The difficult-to-buy-for crowd today includes former Ambassador to the Russian Federation and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee Sir Rodric Braithwaite (94), Apple Computer Company co-founder Ronald Wayne (92), blues singer-songwriter Taj Mahal (84), singer-songwriter and guitarist Dick Gaughan (78), Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford (77), ex-Government Chief Whip and Labour MP Lord Bradley (76), former Home Secretary, trades union leader and author Alan Johnson (76), onetime Liberal Democrat deputy leader Sir Simon Hughes (75), world champion boxer Sugar Ray Leonard (70), producer, entrepreneur and svengali Simon Fuller (66), singer-songwriter and producer Enya (65), former J. Sainsbury plc CEO Justin King (65), comedian, actor and talk-show host Craig Ferguson (64), journalist, author and columnist Jane Moore (64), Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor (61), radio presenter, journalist and bicycle bore Jeremy Vine (61), New Kids on the Block lead singer Jordan Knight (56), singer-songwriter, pianist, tin whistle player and actress Andrea Corr (52), historian, energy activist and ex-Conservative minister and MP Chris Skidmore (45) and former Conservative Cabinet minister and MP Chloe Smith (44).
Gone but not necessarily forgotten are 1st Duke of Prussia and 37th Grand Master of the Order of Brothers of the German House of St Mary in Jerusalem (the Teutonic Knights) Albert of Brandenburg (1490), Jesuit theologian and occultist Martin Delrio (1551), successful and pioneering pirate Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts (1682), physician, microbiologist and smallpox vaccine creator Edward Jenner (1749), Queen of the United Kingdom, estranged wife of George IV and popular heroine Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1768), twice Master General of the Ordnance, twice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Battle of Waterloo veteran Field Marshal the Marquess of Anglesey (1768), composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866), monarch from birth and pornography enthusiast King Alfonso XIII of Spain (1886), actress Maureen O’Sullivan (1911), former US Solicitor General and Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox (1912), horn player Dennis Brain (1921), banker and Lord Chamberlain of the Household the Earl of Airlie (1926), Heaven’s Gate cult founder, mass suicide leader and obvious wrong ’un Marshall Applewhite (1931), screenwriter, director and producer Dennis Potter (1935), actor and director Dennis Hopper (1936), actor and director Bill Paxton (1955), comedian, actor and presenter Bob Saget (1956) and Supervisor of the Republican Guard of Iraq, murderer, rapist, abuser and copper-bottomed scumbag Qusay Hussein (1966).
Off with his head
Today, 505 years ago, a nobleman was executed on Tower Hill having been accused of conspiring against King Henry VIII. It is not, true, an especially unusual synopsis and would hardly stand out from the crowd in a collection of pitches for a new Tudor drama. But the death of the 3rd Duke of Buckingham is worth marking because, more than almost any other execution ordered by Henry VIII, it showed how intertwined the great noble families of England were with each other and how little distance separated the most powerful and high-born aristocrats from the monarchy.
Edward Stafford was born at Brecon Castle on 3 February 1478, the son of Henry, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Katherine Woodville, the niece of Edward IV’s Queen, Elizabeth Woodville. When he was only five years old, in October 1483, Edward’s father rebelled against the new King, Richard III, coordinating a series of rising across England and Wales. He was supported by partisans of the deposed (and probably murdered) boy-king Edward V, as well as the exiled Lancastrian claimant ti the throne, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), and his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady Stanley and Dowager Countess of Richmond. The rebellion was a failure, and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham was executed in Salisbury marketplace on 2 November 1483. All his honours were forfeit as a result of his treason.
Everything changed after the death of Richard III and the accession of Henry VII following the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485. In October, Edward, now seven years old, was created a Knight of the Bath and acknowledged in the restored title as 3rd Duke of Buckingham, attending Henry’s coronation on 30 October as such (although his father’s attainder was not formally reversed until the following month). A week or so later, Buckingham’s mother, Katherine Woodville, married Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, who had been restored to his title of Earl of Pembroke, been reinstalled as a Knight of the Garter and created Duke of Bedford.
Pausing here is indicative of the complexity of dynastic relations. By the end of 1485, there were only three dukes in the English peerage, the Duke of Norfolk having been killed fighting for Richard III at Bosworth and his titles made forfeit. Buckingham, newly restored was one; Jasper Tudor, now Duke of Bedford, was another; and the third was John de la Pole, 2nd Duke of Suffolk. Buckingham was now Bedford’s stepson, and Bedford was the King’s uncle, but Buckingham was also the great-nephew by marriage of the late Edward IV. The King was also pledged to marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and did so in 1486. Suffolk comes into the mix too: when they were both very young, perhaps eight and seven, he had been married to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother. The marriage had been annulled in 1453 on grounds of consanguinity, and almost certainly never consummated. Fiv years later, however, when he was 15 or 16, he married again, this time to Elizabeth, daughter of Richard, Duke of York, who was the younger sister of Edward IV and the older sister of Richard III.
These tangled genealogies might not have mattered so much had Henry VII’s claim to the throne been straightforward and cast-iron. But he derived his title from two sources: one was by right of conquest, having won the Battle of Bosworth, on which grounds no-one could deny him. His ancestral claim was much less certain, depending principally on his mother Margaret being the daughter and sole heir of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, who was in turn the legitimised grandson of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, by his mistress Katherine Swynford. A legitimation had indeed been issued but it specifically excluded the children within its terms from succession to the Crown. Henry VII could be more or less matched in terms of hereditary by several members of the aristocracy, and that would forever cause him a anxiety.
Restored to his father’s titles and estates, Buckingham became a ward of Margaret Beaufort and was probably raised in her household. The King seems to have decided to keep him close, and he was a prominent figure at court for celebrations like the elevation of the King’s second son Henry (later Henry VIII) to Duke of York in 1494. Buckingham was created a Knight of the Garter in 1495, and in 1497 he was one of the commanders of the royal forces sent to put down the Cornish Rebellion. He was a glamorous and well-dressed presence at Henry VII’s court, catching the attention even of foreign ambassadors. When the King’s heir, Arthur, Prince of Wales, married Katharine of Aragon at old St Paul’s Cathedral in November 1501, Buckingham wore a gown reputed to have cost £1,500, a staggering sum of money well into the hundreds of thousands of pounds today. In 1504, he was named Lord High Constable of England, an office held by his father and grandfather at various times. Originally the commander of the King’s armies, it was largely an honorary post but one which underlined Buckingham’s status at court.
With the accession of Henry VIII in April 1509, Buckingham was more favoured still. For the new King’s coronation on 23 June, he was named Lord High Steward, the most senior of all the Great Officers of State and appointed only for coronations (Jasper, Duke of Bedford had been Lord High Steward for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1487). Buckingham rode ahead of the King in the coronation procession carrying a silver baton of office, and was the first peer to pay homage to Henry in the coronation. ceremony.
I, Edward Stafford, become your liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth and I shall bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folk, so God help me and his saints.
That same year, Buckingham was appointed to the King’s Council. He seems thereafter to have been everywhere. From June to October 1513, he commanded a force of 500 men in the “middle ward” of the English army during the invasion of France. In October 1514, after Cardinal Wolsey had negotiated a peace treaty, he was present at the wedding of the King’s sister Mary to Louis XII of France at Abbeville. He then attended to lavish meeting ceremony between Henry VIII and Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520.
Yet, for all of this outward grandeur and status, Buckingham never seems to have been especially influential nor part of Henry VIII’s intimate circle of advisers. He could not be ignored: even if the first two Tudor kings had not heaped honours and estates upon him, Buckingham was one of the last peers with significant amounts of Plantagenet blood, and was believed to be potentially ambitious. At some point during 1520, the King became sufficiently suspicious of Buckingham’s activities that he instructed Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York and papal legate a latere and indubitably the King’s most important minister, to put the Duke under surveillance.
It was quickly discovered than Fra Nicholas Hopkins, a Carthusian friar and confessor at the Charterhouse at Hinton in Somerset, had been in contact with Buckingham; more specifically he had been prophesying to the Duke that Henry VIII would die without a male heir and that he, Buckingham, would become King. Wolsey interrogated Buckingham’s household staff to gather evidence of these conversations to present Henry with a case against the Duke.
This was not merely idle, if rather impolite and insensitive, chatter on Hopkins’s part. Under the terms of the Treason Act 1351, “When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King”, he committed treason, and it could plausibly be argued that this was exactly what Buckingham and Hopkins were doing. In April 1521, Buckingham was summoned to court and arrested as soon as he arrived, then imprisoned in the Tower of London.
On 13 May, Buckingham was put on trial before the Court of the Lord High Steward (which office he had once held). Peers were entitled to be tried before the House of Lords, but when Parliament was not in session this responsibility was delegated to the Court of the Lord High Steward. The Duke of Norfolk, Lord High Treasurer and Earl Marshal, was appointed Lord High Steward for the trial, and a panel of peers was named to act as a jury. This included all peers above the rank of baron who were not closely related to Buckingham. As well as the Duke of Norfolk, the jurors were:
The Duke of Suffolk, the Marquess of Dorset, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Kent, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Devonshire, the Earl of Worcester, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Essex, Lord de Ros, Lord Willoughby, Lord De La Warr, Lord Morley, Lord Dacre, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, Lord Cobham of Kent, Lord Fitzwarin, Lord Mountjoy and Sir Thomas Docwra, Lord Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.
The Earl of Arundel was the only earl not summoned, but that may have been due to age, as he was over 70. Lord Berners and Lord Berkeley, both of whom had openly feuded with Buckingham, were not included.
Hopkins testified to the accuracy of the charges and then disappears from the historical record, and members of the Duke’s household were also witnesses. Buckingham vehemently denied all the charges, but it was a foregone conclusion. The King had indicated very clearly the outcome he expected, and a tearful Norfolk delivered the guilty verdict and the attendant death sentence. Nevertheless, the degree to which the trial was manipulated or biased has been challenged: the trial of a peer was a very rare occurrence but Buckingham’s was conducted largely in the prescribed fashion, the jury, as noted above, was not wholly packed by the King’s supporters, and there is in any event a very good chance that, within the framework of the criminal law of the time, the Duke was guilty as charged.
Four days later, on 17 May 1521, Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, aged only 43, was taken to Tower Hill and beheaded for treason. It was the same fate as his father had suffered 38 years before, if in slightly more salubrious surroundings. Whether he was guilty or not, Buckingham was too rich, too powerful and too well connected: one historian said that his crime was not treason but descent from Edward III. The end result was the same.
Substantially holier than thou
Today is the feast of St Restituta (d AD 255 or 304), a Berber probably born in Carthage who, according to one story, was severely tortured by the Roman authorities then placed in a burning boat containing resin and oakum, but prayed to God for help, was unharmed by the flames and in her boat guided by an angel to Ischia, where, upon landing at San Montana, she was found dead but her body incorruptible; of St Paschal Baylón (1540-92), a shepherd from Torrehermosa in Aragon, who took his vows with the Order of Friars Minor and devoted himself to caring for the sick, observing strict austerity; of St Peter Lieou (1760-1834), who was born in Guizhou, converted to Christianity, preached the Gospels, was caught and exiled to Mongolia and on being arrested was then strangled to death; and St Giulia Salzano (1846-1929), born in Caserta and raised by the Sisters of Charity, who qualified as a teacher, became an active catechist and founded the Catechetical Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, noted especially for her devotion to the Madonna and to the Sacred Heart.
Today is World Hypertension Day and International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, two things to watch out for and avoid, in their own separate ways.
Factoids
Adolf Hitler regarded Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as one of the best films ever made. It was never released in Germany but the Führer often watched his own copy and held screenings for favoured guests at the Berghof, his holiday home in the Alps near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. He was impressed by the technical perfection of the animation and wanted German animators to use it as a benchmark; and of course the story was based on an old German folk tale, Schneewittchen, published in Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1812). Predictably, the version recorded by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, is as dark as it can reasonably be—these are German fairy tales, for goodness’ sake—and Hitler was attuned to the power of Germanic mythology, especially in his love of Richard Wagner’s operas (the Nibelungen in the Ring Cycle are a race of dwarfs led by Alberich, who forges the Ring and whose brother Mime is a smith; the Seven Dwarfs in the Grimms’ tale are miners).
The first red/green traffic lights were installed outside the Palace of Westminster on 9 December 1868 to allow pedestrians, especially Members of Parliament on their way to vote in the House of Commons, to cross Bridge Street more safely and quickly. The 22-feet high apparatus had three semaphore arms, raised and lowered through a pulley system by a policeman, surmounted by a gas lantern for use at night: when the arms were horizontal, it indicated to traffic to stop, while the arms lowered to a 45-degree angle allowed traffic to proceed with caution. A lever controlled the gas lantern at night showing a red light to pedestrians and a green light to traffic or vice-versa. Although labour-intensive and somewhat cumbersome, the device was broadly successful at regulating traffic flow, but, less than a month later, on 2 January 1869, a leak in one of the gas lines underneath the pavement caused the traffic light to explode, badly burning the face of the police constable operating it. Despite the success of the idea, the explosion meant that traffic lights were out of favour in Britain for decades afterwards.
In the early decades of the 20th century, as traffic signals spread across the United States, there was no agreed standard on colours or format. In some cities green meant (as it does now) “go” while in others it meant “stop”, and elsewhere “go” was indicated by the amber light. Some lights had the red at the top and some the green; in Syracuse, New York, the Irish American community insisted that the green light be at the top, as green, the symbol of Ireland, should not be underneath red, the traditional colour of British Army uniforms. Eventually, the Secretary of Commerce and later President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, convened a National Conference on Street and Highway Safety in 1924 which standardised colours and positioning of traffic lights.
With 26 of the excepted hereditary peers who lost their places in the House of Lords last month now nominated for life peerages, it is a scrap of comfort to traditionalists like me that among them is the 9th Duke of Wellington, 80, who was a Member of the European Parliament 1979-89 and was elected as an excepted hereditary peer in 2015. The “reformed” House of Lords will continue to contain a duke, a fistful of earls and some viscounts alongside the barons and baronesses (though there have been no marquesses since the death of the 13th Marquess of Lothian in 2024). After 1554, there was only one living duke, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, who was succeeded later that year by his grandson, another Thomas. The 4th Duke of Norfolk was then attainted and executed in 1572 for plotting against Elizabeth I; from then until King James VI & I created his favourite, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (of the second creation) in 1623, for a full half-century there were no non-Royal Dukes.
Arthur Kattendyke Strange David Archibald Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, was a Conservative hereditary peer from 1958 until his death in 1983. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and nicknamed “Boofy”, he was an occasional journalist and served in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. He was most celebrated, however, for campaigning on two issues in the 1960s: he favoured the decriminalisation of homosexuality and argued for greater protection for badgers: his aim, he said, was to “stop people badgering buggers and buggering badgers”. On the latter, he was able to see a bill he had introduced into the House of Lords become the Badgers Act 1973, though its provisions were more modest than he would have liked. He helped achieve more profound and lasting change on the former issue: having introduced a Sexual Offences Bill into the House of Lords in 1966, then championed Leo Abse’s very similar Sexual Offences (No. 2) Bill which gained support in the Commons and eventually passed into law as the Sexual Offences Act 1967. He was asked why he had enjoyed greater success with the decriminalisation of homosexuality than with strengthening protection for badgers. It was, he said, because there were “not many badgers in the House of Lords”.
Double-barrelled names are no longer the likely indicator of aristocratic status and landed wealth that was once the case. Other explanations now can be couples wishing to maintain both of their surnames on marriage or children whose parents are unmarried being named with both surnamed. However, the hereditary peerage, the last members of whom sitting in the House of Lords by virtue of heredity, is still liberally strewn with such badges of grandeur. England’s premier peer, the Duke of Norfolk, bears the surname Fitzalan-Howard, while the premier peer of Scotland, the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, is of the Douglas-Hamilton family. There are also triple-barrelled names: Shadow Defence Minister the Earl of Minto is one of that club, named Gilbert Timothy George Lariston Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound. Quadruple-barrelled names are rarer still, although the Conservative MP for South Dorset from 2010 until the previous election was Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. The greatest height achieved was by the 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos: he was born Richard Temple-Nugent-Grenville in 1776, son of the 1st Marquess of Buckingham, and at 20 married Lady Anne Brydges, daughter and sole heir of the 3rd Duke of Chandos. In 1799, he added his wife’s family name, Brydges, and her father’s ducal title, Chandos, to their names and those of their children by royal licence, producing the extraordinary quintuple-barrelled Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville. For such heroic efforts, it was the least the Crown could do in 1822 to create him Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Marquess of Chandos and Earl Temple of Stowe; in 1813 he had already succeeded his father as Marquess of Buckingham, Earl Temple and Earl Nugent.
The regulations of the Universal Postal Union require stamps to bear the name of the issuing country in Roman letters, but there is one exception: the United Kingdom. As the home of the adhesive postage stamp, the UK was granted a waiver, and is identified by a silhouette portrait of the reigning monarch.
The Welsh name for England is Lloegr. Seems etymologically improbable? It derives from a mediaeval term, Lloegyr, for a region of eastern and southern Britain, roughly beyond a line running from the Humber Estuary to the Severn Estuary. It dates from at least the 10th cenury, perhaps earlier, and was the name used for the realm of King Arthur in The Matter of Britain, a mediaeval collection of literature and chronicles relating to British history.
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.” (William Faulkner)
“‘Manchesterism’ is a third way to nowhere”: in CapX, the reliable Mani Basharzad of the Institute of Economic Affairs carefully and judiciously pulls apart the contradictory beams on which Andy Burnham’s so-called “Manchesterism” rests. Burnham’s vision seems too good to be true—high-quality public services, substantial investment in infrastructure, lower taxes for the lower paid and increased economic growth—for the very simple reason that it is too good to be true. It’s a loose assemblage of desirable outcomes blended with a dogged assertion that there will be no negative effects. Of course it’s popular, but it’s also impossible.
“Explainer—debunking the dodgy stats used by Project Rejoin”: on his eponymous Substack, economist Julian Jessop takes on some of the most frequently deployed arguments that leaving the European Union has been deeply disadvantageous to the UK in economic terms. This has a new piquancy as both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, as they mentally measure 10 Downing Street for new curtains, have said in varying terms that they favour rejoining the EU. Let me say here, for clarity: I voted to leave, would have voted to leave 20 years before and would vote to remain outside the EU if there were another referendum. I did so not on any finely balanced economic arguments but on grounds of sovereignty and because I think the EU is a sclerotic, insular, more-than-mildly corrupt, definitionally centripetal and increasingly old-fashioned institution. Whether in the long run the United Kingdom will be in some definable way “better off”, I cannot say, though I think a more skilful approach to our new status than has previously been in evidence could open a range of opportunities. But I also profoundly believe it is far, far too early to make a definitive judgement: it is only just over six years since we left the EU, at 11.00 pm on 31 January 2020, since when we have experienced a global pandemic, the beginning of a major land war in Europe, increasingly acute conflict in the Middle East including intense pressure on two of the world’s most vulnerable maritime chokepoints—the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz—and the first 18 months of an American presidency which is more disruptive globally than perhaps any other we have seen. Jessop provides useful counterpoints, but we should remember what a short distance down the road we have come so far.
“Unelected PMs must lay out their beliefs. I should know”: former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?—in one of his new guises as a columnist for The Sunday Times argues that leaders who come to the premiership without having been returned at a general election and who avoid making specific and detailed policy pledges are at a disadvantage. They may evade hard-edged scrutiny on their journey to the top, but they cannot then turn to their parties for backing when unpopular measures are necessary. In short, they have failed to make sure that everyone has dipped their hands in the blood. He owns up to his own deficit in this matter, ruing the fact that he eventually reached Downing Street in October 2022 without facing a formal leadership contest. I have not always been kind about Sunak (after all, I worked on the leadership campaign of one of his rivals, Dame Penny Mordaunt), and I think he had substantial gaps in his skill set, particularly in political terms, which were destined to cause him difficulties as Prime Minister. I have never had reason, however, to think that he is other than intelligent and able, committed to public service and—perhaps to an unusual degree?—fundamentally honest and straightforward. Former leaders often settle into the half-unexpected glow of public affection: William Hague did so, as did Ed Miliband, though the latter’s return to frontline politics has re-polarised views of him, and there may be an element here of that with Sunak. Readers may wish to note how many times he uses the name of his predecessor as Prime Minister, Liz Truss. I’ll give you a hint: it’s less than one.
“The Enigma of Sinn Féin”: on his Sweeney Agonistes Substack, journalist, author and sports writer Eamonn Sweeney examines the bafflement experienced by some in Irish politics that Sinn Féin has moved towards a stance which is increasingly sceptical to immigration, and dismisses it as performative or stupid: “There is no enigma, they’re not a left-wing party. Why pretend otherwise?” One could argue that great swathes of the Irish (and British) political community have spent decades pretending to themselves that Sinn Féin is something it isn’t, and that former party president Gerry Adams is a “man of peace”. I also couldn’t suppress a grimace at Mary Lou McDonald, current President of Sinn Féin, praising protesters for making the streets of Dublin safer. The party certainly has long and deep knowledge of dangerous streets. Sweeney’s fundamental point is simple enough but absolutely accurate and worth repeating often. Sinn Féin has had a wandering history in terms of left/right ideology, but the party’s essential platform is a united Ireland and it wants to be the dominant political force within that state. That was true when Sinn Féin candidates won 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats at the 1918 UK general election—of course they did not take their seats but rather formed the First Dáil in Dublin—and it is true now. Everything else is subservient to that purpose.
“Can a Jew win the Democratic presidential nomination?”: Dr Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation, writing in The Hill, asks whether the anti-Israel sentiment in the Democratic Party which has developed since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza in 2023 makes it impossible for a Jew, and particularly a vocally pro-Israel Jew, to win the party’s nomination for the next presidential election in 2028. He points out that four of the potential nominees to emerge so far are Jewish: former Mayor of Chicago and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro; J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois; and Governor of Colorado Jared Polis. Matthews reasonably points out that, under other circumstances, Emanuel and Shapiro at least would be formidable candidates. But there is a lingering feeling that Shapiro was passed over for the vice-presidential nomination by Kamala Harris not leats because of his active support for Israel, leading to the choice of the ultimately unimpressive Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Polling suggests 80 per cent of Democratic voters have a negative view of Israel, and attempting the usual elaborate separation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is missing the point, because many voters will not parse the issue so meticulously. “The day may be coming as soon as 2028, when Jews are forced to ask themselves, can I vote for a party’s presidential candidate whose party won’t let their members vote for someone like me?”
“The ‘airport effect’ that’s ruining modern life”: an excellent Wiki Man column by Rory Sutherland in The Spectator examines the phenomenon of what behavioural scientists call “defensive decision-making”, whereby the most significant driver on the decision-making process is not achieving the best outcome but the minimisation of responsibility and accountability on the part of the decision-maker for whatever that outcome might be. This is the essence of “Computer says no”. As we look more and more to automation and, beyond that, to artificial intelligence, we need to remember all the more often that human beings are not machines and do not always—should not always—act in accordance with strict logic. The question is how we retain that human element in interpersonal relationships and transactions.
“The pub garden is the pinnacle of English civilisation”: in The Daily Telegraph, the splendid and civilised Henry Jeffreys pays tribute to the pub garden and its distinctively English (British?) nature and role. Especially in densely populated city centres, they are oases: “One moment you’re in a backstreet Victorian boozer, but beyond the door you are in Arcadia, with all the cares of the world behind you”. They can trace their roots to the less-than-reputable “pleasure gardens” of Georgian England, but they have come to play a distinctive part in our social and drinking culture. They are somehow more communal than pub interiors, without any enforced mixing between groups, they grant respite from increasingly indoor lives, they allow those who do to smoke at their leisure and they are attractions which publicans can leverage in a brutally competitive hospitality trade. And I suspect almost all of us have a few moments of glorious happiness in a sun-dappled garden or yard to which we can turn for happy memories.
“Inside the Burton mausoleum”: on his Substack The Broken Compass, Mathew Lyons marks the opening to the public of the mausoleum of Victorian polymath Sir Richard Burton. The mausoleum is in the grounds of St Mary Magdalen Church in Mortlake, a tent constructed from Carrara marble and Forest of Dean stone, and is as remarkable as the man for whom it was built. It is impossible to do justice to Burton in a few lines, an officer in the Bombay Army, an explorer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society who led an expedition to find the source of the Nile, the first European known to have seen Lake Tanganyika, a restless intellect who undertook the Hajj to Mecca in disguise, spoke 29 languages, translated One Thousand and One Nights and The Perfumed Garden, published an annotated English version of The Kama Sutra and was an expert on falconry, human behaviour and sexuality, fencing and countless other subjects. No doubt these Victorian supermaen were riddled with faults, but the sheer scale of their ambition and achievements remains awe-inspiring.
Jukebox jury: Vangelis edition
He knelt by the bed…
… Edith Wharton wrote as Lawrence Selden contemplates Lily Bart’s body, and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.
Good one - loved the story of the traffic lights!