Sunday round-up 19 May 2024
The usual collection of things to know, things to read and things to watch, while Grace Jones celebrates her birthday and we mark the death day of Anne Boleyn
Today you forgot to send birthday cards to the most prolific bass player you’ve never heard of Herbie Flowers (86), actor and long-suffering father James Fox (85), former MP, MEP, television presenter and self-licking ice lolly Robert Kilroy-Silk (82), perhaps the most underrated figure in modern Irish folk music Paul Brady (77), Jamaican singer and general force of nature Grace Jones (76), everyone’s favourite Tory intellectual Sir Oliver Letwin (68), Indianapolis 500 legend Dario Franchitti (51) and the generally preposterous Sam Smith (32).
Born on this day but no longer with us are undoubted saint Sir Nicholas Winton (1909) and equally certain wrong ’un Pol Pot (1925). Somewhere between them on the spectrum are Nancy Astor (1879), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881), Colin Chapman (1928) and Nora Ephron (1941).
It is the anniversary of the execution of Anne Boleyn in 1536. She was in her late 20s or 30s (her date of birth is unknown) and was nine days short of three years as queen. For reasons which I partially understand and which partially annoy me, she has become a modern icon for all sorts of causes: I wrote an essay about this last year if you’re interested. Convicted of high treason, adultery and incest, she should according to law have been burned at the stake, but Henry VIII showed a weird and inimitable form of mercy and she was beheaded by a French swordsman brought specially from Saint-Omer to do the job (executioners in England were wildly variable in terms of ability). In the French manner, she knelt upright to receive the blow, repeating the prayer “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul” until the blow struck.
In 1962, there was a celebration at Madison Square Garden for President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (10 days ahead of the actual date). It is, of course, immortally remembered for Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of Happy Birthday, wearing the famous sheer, flesh-coloured dress by Jean Louis. Peter Lawford, the president’s brother-in-law, mocking Monroe’s reputation for tardiness, welcomed her on stage as “the late Marilyn Monroe”. She was dead 77 days later. Kennedy himself died within 18 months.
A happy sixth wedding anniversary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who were married in St George’s Chapel, Windsor this day in 2018. An estimated 1.9 billion of us watched the event, which is quite a chunk of humanity.
On the hagiographical front, today is the feast of St Dunstan, 10th-century monk and archbishop of Canterbury who was, according to his first biographer, skilled in “making a picture and forming letters”, which is a good start. Canonised within 50 years of his death, he is the patron saint of English goldsmiths and silversmiths, and of Stepney, and was the most popular saint in England until Thomas Becket’s murder and canonisation in the late 12th century. His mortal remains seem to have ended up haphazardly divided between Glastonbury Abbey (where he had been abbot) and Canterbury Cathedral, but both tombs were destroyed during the dissolution of England’s monasteries in the 1530s and his bones scattered.
Also celebrated today are St Pudentiana, a young Roman girl martyred in the 2nd century for refusing to acknowledge the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus Pius as deities; St Celestine V who, in 1294, became the first pope to abdicate; and St Crispin of Viterbo, a Capuchin friar who was the first canonisation of St John Paul II’s papacy.
On a more secular note, Vietnam celebrates the birthday of Hồ Chí Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 to his death in September 1969. Vaguely connected (see below), it is World Baking Day, and Ride A Unicycle Day (though I have always regarded the unicycle as a reliable indicator of the insufferable twat). So, you choose, really.
Factoids
St Celestine V, whose feast day it is, was not only the first pope to abdicate when he gave up the throne of St Peter in 1294, but he was also the last pope to be elected without a conclave (in which the cardinals are physically locked away—cum clave, “with a key”—until they decide on a candidate). When Nicholas IV died in April 1292, the College of Cardinals, only 12 strong, deliberated on and off for more than two years about his successor. The process was so drawn out that one of the electors, Jean, Cardinal Cholet, died before a decision was reached. The cardinals were torn between different factions but also distracted by other affairs so that by the summer of 1294 only six remained in Perugia, still to agree. A letter was read to them from a well-known hermit, Pietro de Morrone, who claimed that God had told him they would be punished for any further delay. So they elected the hermit to be pope. It was not a success, and his papacy lasted only five months and eight days. (He is still not even in the top 10 shortest papacies.)
The shortest papacy, you ask? Urban VII, born Giovanni Battista Castagna, was elected on 15 September 1590. A 69-year-old Roman, of Genoese origin, he contracted malaria and died after 13 days as pope, before he could be consecrated or crowned. However, during that short time, he introduced what is believed to be the world’s first public smoking ban, threatening excommunication for anyone who “took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose”.
I’ve always been vaguely amused by the shortest war in history, the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896. It lasted somewhere between 38 and 45 minutes. It’s an inappropriately lengthy story, but essentially, on 25 August, the sultan of Zanzibar, Hamad bin Thuwaini, died suddenly. He was probably poisoned by his cousin, Khalid bin Barghash, who declared himself the new sultan, but Zanzibar had been a British protectorate since 1890 and Britain had the right of veto over a new sovereign. The British consul, Basil Cave, and the first minister of Zanzibar, General Sir Lloyd Mathews, had not authorised the succession, and ordered Khalid to stand down by 9.00 am on 27 August. The sultan barricaded himself in his palace with nearly 3,000 guards, while the British assembled two cruisers, three gunboats, 150 marines and sailors, and 900 Zanzibaris in the harbour area. At 9.02 am, the British began bombarding the palace, then sank the sultan’s yacht Glasgow. At 9.46 am, having shot down the flag flying over the palace, the British ended their barrage. Khalid fled to the German consulate, and thence to Dar es Salaam in German East Africa.
It may have been a short war but British memories were long. Former sultan Khalid escaped to German East Africa but was captured there by British soldiers in 1916. He was exiled first to St Helena, and then to the Seychelles, before being allowed to return to Mombasa, where he owned property, in March 1922, by order of the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill. He died there five years later.
As mentioned above, it is the anniversary of the birth of Hồ Chí Minh, and of American civil rights activist Malcolm X. Coincidentally, both worked at the Parker House in Boston, Hồ as a baker in 1913 and then-Malcolm Little as a busboy in the 1940s. It was also where John F. Kennedy announced his first candidacy for Congress in 1946, proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier (at table 40 in Parker’s Restaurant) and then held his bachelor party (in the Press Room) in 1953.
You may have come across Allan Gurganus’s 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, the sprawling tale of 99-year-old Lucy Marsden who is, well, exactly as billed in the title. However, you may not know that the United States government stopped paying its last Civil War pension less than four years ago. Irene Triplett was born in 1930, the daughter of 83-year-old Mose Triplett, who had fought first for the Confederacy and then the Union. After his death in 1938, she was entitled to his monthly pension of $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs on the basis of mental disability. She remained its beneficiary until her own death from complications after surgery on 31 May 2020, aged 90, just over 155 years after the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House. It was probably a longer liability than had been anticipated.
The Metropolitan Police, currently at least embattled and perhaps moving towards beleaguered, is approaching its 200th anniversary, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. Ten years later, the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 expanded the powers of the police and the offences which they regulated. It is still in force, albeit after much amendment, and covers some quaint-sounding activities. The Met has responsibility for fairs “holden without lawful authority” and may “remove every booth, standing, and tent, and every carriage of whatsoever kind conveyed to or being upon the ground for the purpose of holding or continuing such fair”; it is forbidden to “discharge any cannon or other fire-arm of greater calibre than a common fowling-piece within three hundred yards of any dwelling house within the said district to the annoyance of any inhabitant thereof”; and section 61 is splendidly entitled “Mad dogs, &c.”. These seem to have slipped through the cracks of the recent mayoral election campaign.
I’m always intrigued by famous people who have a formal profession other than the source of their fame. Medicine unites a particularly disparate group of notables, and here are some physicians best known for something other than their clinical work: Anton Chekhov (Moscow), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh), Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Buenos Aires), Jonathan Miller (Cambridge), Hank Wangford (Cambridge), Michael Crichton (Harvard), George Miller (New South Wales) and Harry Hill (London). St Luke is also remembered as a physician, though his medical school is not recorded.
The guillotine is, of course, emblematic above all of the French Revolution. It was adopted as a humane method of execution in 1792 and was first used on 25 April to execute a highwayman called Nicolas Jacques Pelletier. However, less well known is the fact that it remained France’s execution method of choice until capital punishment was abolished in 1981. The last beheading occurred, in fact, six weeks before I was born, on 10 September 1977: Tunisian-born Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 22-year-old Élisabeth Bousquet, was subjected to Le Rasoir National in Baumettes Prison in Marseille.
This week saw a new television adaptation of Sir Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels (see below). Rankin began studying for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the novels of Dame Muriel Spark, but became a full-time author and never finished his thesis. Other unfinished doctoral work: Alan Coren on the modern American novel, at Yale and then Berkeley; John Sessions on the poet and novelist John Cowper Powys, at McMaster University; David Baddiel on the Victorian sexualisation of children, at University College London; David Duchovny on magic and technology in contemporary fiction and poetry, at Yale; Armando Iannucci on religious language in the work of John Milton, at University College, Oxford; Rowan Atkinson began working towards a DPhil in the application of self-tuning control systems at Queen’s College, Oxford, but took an MSc instead.
News is not at all an easy thing to do on television. A good many of the main news items are not easily made visual (Sir Ian Jacob)
“Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How to Escape It”: this week my friend Ian Acheson gave a talk to the Counter Extremism Project, to which he is an adviser, on his new book about our failing prison system. Ian is a very wise, practical and straight-talking Ulsterman with a seriously impressive CV and he knows HM Prison and Probation Service inside out. The circumstances he lays out are horrifying and depressing, and it’s sometimes hard to believe we have been so complacent about the condition of our prisons, but, as Ian points out, he is also offering potential solutions. Yes, things are bad, but the system has not yet collapsed and the challenges are not insuperable. It will, however, require strong direction, determined radicalism and a willingness to accept where we have gone wrong. Watch this and buy the book.
“Tom Hanks on the Moon Landings and What He Learned Working With Astronauts”: granted this is a podcast but this episode of the all-conquering The Rest Is History has visuals too. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland welcome special guest Tom Hanks to talk about the United States space programme and especially the various missions to the Moon. Hanks, who played mission commander Jim Lovell in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995), absolutely immersed himself in research and is hugely knowledgeable on the subject, which is fascinating in itself. But Hanks also comes across as extraordinarily down-to-earth and amiable, and wears his knowledge lightly. The three-way conversation is an informative delight and reminds you just how huge an undertaking the Apollo missions were.
“Manhunter”: Sky Cinema Select was showing Michael Mann’s 1986 neo-noir masterpiece this week, which is an adaptation Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and stars William Petersen and Succession legend Brian Cox in Hannibal Lector’s first cinema outing (it’s spelled Lecktor in the film, don’t worry about it, it’s fine). I can keep this very brief, because I wrote about the film at length here in CulturAll a couple of years ago, so the message is: if you haven’t seen it, stop now and watch it. I don’t care what you’re doing. It is one of the best films of the 1980s, one of Mann’s best (and that’s a strong body of work), everyone is brilliant in it and it si deeply sinister and chilling. Just a stunning work of cinematic art.
“Rebus”: as a rule, I’m sceptical of “reboots”, and on the face of it I wasn’t sure what this new interpretation of Sir Ian Rankin’s superb detective novels was really for. I think Rankin is a brilliant writer and one whose books, which are great, have found equally good adaptations on television, especially with Ken Stott playing John Rebus. Taken in isolation, and based only on the first episode, this is an enjoyable drama with much to recommend it: the script, by Gregory Burke who wrote the powerful 2006 play Black Watch, is punchy and fast-paced, with some twists of humour; Richard Rankin is tough, troubled and beginning to curdle as Rebus, who is portrayed as a 40-year-old detective sergeant; and his relationship with his daughter Sammy, played by Mia McKenzie, is convincingly affectionate but self-conscious. My hesitation is that a drama about a middle-aged policeman with a troubled personal life and potentially self-destructive habits is hardly new, nor are some of the themes of professional standards in policing, young graduate recruits pitted against grizzled veterans or the sometimes-blurred line between law enforcement and the criminals they pursue. There’s nothing wrong with it, but is the Rebus tag masking a run-of-the-mill police procedural?
“Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger”: on Monday I went to BFI to see Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about legendary film-making partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I love the earnest, unashamed adoration Scorsese has for the history of cinema, but had no idea that he’d been so heavily influenced by Powell and Pressburger, and that he’d become good friends with Michael Powell in the 1970s. At first it seems bizarre that films like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or The Red Shoes could have influenced Scorsese’s gritty masterpieces like Mean Streets or Raging Bull, but once he explains it, it seems so obvious. A documentary about Powell and Pressburger would be worth watching anyway, but this is a jewel. If you have any interest in film as an art form and why it is the way it is, go and see this. Delightful.
Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it? (Thomas Carlyle)
“The quest for interesting conversation”: this Financial Times column by Janan Ganesh caught my eye because of its slightly whimsical, intellectual tone and because the question of where columnists find ideas is (naturally enough) always interesting to me. I like his “Dubai test”, and, although I don’t think it’s 100 per cent reliable, I agree with his notion that the head of any organisation may well not be the most interesting member. If I think about my time as a clerk in the House of Commons, for example, although there were some exceptional and fascinating Clerks of the House, there were also some splendidly rich, varied and unusual characters a couple of steps down the organisation, with unpredictable interests and absorbing stories. “I’ve just come back from horseback archery in Mongolia…” began one answer to an innocent inquiry about holidays. And I can’t endorse vigorously enough Ganesh’s sign-off: “A columnist is never ‘off’. The cost of freedom is said to be eternal vigilance. This charmed job asks much the same price.”
“The Rich Pay Late”: it seems implausible that I have reached the age of 46 without reading anything by Simon Raven. He was a brilliant, lazy, rackety drunk who penned witty, scabrous, elegant, funny novels, his greatest achievement being then 10-novel cycle Alms for Oblivion. This sequence follows the fortunes of a group of often-gruesome but entertaining upper-middle-class and aristocratic grotesques, and I eventually picked up, and tore through with hooting laughter and profound enjoyment, the first book in the series, The Rich Pay Late. Raven himself had a slightly disdainful attitude towards writing, having one of his characters say “I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money”, but he was a singular talent, mixing elements of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. When he died in 2001, his obituary in The Daily Telegraph summed him up like this: “There was something of Lord Byron about Raven: if not the same genius, at least the same energy, contempt for cant, unshocked 18th century acceptance of human folly, urge towards sexual experiment and—underlying the hedonistic philosophy—the same desire to court retribution.” I loved it and can’t wait to read more.
“Has devolution been a success?”: recently we passed the 25th anniversary of the first meeting of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, established by Sir Tony Blair’s Labour government under the provisions of the Scotland Act 1998. This had been prompted by the referendum of September 1997, which invited assent or otherwise to two propositions: “I agree there should be a Scottish Parliament” and “I agree that a Scottish Parliament should have tax-varying powers”. It was the very beginning of my second year as an undergraduate at St Andrews, and I voted no to the first question and yes to the second. This assessment of Scottish devolution after a quarter of a century by Times columnist Alex Massie is thoughtful, balanced and, I think, right: the creation of the Scottish Parliament has in some ways been its own success and was necessary and inevitable, but it has not transformed Scottish politics and has seen some pretty dismal times. But it is here to stay.
“The Eight Dynamics That Will Shape the Election”: the 2024 US presidential election was always likely to be odd, but a strikingly peculiar aspect of it is how many commentators have surrendered their critical judgement and view the likely outcome through the prism of what they would like to happen. I’ve tried very hard not to do that, and to rely as much as possible on what data are available; but one outcome of this is apparently incompatible truths and patterns of behaviour which would ordinarily make no sense. This article in The Atlantic by David A. Graham identifies some key factors and analyses them carefully and logically, which serves to highlight how unusual this contest is. Two very elderly men, both of whom have been president, facing off while one of them faces a series of criminal cases in court. It’s insane, but it’s what’s happening, so we have to be dispassionate and methodical in trying to understand what is going on.
“The Bedside Urban Voltaire”: the more I write, the more I become interested in writers, and as my life is currently a succession of columns and op-eds, I’m particularly drawn to those for whom the 700-800 word burst is their diet. Jack McLean, who died last December, was a long-time columnist for The Herald dubbed by one of his editors “the Urban Voltaire”. Like some of the very best short form writing, his columns were often about not really very much, and yet spoke of deeper fundamental truths of society and human nature; and they were delivered in a distinctive, florid, funny and often bathetic Glasgow patter. Even for his age he was old-fashioned in some ways, and apt to chase the bon mot beyond the bounds of wisdom, but he encapsulates a certain sort of Scottishness and a love of the craft of putting words together, and that I find absorbing. Niche, though, I accept.
That’s your lot for this week
As Holden Caulfield says rather ruefully, it’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
Ride A Unicycle Day (though I have always regarded the unicycle as a reliable indicator of the insufferable twat)...made me laugh out loud...mainly because I agree with you.