Sunday round-up: observations and recommendations

A few facts which have passed through my mind recently, and some things you should watch or read

I have a terrible (by which I mean almost certainly irritating) inability to keep knowledge to myself. I blame my mother’s pedagogical instinct. To slake that thirst, here are a few observations, or rather nuggets of information, which have tumbled through my brain and may amuse, interest, inform and/or inspire readers, and a few recommendations of things to watch and read if you are so inclined.

Factoids

1. If November’s US presidential election is fought out between the expected candidates, the only living former president older than the two main contenders will be Jimmy Carter, who—if he is spared—turns 100 on 1 October. President Biden will be two weeks short of 82 on polling day, while Donald Trump will be 78. Barack Obama will be 63, and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton will both be 78 (but a few weeks younger than Trump).

2. The complex relationship between the United Kingdom and Ireland is shaped in part by the imbalance in size. The UK population is estimated at 67.9 million while that of Ireland is only 5.1 million. But there was a time when this disparity was vastly smaller. In 1831, the population of Great Britain was 16.5 million, while Ireland (the whole island was then one jurisdiction) was very nearly half that, at 7.8 million. During the Great Famine of 1845-52—otherwise known as an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger—around one million people died from disease and starvation, and another one million emigrated. The population of the island of Ireland, currently estimated at 7.2 million, has still not recovered to its pre-Famine level of 8,175,124 as recorded in the 1841 census. When the 2022 census showed that the population of Ireland was 5,123,536, it was the first time it had exceeded five million for 170 years.

3. To distinguish it from the geographical name of the island, the jurisdiction governed from Dublin is generally referred to as “the Republic of Ireland”, but this can raise hackles in some exacting quarters. From 1922 to 1937, it was called the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann), and it was a dominion of the Empire of which the king was sovereign, represented formally by a governor general; until 1932, the governor general officially resided at the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park (now Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the president of Ireland). The Constitution of Ireland which was adopted in 1937 states in Article 4 that “the name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland”. The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 stipulates that “the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland” (Poblacht na hÉireann) but the constitutional name remains unaffected.

4. When George Galloway was elected MP for Rochdale this week, it became the fourth entirely different constituency he has represented after Bradford West (2012-15), Bethnal Green and Bow (2005-10) and Glasgow Hillhead/Kelvin (1987-2005). Only three men have sat for more different constituencies. Sir Robert Peel represented five (Cashel, Chippenham, Oxford University, Westbury and Tamworth) as did William Gladstone (Newark, Oxford University, South Lancashire, Greenwich and Midlothian), while Walter Long, a Conservative who was briefly leader of the Irish Unionist Party, racked up seven seats over 41 years (Wiltshire North, Devizes, Liverpool West Derby, Bristol South, South Dublin, Strand and Westminster St George’s).

5. Peel and Gladstone did not overlap as MPs for the two-member constituency of Oxford University, but both had earned double first-class degrees in Literae humaniores (classics) and mathematics from the same college, Christ Church. They were also both from Lancashire, Peel born in Bury and Gladstone in Liverpool, both sons of baronets and Tory MPs, and both were regarded as bearing slight Lancashire accents.

6. Sibling rivalry: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Liz Truss all have or had elder brothers. Boris Johnson is the eldest of four siblings, while Rishi Sunak is the eldest of three. Theresa May is an only child.

7. Norman Mailer coined the term “factoid”, with which I headed this section, in his eccentric and unconventional 1973 study Marilyn: A Biography. He defined factoids as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and which were therefore of dubious provenance, analogous to urban myths. It was used in the more familiar sense of a relatively trivial but interesting, quirky or surprising fact by CNN’s Headline News channel in the 1980s, and its new meaning popularised by the recently deceased disc jockey Steve Wright on his BBC Radio show Steve Wright in the Afternoon, as well as in subsequent books.

8. In 1993, the great American columnist and author William Safire, in his “On Language” column in The New York Times which ran for 30 years, attempted to bring clarity to this confusing double meaning. Observing that “the Greek suffix -oid, long used in mathematics and astronomy (rhomboid, asteroid), usually means ‘similar but not the same’ when applied to a noun”, he admitted that a factoid should mean what Norman Mailer had used it to mean, but observed that there were in fact three meanings. The first was after Mailer, the second was broadly neutral, referring to a piece of information that was seemingly, but not necessarily, accurate, while the third was the one employed by Steve Wright. Safire preferred to describe that last sense as a “factlet” but feared he was fighting a losing battle. He concluded, “Who will prevail? Stay tuned. Woe Unto Life.”

9. From 1968 to 1973, Safire was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and his vice-president, Spiro T. Agnew. He coined and gave to the latter for his address to the Republican National Convention in 1968 the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” to describe bien pensant cynical liberals, but his best work was surely this speech, prepared in July 1969 for Nixon to deliver on television in the event that the Apollo 11 mission to the moon went wrong and the astronauts perished. It was, of course, never used but is very much worth reading.

10. All of the above, so far as I can ascertain, are factoids in the Wright sense rather than the Mailer sense.

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it

I watch remarkably little linear television, if that’s the phrase I want to describe TV programmes at the point at which they are broadcast, and almost all of what I do watch is on BBC. I use Amazon Prime and Netflix far less than many people seem to, but I spent far more time tumbling headlong down YouTube rabbit-holes than most. I take comfort from the fact that the under-recognised virtues of YouTube are championed by the great advertising executive, writer and thinker Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, who discovered the joys of watching the platform of your television during lockdown and wrote an encomium to it for The Spectator in April 2022. It’s an unbelievably rich resource, though there is so much content now (an estimated 800 million videos) that if you search in vain for something, you realise it must be very recherché indeed.

I think, actually, we are paying less attention to which specific platforms and devices deliver our content now. I can start watching a YouTube video on my iPhone, pause it and resume on my laptop or the television, a level of delicate sophistication at which my 46-year-old brain still sometimes boggles. Equally, can you always remember if a drama or documentary was on BBC or Channel 4, or Prime or Netflix? I sometimes lose track. At any rate, here are a few things which I have watched and enjoyed, or recalled watching recently.

1. Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story: this is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the miners’ strike of 1984-85, as prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, fought desperately for supremacy over much more than simply the coal-mining industry. It lasted for nearly a year, during which 26 million person-days of work were lost, the highest total since the General Strike of 1926. This Wednesday, 6 March, will mark 40 years since a walk-out at Cortonwood Colliery near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, generally held to mark the beginning of the strike. This documentary is from the team which made Our Falklands War in 2022 to mark 40 years since the war in the South Atlantic, and, following the stories of 15 men and women involved in the strike, is every bit as searing and arresting. People will have different views on the showdown between government and trades union, but it was a raw and dramatic episode and this captures the intensity of it brilliantly.

2. End of Empire: Channel 4 broadcast this 14-part documentary by Granada TV in 1985 but all episodes are available on YouTube. Decolonialisation is a hot topic now, of course, but this was made 40 years ago, which gives it the advantage of being less overwrought and self-conscious. It examines Britain’s withdrawal from ten locations (one of which, Iran, was never formally a colony or protectorate) and makes fascinating use of interviews with many people involved in the retreat from empire, from senior politicians and colonial administrators to settlers and military personnel. Some are more reflective than others: they interview former subjects from the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya who have fairly punchy views on the Mau Mau insurgency of 1952-60 (I wrote about the legacy of Mau Mau in November last year). If you want to gain an insight into what the last decades of the British Empire really felt like to people who were there, this is fascinating.

3. Ban the Sadist Videos!: I watched this on Amazon Prime and, yes, I confess there was a degree of prurience in my motivation, but I was also drawn in by the absurdly arresting title and the stilted, nostalgic tone of it. Written and directed by David Gregory in 2005, it’s the story of the 1980s moral panic over “video nasties”, as regulation and policy struggled to keep up with evolving technology, audiences sought more extreme and outrageous content, savvy entrepreneurs worked out how to monetise the whole thing and the establishment suffered a full-on moral panic. It was the heyday of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the censor-loving pressure group created in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse, an pious, unimaginative, moralising teacher from the Midlands who hated and feared liberalism and the “permissive society”. There were certainly some morally void and cheaply exploitative offcuts of cinema produced, but in the main it showed the long-term futility of strict censorship. There is a cameo role for the late Sir Graham Bright, Conservative MP for Luton East then Luton South, whose private member’s bill became law as the Video Recordings Act 1984 and created the modern system of age classification. I once heard Bright described as “the most inaptly named Member of Parliament since James Wellbeloved”.

4. Kin: I’m cheating slightly here as I haven’t yet watched the new season of Irish gangland drama Kin which is now available on BBC iPlayer. I saw the first series of this RTÉ/AMC+ co-production created by Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly last year when BBC started hosting it, though it was first shown in Ireland in 2021 and then the US and Canada in 2022. I initially had a look because it starred Ciarán Hinds, whom I love and would watch in anything, and because its Dublin setting gave it a slight novelty against every other dark crime drama on television. It’s not for everyone—my friend Sophie Grenham, a brilliant arts writer on whom I rely for temperature checks on matters cultural across the Irish Sea, didn’t care for it—but I’m generally amenable to moody tales of gangland folk, up to a point, and Aiden Gillen, whom I first remember positively bursting on to the TV screen in Queer As Folk 25 years ago, is superb but barely recognisable as neat, restrained, self-contained gang boss Frank Kinsella. Dublin looks edgy and vibrant and there are some first-rate performances and the occasional surprise, though maybe Alex McLevy nailed it when he said in The A.V. Club that “It’s simply an opportunity to watch some gifted actors do what they do, very well, with a story that glides along in entertaining but unoriginal manner.” I’ll take that.

The inner music that words make

Finally a few things I’ve read recently and either pressed on a few unlucky souls already or made a mental note so to do. What can I tell you? Imagine those fortunate few dozen seekers after truth who were taught second-year modern history by me at St Andrews in the early 2000s. What a time it must have been to be alive.

1. “Navalny’s final agony at the Polar Wolf gulag”: Owen Matthews is my favourite writer on all matters Russia- and Ukraine-related at the moment and his columns in The Spectator are regularly superb, insightful, well-crafted and faintly romantic. He was Newsweek’s bureau chief in Moscow for many years and obviously knows his subject intellectually but feels it emotionally and viscerally too. This account of stopping at the Siberian village of Kharp while travelling across northern Russia by train is haunting. He alighted from the train because he wanted to see the Northern Lights, not at that point knowing that close by was a Soviet-era penal colony officially named FKU IK-3 but known as “Polar Wolf”, home—if one can use that word—to a thousand inmates of the Federal Penitentiary Service (once the Main Administration for Execution of Punishments). Alexei Navalny died at Polar Wolf, officially at 2.17 pm on 16 February, having lost consciousness following a walk. Strangely, several of the surveillance cameras at the prison were not working. His mother Lyudmila was told that he had succumbed to “sudden death syndrome”, which, I suppose, we all do eventually.

2. “I Was A Heretic At The New York Times”: this article in The Atlantic by Adam Rubenstein relates his experiences as an opinion editor at The New York Times from 2019 to 2020, and how he, as a conservative-leaning writer, came first to feel stigmatised and disapproved of by a culture of liberal uniformity, then victimised and hounded out for his role in editing an op-ed article by Senator Tom Cotton which was published in June 2020. It’s an extraordinary episode: Rubenstein edited—but did not write—a piece in the wake of widespread rioting after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in which the author, a Republican senator from Arkansas, argued that if the violence did not subside, the Insurrection Act of 1807 should be invoked to allow the president to deploy military personnel to support the police and there should be “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters”. It is a companion piece to a longer essay in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine last December by James Bennet, the NYT’s editorial director, who also left the newspaper because of the furore. Both set out, meticulously and sadly, the complete seizure of control of the paper’s critical faculties by a narrow section of liberal thought, one which simply cannot bear to see or hear contrary opinions. It is damning but a must-read.

3. “Lutfur Rahman and the future of localism”: my friend and partner Mark Heywood lives down Wapping way so is intimately familiar with the, let’s say, antics of Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets from 2010 to 2015 and again since 2022, serving a five-year ban from public office for electoral fraud between his two terms of office. This article from The Critic by Sam Bidwell, who is director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute, wears its outrage lightly and wittily, but the details do sink in. Essentially, Rahman harnessed a small clique of the Bengali community in his borough, partly through generous dispensations of public money and patronage, to carry him to power through “kleptocratic, sectarian politics conducted along ethno-religious lines”. The events of the past fortnight have made us think about threats to democracy in terms of violence and intimidation, but just as serious, in many ways, is grubby but endemic graft which goes unchallenged for fear of appearing racist or insensitive. It’s funny if it happens in one place, and if you don’t live there. But we all know, if we’re honest, that Rahman’s corruption and impunity are not one-offs. This isn’t over.

4. “Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet 1940-1945”: you wouldn’t think, would you, there was room for another book about Churchill, but this 2015 volume by Jonathan Schneer, emeritus professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology, takes the slightly unusual approach of examining how the wartime coalition government operated as a political organism between Churchill’s appointment as prime minister in May 1940 and the departure of the Labour ministers in May 1945 in anticipation of a general election (which most thought they would lose). The ground is so well trodden that there aren’t many great revelations, although it was curious to learn that Churchill tried to persuade the ascetic and self-righteous Sir Stafford Cripps, minister of aircraft production 1942-45, to stay in the government when Labour left (he had been expelled from the party for Communist sympathies in 1939 and only readmitted in February 1945). Cripps declined, and would serve under Clement Attlee as president of the Board of Trade and then chancellor of the Exchequer; but he turned Churchill down with reluctance, and reflected that he might have agreed if the invitation had come from Anthony Eden, Churchill’s increasingly impatient heir apparent. Schneer is a New Yorker and once or twice his nationality shows, but he has a deft touch and a sharp judgement. If you feel you can stomach anything more about the Second World War, this is informative and, at 260 pages, won’t detain you long.

5. “Hangover Square”: I don’t re-read fiction very often, as a rule, because I find it so daunting to contemplate how many thousands of books I want to read and how many I never will, but I recently went back to Patrick Hamilton’s bleak, devastating tale of precarious existence in pre-war Earl’s Court. It was published in 1941 and revolves around a lonely alcoholic called George Harvey Bone and his fierce passion for a failed actress, Netta Longdon, one of his drinking companions who treats him as an easy source of cash. I was introduced to Hamilton by my friend Tom Goldsmith, now clerk of the House of Commons, who has a sharp affinity for the rackety atmosphere of grimily Bohemian London in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and I devoured it at my first attempt about 15 years ago. I shan’t say much more about it for fear of spoiling it: it is regarded as one of Hamilton’s best works, a desperate, nihilist masterpiece. John Betjeman thought it belonged in “the top class of English novels”, and it is a brilliant evocation of a solemn, worn-away, hopeless kind of Britishness that sees life as a tragedy which nevertheless has to be played out, to however inevitably catastrophic a conclusion. I’m making it sound bleak because it absoluetely is, and you will want to weep and wail, but it’s a stunning work of fiction by an author who drank himself to death before he was 60. (He also wrote the play Gas Light (1938) which was filmed by Thorold Dickinson in 1940, starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and gives us the term so ubiquitous today for manipulating people into thinking that they are merely imagining things that are actually happening.)

When Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too

Inevitably I’ve written more than I meant to. It’s a curse, except that writing is what I do, as a compulsion and a release as well as a hobby and a job. I wrote a few years ago about being a writer, I hope without grandiosity, pomposity or self-pity, trying just to explain that it is to an extent a reflexive activity, a conditioned response, just the way in which writers react to the world.

You don’t need to tell a writer to write. They can’t stop. It will gush out of them unstoppably, or ooze like treacle, and it will bloody well hurt, but it will come out. That’s how you know you’re a writer.

It’s not a universal truth: I remember reading how Jeffrey Archer wrote his first novel, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, in 1974 purely as a way to make money and avoid bankruptcy, and he is ruthlessly disciplined in his production or words, composing in two-hour blocks. A profile many years ago in The New York Times observed shrewdly that “Politics is his first love, writing is the meal ticket”, and his approach is like an assembly line:

Two years, 1,200 hours and 17 drafts a book, he claims. He leaves London to do it. No interruptions. And an ironclad schedule: writing hours are 6 A.M. to 8, 10 A.M. to noon, 2 P.M. to 4, 6 P.M. to 8, and to bed at 9:30. Presto, in six weeks, a first draft.

I’m not going to knock Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, for all that he is regarded as an easy target. The author of the profile admitted he was “not a felicitous writer”, but he’s written 42 books which have sold 275 million copies, and earned more money than I ever will. So when I say, as I’m about to, that it doesn’t sound like he loves writing, perhaps doesn’t even like it, he may well not: but who’s the fool?

I’m not even getting paid for this (yet). Labour of love, to quote UB40: or, more accurately, expression of essential need. Perhaps the “why” should only matter to the person doing the writing.