Sunday round-up 28 April 2024

Today marks the Mutiny on the Bounty, the resignation of President de Gaulle and the 1978 coup in Afghanistan, plus a slew of celebrity birthdays: did you send a card?

Lots of birthdays today: you may have forgotten to send cards to former United States secretary of state James Baker (94), multiple Golden Globe winner Ann-Margret (83), BBC Sport icon Steve Rider (74), leading monetarist Tim Congdon (73), associate justice of the US Supreme Court Elena Kagan (64), author Sir Ian Rankin (64), surgeon and newly appointed Knight of the Garter Lord Kakkar (60), film legend Penélope Cruz (50), presenter and Sunderland deity Lauren Laverne (46), cyclist Sir Bradley Wiggins (44) and actress Jessica Alba (43). Celebrating in the afterlife are Saddam Hussein and his former foreign minister Tariq Aziz, born a year apart in the 1930s.

In other news, as it were, on this day in 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh, captain of HMS Bounty, was set adrift with 18 of his sailors 30 miles south of Tofua in the Pacific Ocean after a mutiny led by Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate. Bligh’s departing pledge to the remaining crew was “Never fear, lads, I’ll do you justice if ever I reach England”. Eighty years later, in 1869, Chinese and Irish labourers working on the Central Pacific Railroad stretching eastward from Sacramento, California, laid 10 miles of track in a single day. It is an achievement which has never been matched.

A century after that back-breaking labour, in 1969, General Charles de Gaulle resigned as president of the Fifth French Republic. He had been in office for just over a decade. Nine years later, in 1978, the president of Afghanistan, Mohammad Daoud Khan, was assassinated in a communist coup d’état. Eighteen months later, as the Marxist-Leninist government encountered rising resistance, the USSR invaded to assist its fellow communists.

In Japan, today is the 12th celebration of Restoration of Sovereignty Day (主権回復の日): it was inaugurated by prime minister Shinzo Abe to mark the end of the US military occupation of Japan in 1952 under the terms of the Treaty of San Francisco. It is also Afghanistan’s Mujahideen Victory Day, commemorating not the coup of 1978 but the régime’s defeat by Mujahideen insurgents on the same date in 1992.

On the religious front, today is the feast of St Aphrodisius, an Egyptian martyr beheaded in around AD 65 in southern France along with his companions Caralippus, Agapius and Eusebius. His head was kicked into a well by the pagans who killed him but, according to tradition, the water gushed out and the saint picked up his head and carried it through the nearby city of Béziers (see below, Factoids). It is also the festal day of St Pamphilus of Sulmona, St Cyril of Turov and St Peter Chanel, among others.

For lovers of profanity like me, it is disappointingly Clean Comedy Day. It is also the potentially massively problematic and allegation-strewn Kiss Your Mate Day (please, please ask permission), Biological Clock Day (not as grim as you think) and—this I can get behind—Great Poetry Reading Day. What a time to be alive.

Factoids

1. Having been to BFI last weekend to see Michael Mann’s sweepingly epic The Last of the Mohicans, I was thinking about the word “Yankee”. Its etymology is uncertain, as with so many familiar terms. The Oxford English Dictionary proposes as “the most plausible conjecture” that it derives from the Dutch Janke, a diminutive of Jan, so roughly equivalent to “Johnny”, and could have been applied to early Dutch settlers along the Hudson Valley and thence to New Englanders more generally. Its first known use in English is in a letter by Major General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, who in 1758 scornfully offered to send a fellow officer “two companies of Yankees... better for ranging and scouting than for work and vigilance”, but Wolfe’s employment of the term meant it was obviously clearly understood. There have been numerous theories proposing a root in one of the native languages of America, including Cherokee and Algonquin; James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote the 1826 novel on which Mann’s film is based, suggested it was a corruption of the word “English” through an intermediate “Yengeese”. But it caught on quickly, and by 1778 its shortening, “Yank”, was already in currency to mean an American.

2. Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) was—as far as we can say certainly—the last pontiff to have fathered children. He was born Ugo Boncompagni in 1502 in Bologna, then an independent city-state ruled by Giovanni II Bentivoglio, and graduated in law from the city’s venerable university. He worked as a papal official for some years and was not ordained until he was 56, then created cardinal-priest of San Sisto Vecchio in 1565 and sent to the Council of Trent as a delegate by Pius IV. When Pope Pius V died on 1 May 1572, the conclave which assembled, 53 cardinals strong, quickly and unanimously chose Cardinal Boncompagni, then 70 years old, to be the next bishop of Rome. (Almost unanimously: Boncompagni himself voted for the Burgundian statesman Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, archbishop of Mechelen and viceroy of Naples.) In 1547, while working at the Council of Trent which had relocated to Bologna to avoid plague, he had a relationship with an unmarried woman called Maddalena Fulchini; on 8 May 1548, she gave birth to a son, Giacomo. The child was legitimated at two months old, and entrusted to the Jesuits to be educated. Giacomo moved to Rome when his father became pope and amassed wealth and property, eventually becoming Duke of Sora, Aquino, Arce and Arpino, and Marquess of Vignola. If any pope since has fathered children, there is no proof of the fact.

3. In the summer of 1579, James fitz Maurice FitzGerald, an Irish Catholic exile who had been captain-general of the 14th Earl of Desmond, sailed from the Galician port of Coruña with a fleet of four ships and a small Irish, Spanish and Italian force of 50 men to raise a rebellion in Ireland. They landed on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry and the papal representative, Fr Nicholas Sanders, paraded a banner from Rome and declared a holy war. The uprising attracted some support and was reinforced in September 1580 by a landing of 600 Spanish and Italian troops sponsored by Gregory XIII. However, besieged by an English army at Smerwick, the rebels surrendered on 10 November, and the new lord deputy of Ireland, Lord Grey de Wilton, allowed most of the defenders to be massacred. I mention this because the plan, insofar as there was one, was for a Catholic uprising to result in the proclamation as king of Ireland of Giacomo Boncompagni, the son of the pope.

4. We talk a lot about America’s Monroe Doctrine, articulated 200 years ago by President James Monroe in his annual State of the Union address in 1823. (I wrote about it last December.) Essentially, it sought to draw a line under European colonialism and regarded outside intervention in the Americas as potentially an act of aggression against the United States. It has often been used as an example of American exceptionalism and imperial overreach, but it had a latter-day counterpart in Soviet foreign policy in the form of the Brezhnev Doctrine, publicised in the wake of the Prague Spring in 1968. Its basic proposition was that any threat to “socialist rule” in the Warsaw Pact or the wider socialist family in the East was a threat to all members, and therefore justified intervention by any “socialist” state. Retrospectively, of course, it was the theology which supported the Soviet intervention that year in Czechoslovakia as well as the crushing of the uprising in Hungary in 1956, and it was also the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 (see above). The imposition of martial law in Poland by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981 without the intervention of the Soviet Union raised question marks over the Brezhnev Doctrine, and when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to assist the government of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 it was effectively dead. However, President Putin’s claim to legitimate influence in the “near abroad” (ближнее зарубежье), the states bordering Russia, bears traces of the Soviet-era philosophy.

5. You probably know that the Canary Islands, the autonomous community of Spain 60 miles off the coast of Morocco, are named nor for birds but for the population of dogs on the islands in ancient times: the Romans called them Canariae Insulae, canis being Latin for “dog”, which in Spanish became Islas Canarias, and Pliny the Elder in the first century AD recorded “vast multitudes of dogs of very large size”. Bananas had long grown in the Canary Islands, but at the beginning of the 20th century, British companies like Fyffes began large-scale importation of the fruit to the United Kingdom. The (literal) banana boats made their first stop at the South Quay Import Dock in London, which in 1937 was leased to Fruit Lines Limited, a subsidiary of Fred. Olson & Co, and dubbed Canary Wharf, after the origins of the cargo. So dogs gave their name to the Canary Islands which led to the christening of Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands. But what is the peninsula on which Canary Wharf is situated? It’s the Isle of Dogs.

6. So why is the Isle of Dogs so called? The name is first recorded in October 1520, when in Henry VIII’s papers there is a record of the purchase of “A hose for the Mary George, in dock at the Isle of Dogs, 10d”. There are at least eight different theories for the origin of the name, including a corruption of “Isle of Ducks”, after the waterfowl which inhabited the marshland of the peninsula; its use by Edward III to keep his greyhounds, which were used to hunt deer; and a borrowing from the 1597 satire by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, which mocked the English establishment (but this cannot be right if it was already known as such in 1520). We will never know for sure.

7. The canary itself, otherwise the Atlantic canary, common canary, island canary or wild canary, Serinus canaria in Linnaeus’s classification, is named after the Canary Islands (and therefore after dogs). It is a small passerine bird also found in the Azores and Madeira, but has been adopted as one of the natural symbols of the islands, along with the Canary Islands date palm.

8. I mentioned above that it is the feast of St Aphrodisius, who was beheaded but then carried his severed head through the streets of Béziers. He was a cephalophore, from the Greek for “head-carrier”, a term coined in 1914 by the French philosopher Marcel Hébert, and it was a surprisingly common trope: examples of head-carrying saints are St Denis, the patron saint of France—regarded as the original cephalophore—St Nicasius of Reims and St Justus of Beauvais, but folklorist Émile Nourry counted 134 examples in French legend alone. The idea was taken up by St John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople from AD 398 to AD 404, who taught that the severed head of a martyr was more fearsome to the Devil than when it was still attached, and he compared the carrying of a severed head to a soldier showing his wounds. To paraphrase Frank Whaley as Giles Prentice in Broken Arrow (1996), “I don’t know what’s scarier, a saint carrying his severed head, or that it happens so often there’s actually a term for it”.

9. Cephalophores presented an unusual challenge for artists. If saints are depicted with halos around their heads, but they are carrying their severed head, how—and where—does one depict the halo? This tweet by the Reverend Richard Coles illustrates some of the approaches: halo on the severed head, halo over the stump, or both. True artistic diversity in tackling a knotty theological and iconographical conundrum.

10. The North-East of England, where I grew up, has produced many pioneering engineers and inventors, but one of the greatest, and most influential, was George Stephenson, the “Father of the Railways”. He probably separately invented the safety lamp ahead of Cornwall’s Humphry Davy, designed and patented the rolled railway rail which could support the weight of early locomotives, oversaw the Stockton and Darlington Railway (the world’s first public railway with steam locomotives) and designed the skew bridge across the Liverpool and Manchester Railway at Rainhill, the first to cross a railway at an angle. But, born in Wylam in Northumberland in 1781, he received virtually no formal education and was illiterate until he was 18. After becoming an engineman at Water Row Pit in Newburn, he paid to attend night school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, but retained a thick Northumberland accent all his life. It was so impenetrable to those outside the North-East that when, later in life, he conducted business in London, he allegedly sometimes employed a translator to make himself intelligible to investors and colleagues. Ironically, the Geordie accent, which may even be named after Stephenson, is now regularly rated among the nation’s favourites.

11. An extra one, as a caution: please note that natives of Sunderland, where I grew up, are not Geordies and do not have Geordie accents. They are Mackems, and I have seen fights start over less. Step forward birthday girl Lauren Laverne, a proud Mackem, who was at school across the road from me when we were teenagers. And it’s a lovely sound.

Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover (Homer Simpson)

1. “Civilisation: 1. The Skin of Our Teeth”: BBC4 has been showing Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1969 cultural history of the West, subtitled “A Personal View”. He was 65 years old and would be elevated to the House of Lords that summer but his storming of the artistic institutions of Britain as a young tyro had been astonishing: at 27, keeper of fine art of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; director of the National Gallery from 1934 to 1945; Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1949; chairman of the Arts Council from 1953 to 1960. But he was also the inaugural chairman of the Independent Television Authority (1954-57), created to oversee the birth of commercial television, and after he stepped down as chairman, Lew Grade, head of Associated Television, tempted him into an Indian summer in front of the camera. Civilisation is now almost the epitome of old-fashioned, elitist, de haut en bas arts programming, but it remains extraordinarily vibrant and direct. Clark was strangely compelling on camera because he made no concessions, suited in tweed, his accent purest Winchester and Oxford. The 13 episodes were phenomenally popular for a documentary series on art history, and a retrospective piece by Morgan Meis in The New Yorker in 2016 called him “the man who made the best telly you’ve ever seen” and hit the nail on the head: “Scholars and academics had their understandable quibbles, but for the general public the series was something like a revelation. Art-museum exhibits in both England and the US reported a surge of visitors following each episode.” Sublime, uplifting, fierce stuff.

2. “Face to Face: Carl Gustav Jung”: last week I recommended the extraordinary BBC series Face to Face and chose the interview with Dame Edith Sitwell. But in 1959, John Freeman, the interrogator, travelled to Zürich and on 22 October the corporation broadcast a 38-minute encounter with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, then aged 84. I’ll say that again: he interview JUNG. That’s Carl Jung, close friend of Sigmund Freud, inaugural president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, creator of the concepts of synchronicity and the collective unconscious and one of the most influential psychologists in history. On your television/laptop/smartphone. And the old man is pin-sharp, fluent and engaging. I really can’t explain how remarkable this interview is: reaching back into history.

3. “Jimmy’s Jobs Podcast: Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator”: unashamed disclosure here, I write frequently for The Spectator, as do several of my friends, and without apology I regard it as one of the liveliest, healthiest and most intellectually interesting current affairs publications going. I also know Jimmy McLoughlin, presenter of the podcast, a little bit. This 45-minute interview with Fraser Nelson is fascinating: he’s been editor for 15 years now, and has kept the magazine not just afloat but madly buoyant to the point where its valuation is towards £100 million. His introduction of blind assessment of internship applications has been revolutionary, and I was astonished to learn that advertising only contributes five per cent of the publication’s budget. A fascinating analysis of recent politics and journalism.

4. “The Last of the Mohicans”: last Sunday I went to the British Film Institute on the South Bank, emphatically one of my happy places, for a screening of Michael Mann’s 1992 colonial-era epic The Last of the Mohicans, based on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of 1826. I hadn’t seen the film for years and had forgotten just what a powerful piece of cinema it is: it goes without saying that Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe are outstanding, and the latter is electrifyingly beautiful as she makes her way through the forests and mountains with verve and passion. The whole look of the film is amazing: the opening shot of the Hudson Valley, verdant and shrouded in mist, is visually overwhelming, even before Trevor Jones’s soundtrack crashes in. There are compelling performances by Jodhi May as the young Alice Munro, Steven Waddington as Major Duncan Heyward, Wes Studi as Magua and the stalwart Maurice Roëves as Colonel Edmund Munro. And then you remember this was directed by Michael Mann, director of Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), writer and producer of the TV series Miami Vice, who would go on to make Heat and Collateral. It is a world away from the edgy neon-and-synthesisers of his pomp but it not a whit less brilliant. He explained the film’s power in Sight and Sound (November 1992): “the reason why I love making pictures—it’s the intensity of the experience, the power of film to make you dream, to take over your nervous system and sweep you away”. Find the biggest screen you can, and watch it. And consider that Mann does all of this in a shade under two hours. Breathtaking.

5. “Talking Pictures: On The Waterfront”: again not new, but the BBC reshowed this half-hour documentary about Elia Kazan’s 1954 masterpiece On The Waterfront, which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Marlon Brando) and Best Supporting Actress (Eva Marie Saint). It is a scintillating film, revolutionary in so many ways: Martin Scorsese, interviewed for the documentary, says of Brando “You couldn’t call it ‘acting’, let’s say ‘behaviour’”. Kazan was an undoubted genius, described by Stanley Kubrick as “without question, the best director we have in America, capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses”. But in 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and, after initial reluctance, named as communists eight fellow members of the Group Theatre. Some never forgave his “betrayal”, and in 1982, the always-unpredictable Orson Welles thundered “Elia Kazan is a traitor”, though, at the end of his tirade, he admitted “I have to add that he is a very good director”. A fascinating look at a landmark film.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know (Ernest Hemingway)

1. “How to stabilise a country after war”: RUSI director general Karin von Hippel wrote this wise and punchy op-ed for The Financial Times with an eye on Gaza and Ukraine among other conflicts. The failure of reconstruction efforts after the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, by my reckoning, the greatest folly of the whole adventure, because it not only ruined the best narrative available to the West, both for Iraq and the wider region, but also cost the United States alone more than $200 billion with very little to show for the enormous cost. But the coalition failed properly to answer the question repeatedly put by Washington Post legend George Will (appropriated from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto): and then what? Hippel argues there are three principles: security is the necessary precursor; you must build back better; and the local population should be in the driving seat. Last June the British government hosted the annual Ukraine Recovery Conference, and this issue will remain pressing.

2. “First Wave at Omaha Beach”: this November 1960 article from the archives of The Atlantic is drawn from the notebooks of war correspondent S.L.A. Marshall and is a brutal, bloody, bone-and-gristle account of the American landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Written nearly 40 years before Saving Private Ryan showed a new generation as nearly as it could what D-Day had been like, it is horrifying, chilling and compelling, stuffed with fear, death and extraordinary heroism. Lieutenant Edward Tidrick of Able Company, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, is shot through the throat as he hits the sand of the French beach and falls, blood gouting, but as he dies he gargles a last exhortatory order to the men under his command: “Advance with the wire cutters!” As the Duke of Wellington wrote from Waterloo, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won”.

3. “The CIA’s Man in Constantinople”: this extraordinary, recondite, superficially comic but profoundly serious article by Michael Warren Davies, self-described “philosophaster, poetaster, and potvaliant”, caught my eye because I have a mild fascination with the Orthodox Church (in all its forms). It first raised its head when, as a teenager studying early modern history at school, I became fixated on the history of Byzantium through John Julius Norwich’s magnificent trilogy. This tale of the militant pro-American feeling of Athenagoras I, patriarch of Constantinople from 1948 to 1972, explores the sharply political role of Orthodoxy in modern Russian foreign policy and the influence that churches still have in eastern Europe. I can almost guarantee you will learn a lot (I did).

4. “Meet George Smiley: John le Carré’s Spy Extraordinaire”: I revere John le Carré, one of the best three British espionage writers of the post-war period (Ian Fleming and Len Deighton, as you ask) and one of the best British writers of the period in any genre. I wrote about the magnificent 1979 BBC television adaptation of his 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which revolves around the retired spymaster George Smiley, brought back to find a mole at the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. Smiley was captured with sublime brilliance by Sir Alec Guinness, and one of the triumphs of the portrayal is the elderly spy’s ordinariness, his sense of being eminently forgettable. This article by Dr Lisa Reynolds Wolfe, who has written widely on the Cold War, sifts carefully through le Carré’s books for physical descriptions of Smiley, and cases an interesting light on character and author.

5. “So, 112 ignoble, infantile Republicans voted to endanger civilization”: I am a huge fan of veteran Washington Post opinion columnist George Will, 83 next week, who’s been filing twice a week for 50 years and won the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 1977. I happen to agree with the sentiment of this piece, that Republicans in the House of Representatives opposed military aid to Ukraine for “the infantile satisfaction of populist naughtiness (insulting a mostly fictitious ‘establishment’)” and in doing so stood with President Vladimir Putin in his attempts not just to control but erase a European nation. But I was particularlt struck by its absolute columnar perfection: it is concise, punchy, learned, powerful but retaining a lightness of touch. You don’t get to be this good easily or quickly, but I cannot encourage you enthusiastically enough to read what Will produces. He read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then wrote a doctoral thesis in political science at Princeton entitled “Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society”, but is also a huge baseball fan (“I write about politics to support my baseball habit”) and a very dry, laconic but funny public speaker.

Time’s up!

… as Betty Boothroyd would say at the end of questions in the House of Commons. We have survived a third of the year, my friends. Maybe, just maybe, as I squint at the sky, sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu, groweth sed and bloweth med, and springth the wode nu: sing cuccu! (I haven’t had a stroke, it’s a mediaeval English round celebrating the coming of summer.)