Sunday round-up 16 June 2024

It is the year's biggest James Joyce celebration, Bloomsday, and another year ticked off by Joyce Carol Oates, Jürgen Klopp and Shami Chakrabarti

Let’s get the awkward birthdays you forgot out of the way first. Many happy returns to Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (87), last tsar of Bulgaria then prime minister 55 years after his crown was abolished, author Joyce Carol Oates (86), gallery guru Neil MacGregor (78), former prime minister of Greece George Papandreou (72), German football maestro and recently departed Liverpool FC manager Jürgen Klopp (57), human rights lawyer and Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti (55) and South Shields-born X Factor winner Joe McElderry (33).

If that isn’t a dizzying enough variety, today is also the dies natalis of the now-departed Adam Smith (1723), pioneer of political economy and the “Father of Capitalism”, ousted Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (1882), comedian Stan Laurel (1902), controversial British politician Enoch Powell (1912) and longtime publisher of The Washington Post Katharine Graham (1917). I have met only one of that group.

Today in 1487 marks arguably the final engagement of the Wars of the Roses. At the Battle of Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire, Henry VII, at the head of an army of around 12,000, took on a force which had been raised to support the claim to the throne of Lambert Simnel, a 10-year-old boy who many claimed was in fact Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick. (He almost certainly was not.) The driving figure behind the rebellion was the Earl of Lincoln, nephew of Richard III. Although his army was smaller, perhaps 8,000 men, it included a solid core of well-trained German and Swiss mercenaries. But the outcome, though bitterly contested, was not really in doubt: Lincoln’s lightly equipped Irish troops had no armour and were devastated by repeated volleys of arrows and the whole army became hemmed in by the River Trent. Around half of them were killed or injured, Lincoln fell in the battle, and Simnel was captured, but pardoned. Henry VII gave him a job as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens, and he was later promoted to falconer. He lived at least until his late 50s but virtually disappeared from the historical record.

In 1871, the Universities Tests Act received Royal Assent. This forbade the application of any religious “tests” to office-holders and students at England’s three Anglican-only universities—Oxford, Cambridge and Durham—except those seeking to study divinity. Previously the institutions had required a declaration of membership of the Church of England, so the effect was dramatic: suddenly Roman Catholics, non-conformists and non-Christians could aspire to almost any office and enrol for almost any degree at an English university. Championed by the Liberal government of William Gladstone, the matter had been brought to a head by the case of a young Jewish mathematician, Numa Hartog, who had managed to graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge, as senior wrangler in 1869. Although he had somehow circumnavigated the tests to gain his BA, he was unable to take up a fellowship because of his religion, and his case was taken up by the solicitor general, John Coleridge. Although the Universities Tests Acts 1871 was the eventual outcome, it was little good to Hartog: he died of smallpox three days after it was given Royal Assent, aged 25.

On this day in 1948, three European rubber plantation managers were killed by Communist insurgents at Sungai Siput in Malaya. A fourth attempted attack failed to take place. This caused the British authorities in the colony of Malaya to declare a state of emergency which heralded a guerrilla war and a counter-insurgency campaign which would last for 12 years. The Communist guerrillas, the Malaysian National Liberation Army, were eventually defeated, in what is still regarded as a textbook example of successful counter-insurgency, although it came at the cost of thousands of civilian deaths. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya became an independent member of the Commonwealth. The chief architect of British strategy during the emergency is regarded as being Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, who served from 1952 to 1955 as high commissioner for Malaya with both military and political power. He also, rather splendidly, once said to Lord Mountbatten, “Dickie, you’re so crooked, if you swallowed a nail, you’d shit a corkscrew.”

Today, 16 June, is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the life and works of James Joyce. It falls on this date for two reasons: it was 16 June 1904 when Joyce began his relationship with his future wife Nora Barnacle—they went for a walk through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend and it concluded with her giving him a handjob—and it is also the date on which the author chose to set his Dublin epic Ulysses. It seems to have been celebrated as early as 1924 (the novel was only published two years before) but was cemented in 1954 when artist and critic John Ryan and novelist Brian O’Nolan organised a day-long pilgrimage along the route followed by the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom. It descended into a brilliant, Bohemian drunken mess. I am no Joycean, never having had the gumption to tackle Ulysses, much less Finnegan’s Wake, but I like Joyce’s use of language, and, even more, I love the full-throated fervour with which Dublin throws itself into the celebration of a difficult literary work. I have been twice, in 2019 and 2022, and absolutely adored it. You don’t need to know more than the first thing about Joyce to find it a delight.

There are some religious observances which may entertain you. It is the feast of St Curig of Llanbadarn, a 7th-century Welsh bishop, St Lutgardis of Aywières, who experienced regular ecstasies, and SS Ferreolus and Ferrutio, martyred in AD 212 and the patrons of the French city of Besançon. The Episcopal Church in the United States today commemorates (but of course does not venerate) Irishman George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne from 1734 to 1753, and Joseph Butler, eventually bishop of Durham 1750-52. The Rastafari movement is marking the birthday (in 1898) of Leonard Howell, a Jamaican preacher known as the “First Rasta” (also as “The Gong” and “G. G. Maragh”).

More secularly, it is Father’s Day (miss you, Big Yin). This is, while excellent, a surprisingly recent tradition which entered British culture “sometime after the Second World War, not without opposition”. You may want to celebrate National Fudge Day, and/or National Mohammad Day. (If you are called Mohammed, you will probably be celebrating Eid al-Adha, the Greater Eid, which began at sundown yesterday.) It is also Sussex Day, which is pretty self-explanatory.

Factoids

1. The Malayan Emergency (see above) was so called not because of any squeamishness or propaganda intent but for a very straightforward and prosaic reason: if it had been labelled as a “war”, insurance companies would not have been obliged to pay claims by the owners of rubber plantations and tin mines which were damaged or destroyed. The Communist guerrillas referred to the conflict as the Anti-British National Liberation War.

2. Stan Laurel, who was born on this day, has strong links to the North-East of England. He spent several years as a child living with his maternal grandmother, Sarah Metcalfe, in North Shields and attended first King James I Grammar School in Bishop Auckland then The King’s School at Tynemouth. Laurel and Hardy’s UK tour of 1952-54, immortalised in Steve Coogan’s 2018 film Stan and Ollie, included several performances as the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. And his younger sister, Olga Healey, lived her last years in the Roker area of Sunderland, then dominated by Sunderland AFC’s Roker Park stadium.

3. Laurel’s last words, in 1965, came as he recovering in his apartment in Santa Monica from a heart attack. He told the nurse that he would quite like to go skiing, to which she replied, puzzled, that she had not known he was a keen skier. “I’m not,” he told her, “I’d rather be doing that than getting all these needles stuck in me.” He died a few minutes later, aged 74.

4. I am fascinated by “famous last words”. How do you know you are right at the end, and that these will be your last words? Many examples, of course, prove on even cursory examination to be apocryphal: Admiral Viscount Nelson probably did not die after uttering the words “Kiss me, Hardy”, and the best reckoning of his last utterance is “Thank God, I have done my duty”. There are, however, some which always stick in my mind. When William Pitt, 46 but exhausted by office and ruined by drink, died in January 1806, his last words were the falsely optimistic “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies”. Benjamin Disraeli, desperately ill with bronchitis in 1881, was asked if he would like Queen Victoria to visit. “No, it is better not,” he replied. “She will only ask me to take a message to Albert.” The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen had suffered a series of strokes in 1900 and by 1906, at the age of 78, was clearly failing fast. A visitor called to see him at his home in Kristiania (now Oslo), and was assured by the nurse that the patient was slightly better. Ibsen managed one final word: “Tvertimod!” On the contrary! He died the following day.

5. Talking of Ibsen… the current capital of Norway was founded in 1040 as Ánslo, a Viking settlement (of course). King Haakon V of Norway made it his capital in 1300 but in 1624 it was destroyed by fire, the fourteenth time the largely wooden city had suffered a conflagration. Christian IV, king of Denmark and Norway, duke of Holstein and Schleswig, decided not to rebuild it but instead created a new settlement in Akershagen, across the bay, which he named Christiania in his own honour. In 1814, Norway was ceded by Denmark to Sweden and Christiania again became the Norwegian capital. It was renamed Kristiania in 1877 but on 1 January 1925 it reverted to its old name of Oslo, Norway having become independent (again) in 1905. Roald Dahl, whose parents were Norwegian, wrote in his childhood memoir Boy that “somewhere along the line, the Norwegians decided to do away with that pretty name and call it Oslo instead. As children, we always knew it as Christiania, but if I call it that here we shall only get confused, so I had better stick to Oslo all the way through.”

6. Rishi Sunak is the first prime minister since Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) to have no middle name. Sir John Major is a partial case: he was christened John Roy Major but is recorded on his birth certificate simply as “John Major”. Perhaps Sunak is compensating for Heath, Blair, Cameron and Johnson, each of whom had two middle names. David Lloyd George’s middle name was Lloyd (his parents were Mr and Mrs George) while Bonar Law’s middle name was Bonar (his forename was Andrew). Assuming what we think will happen, happens, you may like to know that Sir Keir Starmer’s middle name is Rodney. Jeremy Corbyn’s middle name is Bernard.

7. We are used to monarchs and other royal figures having very elaborate collections of names: His Majesty is Charles Philip Arthur George, his grandfather George VI was Albert Frederick Arthur George, while Edward VIII had the splendidly inclusive appellation Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, which you will note includes all four patron saints of the United Kingdom. But this really only started with George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert), born in 1865, and his elder brother who predeceased him, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Their father, Edward VII, was simply Albert Edward, while his mother, Queen Victoria, was christened Alexandrina Victoria, although his father, Prince Albert, was fully Franz August Karl Albert Emanuel. Perhaps we should blame the Germans.

8. The European aristocracy offers some wonderful names. There is an Austria racing driver called Ferdinand Habsburg who happens also to be heir apparent to the head of the House of Habsburg-Lothringen, Karl von Habsburg, and his full baptismal name is Ferdinand Zvonimir Maria Balthus Keith Michael Otto Antal Bahnam Leonhard. I know what you’re thinking. It’s that “Keith”, isn’t it? How does the Habsburg heir end up with the same name as a character in Martin Amis’s London Fields? His maternal great-grandfather was Rear Admiral Keith Campbell-Walter, a senior Royal Navy officer who served as commander of Allied Naval Forces Northern Area, Central Europe, 1955-58.

9. For all the supposedly egalitarian nature of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s armed forces still relied heavily on the traditional German military aristocracies. Among the 25 field marshals he appointed the Bavarian cavalryman Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von und zu Weichs an der Glon, Job Wilhelm Georg Erdmann Erwin von Witzleben and fellow Prussian Moritz Albrecht Franz Friedrich Fedor von Bock. The man who planted the bomb meant to kill Hitler in 1944 was Claus Philipp Maria Justinian Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, while one of the candidates to be Germany’s foreign minister if the plot had been successful was a diplomat called Friedrich-Werner Erdmann Matthias Johann Bernhard Erich Graf von der Schulenburg.

10. Adolf Hitler had a strong notion of personal and professional honour which was not always widely shared. As the Sixth Army at Stalingrad collapsed in January 1943, Hitler promoted its commanding officer, Colonel General Friedrich Paulus, to field marshal, for one simple reason: no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner, so Hitler assumed that Paulus’s new dignity would induce him, if all else failed, to commit suicide. Paulus did not. Although he initially refused to collaborate with his Soviet captors, after the July plot in 1944 he became an outspoken critic of the Nazi régime and joined the Soviet-backed National Committee for a Free Germany. He once protested to Marshal Nikolai Voronov, “I didn’t surrender, I was taken by surprise”.

“It has great difficulty in generating joy” (Pope Paul VI)

1. “Copa ’71: The Lost Lionesses”: I know I’m not the obvious target for a documentary about women’s football but my friend Mark Heywood mentioned this one at Writing Salon a couple of months ago and the story fascinated me. Even I knew that the World Cup had been held in Mexico in 1970, but I had no idea that the country had hosted the Women’s World Cup the following year, or that England was one of the six teams involved. Pioneering? Yes. The matches were played in front of crowds of more than 100,000. But the true story is scandalous: governing body FIFA opposed women’s football on principle and tried to stop the tournament happening, threatening the Mexican Football Federation with fines and bans if it allowed games to be played in stadiums it controlled. Our own Football Association sanctioned female players who participated. The casual misogyny of the football officials is breathtaking, but the optimism and achievement of the women who played in front of those huge crowds is absolutely uplifting.

2. “Shadow Dancer”: a WhatsApp conversation with a friend reminded me in a roundabout way that this film is scripted and based on a 1998 novel by ITV’s Tom Bradby, the first of his (so far) 10 novels. It was an easy sell for me: a spy thriller about Northern Ireland starring Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough, both superb actors. It was released in 2012 and is one of those films which just doesn’t have any weaknesses. The plot is tight and gripping, the cinematography is bleak and atmospherically flat and the cast is brilliant. There’s an interesting supporting role for Gillian Anderson as an MI5 boss, cool and ruthless, which to a degree prefigures her role which began the following year as a senior police officer in Northern Ireland in The Fall. If you want happy endings, then you’d better move along, but otherwise this is a tense, delicate, unforgiving and thought-provoking thriller of the highest order. It may also make you think, as I often do: why isn’t Clive Owen in everything?

3. “On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace”: this six-part documentary began on BBC2 this week. The background is straightforward: in September 2013, Greenpeace activists attempted to scale the Prirazlomnoye oil drilling platform in the Pechora Sea as a protest against the exploitation of natural resources. The following day, Russian authorities boarded and seized Greenpeace’s ship Arctic Sunrise, towed the vessel to Murmansk and arrested 28 Greenpeace activists and two journalists, charging them with piracy. Russia ignored widespread international and legal protests, although the detainees were released in December as part of a general amnesty. This clear, vivid, well presented film reveals a number of things, including the passion of environmental activists and their bravery, the degree to which they can sometimes seem like zealots, and the fact that Putin’s Russia will respond to threats will overwhelming force. This makes you ask yourself a question: even if one endorses Greenpeace’s approach, is it sensible and productive, when we know how extreme the response will be? I don’t know the answer, but it is a useful reminder than Vladimir Putin has no concern for international law and world opinion when it comes to the security of his régime.

4. “Spooks”: for various reasons I ended up going back to the first episode of the first series of the BBC’s brilliant Spooks, partly to see how it had aged. It was broadcast in 2002, a period piece now, and an utterly different world. The MI5 it depicts is just coming to grips with the sudden irruption into its work of Islamic fundamentalism, and there are some interesting references to the way the intelligence communities were hastily reorientating themselves. The plot of the episode itself seems strangely quaint now, a bomb plot by an American pro-life extremist organisation, but, more than two decades on, I was pleased to see that it has worn well. The cast—Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Hawes, David Oyelowo, Hugh Simon, Lisa Faulkner and the magnificent Peter Firth—is brilliant, believable and assured, and the plot is tense and involving. You’re reminded why it lasted for 10 series over a decade. Very fine part of the espionage canon.

5. “How Putin failed to achieve his military aims in Ukraine by satellite”: gripping Times Radio segment on the progress of Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine with military analyst and former RAF pilot Sean Bell and my friend Philip Ingram, a former senior officer in the Intelligence Corps. These guys know their onions, and their reading of how the war has unfolded since February 2022 is fascinating. It’s very easy to be pessimistic about the impossibility of turning the tide against a country as vast as Russia, but the reminders of how much has gone wrong, how many poor decisions Putin has made and how bad Russia’s planning and preparation has been are heartening. This isn’t over yet, and the outcome is not written in Putin’s favour.

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it” (Jack Kerouac)

1. “Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-Constitutional’ vision for second term”: a darkly fascinating piece from The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Reinhard. Donald Trump is easy to dismiss as a bloviating fool, but behind him are some very clever and very malign individuals who see him as an opportunity. This article profiles Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s (first?) administration, who is tipped for a leading role in a second term, perhaps as White House chief of staff. A self-described Christian nationalist, he has been involved in drawing up radical plans to increase presidential power at the expense of other parts of the executive and of Congress. This vision, which he calls “radical constitutionalism”, is designed to give the presidency the ability to use the armed forces to tackle immigration and political dissent and to sweep away checks and balances in the federal administration. These people are not playing games. They have a very clear vision of America. It rejects immigration, rejects liberalism and allows “an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society”.

2. “Making a miserable meal of mythbusting”: there is something bracing and entertaining about a negative book review and Fred Skulthorp in The Critic pulls no punches in demolishing England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country—and How to Set Them Straight, by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears. I haven’t read the book but I’ve seen the authors talk about it and I am inclined to believe Skulthorp’s charge that it’s effectively a self-satisfied, pompous, flabby mess which sets up straw men and then makes heavy weather of knocking them down. He concludes that “ironically, the writing itself is laced with the sins of myth-making: boring, trite, incoherent, lazy and unfunny”. On Twitter he went further: “the worst book I’ve ever read”. That’s it’s own tribute.

3. “Fleet Street is colonising the American newsroom”: a typically smart and elegant contribution from Kara Kennedy Clairmont in The New Statesman on the extraordinary domination of US media by British figures like Sir Mark Thomson, Emma Tucker, Sir Will Lewis, John Micklethwait, Keith Poole, Robert Winnett and Daisy Veerasingham. Her essential thesis, which I think is right, is that British journalists and editors are seen as hard-nosed and no-nonsense, renowned for running much leaner organisations than the United States is used to, although there is also a slightly prim sniffiness about the “ethics” of British journalism. She’s also quite right to observe that, compared to our American cousins, we are, well, cheap. Or perhaps “competitively priced”. In any event, it’s an excellent survey of a remarkable British invasion.

4. “On writing strategies”: a deep and absorbing read from Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman’s Substack (co-owned with his son Sam, a former adviser to Michael Gove at the Department for Education) on the genesis, nature and purpose of “strategies”. Freedman (senior) is an enormously distinguished historian of defence and foreign policy who as been dubbed the “dean of British strategic studies” and was one of the five members of the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot. He was the official historian of the Falklands War but he is not just an observer: he contributed to Sir Tony Blair’s 1999 speech in Chicago, “Doctrine of the International Community”, which set out what became known as the “Blair doctrine” of liberal interventionist foreign policy. Here he explains lucidly what strategies should be and what they are not, the elements they must contain and the circumstances which shape them. As a new government in Whitehall seems likely, we should expect a thunderstorm of “strategies”, so this will be a useful ready reckoner.

5. “Solitude and Leadership”: I came to this by a circuitous route. Henry Oliver, author of the excellent Substack The Common Reader, asked his followers to suggest “the best essays of the past ~thirty years”, and the anonymous author of the Marginal Gains Newsletter suggested this, among others. In October 2009, author and critic William Deresiewicz gave this lecture to the Plebe Year (first-year students) at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He had left his teaching job at Yale the previous year after being denied tenure. I think we often unconsciously equate West Point with the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, but Sandhurst is a much narrower, more vocational institution, and the main Regular Commissioning Course is only 44 weeks long. West Point, like its counterparts in France, Australia, Canada, Pakistan and elsewhere, is a university which awards a degree of Bachelor of Science after four years of study. A lecture from someone who specialised in modern British and Indina fiction and “great books” was not, therefore, as odd as it seems. It is a fascinating reading of leadership and the homogenising nature of bureaucracies, of which the United States Army was a prime example. He emphasises the importance of standing apart from the crowd and independent thought in the business of leadership, and it is well worth reading.

All right, Mr DeMille…

… as Norma Desmond deludedly announces to the newsreel cameras. I’m ready for my close-up. See you next week.