Sunday round-up 21 April 2024
It is the anniversary of the foundation of Rome, according to traditional Roman chronology, and the feast of St Anselm of Canterbury
I hope these regular compendiums are proving useful and/or informative to readers; they are a good discipline for me without (yet) being an unmanageable burden, so everyone’s a winner so far (not in the sense of Iran “winning” last weekend’s conflict). Today is a crowded one for anniversaries and celebrations, so here are a few.
By the late Roman Republic, 21 April 753 BC was taken as the notional date of the foundation of the city by Romulus. This coincided with the Parilia, a festival of the cleansing of sheep and shepherds dedicated to the god Pales, who is—how fashionable and au courant!—of undetermined gender. It became a kind of commemoration of Rome’s agrarian past and involved cattle walking through bonfires, which is surely halfway to a barbecue. In fact there were bronze-using settlements on the Capitoline Hill as early as 1700–1350 BC.
It is 515 years since the accession of Henry VIII, which I think we can agree was a significant event, for good or ill. He was only 17 years old, around 6’2”, clever but impatient, fluent in Latin and French with some facility in Italian. He would reign for nearly 30 years and see more change in that span than any monarch probably until Victoria. He was only 55 when he died.
On the religious front, it is the feast of the Benedictine monk St Anselm of Canterbury, primate of all England from 1093 to 1109, born in the Italian Alps around 1033, and famed as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God. It is also the commemoration of St Abdecalas and St Shimun Bar Sabbae, fourth-century Persian martyrs, St Anastasius the Sinaite, abbot of the monastery of St Catherine’s on Mount Sinai, and St Wolbodo, an 11th-century bishop of Liège. Today also marks the death in AD 640 of the Welsh monk St Beuno, whose working included raising seven people from the dead, but his feast is commemorated on 20 April to leave today clear for St Anselm, which is something of a monastic burn.
If you like the stuff (I don’t: see below), it is National Tea Day, and National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day (yes really). It is also Big Word Day, and the London Marathon. Guess which one I’ll be honouring more closely.
Factoids
North East acting legend and occasional crooner Robson Green bears the middle name Golightly. It is the maiden name of his maternal grandmother Cissie, whose father, William Golightly, was president of the Northumberland Miners’ Association from 1927 to 1940. Golightly died when the passenger ship he was on, the SS City of Benares, was torpedoed on its way across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada by U-48, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt. There were 123 children on board the Benares, of whom 98 died, making it one of the worst losses of young life in maritime history. (112 children were on the Titanic, of whom 58 were saved.)
We will soon reach the 50th anniversary of the general election of October 1974. (The only other year in which the United Kingdom has held two general elections is 1910, when the country, which then included all of Ireland, went to the polls 15 January-10 February, and again 3-19 December.) It was a fairly miserable affair, in which Harold Wilson, having led a minority government since March, won a majority of only three; but it was his fourth contest against Edward Heath as leader of the Conservatives, and his third win. Heath did not feature heavily in the Tory campaign, some late recognition that he was not an electoral asset, but the most prominent figure on the opposition front bench in terms of public appearances was the shadow environment secretary, Margaret Thatcher. Four months and one day later, she replaced Heath as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. (I have written about her ascent to the top job in 1974-75 here.)
(Enormous hat-tip to Tim Marshall for this) Have you ever wondered why there is a countdown sequence before rocket launches? It’s a standard part of the drama of NASA sending another projectile into orbit but it is not a universal practice: in Russia, they just press a button. We owe the tension-ratcheting device to Wernher Freiherr von Braun, the aristocratic Prussian engineer and rocketry pioneer whose work on the V2 ballistic missile in Nazi Germany saw him seized and put to work after the Second World War by the United States. He eventually became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and oversaw the development of the Saturn programme of rockets. As a young man, however, he had been struck by Fritz Lang’s 1929 science fiction film Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond), which included a countdown from six to zero (actually “jetzt”, or “now”) before the launch of a rocket. The seconds were counted off on intertitles to heighten the drama but had no scientific basis. But von Braun liked the concept so much it was adopted by NASA and is now (in the West, and in India) seen as an indispensible part of a space launch.
The Birth of Nation, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 sprawling racist epic which chronicled the history of America from the Civil War through Reconstruction to the then-present day and breathed new life into the Ku Klux Klan, is now regarded as a morally bankrupt film. It was ground-breaking in terms of cinematography, and is hugely important in the history of film, and The Los Angeles Times called it “the greatest picture ever made and the greatest drama ever filmed”. But it was also the first film ever screened in the White House. On 18 February 1915, President Woodrow Wilson, his family and members of his cabinet assembled in the East Room, joined by Griffith himself and Thomas Dixon Jr, author of The Clansman, the novel on which the film was based, for a viewing. Claims that Wilson, one of the most racist occupants of the Oval Office in history, approved of or endorsed the film are disputed, but in 1937 a magazine claimed he said “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”.
I mentioned above that it is National Tea Day. Perhaps because my parents were not tea drinkers, I never developed a taste for what some people regard as a quintessentially English drink (insofar as the English imported it from China then forced large numbers of farmers in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and elsewhere to grow it), but I cannot stomach it: genuinely, the smell turns my stomach. In this regard, I always cite Commander James Bond RNVR, who advises a young woman in the SIS canteen in Goldfinger (1959), “I don’t drink tea. I hate it. It’s mud. Moreover it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.” Two years later, in Thunderball, 007 is sent to a health clinic, where he is restricted to water, an orange for breakfast, vegetable soup and, yes, tea. “Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses, but on his empty stomach, and in his febrile state, the sugary brew acted almost as an intoxicant.”
The first cinematic “Bond girl” is often forgotten now. It was the marvellous Eunice Gayson as Sylvia Trench, whom Bond meets at a game of chemin de fer in Dr. No (1962), and she is absolutely dazzling. Not only does she effortlessly have Bond’s measure, she sets up his iconic catchphrase when he asks her name. “Trench, Sylvia Trench,” she tells him, “Mister…?” You know what comes next. Gayson appears again in 1963’s From Russia With Love, when Bond tells Mis Moneypenny (rather ungallantly) he is “reviewing an old case”. Until No Time To Die in 2021, in which Léa Seydoux reprises her role as Madeleine Swann, she was the first “Bond girl” to appear in two films in the same role.
The role of Sylvia Trench was one of two offered to Canadian actress Lois Maxwell by Terence Young, who directed Dr. No (as well as From Russia With Love and Thunderball). Maxwell’s husband, television executive Peter Marriott, had recently suffered a heart attack and she needed to earn some money, but she was uncomfortable with some of the more revealing shots necessary for the role of Trench, so instead took the other role offered, two days’ work at £100 a day, for which she would have to supply her own clothes: that of M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny. She went on to feature in 13 more Bond films, the last A View To A Kill in 1985.
I also mentioned above that it is the anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII. It is well known that his first queen, Katharine of Aragon, had been the wife of his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, but the beginning of her relationship with the Tudor king was almost as convoluted as its end. Not long after Arthur’s death in 1502, possibly from the mysterious “sweating sickness”, his father Henry VII offered the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, his younger son as a replacement husband for the young Katharine (at 16, she was slightly older than Arthur and more than five years Prince Henry’s senior). Diplomatically, this suited all parties, and a marriage treaty was concluded on 23 June 1503, the pair betrothed two days later. Henry was too young for the couple to live together or be formally married, and Anglo-Spanish relations deteriorated after the death of Queen Isabella in November 1504. When Prince Henry was 14, he rejected the proposed marriage, leaving Katharine in an awkward position only partially resolved by her father making her Spanish ambassador to England to justify her continued presence at court. However, mercurial as ever, Henry declared shortly after he became king in 1509 that he would, after all, marry Katharine: the intimate ceremony took place on 11 June at the church of the Observant Franciscan friary next to Greenwich Palace.
To remind us of how different from current mores the ways of 16th-century diplomacy were, marrying Katharine meant jilting another princess: Katharine’s 10-year-old niece, Eleanor of Austria (also known as Eleanor of Castile). Born in Leuven (or Louvain, in modern-day Belgium), she was the eldest child of the ill-fated Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad, King and Queen of Castile and León, and her younger brothers included the Holy Roman Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I. She and Henry were probably betrothed in 1508 but Henry VIII decided to marry her aunt instead: we need not feel too sorry for her, as she not only dodged a bullet as a wife of Henry VII but went on to be Queen of Portugal (1518-21) and then Queen of France (1530-47). She died in Spain in 1558, aged 59.
Rulers in the 16th century, especially Habsburgs, were by necessity multilingual. English monarchs would have taken English and Latin for granted, one as mother tongue and the other as the, ahem, lingua franca of intelligent society, but what was a mother tongue? Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556, for example, was born in Ghent (as was John of Gaunt, whose traditional appellation recalls his birthplace), a Flemish-speaking port controlled by the Austrian Archbduke Maximilian, but was named Prince of Asturias, heir to the throne of Castile, at the age of four, and before he was 20 he was nominal ruler of Germany. Famously, his verdict on language was as follows: “To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse—German.” One can draw one’s own conclusions of hierarchy from that.
I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality (P.J. O’Rourke)
“Blue Lights”: how do you make a police drama new? The answer that Northern Irish journalists Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson found was simple, brilliant and effective: set it in your home town of Belfast. The first six-part series of Blue Lights aired on BBC1 between March and May last year, and it roared back on to the channel’s schedules this week for another half-dozen episodes. There’s a lot of to love about this show, with humanity, tension, drama and dry, caustic wit as well as some fantastic performances: special mentions to Siân Brooke as Constable Grace Ellis, a former social worker from England who has relocated and started a new career in law enforcement; Martin McCann as Constable Stephen Neil, Grace’s training officer; and the electrifyingly good Katherine Devlin as Constable Annie Conlon, a Catholic probationer who gives the line of the series so far when she rolls her eyes at her partner’s musical taste and groans “Would you ever shut up about Johnny fucking Cash?” The Northern Irish setting gives Blue Lights its USP, though: a world barely known to so many British people, where police officers routinely carry firearms, check their cars for bombs every morning (yes, still) and often don’t tell friends or family what they do for a living, or disclose very few details. Watch it to enjoy, but, if you’ve never been to Northern Ireland, or have never given the place much thought, watch it to learn too. These are some of the best, hardest, most determined and funniest people in the world.
“Nazi Town, USA”: I don’t watch PBS America (available on Freeview, channel 84) as much as I should, because there is some excellent programming available. This week the network (again) showed a perhaps-sensationalist titled documentary about the growth not just of fascism but outright Nazism in America in the 1930s. As it pointed out, in February 1939, 20,000 Americans attended a rally in Madison Square Garden addressed by Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund, backed by banners of George Washington and swastika flags, at which he denounced the “Jewish-controlled media” and advocated a racially “pure” America (which of course there had never been). Of course Nazism was tapping into a society which still enforced segregation and Jim Crow laws, and in which the Ku Klux Klan was an active presence only 20 or so years after The Birth of a Nation (see above). The vile Father Charles Coughlin, “the Radio Priest”, found audiences of 30 million for his authoritarian and antisemitic outpourings. A sobering reminder of how close we still are to an era of unspeakable inhumanity.
“Waco: American Apocalypse”: this Netflix documentary came out last year but if you haven’t watched it, you really, really should. It’s more than 30 years now since the siege in Waco, Texas, which came to a horrible and bloody end: four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were killed, and all told 82 members of the Branch Davidian cult lost their lives, including, heartbreakingly, 28 children. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and no-one emerges from this story well, but it’s a fascinating (and sobering) look at America when the most sinister threat to national security was homegrown, anti-government extremism: the siege at Ruby Ridge in Idaho the year before had been a horrible portent. Chilling fact: Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 partly in revenge for Waco, travelled to Texas to see the denouement of the siege and was captured as a bystander on film. He was executed by lethal injection at 7:14 a.m. on 11 June 2001 in USP Terre Haute, Indiana.
“Face to Face: Dame Edith Sitwell”: it is 65 years since the BBC began showing Face to Face, an extraordinary series of 35 interviews with major figures from politics, the arts, sport and other areas of public life. I choose the episode with Dame Edith Sitwell partly because its anniversary is approaching, on 6 May, and also because she is one of the oddest and least adaptive subjects of all, fully aware of her eccentricity, unwilling to change it and slightly trapped by her upbringing and persona. The format was created by Hugh Burnett but the secret weapon was the largely unseen interviewer, John Freeman. He had been Labour MP for Watford from 1945 to 1955, a promising young politician who was a junior War Office and Ministry of Supply minister under Clement Attlee, but quit politics at the age of 40 to move into the media. He presented the BBC’s documentary magazine Panorama in the late 1950s, and after Face to Face he was editor of The New Statesman (1961-65), high commissioner to India (1965-68) and ambassador to the United States (1969-71). He died only 10 years ago, aged 99. The intimacy and punch of Freeman’s interviewing is extraordinary now, but for the 1950s and 1960s it was nothing short of revolutionary: the acerbic Gilbert Harding wept chokingly and blurted out “I shall be very glad to be dead”—less than two months later he died of an asthma attack outside Broadcasting House—while the famously melancholic Tony Hancock was plunged into introspection by Freeman’s straightforward “Are you happy?”
“The Bermuda Triangle: Beneath the Waves”: I’m an atheist and I take a fairly sceptical line on most conspiracy theories, but I have a strange fascination for weird natural mysteries (like cryptids, which mostly turn out to be pumas). This BBC documentary looks at potential explanations for the Bermuda Triangle, an area in the North Atlantic in which it is claimed hundreds of ships and aircraft go missing without explanation every year. No spoilers, but what this does demonstrate is simply how huge and uncharted the world’s oceans are, how relatively impenetrable they can be and how little we know about a major proportion of the planet we live on. It’s probably all nonsense, though. Probably…
Whenever people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government (Thomas Jefferson)
“The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages”: artificial intelligence and machine learning offer society and humanity huge potential benefits but we are also stricken by anxiety that we are also under threat, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by scenarios of disaster. This article from The Atlantic by Matteo Wong looks at a relatively unexplored element of AI, which is that it devours the Anglophone internet and has absorbed vast quantities of content in a small number of other languages, but it is not just entrenching the dominance of English but threatening to smother less widely spoken languages. One researcher found that an AI described Fon, a language spoken by around 2.3 million people in West Africa and used by a quarter of the population of Benin, as “a fictional language”. Nine-tenths of websites are in one of 10 languages: English, Russian, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian and Farsi. But there are 7,164 spoken languages in the world. AI, unchecked, risks becoming a doom spiral of linguistic homogenisation.
“African Lending Needs a Better World Bank”: in Foreign Policy, Hannah Ryder, CEO of aid consultancy Development Reimagined, argues that the financial institutions created towards the end of the Second World War, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (collectively known as the Bretton Woods Institutions), are structurally reflection of 1944 rather than 2024 and need fundamental restructuring to be able to operate effectively. Currently there is dramatic underspending: “The financial needs of most African countries… far exceed the capacity of their economies to invest what’s needed just to meet their citizens’ basic needs”. Unless the Bretton Woods Institutions find ways to provide more investment, Ryder argues, African nations will turn to lenders like China and Russia. A thought-provoking piece: we need to get development assistance to Africa right.
“There are three sides to every story”: my admiration for Rory Sutherland is on record and enduring, and his “Wiki Man” column for The Spectator is always entertaining and informative. This article frames media bias through the focusing illusion, by which we attribute importance to issues on the basis on how much attention we pay to them. This bias is exacerbated by the inevitable fact that we receive most of our news through the filter of journalists and reporters, who have to make decisions on priority based on their own judgements and biases. Worth remembering next time you hear politicians arguing fiercely about what is or isn’t a “real story”.
“W.S. Gilbert”: a lovely portrait of the Victorian lyricist and playwright by Alexander Larman for The Critic. We remember the honour given to his partner Sir Arthur Sullivan, but he was Sir William Gilbert, knighted in 1907 and the first British writer ever awarded a knighthood solely for his plays, rather than for any political or other activity. Gilbert and Sullivan are unfashionable now—they have been for as long as I can remember, and I’m in my forties—but I find them hugely entertaining and witty, and there’s a charming, self-confident brio about their work which reflects the benevolence of Victorian Britain. They poke fun at our imperial pomp but never with venom, able to mock society’s excesses and absurdities without corroding society itself. As Larman says, “Patriotism, humour and tunefulness were a potent combination”. Amen to that.
“Why more executive careers should start in a parish council”: an unexpected but absorbing proposal in The Financial Times by leadership guru Margaret Heffernan on the lessons which can be gleaned from the workings of a parish council, the lowest tier of English local government. She highlights “open minds, good listening, fairness, creative problem-solving and thoughtful action”, and a lack of “politics. Posturing. Power grabs. Ego. Perverse incentives. Competition”. Of course the boardroom cannot and should not replicate the parish council, but it’s always worth looking at transferrable skills and different ways of working.
Good night, good luck, and be well…
… as Bill Beutel used to tell his viewers on ABC. Or, to quote Jan Ravens as Kirsty Wark, more on that story later.
'A monastic burn'...lol. Anselm 1 - Beumo Nil.