Sunday round-up: observations and recommendations 17 March 2024

These collections are proving useful for me and some readers say they're useful for them, so here we are for the time being

Happy St Patrick’s Day! For those who celebrate, Sláinte, céad míle fáilte, ádh mór ort and may your hangovers stay far away.

(An Irish senator once told me a story about a German friend of hers in Brussels who was duped the pronunciation on an Irish phrase which led to him unwittingly calling his ambassador the c-word but that’s an offline anecdote.)

I said in my recent post about Substack that “I read a lot of stuff, from books and hard-copy magazines to blogs and individual articles aggregated through various websites”, and I’ve found that systematising recommendations is actually a useful tool for me to keep track of what I need to, want to and ought to read too. As there has been some positive feedback from readers as well, I’m going to keep these Sunday round-ups (rounds-up?) going for a while and see where they lead us.

Factoids

1. As it is his feast day, we might observe of St Patrick that very little is known about him. He was Romano-British, rather than Irish, but several places compete for the claim of his birthplace: Ravenglass in Cumbria, Kilpatrick in Dunbartonshire, Glamorgan and Birdoswald, on Hadrian’s Wall near Carlisle. His father, Calpurnius, was a decurion (in the civil sense of a city official) and his grandfather, Potitus, had been a priest from Bonaven Tabernia, another location of dubious exactness.

2. St Patrick was never formally canonised, as he was already venerated before the Catholic Church regularised its procedures on saints. However, his Feast Day is celebrated on 17 March and is a holy day of obligation in Ireland. It falls during Lent but is one of the days on which lenten vows can be set aside.

3. St Patrick is regarded as a saint not only by the Roman Catholic Church but by the Church of Ireland, the Lutheran tradition and the Eastern Orthodox Church; in Orthodoxy, he is accorded the the title isapóstolos (ἰσαπόστολος), “equal to the apostles” and “Enlightener of Ireland”.

4. St Patrick’s Day was declared a bank holiday in Ireland by the United Kingdom Parliament under the provisions of the Bank Holiday (Ireland) Act 1903. The bill was sponsored by James O’Mara, MP for Kilkenny South from 1900 to 1907, representing the Irish Parliamentary Party. He later sat in Dáil Éireann for Kilkenny South (1918-21) and Dublin South (1924-27).

5. As we’re talking about Ireland, if you’ve ever wondered why Northern Ireland’s oldest university is called Queen’s University Belfast, it was created as part of a federal, all-Ireland institution of higher learning, the Queen’s University of Ireland. The Queen’s Colleges (Ireland) Act 1845 established colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway to provide university-level instruction for Roman Catholics, who generally did not attend Trinity College Dublin, the Elizabethan foundation which was Ireland’s only university at the time. However, under pressure from Protestant interests, the new colleges were prohibited from teaching theology.

6. The Queen’s University was superseded after the passage of the University Education (Ireland) Act 1879 which created the new Royal University of Ireland (RUI). Its charter was issued on 27 April 1880 and was based on the University of London’s federal model, and it set examinations and awarded degrees to students of the three Queen’s Colleges and Magee College (now Ulster University), University College Dublin, the Catholic University Medical School (now part of UCD), St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and Blackrock College (which trained missionaries and civil servants as well as education boys at secondary school level). Like the Queen’s University, the RUI did not award degrees in theology.

7. The Queen’s University of Ireland was dissolved in 1882. However, the RUI itself was broken up by the Irish Universities Act 1908, which established Queen’s University Belfast as an independent entity and also created the National University of Ireland (Ollscoil na hÉireann), which survives to the present day. The other Queen’s colleges became University College Cork and University College Galway, now the University of Galway.

8. Separate from all of these was, and is, the University of Dublin, founded in 1592, the only constituent college of which is Trinity College Dublin (formally The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin). TCD was, and to an extent is, a Protestant institution: until the Catholic Relief Act 1793, students could only graduate by swearing the Oath of Supremacy, effectively excluding Catholics, and some academic positions remained reserved for Protestants afterwards. From 1871 to 1970, Catholics were banned from attending TCD under most circumstances not by the college but by the Catholic Church. For the first decades after Ireland became independent, TCD students remained largely unionist and Protestant, the Union Flag was often displayed and God Save The King sung.

9. Oscar Wilde went up to Trinity College Dublin as a Royal School Scholar to read classics in 1871. His tutor was the brilliant J.P. Mahaffy, who had just become professor of ancient history but was also a leading classicist and papyrologist, as well as being a talented composer and musicologist. Wilde would describe Mahaffy as “my first and best teacher” and “the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things”, and assisted him with the writing of Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander, published in 1874. Mahaffy, in turn, would call Wilde “the only blot on my tutorship”. Wilde did not graduate from TCD: after three years of study (on a four-year degree course), he transferred to Magdalen College, Oxford, after winning a demyship, a half-scholarship worth £95 a year for up to five years. He flourished at Oxford and won a first-class degree in Literae humaniores, but it was Mahaffy who had encouraged him to apply to transfer from Dublin. Supposedly the tutor told him, “You’re not quite clever enough for us here, Oscar. Better run up to Oxford.”

10. Mahaffy was notoriously splenetic and snobbish. He became provost of Trinity College in 1914, at the age of 75, but had long coveted the position. When one incumbent was reported to be unwell, he inquired “Nothing trivial, I hope?” His views on the education of Irish Catholics were withering. One biographical sketch recorded him as saying:

    James Joyce is a living argument in defence of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island—for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey.

Son et (ou) lumière

1. “Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War”: I’ve only just started watching this Netflix nine-parter but it looks magnificent, lavish, detailed and about as high-level as you can get. If Volodymyr Zelenskyy is one of your talking heads, you’ve smashed it. It takes the story of nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project through to the present day, with Vladimir Putin’s posturing over Ukraine (I wrote an essay last summer on whether Putin would cross that reddest of red lines: my conclusion was probably not). The Cold War was shaped by the bomb, because for the first time in human history, I would argue, it made the act of going to war potentially not just costly but existential, though we should never forget how often and in how many places the Cold War was actually hot. This Brian Knappenberger series will quickly become essential.

2. “A global conflict update with Tim Marshall”: this edition of the Reaction podcast, hosted by Iain Martin, was a very sound analysis of the state of the world with the excellent Tim Marshall. His insights on the conflict in Gaza and the wider “peace process” are fascinating, and he is absolutely right to underline that the current crisis in the Red Sea is being fomented by bad actors in the Houthis: these are not good people nor freedom fighters but brutal Islamist terrorists with hideous practices in almost every area you can imagine; I emphasised this in The Daily Express in January. Tim has enormous knowledge and experience but is also very good at putting events straightforwardly and understandably as well as in context. His back catalogue is well worth a look.

3. “Middle East Dialogues: a conversation with Jared Kushner”: this dates from last month but I came across it last week. Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, also chairs the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Here, in the first of a series of talks, he interviews Jared Kushner, former senior advisor to President Donald Trump and the hand behind the historic Abraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements between Israel and other countries which for a while promised a degree of stability in the Middle East. For some people, Kushner will be beyond endurance because of his connection to Trump (who is his father-in-law, of course). I think it’s worth listening to what he has to say: he’s honest about his shortcomings, but also shies away from false modesty. And, whatever one thinks of Trump, more was achieved by the Abraham Accords than many more qualified US diplomats could point to. His back-to-basics approach is striking in international relations. It is not 90 minutes wasted.

4. “The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities”: this is almost 10 years old now but was repeated to mark the weekend of St Patrick’s Day. It is a fairly well-worn story, too, but it remains a fascinating story of the growth of rock music in Ireland with the twin influences—censors?—of the Roman Catholic Church in the south and hard-faced Ulster Protestantism in the north. There’s a hint of the documentary skewing towards “people who were available”, as Bob Geldof (not “Sir Bob”, he never has been, nor would he be unless he took British citizenship) and the late Sinéad O’Connor feature quite heavily. That’s no bad thing, though, as both have interesting things to say about music and society. It also made me laugh when Geldof remarks in partial exasperation, “Talk about me, but get Bono going, he never shuts up!” He also makes an interesting comparison between Sir Van Morrison (who really is “Sir”) and W.B. Yeats, anchoring Van the Man lyrically in a specifically Irish tradition. The showband element is alien to an audience outside Ireland, but the savage murders of three members of the Miami Showband by terrorists from the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1975 remain shocking for their brutality. Violence hung over so much of this, but some of the music is simply transcendent.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind

This is a typically random collection of articles and other items, but I’m afraid that just reflects the randomness of my brain.

1. “Inside Trumpworld, the cabinet casting begins”: this piece by Tara Palmeri in Puck is fascinating and largely depressing with a few chinks of tempered optimism. On the one hand, it’s predicated (necessarily) on Donald Trump winning the presidential election in November, which, for what it’s worth, I think is the likely outcome but not a done deal. And it brings to the surface some dismaying names for very senior positions, with Kellyanne Conway, former senior counsellor to the president and creator of the phrase “alternative facts”, mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. But Palmeri also suggests that Trump seeks outward approval and will want “names” in his administration, “hoping some of their respectability will reflect onto him”. She quotes Anthony Scaramucci, who was White House communications director for 11 days in 2017: “They will think they can join Donald Trump and that it won’t hurt their careers. And Trump will select them.” Robert Lighthizer, former US trade representative, and billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson are at the less eccentric end of the spectrum. It is also suggested that Florida’s Marco Rubio is tiring of the US Senate after 13 years and may be tempted by an executive post.

2. “Why memory is more about your future than your past”: this article from the potentially addictive web portal Big Think is an interview with Professor Charan Ranganath, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Davis, about how memory works and what purpose(s) it serves. He has a book out, Why We Remember: the science of memory and how it shapes us. The final rallying call, while slightly motivational-quote, you-can-do-this-girl, was at least grounds for optimism.

   Instead, you should use memory to strategically think of things that can help you in the present or [generate] future possibilities—giving you the options that will help you be more flexible, creative, and imaginative.

3. “India eliminates extreme poverty”: an arrestingly simple headline from this Brookings Institution commentary by Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin but, astonishingly enough, this is essentially true. India has grown in prosperity sufficiently that it has moved up the scale of how poverty is measured, leaving a whole set of measurements below it. As the authors remark judiciously, “This is an encouraging development with positive implications for global poverty headcount rates”. I have thought for a while that, as we are transfixed by the economic wellbeing of China, it’s actually India which is the big mover: it has more potential, it has some aspects of democracy and a year ago it overtook China to become the world’s most populous country. (I wrote about this in City AM.) So the elimination of “extreme poverty” is a demonstration that things are moving in the right direction, and Western policy-makers should take that into account.

4. “Inventing Hindu supremacy”: one of the complexities of Western relations with India is widespread caution towards the prime minister, Narendra Modi, who will celebrate his tenth anniversary in office in May. As parliamentary chairperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party), he is commonly described as a right-wing Hindu nationalist, and that element of sectarian politics makes the West uneasy. This essay by journalist Mihir Dalal in online magazine Aeon seeks to explain the origins of Hindu nationalism and the ideology of Hindutva, formulated by the activist and writer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He wrote a pamphlet entitled Essentials of Hindutva while in prison in 1922, convicted of abetment of the murder of Indian civil servant A.M.T. Jackson, a magistrate in Nasik, in 1909. (Somewhat ironically, Savarkar was an atheist.) Understanding the past is always key to understanding the present, and this is as true in India as anywhere else.

5. “The Back Channel: A memoir of American diplomacy and the case for its renewal”: I’ve only started this recently, an autobiography-cum-manifesto by William J. Burns, a distinguished US Foreign Service veteran who was appointed director of the CIA in 2021. In the UK—I bought my copy in America—it is subtitled “American diplomacy in a disordered world”. Burns was promoted to career ambassador, the Foreign Service’s equivalent of a four-star rank, in 2008 and he was the first professional diplomat to be deputy secretary of state, from 2011 to 2014. The book was published in 2019 at the same time as an archive of nearly 100 declassified diplomatic cables. There is a strong sense of an “adult in the room” to Burns’s presence in the Biden administration after the turbulent Trump years, and the current president’s remarks were pointed when he explained that Burns shared his belief “that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect”. He writes quietly and soberly, describing diplomacy as “by nature an unheroic, quiet endeavor, less swaggering than unrelenting, often unfolding in back channels out of sight and out of mind”. One reviewer remarked on his lesson that “good foreign policy is invisible” (see also this 2017 article in Foreign Affairs) and in a world which seems to catch fire anew every week, I think there is a lot to learn from Burns’s apologia.

Con te partirò su navi per mari

Enjoy the balance of your weekend and your holy obligations, as I, I am sure, will enjoy mine.