Sunday round-up 25 August 2024

What do Elvis Costello, Tom Skerritt and Blake Lively have in common? It's their birthday! We also commemorate the sack of Louvain and the liberation of Paris

Who is unwrapping presents and pretending to be pleased today? Among those celebrating are Hollywood stalwart Tom Skerritt (91), best-selling novelist Frederick Forsyth (86), former newspaper magnate and jailbird Lord Black of Crossharbour (80), Kiss frontman Gene Simmons (75), Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford (73), singer-songwriter and producer Elvis Costello (70), former Deputy First Minister of Scotland Lord Wallace of Tankerness (70), 80s pop producer Matt Aitken (68), director, producer and screenwriter Tim Burton (66), celebrity parent and achey-breaky-heart owner Billy Ray Cyrus (63), actress Joanne Whalley (63), versatile stage and screen actor and celebrity onanist Tom Hollander (57), founder and lead vocalist of Wilco Jeff Tweedy (57), supermodel Claudia Schiffer (54), actor Alexander Skarsgård (48), The O.C. star Rachel Bilson (43) and model and actress Blake Lively (37).

Those who once celebrated on this day include Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1530), painter George Stubbs (1724), pioneering detective Allan Pinkerton (1819), famously unbalanced Bavarian monarch Ludwig II (1845), North Vietnamese military leader Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911), East German leader Erich Honecker (1912), legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918), former Governor of Alabama and segregation enthusiast George Wallace (1919), screen legend Sir Sean Connery (1930) and television host Regis Philbin (1931).

Today in 1537, the oldest regiment in the British Army, the Honourable Artillery Company, received a royal charter from Henry VIII. The original document acknowledged the formation of a “Fraternity or Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handgonnes”, was first called the Artillery Company in 1658 and then took on its current name in 1685. Today the HAC is a reserve regiment which has two roles, surveillance and target acquisition, and parachute artillery and is part of 77th Brigade. Notable veterans of the regiment include Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Dad’s Army star John Laurie, Hammer Films co-founder Sir James Carreras, former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, actor Nigel Bruce, publisher Leo Cooper and Father of the House of Commons Sir Edward Leigh.

On this day in 1914, German military units, having occupied the Belgian town of Leuven virtually unopposed a few days before, began what would become the Sack of Louvain. The origin seems to have been one group of German soldiers firing on another amid rumours that a major Allied offensive was imminent, but, as so often and so tragically the case, that was all it needed: soldiers went wild, torturing, bayoneting and shooting civilians, setting homes on fire and dumping corpses in ditches and construction trenches. At 11.30 pm, some soldiers broke into the University of Leuven’s library, located in the 14th-century cloth hall, and set it ablaze. In 10 hours, the fire destroyed over 230,000 books, including 750 medieval manuscripts. Over the following two days, the destruction continued, and 248 civilians would eventually die, most of the city’s 42,000 inhabitants were driven into the countryside and 1,100 buildings were destroyed. All, essentially, for nothing. When the university’s reconstructed library was opened in 1927, the rector, Paulin Ladeuze, said “At Louvain, German disqualified itself as a nation of thinkers”.

This marks the date in 1944 on which the German garrison in Paris surrendered to the Allies and the French capital was fully liberated. Hitler had ordered that the city “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris” and wanted buildings and bridges destroyed, but the military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had neither the capacity nor the inclination to do as the Führer wished. At 3.30 pm, he surrendered at the Hôtel Meurice opposite the Tuileries Gardens, was driven to the Paris Police Prefecture to sign the official instrument of surrender and thence was taken to the Gare Montparnasse, headquarters of the French commander General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, to signify the formal surrender of German military personnel. Choltitz was held as a prisoner of war, first at Trent Park in north London, then at Camp Clinton, Mississippi, before being released without charge in 1947. He died in 1966.

If you have a fondness for saints called Genesius, then, boy, are you in luck. Today is the feast day of St Genesius of Rome, a comedian and actor who had a sudden conversion while performing in a play which mocked baptism and was put to death in AD 303; St Genesius of Arles, martyred in AD 303 or AD 308 and the patron of notaries; and St Genesius of Cartagena, a semi-legendary Spanish saint who may in fact be the same person as one or both of the preceding Genesiuses but is the patron of sailors, vintners and agricultural labourers, and invoked against hernias and storms. It is also the feast day of St Louis IX of France, the Capetian king who ruled from 1226 to 1270, fought off Henry III’s attempts to reclaim his Angevin ancestral lands and expanded the Kingdom of France by annexing large parts of Aquitaine, Maine and Provence. He was also a reliable antisemite, forcing French Jews to wear a yellow badge (uh-oh) and overseeing the Disputation of Paris, otherwise known as the Trial of the Talmud (uh-oh), in 1240 which condemned the Jewish holy book and saw 10,000 volumes of Hebrew manuscripts being burned on 12 June 1242.

Uruguay today celebrates Independence Day, to mark the country’s secession from the Empire of Brazil in 1825, although it was not recognised for a further three years. In Brazil, today is Soldiers’ Day (Dia do Soldado), celebrating the history and achievements of the Brazilian Army. In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, they are today marking (because they have no choice) the Day of Songun, marking the date in 1960 on which Kim Jong Il accompanied his father, Kim Il Sung, to a military base in Pyongyang and was inspired with the idea of a “military-first” (Songun) policy of government.

Factoids

1. The biggest single consumer of Bénédictine liqueur in the world is Burnley Miners’ Social Club in Lancashire. The origins of this supposedly lie in the First World War. In September 1914, in response to the call for volunteers from the war secretary Lord Kitchener, the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington), East Lancashire Regiment, was raised in just 10 days. The unit, dubbed “the Accrington Pals”, was assigned to the 94th Brigade of the 31st Division. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, it was given the task of attacking the village of Serre-lès-Puisieux and forming a defensive flank for the main British advance, but the division came badly unstuck and the Accrington Pals suffered horrifying casualties. Around 700 men went over the top and within half an hour 235 had been killed and 350 wounded. The story goes that some of the wounded soldiers were served Bénédictine while recuperating in hospital at the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy where the drink is made, and carried the taste back to East Lancashire with them. The 600-member club now consumes 1,000 bottles of Bénédictine every year, some of it served with hot water as a “Bene’ ’n ’ot”, though some younger patrons prefer it mixed with Red Bull as a “Bene Bomb”. Burnley Football Club also sells Bénédictine at its Turf Moor ground, believed to be the only football venue in England where it is on offer.

2. The Mayflower Pub in Rotherhithe dates back to around 1550. It takes its current name from the ship which carried the Pilgrim Fathers to America and left from a mooring just by the pub in 1620 (and to which it returned before being broken up in 1624), and there is a memorial to the Mayflower’s captain, Christopher Jones, in the nearby St Mary’s Church. It was previously called the Spread Eagle and Crown but was renamed the Mayflower in 1957, the same year a replica of the original ship, dubbed Mayflower II, sailed from Plymouth in Devon to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where it can still be seen (I have). One of the pub’s distinctions is that it is the only public house in the country licensed to sell British and United States stamps.

3. As regular readers will know, I was (for my sins) born in Stockton-on-Tees, then the closest maternity hospital to my parents’ home in Sedgefield in County Durham. The town was one end of the world’s first public steam railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in September 1825 and was used to transport coal. However, another claim to fame came shortly after that. John Walker (1781-1859) began his career as an apprentice to Watson Alcock, Stockton’s principal surgeon, but discovered a deep aversion to surgical procedures—a substantial handicap—and instead turned to chemistry. In 1818, he started a pharmacy at 59 High Street, and one of his interests was finding a convenient way to kindle fire. As so many great discoveries do, his came by accident: he scraped a matchstick tipped with a combustible chemical mixture against the hearth and it caught light. Walker had invented the friction match, which revolutionised the production and portability of fire. He began manufacturing matches made of slivers of wood or cardboard dipped in sulphur and tipped with a mixture of sulphide of antimony, chloride of potash and gum, and called them Friction Lights. He sold them for a shilling for a box of 50, and they came with a folded piece of sandpaper against which the match-head could be struck, selling the first on 12 April 1827. However, despite advice to the contrary, Walker failed to patent his invention, and in 1829 a London-based manufacturer called Samuel Jones produced (and patented) the same item as Lucifers.

4. In the course of, well, never mind what, I discovered that American singer-songwriter Gene Pitney, probably best known for the Bacharach/David-penned Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, died in the Hilton Cardiff, of a heart attack in April 2006. It made me think about other unlikely celebrity death locations (as you do), so here are four more: Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (heart attack, 22 April 1908, 10 Downing Street: he had resigned as prime minister 19 days earlier but was too ill to move, and is the only premier to die there); 1st Earl Kitchener (presumed drowned, 5 June 1916, on board HMS Hampshire somewhere west of Orkney; the ship struck a recently laid German mine); Elvis Presley (heart attack and drug abuse, 15 August 1977, having fallen off the toilet in his Graceland mansion); Tommy Cooper (heart attack, 15 April 1984, on stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Westminster: the audience thought it was part of his act).

5. The Elizabeth line, which began as Crossrail in 2001, runs from Heathrow and Reading in the west to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east, 41 stations distributed along 73 miles of track. It opened in May 2022 and as it happens I have travelled on it once and once only, as it pulls off the neat trick of not really going anywhere I want to go. However, its success is extraordinary: in its second year of operation it saw 200 million journeys undertaken and—here’s the real headline—it accounts for 14 per cent of all rail travel in the United Kingdom.

6. You might think that 20 years from proposal to operation is a rather lengthy genesis for the Elizabeth line. However, the idea of large-diameter tunnels through central London to connect Paddington and Liverpool Street was first proposed in The Star on 14 June 1941 by George Dow, press relations officer for the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), the second-largest of the “big four” railway companies before nationalisation. This idea was taken up by London County Council’s County of London Plan of 1943, written by Professor Patrick Abercrombie and J.H. Forshaw, and Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan the following year. In 1944, the minister of war transport, Lord Leathers, appointed a Railway (London Plan) Committee under the chairmanship of engineer Charles Inglis, vice-provost of King’s College London, to examine this and other ideas, producing reports in 1946 and 1948. The project then vanished from view for nearly 30 years.

7. This is the anniversary in 1945 of the abdication of Bảo Đại, the last Emperor of Vietnam. Today there is by general agreement only one emperor remaining in the world, His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, Naruhito. In Japanese he is referred to as Tennō (天皇), or “heavenly sovereign”, while his father Akihito, who abdicated in 2019, is Daijō Tennō (太上天皇), “emperor emeritus”. The British sovereign was Emperor (or Empress) of India from 1876 to 1948, while Haile Selassie I was the last Emperor of Ethiopia, being overthrown in 1974 and the monarchy abolished in 1975. He was called nəgusä nägäst (ንጉሠ ነገሥት) or “king of kings” in Ge’ez and atse (ዐፄ) or '“emperor” in Amharic. The only other post-war imperial dignity was the self-proclaimed Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire (1976-79), previously president of the Central African Republic (1966-76).

8. The last Emperor of China, Puyi, abdicated in 1912 at the age of six. He was restored for 12 days in July 1917, then served as Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria in north-east China, from 1934 to 1945. However, having lost an imperial title three times, he lived quietly in Beijing until his death in 1967.

9. If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, will become the third Minnesotan to serve as vice-president. The first was Hubert Humphrey, vice-president under Lyndon Johnson (1965-69) and senator for Minnesota 1949-64 and 1971-78; the second was Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice-president (1977-81) and senator for Minnesota 1964-76, having replaced Humphrey. Not bad for a state of 5.7 million people which was the 32nd to be admitted to the Union in 1858.

10. The state bird of Minnesota in the common loon.

“I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.” (P.J. O’Rourke)

1. “Good Afternoon: Diana Mosley”: last week I was talking to someone about Lady Mosley, née the Hon. Diana Mitford, as one does, and I was reminded of this interview broadcast on Thames Television in April 1977. The interviewer is Welsh journalist and writer Mavis Nicholson, who used the seemingly mild surroundings of an afternoon chat show to subtly devastating effect. Mosley was by then 66, and her second husband, fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, was still alive; they lived in Orsay just outside Paris. You can see why contemporaries found the young Diana Mitford compelling, if not quite charming, but her utter lack of contrition for her and her husband’s Nazi sympathies is horrifying. She speaks with obvious affection of Adolf Hitler (guest of honour at her wedding to Sir Oswald at the home of Joseph Goebbels in Berlin in 1936). Of her husband and his creation first of the New Party then the British Union of Fascists, she says “there was somebody who seemed to know the answer. Now, looking back, one sees that he was right.” Her portrayal of Hitler is utterly chilling: “he hardly ever talked about the Jews”. Well, no, he wouldn’t, would he? She really was a monster.

2. “Michael Caine on Acting in Film, Arts and Entertainment”: part of a BBC series on acting, the 1987 masterclass is so well known now that it has been parodied, one of the sincerest forms of acknowledgement, but I was rewatching it this week and it very much bears another look. Caine coaches five young actors—Simon Cutter, Ian Redford, Celia Imrie, Mark Jefferis and Shirin Taylor—in scenes from Alfie (1966), Deathtrap (1982) and Educating Rita (1983), and reveals fascinating tricks and techniques of acting on camera. It’s easy to take Caine for granted, especially given some of the roles he undertook for obvious commercial reasons (yes, we’re looking at you here, 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge) but he was, and indeed is, a meticulous craftsman with a sharp eye for detail who has the impressive skill of making something hard look easy.

3. “The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince”: there are many reasons to criticise the BBC but it consistently produces and screens first-rate contemporary documentaries, and this two-part profile of Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is no exception. With a wealth of interviews with talking heads and input from Channel 4 News’s distinguished foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman, it examines the rise of MBS from the fringes of Saudi politics to a central and dominant position, his liberalising positions on some issues including women’s rights and the influence of hardline Wahhabi clergy and his parallel ruthlessness which culminated in the brutal murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. I have long argued that if we want any influence in the Middle East, it boils down to a choice between allying with Saudi Arabia and allying with Iran, and on those terms Riyadh wins every time, so we need to come to terms with the contradictions in MBS’s character and approach. Essential viewing.

4. “GoodFellows: Generally Speaking—McMaster on Trump Foreign Policy and Technology Warfare”: I get a great deal of slightly geeky pleasure from the punningly titled GoodFellows, a series made by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and featuring economist John Cochrane, historian Sir Niall Ferguson and former US national security advisor H.R. McMaster. This episode is a one-on-one interview with McMaster by research fellow and journalist Bill Whalen, and draws on his distinguished military career and political experience to explore what American foreign policy might look like under a second Trump presidency, as well as potential developments in warfare, equipment and doctrine in the future.

5. “The Day of the Jackal”: in November, Sky will be broadcasting a new series based on birthday boy Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch and written by Ronan Bennett. It may well be perfectly good, but, honestly, why bother? Do something new. In the meantime, revisit Fred Zinnemann’s iconic 1973 film adaptation, in which Edward Fox at his handsome, English peak plays the eponymous assassin, with a stellar supporting cast including Michael Lonsdale, Derek Jacobi, Terence Alexander, Tony Britton, Donald Sinden, Cyril Cusack, Maurice Denham, Delphine Seyrig, Timothy West and others. It is a story that shouldn’t work, because you know from the outset how it will end, but Forsyth’s meticulous storytelling, brilliantly stylish cinematography and a fine script by Kenneth Ross combine to produce a taut, absorbing masterpiece.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” (Stephen King)

1. “Someone Is Watching. Is It God, Or Your Boss?”: my excellent lawyer friend Tim, a formidable cinéaste, recently invited me to the BFI for a screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid surveillance masterpiece The Conversation (1974), followed by a Q&A with Walter Murch, the supervising editor and sound designer. This article in The Atlantic by film critic Mark Asch, brilliantly dissects the film, taking in its contemporary context of the unfolding Watergate scandal, its significant debt to Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Gene Hackman’s mesmerising central performance as Harry Caul. I recommended The Conversation a few weeks ago, so if you haven’t seen it (why not?), do watch it, and then savour this article all the more.

2. “The cinematic future is bright”: an upbeat examination of the cinema industry by Rob Hutton in The Critic, which cheers the soul of anyone who loves that experience of the hush which descends over a darkened room as the film begins to play. Although the death of the cinema is often gloomily predicted, Hutton points out that ticket sales rose every year between 2010 and 2020, and the advent of digital film means that a picture house can be run with a tiny skeleton staff. The lockdown imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic was a severe challenge to the industry but it is rallying and there is considerable optimism, despite the obvious rival of streaming at home. As Tim Richards, founder and CEO of cinema chain Vue International, notes, “We are social beings. We like to enjoy things together socially, eating a meal out, listening to music together, or watching a movie together. And movies watched collectively, well, they’re scarier, they’re funnier, and they’re sadder.” Let’s hope that remains true.

3. “Tory leadership hopefuls must face some hard truths”: in this bracing Financial Times piece, Tim Leunig, former economic adviser to Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak and visiting professor at the London School of Economics, argues forcefully that a Conservative Party hoping to recover appeal and political potency will have to accept, absorb and articulate some uncomfortable truths. These include, in his view, unilateral regulatory alignment with the European Union, scrapping tax breaks for small businesses in favour of “larger, more productive firms”, supporting green energy and abandoning the triple lock on pensions. I don’t agree with every assertion but Leunig is an intelligent and well-informed commentator and the Conservatives need honest, robust and exacting debates about their future if they really are to pull themselves out of the mire. File this under “thought-provoking”.

4. “Memo to Trump: Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right. Period.”: one of my favourite American commentators, George Will, is on typically brisk and resolute form in his latest column for The Washington Post. He is starkly dismissive of Donald Trump’s ambition to change the Fourteenth Amendment and end birthright citizenship in America, a provision introduced in 1868 to affirm the status as citizens of African Americans which had been shamefully denied by what Will calls “the Supreme Court’s worst decision”, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Trump is targeting the children of illegal immigrants, a class which was not even conceived of when the amendment was ratified in 1868, but Will argues that the principle is solid and undeniable in the Constitution: “Birth on U.S. soil is entry into the community of persons subject to U.S. laws.” Clear, lucid and forceful.

5. “Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley”: a fascinating essay from Henry Oliver’s Substack The Common Reader, considering the future of the literary canon. Harold Bloom was one of America’s leading literary critics, Sterling professor of humanities at Yale University, and a robust defender of the traditional Western canon with little patience for those who smothered it in academic theories and deconstructions. Oliver argues that the tech elite of Silicon Valley has a huge interest in history and heritage, and its leaders “see it as part of the great ongoing attempt to preserve and progress human society”. He points to Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreessen and computer scientist and entrepreneur Paul Graham as major players who study the achievements of the past carefully and closely. Oliver argues that Bloom’s dedication to the canon is reflected in the interests of these figures. “Take yourself away to some quiet place and read great literature. Nurture your inner self. Feed your imagination. Not for any special purpose or particular gain, but because it is the only way to develop your own self without the crushing collective influence of modern society.”

Great is the art of beginning…

… as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow concluded, but greater is the art of ending. So, consider this great art, and enjoy the bank holiday weekend. Kwaheri, as they say in East Africa.