Sunday round-up 18 August 2024

Birthday wishes to Robert Redford, Sir John Scarlett, Carole Bouquet and Madeleine Stowe, light a candle for St Helena and remember Australia's Vietnam veterans

Who is celebrating and unwrapping presents with a polite smile today? A chorus of “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” (or not) for director, producer and child-sex enthusiast Roman Polanski (91), Hollywood legend Robert Redford (88), former intelligence supremo Sir John Scarlett (76), French cinema star and lambent Bond girl Carole Bouquet (67), comedian, actor and writer Denis Leary (67), former world rally champion Didier Auriol (66), actress Madeleine Stowe (66), former newsreader and convicted child pornography user Huw Edwards (63), former US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner (63), actors and producers Edward Norton and Christian Slater (55), singer-songwriter Mika (41) and far-right moral vacuum Nick Fuentes (26).

Those eating ice-cream and jelly in another place include composer Antonio Salieri (1750), two-time Whig-cum-Liberal Prime Minister Earl Russell (1792), penultimate Emperor of Austria-Hungary Franz Josef I (1830), Nazi central banker and Minister of Economics Walther Funk (1890), former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1917), Hollywood stalwart Shelley Winters (1920), science fiction author Brian Aldiss (1925), former US First Lady Rosalynn Carter (1927) and actor, dancer and singer-songwriter Patrick Swayze (1952).

Today in 1572, King Henry III of Navarre married Margaret of Valois on the parvis in front of Notre-Dame in Paris. The bride was the sister of the French king, Charles IX, and her union with the Protestant Henry was an attempt to heal the sectarian conflict convulsing France. In the short term, it was not a dramatic success: six days after the wedding, the thousands of Henry’s Huguenot supporters who had travelled to Paris for the ceremony became some of the first victims of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which reignited the wars of religion. The death toll of the massacre is estimated at somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000. The whole episode is dazzlingly and stylishly depicted in Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 triumphant La Reine Margot, with Daniel Auteuil intense as Henry of Navarre and Isabelle Adjani mesmerising as Queen Margaret.

On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, which declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. In effect this guaranteed female suffrage but is phrased in what might seem like a slightly roundabout manner because in the earliest days of the republic, it was not always made explicit that women could not vote. Several of the British colonies before 1776 had allowed women suffrage and it was only in 1807 that they were specifically excluded in every state. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment added 26 million new (female) voters to the electorate for the 1920 presidential election, in which the Republican candidate, Senator Warren Harding of Ohio, convincingly beat Democrat Governor James Cox of Ohio (a cosy Ohioan election that year): Harding’s winning margin in the popular vote of 26.2 per cent remains the largest ever scored by a Republican candidate, and the largest of any president since widespread popular elections began in the 1820s.

It is the anniversary in 1958 of the publication in the United States by G.P. Putnam’s Sons of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Then a professor of literature at Cornell University, Nabokov had written the novel over five years (1948-53) and intended to publish under a pseudonym because of its controversial subject of child sex abuse, but the manuscript was rejected by Viking, Simon and Schuster, New Directions, Farrar-, Strauss and Doubleday. It was eventually published in France by Olympia Press in September 1955, “swarming with typographical errors”, only to be banned by the minister of the interior the following year. Despite the controversy, it sold extremely well in America, entering a third printing within days and selling 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. It remains contentious but Graham Greene named it as one of the best books of 1955 when it was first released and it has been included in the 20th century’s top 100 novels by Time and Le Monde. If you haven’t read it you should. But don’t expect it to be nice.

On this day in 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was stopped by South African police at a roadblock near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape and detained under the Terrorism Act (No. 83 of 1967). He was taken to Walmer police station in Port Elizabeth, where he was shackled naked in a cell, then on 6 September he was transferred to Room 619 of the security police headquarters building in central Port Elizabeth. Handcuffed and shackled to a grille, he was interrogated for 22 hours by 10 police officers and beaten severely enough to cause three brain lesions which led to a massive haemorrhage; he was forced to remain standing and shackled to the wall. A doctor who examined him initially claimed to find no evidence of injury, but subsequents revealed blood in his spinal fluid and he was transported 740 miles to a police hospital in Pretoria, naked and manacled in the back of a Land Rover. He died in a cell on 12 September from “extensive brain injury” which had caused “centralisation of the blood circulation to such an extent that there had been intravasal blood coagulation, acute kidney failure, and uremia”. Biko was the 21st person to die in police custody in the space of a year. In February 1978, the attorney general of the Eastern Cape announced there would be no prosecution of any of the officers who had interrogated him. Listen to Peter Gabriel’s Biko.

Ecclesiastically, it is a rich day for the ancient Celtic church, being the feast of St Daig of Inniskeen (d. c. AD 588), abbot, hermit and gardener St Fiacre (d. AD 670), who is invoked against haemorrhoids and venereal disease and 9th-century AD Ayrshire holy man St Inan. But the palm goes to St Helena (AD 246 - AD 330), the mother of Constantine the Great; her son converted her to Christianity and she became an enthusiastic collector of relics, travelling to the Holy Land and supposedly discovering the True Cross and nails used in the Crucifixion. In turn she has become a relic herself, with her “alleged” skull in the east crypt of Trier cathedral and other remains in the basilica of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli in Rome, the Église Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles de Paris in the 1st arrondissement and the former Benedictine abbey of St Peter at Hautvillers in the Marne. However, the church of Sant’Elena in Venice claims that St Helena is buried whole under its high altar.

Residents of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, today celebrate the birth on 1587 of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in an English colony in North America. Very little is known of her: nine days after her birth, her grandfather, John White, the governor of Virginia, departed for England to seek fresh supplies. When he eventually returned in 1590, the colony and the colonists had disappeared. There were no signs of conflict and the buildings had been dismantled, the only remaining sign being the word “Croatoan” carved into a post in the fort.

In Australia, it is Vietnam Veterans’ Day (we often forget that 61,000 Australian military personnel were deployed in Vietnam between 1962 and 1972, the country’s longest war). It is also the Day of the Macedonian Army in North Macedonia, commemorating the formation of the Mirče Acev Battalion in 1943.

Factoids

1. When Henry III of Navarre married Margaret of Valois at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1572 (see above), a number of challenges were presented by the different faiths of the couple: the bride was Catholic and the groom was a Protestant. The newly elected Pope Gregory XIII (of calendar reform fame) refused to grant a dispensation for the wedding, and Henry was forced to remain outside the cathedral for the nuptial mass. His place was taken inside by the bride’s 17-year-old brother, François, Duke of Anjou. The ceremony was officiated by the Archbishop of Rouen, Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon (the uncle of the groom). The marriage would eventually be annulled in 1599, and a story was invented by a 17th-century historian to justify the annulment that Margaret’s brother, Charles IX, forced her head down as if she were nodding when she was asked if she assented to the match.

2. Henry III (who inherited the throne of France in 1589 and became better known as Henry IV, confusingly) remarried in 1600, taking as his second wife the Italian heiress Marie de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Because 16th century Europe was like that, her uncle Ferdinando had married Christina of Lorraine, who was the niece of Henry’s first wife Margaret of Valois. So his second wife was his first wife’s niece’s niece. Nice.

3. In truth, that kind of consanguinity was par for the course. The Habsburgs were the true masters of keeping it in the family. Philip II of Spain was married four times: his first wife, Maria Manuela of Portugal was his first cousin twice over, his second wife, Mary I of England, was his father’s first cousin, his third wife, Elisabeth of Valois was not a close relation (but was the sister of Margaret of Valois, above) and his fourth wife, Anna of Austria, was his niece. That’s right, she was the daughter of his sister Maria, who had married her own (and Philip’s) first cousin Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor.

4. Unfortunately you can’t ride your luck forever, as the Habsburgs found out. The inbreeding chickens came home to roost with Charles II of Spain (1661-1700), Philip II’s great-grandson. His parents, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, were also uncle and niece, and he was plagued by ill health throughout his life, including childhood bouts of chickenpox, rubella, measles and smallpox, suffered from rickets which left him unable to walk until he was four years old and had a pronounced lower jaw (the famous “Habsburg jaw”) which made it difficult to chew his food properly. When he died at the age of 38, having more or less starved to death because of problems eating and digesting, his autopsy report revealed that his “heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water”.

5. We are all familiar with having to turn off mobile phones when flying, or at least switching them to “airplane mode”. This is, we are warned, for our safety. It is possible that interference from mobile phones may have contributed to two otherwise-unexplained air crashes, in Switzerland in 2000 and New Zealand in 2003, but there is no evidence that a phone left in its normal mode has ever caused an airplane to crash. Ever. Now, consider how many mobile phones on each flight are actually left switched on, either by accident or through truculence and stubbornness, and factor in that something like 100,000 commercial flights take place every day, which suggests that in fact the risk is at best theoretical.

6. The Democratic National Convention begins tomorrow at the United Center in Chicago. It last met in the city—in the very same venue—in 1996 to renominate President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore, but the previous assembly in Chicago, in August 1968, hangs over the party’s folk memory as a convention marred by violence, division and rioting. It nominated Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for president and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate but came less than three months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who had been a candidate for the nomination, and five months after the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been killed. At that time, Chicago was in the iron grip of its long-time Democratic mayor, Richard J. Daley, who held office from 1955 to his death in 1976. His 21-year-tenure would be exceeded by that of his son, Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago 1989-2011, but the family influence went wider than that: the elder Daley’s youngest son William was United States Secretary of Commerce from 1997 to 2000, chairman of Al Gore’s unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign then Barack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff 2011-12; another son, John P. Daley, served in the Illinois House of Representatives (1985-89) and the Illinois Senate (1989-92), and has been a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners for the past 32 years. With a population of 5.2 million and including the city of Chicago itself, it is the second-largest county in the United States.

7. Richard J. Daley was notorious for verbal missteps and manglings. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as the Chicago Police Department dealt harshly with protestors, he told the press “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder”. The mayor’s press secretary, Earl Bush, would tell reporters: “Write what he means, not what he says.”

8. As you will see below, the character of Domino in 1965 James Bond adventure Thunderball was played by French actress Claudine Auger, but her lines were dubbed by German-born voice-over artist Nikki van der Zyl. Some roles in the early Bond films were dubbed to compensate for the actors’ heavy foreign accents but it was also simply easier from a technical point of view to record dialogue after the event under studio conditions. Van der Zyl was a frequent vocal presence in the first years of the franchise, recording the lines of all but four of the female characters in Dr. No, including Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) and Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson); a female hotel clerk in From Russia With Love; Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) and Bonita (Nadja Regin) in Goldfinger; Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) in You Only Live Twice; Marie (Denise Perrier) in Diamonds Are Forever; some of the dialogue of Solitaire (Jane Seymour) in Live And Let Die; Chew Mee (Françoise Terry) in The Man With The Golden Gun; and Corinne Dufour (Corinne Cléry) and an air hostess (Leila Shenna) in Moonraker.

9. There are many odd and striking things about the Panama Canal, the vital shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which opened in 1914, not least that, despite the obvious relative positions of the two bodies of water, the canal actually runs south-west from the Atlantic to the Pacific because of the way it cuts across the Isthmus of Panama. But here is a startling fact: taking a ship the 50 miles from one end to the other involves three locks which raise it and three which let it down, and performing those actions requires 52 million gallons of fresh water. For every single ship. That means the canal uses two and a half times as much water in a day than the eight million residents of New York City. And the water level of its artificial reservoir, Lake Gatún, is falling fast.

10. Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita (see above), was born in St Petersburg when it was the capital of the Russian Empire, though he wrote many of his novels (including Lolita) in English. His family could trace its roots to a 14th-century Tatar prince called Nabok Murza: his grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, was minister of justice from 1878 to 1885 under Tsar Alexander II; while his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was elected to the first State Duma in 1906, and served as secretary to the Provisional Government in 1917. From 1920 to his death in 1922, Vladimir Dmitrievich was editor of the émigré newspaper Rul’, which advocated a democratic government in Russia.

“Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.” (Margaret Mead)

1. “Becoming an American Icon: The Story of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’”: veteran music journalist Steven Hyden has recently released a book examining Bruce Springsteen’s iconic 1984 album Born in the U.S.A., setting it in its time and cultural place, and this documentary seeks to cover some of the same ground. It was Springsteen’s seventh album—he had recorded his debut as far back as 1973—but this anthemic expression of blue-collar identity, patriotism and frustration made the Boss a generational star. This was the zenith of Ronald Reagan’s upbeat, “It’s morning again in America” appeal, the year in which he won re-election by one of the biggest landslides in US history, and the economy was recovering after the recession of 1981/82, but there was huge underlying change. As manufacturing began to decline, the nation’s “Steel Belt” became known as the “Rust Belt”, and Reagan’s opponent, Democrat Walter Mondale, used the phrase in his doomed campaign. Springsteen gave a voice to a constituency which was confused, fearful and dislocated, and did it through brilliant music.

2. “Putin’s ‘slow, chaotic reaction’ shows Ukraine will sustain Kursk incursion”: an informative Times Radio segment with Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commanding general, United States Army Europe, in which he argues that the Ukrainian operation into Russian territory has demonstrated the extent to which we have underestimated the military capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces. He also claims that the Russian response has been slow and clumsy, which is surely at part due to surprise: see Lawrence Freedman’s Financial Times article below, which explores a similar perspective.

3. “Thunderball”: I was writing an article about Ian Fleming this week, since Monday was the 60th anniversary of his death, and by chance ITV showed the fourth instalment of the cinema franchise, 1965’s Thunderball. Directed by Terence Young and starring Adolfo Celi, Claudine Auger and Rik Van Nutter alongside Sean Connery as James Bond, it is an enjoyable and not-too-preposterous romp which was enormously successful at the box office. Perhaps the underwater action sequences are a little self-indulgent but it has style, verve and wit, and two magnificent title songs, Thunderball by Tom Jones and Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Shirley Bassey. Not the best Bond film, nor the most complex or satisfying, nor Connery’s best performance, but a very fine action film which must have burst out of the cinema screens in 1965. Interestingly, both Celi, as SPECTRE number two Emilio Largo, and Auger, as his mistress Domino, had their parts dubbed, by Robert Rietty and Nikki van der Zyl respectively. Because of the limitations of audio capture, many roles in the early Bond films were dubbed, but some were also to compensate for actors (like Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder and Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger) who had pronounced accents.

4. “Gerry Rafferty: Right Down The Line”: he is remembered now for Baker Street, of course, and, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s use of Stuck In The Middle With You in Reservoir Dogs, as one of the founders of Scottish folk-rock band Stealers Wheel, but Gerry Rafferty was a hugely talented, multilayered and complex man. Born to an Irish Catholic working-class family in Paisley, he joined Tam Harvey and Billy Connolly in the Humblebums, a surprisingly fine folk group, passed through Stealers Wheel and then carved his own path as a solo artist. For me, City to City (1978) and Night Owl (1979) are exceptional albums, quite as good as anything to come out of that decade. But he was diffident, sometimes difficult and a prodigious drinker, as well as struggling with depression. At the end of 2010 he was admitted to hospital with multiple organ failure, and died on 4 January 2011. He was 63. This ArtWorks Scotland profile talks to many of his friends and family and is a loving and appropriate tribute to a man brimming with talent and lyricism but also a strong streak of self-destruction.

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (Sylvia Plath)

1. “The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks”: this elegant memoir of childhood by BBC presenter Justin Webb is absorbing, heartfelt and immaculately written. The author grew up in Bath in the 1960s and 1970s, his mother self-consciously upper-middle-class but impoverished and his stepfather increasingly plagued by mental illness (his biological father was journalist and newsreader Peter Woods). Webb describes a childhood of some material hardship but more profound emotional trauma, half-cosseted and half-inoculated against feelings by his mother. It is a dazzling piece of writing by a presenter who is so good at his job that it is easy to take him for granted, and shines a novel light on a particular period of post-war British history and society.

2. “Is the People’s Liberation Army Navy a threat to British interests?”: another instalment from the Britain’s World Substack gathers seven short, punchy opinions on an important geostrategic question. This kind of intellectual exploration is vital in parallel with the ongoing Strategic Defence Review being led by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, and this is a particularly interesting question. It’s easy to dismiss Chinese naval ambitions as irrelevant to Britian because, duh, geography, but you have to examine what our national interests are in their fullest sense as well as understanding what China hopes to achieve in the maritime sphere. Like it or not, we are heavily dependent on free and unimpeded global trade, while China has much to gain from disrupting those commercial networks. This matters: what we need to think about is what influence we can exert and how.

3. “Ukraine’s incursion disrupts Putin’s war of attempted conquest”: it is still very hard to understand exactly what Ukraine’s bold foray into Russian territory around Kursk is meant to achieve and what effect it is having, but this analysis in The Financial Times by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, the so-called “dean of British strategic studies”, is the best guess you will find. The operation has certainly surprised and impressed with its scale, organisation and progress, and the Russian military has not been able to respond as forcefully as many expected. If nothing else, it seems to have changed the narrative of slow but inexorable Russian progress and caused confusion and alarm in the Kremlin, both valuable objectives. Its longer term effects, especially on finding a satisfactory conclusion to the conflict, are harder to discern, but Vladimir Putin does not seem at ease, and that can only be to the good.

4. “Conservative women have a new Phyllis Schlafly”: a fascinating profile in The Atlantic by Elaine Godfrey of rising Christian conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey. I wrote an essay this week, perhaps slightly impassioned, rejecting the idea that Christianity can or should be a necessary part of (British) conservatism, so this caught my eye. I’ve no reason to think Stuckey is unpleasant or malign, and there may well be issues on which I agree with her, but alarm bells ring loudly in my head when she talks about using scientific arguments but then goes on to “buttress that with what’s theologically true”. I have no problem with people having religious beliefs, but if you tell me they’re true because, basically, they are, then you’ve dropped out of rational debate and I’m not interested. I could equally argue that the non-existence of God is “theologically true” or some equivalent, and it wouldn’t persuade Christians. This may have potency in American politics, but I am uncomfortable with the ease with which some Christian conservatives have come to terms with Donald Trump, one of the most striking antitheses of Christian values in recent history, on the grounds that he is a useful conduit for their beliefs. How long a spoon do you have?

5. “Why the police have lost the public’s trust”: a well-informed and hard-hitting article in The Spectator by my friend Ian Acheson, arguing that dwindling police resources, poor leadership and standards and disengagement from public concern have led to a collapse in confidence in the police and fostered a sense that a great deal of crime is committed with impunity. We have been left with a deep malaise in some of the most disadvantaged communities who need order and security most, and there are no quick fixes. “The only way to create enduring respect between police and citizens and reverse impunity is to get visible, accountable and effective police officers back into the neighbourhoods they’ve been forced to desert, where criminality has become a lifestyle choice that turns marooned communities into places decent people only want to get out of, not thrive in” Amen.

I’m in a world of shit, yes…

… as Sergeant J.T. “Joker” Davis says at the end of Full Metal Jacket, but I am alive—and I am not afraid. Ciao.