Category: Uncategorized

Adèle of this parish has a post about the church of St Mary the Virgin, in Great Shelford, on The History Girls blog today:

There has been a place of worship here on this site since Saxon times but the present church was built by Thomas Patesely between 1396 and 1418. The village celebrated a 600th birthday in 1996, so I’m calling it 616 years old.

Adèle tells much more about it – and with pictures. Don’t miss it.

I don’t think he should. And are ‘we’ just like the Nazis? Tough one. Mick has the story.

That’s David Ward MP, who is defending himself, in conversation with Aida Edemariam, for his remarks about the Jews not having learned from the inhumanities of Auschwitz. Edemariam does a pretty good job of trying to get him to see why his remarks might have been taken amiss. But Ward is staunch in his failure to see the point. It wouldn’t have mattered what he said, you see; he’d criticized Israel and that’s all it takes to land a person in the soup. Ward:

There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the state of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who’s seen to criticise the state of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me, whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word…
…..
What I am absolutely convinced of, is that no form of words would have been acceptable. We would have been having this same conversation if I’d not used those words. It would simply have been on something else.

Unto Ward, therefore, the prize for reconfirming so very quickly my hypothesis of yesterday that there’s a smelly fish theory of criticizing Israel. Some people plainly believe that it doesn’t matter what you say if you have criticisms to make of that country; even the most dodgy words should get ‘cleaned up’ by your good motives (‘when I say words it isn’t with intention of offending’). Unfortunately, there’s this damned machine at work protecting the state of Israel from criticism.

The world’s a confusing place. The thesis that general happiness and/or well-being isn’t positively correlated with levels of income and wealth has always puzzled me; it goes against what you’d expect on the basis of the obvious ways in which poverty hurts people. Anyway, I’ve expressed my scepticism about the thesis before, but I did this in the face of research apparently showing that the thesis was true. Allister Heath rounds up some studies to the contrary:

One especially brilliant piece of research – by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, all US academics – demonstrates that happiness improves as incomes rise. The paper shows that richer citizens report higher well-being than their poorer compatriots, at any given point as well as over time; that people in richer countries are happier than those in poorer countries; and that GDP growth boosts well-being. Most remarkably of all, there is no maximum wealth threshold at which point higher incomes cease to boost well-being: quite simply, the richer, the better, with no upper limit.

These findings are confirmed by an excellent paper from Ruut Veenhoven and Floris Vergunst. Using statistics compiled as part of the World Database of Happiness (yes, there is such a thing), they discover a positive relationship between GDP growth and improving happiness. GDP and happiness have gone up in most countries, and average happiness has risen more in nations where the economy has grown the most.

I’m not in any position to assess these competing claims, and Heath has an anti-left axe to grind in the way he presents the above material that is not of interest to me. But I do believe one should treat with caution hypotheses minimizing the dependence of general well-being on adequate material and other provision.

Following the announcement that women in the US military will from now on be able to fill combat positions, Lee Siegel expresses his misgivings. Initially he was pleased, but his jubilation soon turned to gloom once it homed in on him that ‘women will now be able to die as brutally and senselessly as men’, or ‘to die for nothing alongside men dying for nothing’.

You won’t be surprised to learn that what is at work in these judgements of his are wars, recent and not so recent, for which Siegel thinks there was no good case: Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. These produced, according to his reckoning, ‘deaths that we know were neither vital for national security nor necessary to advance America’s interests’. He seems not to consider the possibility of other possible reasons for war (as embodied, for example, in the doctrine of humanitarian intevention and R2P), but in any case even the contingencies he does allow – war over national security and national interests – should have sufficed to prompt in him the thought that not all deaths in war are ‘for nothing’. He prefers to reflect instead on the way women’s life-bearing and nurturing impulses are antithetical to war.

So he’s against opening combat roles to women then? Well, no. He ‘would not want to stand athwart the march of progress’.

This story goes back many years. It concerns a conflict that occurred in an academic department – not my own, I hasten to add, nor even one in the University of Manchester. A junior lecturer (call him J) had taken against a policy championed by a number of senior colleagues, including the then Head of Department, this policy distributing the teaching load very unequally and in J’s view, as well as that of many others, unfairly. At a particularly stormy meeting of the departmental policy committee (of which J was a member) after the HoD had announced his decision to implement this policy, J first let rip with some scathing criticisms and then approached the HoD and slapped him across the face with the smelly carcass of a dead fish.

Some of J’s colleagues, including from amongst those who shared his view regarding the unfairness of the new policy, thought he was out of order. As one of them is said to have admonished him: ‘You’re perfectly free to criticize the HoD, and I even think this particular criticism of yours is valid; but it’s quite another thing to slap him in the face with a dead fish.’ As you might have expected, when I was told by a friend of these words of advice to J, I fully agreed with them. However – and this is the really strange part of the story – not everyone in that unhappy department did agree. There was a sector of departmental opinion for which the legitimacy of the criticism levelled at the HoD as it were ‘extended’ to the act of slapping him in the face with a dead fish. Some people really thought that. The fish thing had to be OK because the criticism it accompanied was.

To this day I have trouble believing that they could think like this. But they did.

Actually, none of it is true. I made it up. What this post is really about is an argument I’ve long had with a friend of mine who is given to framing his criticisms of women political figures of whom he disapproves in horribly sexist language – language that comes from the repertoire of bar-room abuse and mockery of women. He used to do this when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and he does it now about Theresa May. I don’t intend to give examples of the things he says; I leave it to your imagination. But, believe me, they’re not mild. I hate it when he does it and have told him so many times. I try to persuade him that his criticisms can be made without resort to this kind of objectionable stuff; but like the members of that mythical academic department, my friend argues that the validity of his criticisms, where they are valid, or the fact that he has a right freely to criticize, where they aren’t, renders the sexist language and imagery he uses quite proper. None of that is aimed – by him – at women in general, only at Thatcher or May, or whatever other individual woman may have come within his critical sights.

He and I disagree about quite a few things but none that has caused as much ill-feeling between us. I cannot credit his thinking that either the validity of his particular criticisms or just his right to criticize can make the use of insulting themes about women all right when in themselves they’re far from all right.

In any case, the upshot of all this is that there’s not one smelly fish theory of legitimate criticism; there are two smelly fish theories of legitimate criticism. In the first, neither valid criticism nor the right to criticize which is protected by norms of free speech renders abusive or prejudicial ways of representing others a commendable way of going on. In the second, provided you have a fair criticism, or merely because you have the right of free speech, such insulting or prejudicial forms cannot be faulted.

All change here.

This post isn’t about the smelly carcass of a dead fish, and it isn’t about a friend of mine who uses vile language towards women in criticizing women political figures. I don’t have such a friend. What the post is about, as some readers will have guessed, is the use of anti-Semitic themes and images in contemporary political argument. It is prompted by two things. One is the apology in the Sunday Times this weekend for the Gerald Scarfe cartoon on Holocaust Memorial Day. The apology is both clear and forthright. The paper apologizes ‘unreservedly’, saying (£):

It is one thing for a newspaper to attack and caricature a leader – and it is as legitimate to attack Israeli leaders in cartoons as anyone else. But it is another thing to reflect in a caricature, even unintentionally, historical iconography that is persecutory or anti-semitic.

Got that? To attack and caricature a leader, including an Israeli leader, is fine; but with anti-Semitic iconography, not so. The distinction couldn’t be more plain. But that some people will have an interest in not grasping it you can be certain, and if you look below the line, at the comments, you will find there a Mr D.J. Noble writing, ‘It is impossible to criticise Israel when even the slightest hint of disagreement is depicted as anti-semitism’. He somehow didn’t notice the smelly-fish component in the Sunday Times leader’s specification of ‘another thing’; no, even ‘the slightest hint of disagreement’, he reckons, has been put beyond bounds.

I said this post was prompted by two things. The second of them is Steve Bell’s cartoon in today’s Guardian – yes, that’s the Steve Bell of recent cartooning memory – mocking the idea that there might be anti-Semitic tropes or that there might be cause for worry about them. Nothing at the Guardian relating to Jews or Israel surprises me any more. But in this case smelly fish doesn’t quite capture it.

Should I seriously think about voting Tory at the next election? Short answer: no. Or, at any rate, I won’t, whether or not I should.

Longer answer. This is what Tom Chivers is suggesting that lefty-liberal types should do. Why? Because… ‘[t]he leadership of the Conservative Party has done something remarkable: it has gone further than any Labour government has gone, and pushed for the full enactment of gay marriage’; for lefty-liberals that is a good thing; and ‘if the Conservative Party isn’t rewarded for making positive moves, it will have no incentive to make them in future’.

The problem with the suggestion is that it treats voting as if it were primarily a way of trying to influence political parties that you like less to behave in ways that will make you like them more; rather than an activity based on all-round assessment of which party of those on offer you would prefer to see in government.

It’s not that Tom fails to note this other sort of consideration. He allows that the rewarding-good-behaviour impulse ‘needs to be weighed against the things that you don’t like [about the Tories]’. But he seems not to see how that wrecks his suggestion.

Go back to my short answer in the first paragraph.

The longer the struggle over legalizing same-sex marriage goes on, the more ridiculous the arguments of those who oppose it will become. This is because they have no sound arguments, so they keep searching, searching, searching for something with which to clothe their increasingly chilly stand in trying to protect what is a heterosexual privilege.

Roger Scruton and Phillip Blond might just as well be telling you that people who are forbidden by law from entering a certain profession should not be seeking to change that law since to do so would be to ‘erase difference, destroy institutional distinction and remove proper and plural provision for different groups’. That is their argument: that equality shouldn’t mean the erasure of difference. The inconvenient circumstance that the difference at issue here is one which gay people experience as a disadvantage, and this for the very good reason that there is no justification that has yet been found to explain its necessity, doesn’t seem to unsettle the thinking of these two friends of diversity.

And should you ask why, according to them, marriage must be preserved as a distinctively heterosexual union, the only answer you will find is this one: ‘recognition of their [men and women’s] role and unique responsibility in creating and nurturing children’. Scruton and Blond fail to explain why, then, they don’t regard creating children as a legal obligation of marriage; or why, to put it differently, non-procreation should disqualify only same-sex couples.

Hal Espen is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a former senior editor at The New Yorker and he was the editor of the travel and adventure magazine Outside from 1999 to 2006. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times and many other publications. Hal blogs at Stone Turntable. Here he writes about Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander.

Hal Espen on Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian

I should confess straightaway that my writer’s choice is a slightly disingenuous one. I frankly don’t think that Master and Commander is by any measure the best novel in Patrick O’Brian’s sprawling 20-volume series, published between 1969 and 1999, chronicling the exploits of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his particular friend Dr Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It is, however, the first, and it’s a thrilling introduction to what is really a single epic work, a continuously unfolding adventure that has given me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than almost anything else I’ve encountered between covers.

Lovers of the Aubrey/Maturin novels will be nodding agreeably. But sceptics and non-initiates, who may resist a series that sounds suspiciously like hoary genre fiction, rife with swashbucking cliché, are equally likely to baulk at an undertaking comprising more than two million words and no less than 6,980 pages in Norton’s Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels. I can only predict that if they sign on with Master and Commander, they’ll almost certainly complete the whole vast prose voyage with but a single regret: that there could not be more to come, apart from the tantalizing fragment of a 21st novel O’Brian left when he died in 2000. And for what it’s worth, they’ll be joining a fan base that has included Sir Francis Chichester, Iris Murdoch, E.O. Wilson, Charlton Heston, David Mamet, Christopher Hitchens and Tom Stoppard, not to mention Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (‘Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin always remind me a bit of Mick and me’).

Master and Commander begins with the two lead characters meeting at a chamber-music recital in Port Mahon, on the Mediterranean island of Minorca. It is April 1, 1800. Aubrey, a bluff young officer on the eve of his first command, and Maturin, a down-at-the-heels Irish-Catalan physician, scholar and former revolutionist, collide, skirt an initial enmity, and gradually form a wary, odd-couple alliance. Their growing friendship is carried forward by the way O’Brian combines a propulsive Modernist prose style with an authoritative mastery of period diction and maritime terminology. The stilted antiquarianism that commonly bedevils historical fiction is utterly absent, despite O’Brian’s insistence on correct Georgian manners and his love for geeking out on sailing jargon. (He rarely deigns to define or explain what ‘hawser-laid’ or ‘spritcourse’ means, apart from those occasions when Maturin’s status as an inveterate lubber prompts some polite bystander to relieve the doctor’s ignorance.) The eccentric beauty of the writing defies brief quotation, but this sentence, describing the first time Aubrey takes the helm as a ship’s captain, hints at its liquid flavour:

Jack let her pay off until the flurry was over, and then, as he began to bring her back, his hands strong on the spokes, so he came into direct contact with the living essence of the sloop, the vibration beneath his palm, something between a sound and a flow, came straight up from her rudder, and it joined with the innumerable rhthyms, the creak and humming of her hull and rigging.

As one might expect from an inaugural volume, Master and Commander exhibits some of the tentativeness of a shakedown cruise. Missing or downplayed are several crucial elements that drive the narrative in subsequent novels, such as Maturin’s career as an intelligence agent (featuring intricacies and dark twists that can put le Carré in the shade), his avocation as a passionate pre-Darwinian naturalist, and the presence of strong female characters, including Sophie Williams, Aubrey’s love interest, and Diana Villiers, the rakish ne’er-do-well who becomes Maturin’s obsession. The second and third books, Post Captain and H.M.S. Surprise, are full-blown masterworks on a Tolstoyan scale; O’Brian managed to maintain this pitch of skill and conviction for three decades, with perhaps only a slight diminishment of force toward the distant end of the 20-novel saga. (One of the most inspiring things about Patrick O’Brian is that he didn’t begin writing his opus until his mid-fifties and was still going strong when he died, aged 85.)

From the start, there are booming cannons and flashing sabres. But heroism in the Aubrey/Maturin oeuvre, as in life, is a primarily practical and contingent affair – an outcome of routine, competence, bloody-minded persistence and the complex negotiations of teamwork, rather than a matter of theatrical dash and flourishes on a burning quarterdeck. (On those few occasions when Jack Aubrey delivers a speech going into battle or in the teeth of a disaster, his remarks are invariably brief, plain-spoken, and utterly practical.) To the degree that heroism and martial virtue are idealized, they embody Northrop Frye’s concept of the archetypal function of literature as ‘visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from “reality,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate’. The wisdom of these novels – and there are insights on leadership, courage, ethics and love – is tightly bound to a chaotic, physical, profane world we recognize as our own.

If these tales sidestep Errol Flynn-style melodrama, the Aubrey/Maturin story succeeds in delivering globe-spanning adventure and incident in a dazzling range of modes, paced by the counterpoint of friendship as the two heroes trade interludes of vulnerability and protectiveness, foolishness and cunning, happiness and misery, addiction and disillusionment, glory and disgrace. The supreme compositional achievement of the novels is the music of this complementary partnership, one of the great comic alliances and ironic doublings in literature. In a sense, fat, blue-eyed Aubrey and lean, cold-eyed Maturin together make up the parts and powers of a complete man, the leader and warrior joined with the scientist and spy. And their nemesis in the novels is not so much any stock villainy of the Napoleonic empire as it is the perennial enemies of humankind: vulgarity, vanity, cupidity, bureaucracy, abuse of power, deluded idealism, fanaticism, viciousness and torture. Yet as replete as these books are with mayhem and suffering, they’re also incredibly funny, in ways that would make Shakespeare and Austen (and Beckett) laugh with delight.

Finally, a postscript on behalf of the audiobook versions of the novels, the full score of them, as read by the late Patrick Tull. They are absolutely first-rate.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

At Shuggy’s Blog, a brief account of the Battle of Stalingrad and its significance:

It would almost be possible to feel sorry for them [the soldiers of the 6th Army] – had it not been for the fact that they had unleashed barbarism across an entire continent.