Sunday round-up 26 January 2025
Birthday wishes to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Lucinda Williams and José Mourinho on this feast of St Paula of Rome, the first nun, while India marks Republic Day
We’re fair rattling through the year, aren’t we? Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that an new-but-old President of the United States, Donald John Trump, was sworn into office on Monday—I wrote about it for The Hill here—along with the third-youngest Vice-President in history, J(ames).D(avid). Vance, 40.
Our cake-and-champagne champions today include director, writer, actor and celebrated Orson Welles intimate Henry Jaglom (87), feminist and Marxist activist, academic and former Black Panther Angela Davis (81), writer and director Sir Christopher Hampton (79), massively successful and surprisingly controversial French singer Michel Sardou (78), actor David Strathairn (76), former Prime Minister of Denmark and Secretary-General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen (72), singer-songwriter and guitarist Lucinda Williams (72), comedienne, actress and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (67), ubiquitous football manager and “Special One” José Mourinho (62), surviving half of Wham! and cycling enthusiast Andrew Ridgeley (62), former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (60), actor, musician and Drogheda native Colin O’Donoghue (44), multiple Grands Prix winner Sergio Pérez (35) and first known surviving octuplets Noah, Maliyah, Isaiah, Nariyah, Jonah, Makai, Josiah and Jeremiah Solomon (16).
Those who would be celebrating but for the minor hurdle of being dead include former Chief of Staff of the United States Army and Medal of Honor winner General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1880), pioneering engine designer Sir Harry Ricardo (1885), consigliere to the Luciano crime family Frank Costello (1891), Irish lawyer and politician Seán MacBride (1904), legendary singing nun, mountain enthusiast and naval wife Maria von Trapp (1905), jazz violinist and co-founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France Stéphane Grappelli (1908), co-founder of Sony Akio Morita (1921), actor, screenwriter and Goon Michael Bentine (1922), former Bishop of Durham and Virgin Birth sceptic David Jenkins (1925), Hollywood legend, racing driver, entrepreneur and owner of iconic blue eyes Paul Newman (1925), actor and director Roger Vadim (1928), mesmerising cellist Jacqueline du Pré (1945), former leader of the Freedom Party of Austria Jörg Haider (1950) and rock guitar legend Eddie van Halen (1955).
Catholicism redux
Today in 1564, Pope Pius IV issued a bull entitled Benedictus Deus, which ratified all the decrees and definitions of the Council of Trent (1545-63), gave the Pope sole authority over their interpretations and enforced obedience to that authority on all Catholics, under pain of excommunication. The ecumenical council had been a protracted and agonising business, with 25 sessions being held between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563. There were three main period of conciliar activity: 1545 to 1547, under the authority of Paul III; 1551 to 1552, overseen by Julius III; and 1562 to 1563, under Pius IV. It would be the last council of the Roman Catholic Church for more than 300 years.
Trent was the eventual response to reformist movements which had grown into Protestantism over the first half of the 16th century. To the disappointment of some, there was little compromise, and the council in essence reaffirmed and clarified the lineaments of traditional Catholicism: the validity of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was agreed, St Jerome’s Vulgate was recognised as the official translation of the Scriptures, justification was asserted to be offered on the basis of human cooperation with divine grace, as opposed to the Protestant doctrine of justification by irresistible grace, the seven sacraments were restated and the Eucharist declared a true propitiatory sacrifice.
Pius IV’s affirmation of the Tridentine decrees effectively closed the door on any kind of major reconciliation between dissenters and the church. Virtually no ground was given on any substantive point, and obedience was demanded. The Reformation was entering a new phase.
Overpaid, oversexed and over here
On this day in 1942, the first American troops of the Second World War arrived in the United Kingdom. It was a mere 50 days after the Japanese attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which finally brought the United States into the conflict, and the first convoy, A-10, brought 4,058 service personnel through hostile waters from Brooklyn in 11 days. They came from the 34th Infantry Division, a National Guard formation headquartered in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and known as the Red Bull Division after the device on its sleeve insignia. Its first unit to arrive was the 133rd Infantry Regiment, recruited principally in Minnesota, and the first soldier photographed setting foot in Belfast that day was Private Milburn Henke, though others had already come ashore. The crowd cheered the new arrivals and a local band played Marching Through Georgia, a Civil War era song written by Henry Clay Work, commemorating General William Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864.
Those 4,000 soldiers were the very tip of the spearhead. Over the next three and a half years, 300,000 American military personnel would be stationed in Northern Ireland, while 1.5 million would be deployed in or pass through the United Kingdom on their way to the theatres of conflict. To avoid unnecessary friction or misunderstanding, the US Department of War prepared a pamphlet entitled A Pocket Guide to Northern Ireland, which was issued to all personnel. It explained that there were two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, of which one was neutral, advised against discussions of religion or politics, and warned “you may not like the Irish climate”. A great deal was compressed into the phrase “Irish history is endlessly complicated”. It is a fascinating and often hilarious read.
Feast or famine?
Today we remember St Timothy of Ephesus (AD 30-AD 97), evangelist and first Bishop of Ephesus; St Titus (1st century AD), companion and disciple of St Paul the Apostle; St Paula of Rome (AD 347-AD 404), an aristocratic Roman who was a disciple of St Jerome and is regarded as the first nun; and St Alberic of Cîteaux (d. 1109), a hermit who was one of the founders of the Order of Cistercians.
Today is Australia Day, marking the anniversary of the arrival of the “First Fleet” in Sydney Cove in 1788, and Republic Day in India, commemorating the adoption in 1950 of the Constitution of India.
Factoids
It is by now well known that Donald Trump is the second President of the United States to serve non-consecutive terms after Democrat Grover Cleveland (1885-89 and 1893-97). Increasingly few candidates, whether they have been President or not, enter the lists more than once: Richard Nixon was defeated in 1960 before winning two terms in 1968 and 1972; Adlai Stevenson stood against Dwight Eisenhower and lost in 1952 and 1956; Thomas Dewey was the unsuccessful Republican candidate against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 then Harry Truman in 1948; Democrat Martin van Buren, having been President from 1837 to 1841, was denied a second term by Whig William Henry Harrison and ran again in 1848 for the Free Soil Party. But for real dedication you have to look at two men who made three unsuccessful bids for the White House: Henry Clay ran as a Democratic-Republican in 1824 then a National Republican in 1832 and 1844; while William Jennings Bryan carried the Democratic Party’s standard to defeat in 1896, 1900 and 1908.
While we’re discussing presidential elections, it is interesting (well I think it is) to note that close, direct descendants of presidents who themselves aim for the nation’s highest office always succeed: John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams (1797-1801), was sixth President of the United States (1825-29); Benjamin Harrison, grandson of William Henry Harrison (Mar-Apr 1841), was 23rd President (1889-93); George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush (1989-93), was 43rd President (2001-09).
By contrast, descent from a leading politician who never made it to the White House tends to end in defeat: John Davis, the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in 1924, was the son of a West Virginia Congressman; Adlai Stevenson, who lost for the Democrats in 1952 and 1956, was the grandson and namesake of Vice-President Adlai Stevenson; Al Gore, the losing Democrat in 2000, was the son of a senator from Tennessee; and Mitt Romney, the unsuccessful Republican candidate in 2012, was the son of a former governor of Michigan. Hillary Clinton, of course, who lost on the Democratic ticket in 2016, is the wife of a former president.
It has always slightly addled my brain that to look at the stars is to look back in time, since they are so far away that the light reaching us was emitted millennia ago. Without a telescope, the visible stars are around 4,000 light years away, so what you see in the night sky are the heavens as they were in around 2,000 BC: Stonehenge was just being completed, horses were first being tamed, the Minoan civilisation was beginning to develop in Crete and settlements began to appear on an island in the River Mincio in northern Italy which would become the city of Mantua.
The Trojan Horse, the device used by the Greek armies to gain access to the city of Troy and capture it, is not mentioned in The Iliad, Homer’s epic tale of the Trojan Wars, and is only referred to briefly in The Odyssey. Its story comes to us from the great Latin poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, in which its construction and use to smuggle a small group of Greek warriors inside the city walls are described. In addition, of course, devised by Odysseus, it was not a Trojan horse at all but a Greek horse.
Mary Tudor (1516-58) (see below), the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, was the first Queen of England and Ireland in her own right, and claimed the throne of France, as every English monarch did between 1340 and 1802. She was also Defender of the Faith, a title granted to Henry in 1521 by Pope Leo X, and, for a short while before she abjured a style which offended her religious sensibilities, “of the Church of England and of Ireland on Earth Supreme Head”. After her marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554, she became Queen of Naples and Jerusalem and, with her husband, Prince of Spain and Sicily, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant and Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol. When Philip succeeded to the Spanish throne in 1556, she also became Queen of Spain and both the Sicilies.
The stereotype still lingers of the British Army in the First World War being a contrast between ordinary soldiers who died at a terrifying rate, commanded by incompetent senior officers safely behind the lines: the so-called “Lions led by donkeys”. In fact the casualty rate among British generals was relatively high, to such an extent that in October 1915 the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Robertson, instructed corps and divisional commanders not to expose themselves to unnecessary risk. It is estimated that 78 general officers were killed as a result of active service during the conflict. These included the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal The Earl Kitchener, who was lost when HMS Hampshire sank off Orkney in June 1916; Lieutenant General Samuel Lomax, fatally wounded at the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914; and Lieutenant General Robert Broadwood, killed by artillery fire in June 1917. By contrast, only 42 French generals were killed.
In December 2013, a couple matched with each other on Tinder in Antarctica. An American scientist at McMurdo Station logged into the dating/sex app out of curiosity, and initially found, as expected, no matches. When he widened the geographical radius, however, he found the profile of a female researcher working at a field camp in the Dry Valleys 45 minutes away by helicopter, and swiped right to indicate his interest. Shortly afterwards, she did the same and they were matched.
The only letter of the alphabet which does not occur in the name of any US state is Q. (It does, however, appear twice in the name of New Mexico’s largest city, Albuquerque, and in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, former capital of the Cherokee Nation.)
Only 24 of the 50 states of the Union have had the same capital since gaining statehood.
“We write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.” (Virginia Woolf)
“Rabbits”: I’d been meaning to read Hugo Rifkind’s second novel (his first, Overexposure, was published nearly 20 years ago) because I like his writing and because the shtick sounded as of it would be my sort of thing: coming-of-age, Scottish boarding schools, house parties, castles, teenage angst. It was, and I devoured it in a couple of days. It’s hard to sum up the plot or even the tenor of the book, because it is witty, snide, laugh-out-loud funny, scabrous, tense, acute, well-observed and bitterly, brutally sad, often within a few paragraphs. Val McDermid called it as “darkly funny as Saltburn, but with kilts”, which is sort of true yet slightly unfair both on the book and the film, but is a good line for the promotion. Look, I loved it, accepting the fact that I’m a man, I’m a few months younger than Hugo, I went to a Scottish university and my family are Scots (indeed, my late mother and Hugo’s father were sometimes at the same synagogue in Edinburgh in the late 1960s). But it’s written with real brio and depth. And the fact that I kept sending snippets to friends is a very good sign.
“Government must resist the urge to interfere”: in The Financial Times, Camilla Cavendish (Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit under David Cameron) argues that Rachel Reeves is right to identify excessively burdensome regulation as a barrier to growth and criticises “constantly changing rules which businesses struggle to keep up with; complexity spawning ranks of lobbyists; and inherent mission creep”. As a free marketeer, I’m all in favour of flexible, light-touch regulation, but where I differ from the Chancellor’s stance is that I think regulators should focus on risk—because it’s a fundamental part of their role—and I suspect that it is a disingenuous lack of policy ideas which has led to ministers trying to turn the spotlight on bodies like the Competition and Markets Authority. Appropriate, effective regulation, yes, but growth will only come from the private sector if the government uses its limited but key powers to create the right conditions.
“Don’t ban political lying”: Ben Sixsmith in The Critic neatly articulates two points which I frequently make: that a legalistic attempt to criminalise “lying” in our political discourse is naïf, muddle-headed and doomed, and that we must be wary of identifying what we think of as essential and irrefutable “truth”. Politics is a battle of ideas and persuasion, of ways of viewing the world, and “truth” and “lies” are rarely clear-cut. It is also firmly not an arena into which he want the judiciary to extend its interest.
“How Pierre Poilievre led Canada’s Conservatives back from the wilderness”: it is the inevitable gravitational pull, I suppose, which makes British politicians focus on their American counterparts, despite the differences in the institutional and philosophical landscape, while paying much less attention to a Westminster-style polity next door, Canada (home of the only other House of Commons in the world). James Heale in The Spectator analyses the extraordinary rise of the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, who seems nailed on for a substantial election victory later this year thereby becoming Prime Minister. Those on the centre-right in this country are correct to study his progress carefully and distil lessons while sifting out that which is context-specific: Poilievre is on the brink of power because of his tireless dedication, his understanding of the electorate and his concentration on a handful of central issues which resonate broadly. I have no doubt that Team Badenoch is taking notes.
“Inside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Big Business Ambitions, 5 Years After Their Royal Exit”: I am not absorbed by the royal family’s internal dramas in the same way some people are, though I am an unflinching monarchist and find the institution fascinating, but I confess that I find little to which I can warm in the Duchess of Sussex. This essay by Anna Peele in Vanity Fair is a fascinating study of Harry and Meghan, however, remaining balanced and fair-minded while offering, or transmitting, some devastating judgements. The portrait which emerges (to me, at least) is one of a couple with substantial self-regard, ambition and entitlement but little focus or grasp of the real world: they want to be the sort of people who do good things, but have no idea how that could be achieved in an effective way. Even if only half of the anecdotes in this piece are true, it is not a flattering picture.
“The TV was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time.” (Don DeLillo)
“Lucy Worsley Investigates: Bloody Mary”: without apology, another instalment in Dr Lucy Worsley’s new BBC2 series, this time examining the reign and reputation of Mary I, England’s first queen regnant and the victim of the calumny of Protestant historians. Readers will know of my profound affection for the unfortunate queen, and also for Dr Worsley, so this was a no-brainer for me, but it is also level-headed and fair. Mary I’s reign really is a great example of a period of which, if people know only a little, they know nothing.
“Paul Newman at the NFT”: it is the centenary of Paul Newman’s birth, so a perfect occasion for the BBC to show this May 1973 interview at the National Film Theatre with Joan (now Baroness) Bakewell. It was an interesting time for the actor: at 48, he was not young any more, and had Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Exodus, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Winning and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid behind him. Yet it was six months before The Sting was released, and the future still held The Towering Inferno, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, The Color of Money (for which he would win an Academy Award), The Hudsucker Proxy and The Road to Perdition; he would also finish second overall at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979 and found the food company Newman’s Own. Readers will have their own favourite performances, but for me perhaps his greatest was simply being Paul Newman. He oozed charisma of a particular and intoxicating kind, as one or two friends who met him attest vehemently. Ultimately, Newman was a genuine movie star.
“Carole King and James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name”: hard to go wrong, but a fine documentary of two of the classiest singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s (terrifying that King is now in her 80s and Taylor in his late 70s). You could ditch the narrative and just watch the pair performing and it would still be great entertainment, but the story of their relationship is a fascinating and rather heart-warming one. It is also, in microcosm, the story of a particular strand of American popular music, one which I would not be without. Enjoy the luxury.
“The Last Waltz”: this week saw the death at 87 of outlandishly talented Canadian multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band. The group was a remarkable phenomenon, a flowering of spectacular creativity from a collection of sessions musicians who had supported first Ronnie Hawkins then Bob Dylan. It is a tribute to their critical importance that when they gave what they billed as their farewell concert appearance at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on 25 November 1976, Martin Scorsese filmed the event and released it as a documentary 18 months later. Worth watching for The Band’s mesmerising artistry but also for the “special guests”: Hawkins and Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Dr John, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Wood, Neil Young, Muddy Waters… their presence tells you everything you need to know. So long, Garth.
“The History of Homosexuality”: I’m not entirely sure what led me to this lecture by Sir Noel Malcolm, the first in a series of four for the Pharos Foundation, and it is devoid of razzmatazz or drama. Malcolm is careful, precise and measured, but I found it a fascinating examination of same-sex attraction in the early modern world and the profound difference between what was then an inclination and is now an identity.
Fare thee well…
… as Lord Byron said, and if for ever, still for ever, fare thee well. But let us hope it is not forever.