he can sometimes be taken for 45 or even 50. In fact, Dr Fogey is a comparatively youthful 38. As one who works on the “modern” side, Dr Fogey is naturally compelled to pronounce on authors who are personally distasteful to him — the “frightful” T.S. Eliot, for example, or the…2 min
The Critic|October 2024Mike Lynch should inspire usTHE DEATHS OF MIKE LYNCH and six others in the sinking of the Bayesian is, at one level, a simple human tragedy. Many City folk had dealings either with Lynch in one of his many incarnations or with Jonathan Bloomer, the likeable chairman of the insurer Hiscox who was one of the other victims. For a few days, members of my Square Mile WhatsApp groups paused their insistent sharing of off-colour memes, and there were only expressions of quiet shock and horror. However, there is also a wider story to be told of a very singular entrepreneur and his relationship to an equally singular sailing vessel — and an important message about the British and their attitudes to wealth creation. I heard about the Bayesian disaster as I was returning…4 min
The Critic|October 2024A real plan for growthGROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH. EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT GROWTH. ALL THE CONSERVATIVE party leadership candidates have said we must achieve it. All the major parties in the last election said it was their number one objective. Our new prime minister has stated that he will focus “laser-like” on growth. And not one of them seemed until recently to have a clue what they meant by the word; prescriptions as to how to achieve it there were none. Well, okay: I think we all understood that what they were talking about was economic growth. But how to define that metric? The politicians, media and commentators use the simple measure of Gross Domestic Product. That leads them into grievous error, coming from their not really understanding what the simple purpose of achieving economic growth…10 min
The Critic|October 2024Bonfire of the veritiesIT IS TOO PAINFUL TO WATCH. CONSERVATIVES are still agonising about the meaning of the General Election of July 2024, but the statistical writing on the wall is clear enough to everyone else. Their party’s share of the votes cast dropped from 43.6 in 2019 to 23.7 per cent. Even in such a transformative crisis, Labour’s share increased only marginally, from 32.1 to 33.7 per cent; in his own constituency Sir Keir Starmer secured half the number of votes he won in 2019. Despite this unique opportunity to inherit the earth, the Lib Dems picked up not nearly enough seats to become the official Opposition, let alone form the government; generally, their voters reasonably assumed that the party had changed its name to None of the Above. The national turnout…10 min
The Critic|October 2024The future that never cameON SATURDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 1940 THE FIRST BOMB OF THE LUFTWAFFE’S SYSTEMATIC BLITZ OF London fell at 43 Southwark Park Road, SE16. It was a grocer’s shop. Twelve minutes later, the first military target was hit, an RAF timber shed in Catford. Fourteen minutes later the first London church affected by the blitz, St Cyprian’s in Brockley, was severely damaged. Over the next 24 hours, 843 bombs fell on the capital, almost exclusively in the south and the east. This was the working-class nineteenth-century London of the docks and of the cheap penny railway ticket, two-storey stock brick homes with dark-green-framed sash windows in streets whose names sang of Victorian imperial confidence: the RAF shed was on Sandhurst Road; St Cyprian’s was on Adelaide Avenue. Over the next nine months,…6 min
The Critic|October 2024EVERYDAY LIES WITH THEODORE DALRYMPLESPEAKING OF THOMAS JOLLY, THE DIRECTOR OF THE OPENING ceremony of the Paris Olympics, the chairman of the organising committee, Tony Estanguet, said, “He was a bold choice.” Note that he did not say Jolly was a good choice: the word “bold” was supposed to include that value judgement. But of course it didn’t. An action or choice can perfectly well be bold without being good. It can be bold and stupid, or bold and vicious, or bold and cruel, or bold and any number of horrible things. Boldness is not a good in itself. Bravery is like that too: not a virtue in itself. Those who flew the aircraft into the World Trade Centre demonstrated bravery, but that does not weigh in the balance against the evil they did.…1 min
The Critic|October 2024Much more than mere child’s playWE ALL REMEMBER OUR FAvourite childhood authors. It was Enid Blyton for me. I spurned the Secret Seven and the Famous Five in favour of her chronicles of a more recherché investigative outfit called the Five Find-Outers, led by “Fatty” whose name would these days be unlikely to escape the attentions of the sensitivity reader. I was also a keen follower of Blyton’s “Secret” series, comprising The Secret Island, The Secret Mountain and so on, and her “Adventure” series, The Island of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and er … so on. Enid was very much of the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it school of writing. When Gateshead Central Library had yielded up its last of her works, I moved on to Malcolm Saville and his “Lone Pine” series — another set of books…6 min
The Critic|October 2024Pornhub exposedIN DECEMBER 2020, PORNHUB, THE WORLD’S largest provider of free pornography and the tenth most visited website in the world, was effectively castrated by a middle-aged American mum. Armed with nothing but a laptop and a working moral compass, activist Laila Mickelwait forced the site to remove 80 per cent of its content. Takedown is the story of how she did it. Part memoir, part gripping crime thriller, Takedown describes in forensic detail how Micklewait forced Pornhub to admit it had been knowingly profiting — along with some of the world’s biggest payment providers including Mastercard and Visa — from child abuse, rape and human trafficking. Mickelwait’s crusade against Pornhub was not sparked by reading Andrea Dworkin; she is no strident women’s liberationist. A Christian, she recalls wanting to follow…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Rising above the mobIN MARCH 2020, HUNDREDS OF LABOUR supporting women gathered in North Kensington to discuss the party’s proposed pledge to expel members deemed transphobic. The event was protested by a large crowd of trans activists who set off smoke bombs, chanted slogans through megaphones and thumped on the venue’s windows. Inside the hall, the cacophony made it almost impossible to hear the speakers. Afterwards, women were forced to run the gauntlet of activists yelling “TERF!”, while photographers snapped close-ups so attendees could be identified and shamed online. As a volunteer steward that evening, I’ll never forget the sight of women scurrying away, faces covered, terrified of the consequences of exercising their democratic right to free assembly and free speech. That this meeting does not merit even a footnote in Jenny Lindsay’s…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Have we been barking up the wrong tree?AS BEN SIXSMITH’S DOG, I’M OFTEN BEmused by the behaviour of my human pal. Look at me. I relocated from an animal shelter, where I had spent a year sitting in a cage, surrounded by noise and filth. Before that, I had been homeless — wandering the streets of Upper Silesia — and I don’t even want to think about what happened before that. Despite all this, I’m a happier animal than Ben. Years of pain and loneliness are not going to faze me. Walks make my day three times over. I love my food. I love to play around. I even like taking showers. Him, he gets cantankerous because he had an article rejected. Our canine joie de vivre inspired Mark Rowlands’s powerful new book The Happiness of Dogs.…4 min
The Critic|October 2024“Between you and me …”Vic’s vapours WITH LONDON’S OLD VIC the latest theatre finding itself under siege from Sir Mark Rylance and comrades, demanding a severing of generous ties with the Royal Bank of Canada (“fossil fuel financiers!” “war investors!” etc), an embattled spokesman wails: “As a registered charity with no regular public subsidy, we’re reliant on ticket sales and philanthropic and corporate donations.” While the venue obsesses over all manner of financial upheavals surely to follow should Rylance and mob get their way (those ethically acceptable alternatives tending to be unclear), the King’s favourite Shakespearean need hardly trouble himself with such dreary details. Thank goodness for theatricals of Sir Mark’s means who can afford to see the bigger picture! ★ AMONG THE FIRST TO PUBLICLY raise midlife alarm bells when housewives’ favourite Hugh…5 min
The Critic|October 2024Sarah Ditum on PopHOW DO YOU GET TO BE THE biggest band in the world? There’s a revealing story — just an aside really — in Street-Level Superstar, the new biography of cult music icon Lawrence by the writer Will Hodgkinson. Lawrence (below) was the leader of the band Felt, who were signed to indie label Creation in the eighties. Creation, founded by impresario Alan McGee, was the home of the British underground scene: fuzzy (and sometimes druggy) acts like Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. These bands did well, but they didn’t go mainstream. They prized cool over PR. Then, in the nineties, McGee found a new band led by two brothers: Oasis. “McGee said that after a decade of dealing with truculent indie bands, he knew…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Robert Hutton on CinemaI FIRST WATCHED THE TERMINATOR on a 12-inch black and white TV, some time in the late Eighties. It’s a reflection of the quality of the film that it still managed to be terrifying. Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing a robot sent from the future on an assassination mission, was at a point in his career when he felt no need to be likeable or tell jokes. His most famous line, “I’ll be back”, would become a punchline, but when first delivered it simply reflected his character’s unstoppable nature. I did eventually see it in colour, but like most people under 60, I’d never seen it on the big screen until this month. Where would I have? Outside of film societies and a few cinemas like London’s Prince Charles, which specialises in…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Ben Sixsmith on PodcastsIN MY LAST COLUMN I LAMENTED how talking can replace doing — and, in turn, how listening can replace talking and doing. Are podcasts the appropriate form of entertainment for a future of living in pods and eating bugs? Are we going to become ever more passive consumers of other people’s thoughts and memories? Hoping to answer in the negative, I turned to Pretty Sure I Can Fly, in which Johnny Knoxville and the writer and comedian Elna Baker interview people who have gone to extremes of doing — ultramarathon runners, boxers, surfers, climbers and even a streaker. Knoxville is an expert on extremes. He started in entertainment by “testing” self-defence equipment on film — peaking when he put on a bulletproof vest and shot himself. As the star of…4 min
The Critic|October 2024Blogosphere bubbleTHE DETECTIVE STORY WAS 86 years old, but the news item seemed to echo it: young bloggers in America are astonishing their readers by praising English food. I laid aside Edgar Jepson’s entertaining ironies to read all about it, although his description of the detective’s dinner in The Murder of Augustin Dench had fascinated me: It was not food which called for thoughtful eating, for it was the ordinary food of the English countryside; the mutton chops, imported from a colony or Dominion, were of a texture which demanded the most sturdy exercise of the inspector’s powerful jaw, and that texture had not been improved by the country cook; the tart was composed of Czechoslovakian currants and Jugoslavian raspberries … surmounted by a sodden crust of that sogginess which goes…3 min
The Critic|October 2024Into the setting sun …PAUL VERLAINE’S SYMBOLIST VERSE SHINES THE LIGHT of absolute truth on our emotions at the waning of the year, casting long shadows across a bright and shining summer, now merely a memory. The poetry of “Chanson d’automne” is even more elegiac given that, this year, our bright and shining summer was not so much a memory to savour, as a hope that went unmet. But no matter, the culprit of our own climate catastrophe, be it La Niña, the polar jet stream, the gods of your temples or Two-Tier Keir, the city was no place to suffer this summer — nor any kind of summer. I have written before about the pleasures to be found in pastoral England. But if your blood is too rich for rustic pursuits, yet your…3 min
The Critic|October 2024Take a bowHWAET! AND WELCOME BACK to Planet Rag. What gives on the frock front? Well, fashion’s still broken, slowed to a glacial same old, same old. There remains a glut of stealth wealth (swank bore core); corp core (pinstriped bore core) and norm core (pure bore core of the white shirt / cotton t-shirt / grey jumper sort). Wine shades continue to do the rounds, after Sabato De Sarno Gucci’s brought them back into currency, but that’s about as flamboyant as matters get. Even Hazzer Styles, formerly of spangled jumpsuits, Mrs Slocombe blouses and corsages as big as his head, now skulks about in hoodie. Meanwhile, the world of celebrity remains most enthused about the baseball cap, an item I wrote about here back in the pre-Christian era (playing ball, june…3 min