Terry Eagleton's Blog, page 4

Autobiography by Morrissey review

The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess".

Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for

Students occupying Ulster University's common room are defending higher education against creeping corporatisation

Common rooms are vital places in universities. In today's corporate-minded, technocratic colleges, where professors are senior managers, junior staff dogsbodies and students consumers, they represent a dim memory of a time when higher education was a rather more collegiate affair. The senior common room in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, run jointly by staff and students on a non-profit basis, is one of the few such places left in the UK. During the years of the Northern Irish Troubles, it provided a safe haven in which Catholics and Protestants could speak to each other across the sectarian divide. Today it represents the sole remaining public space on the Coleraine campus, apart from a dingy entrance hall that looks like a Ryanair departure lounge. It is also one of the only centres open to the general public on a campus that has become increasingly privatised and off-limits to them. Town events have been staged there and local people taking evening classes use it for recreation, as do a host of clubs and societies. In a part of the world where commonality is at a premium, the Coleraine common room has kept alive a notion of the university as a place of dialogue, criticism and open-ended debate, and has recently acquired learned society status.

All this will soon be ancient history if the Coleraine administration has its way. Some time ago, they announced they were appropriating the common room as a corporate dining area. In a magnanimous gesture, however, they offered to replace the room with one containing a kettle and a microwave. Coleraine students, stemming as they do from a deeply conservative region of the world, are hardly noted for their political militancy, but a group of them occupied their common room last week and are set to stay. Some of them are sporting T-shirts reading "Ulster Says Know", an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan. They have had messages of support from such diverse sources as Alec Baldwin and the university rugby club, while supportive academics and stout-hearted mums have baked them brownies and made them soup.

Sackcloth and Ashes review Ann Widdecombe on hedonism and self-denial

Terry Eagleton raises an eyebrow at reflections on Lent from 'one of the country's moralists-in-chief'

One of the great calamities of Ireland, to be ranked alongside Jedward and the potato famine, is that St Patrick's Day falls in Lent. Since a good many of the Irish give up alcohol for Lent, yet drinking on the national feast day is more or less compulsory, this poses a dilemma which not even the wiliest theological brains have been able to resolve. Ann Widdecombe's new book about self-denial isn't much help either, though she is right to see that giving things up is about a lot more than Guinness. Having listed some of those who surrendered their lives for their faith, ending with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's murder at the hands of the Nazis, she adds scathingly: "And we give up KitKats for Lent."

Martyrdom isn't the most fashionable of subjects in a postmodern age. It isn't generally recognised, for example, that martyrs such as Bonhoeffer and Biko go to their deaths in the name of the living. The suicide yields up her life because it has become unbearable to her, whereas the martyr surrenders the most precious thing she has, making a gift of her death to others. Widdecombe, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sees this. What she doesn't see are the millions who have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned by the political system she herself supports. She remembers being urged by a nun at school to "offer it up for Indonesia" when she fell and cut her knee, and only now realises that the nun had in mind an episode in which "500,000 people had died in that country as a result of political unrest". "Had died" is a euphemism for being slaughtered as leftists with the connivance of the CIA.

Sackcloth and Ashes review – Ann Widdecombe on hedonism and self-denial

Terry Eagleton raises an eyebrow at reflections on Lent from 'one of the country's moralists-in-chief'

One of the great calamities of Ireland, to be ranked alongside Jedward and the potato famine, is that St Patrick's Day falls in Lent. Since a good many of the Irish give up alcohol for Lent, yet drinking on the national feast day is more or less compulsory, this poses a dilemma which not even the wiliest theological brains have been able to resolve. Ann Widdecombe's new book about self-denial isn't much help either, though she is right to see that giving things up is about a lot more than Guinness. Having listed some of those who surrendered their lives for their faith, ending with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's murder at the hands of the Nazis, she adds scathingly: "And we give up KitKats for Lent."

Martyrdom isn't the most fashionable of subjects in a postmodern age. It isn't generally recognised, for example, that martyrs such as Bonhoeffer and Biko go to their deaths in the name of the living. The suicide yields up her life because it has become unbearable to her, whereas the martyr surrenders the most precious thing she has, making a gift of her death to others. Widdecombe, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sees this. What she doesn't see are the millions who have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned by the political system she herself supports. She remembers being urged by a nun at school to "offer it up for Indonesia" when she fell and cut her knee, and only now realises that the nun had in mind an episode in which "500,000 people had died in that country as a result of political unrest". "Had died" is a euphemism for being slaughtered as leftists with the connivance of the CIA.

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Sackcloth and Ashes review Ann Widdecombe on hedonism and self-denial

Terry Eagleton raises an eyebrow at reflections on Lent from 'one of the country's moralists-in-chief'

One of the great calamities of Ireland, to be ranked alongside Jedward and the potato famine, is that St Patrick's Day falls in Lent. Since a good many of the Irish give up alcohol for Lent, yet drinking on the national feast day is more or less compulsory, this poses a dilemma which not even the wiliest theological brains have been able to resolve. Ann Widdecombe's new book about self-denial isn't much help either, though she is right to see that giving things up is about a lot more than Guinness. Having listed some of those who surrendered their lives for their faith, ending with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's murder at the hands of the Nazis, she adds scathingly: "And we give up KitKats for Lent."

Martyrdom isn't the most fashionable of subjects in a postmodern age. It isn't generally recognised, for example, that martyrs such as Bonhoeffer and Biko go to their deaths in the name of the living. The suicide yields up her life because it has become unbearable to her, whereas the martyr surrenders the most precious thing she has, making a gift of her death to others. Widdecombe, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sees this. What she doesn't see are the millions who have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned by the political system she herself supports. She remembers being urged by a nun at school to "offer it up for Indonesia" when she fell and cut her knee, and only now realises that the nun had in mind an episode in which "500,000 people had died in that country as a result of political unrest". "Had died" is a euphemism for being slaughtered as leftists with the connivance of the CIA.

Sackcloth and Ashesreview – Ann Widdecombe on hedonism and self-denial

Terry Eagleton raises an eyebrow at reflections on Lent from 'one of the country's moralists-in-chief'

One of the great calamities of Ireland, to be ranked alongside Jedward and the potato famine, is that St Patrick's Day falls in Lent. Since a good many of the Irish give up alcohol for Lent, yet drinking on the national feast day is more or less compulsory, this poses a dilemma which not even the wiliest theological brains have been able to resolve. Ann Widdecombe's new book about self-denial isn't much help either, though she is right to see that giving things up is about a lot more than Guinness. Having listed some of those who surrendered their lives for their faith, ending with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's murder at the hands of the Nazis, she adds scathingly: "And we give up KitKats for Lent."

Martyrdom isn't the most fashionable of subjects in a postmodern age. It isn't generally recognised, for example, that martyrs such as Bonhoeffer and Biko go to their deaths in the name of the living. The suicide yields up her life because it has become unbearable to her, whereas the martyr surrenders the most precious thing she has, making a gift of her death to others. Widdecombe, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sees this. What she doesn't see are the millions who have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned by the political system she herself supports. She remembers being urged by a nun at school to "offer it up for Indonesia" when she fell and cut her knee, and only now realises that the nun had in mind an episode in which "500,000 people had died in that country as a result of political unrest". "Had died" is a euphemism for being slaughtered as leftists with the connivance of the CIA.

It's much the same with Jesus. He was also almost certainly executed as a suspected political rebel, a fact you won't find in this book. The Romans reserved crucifixion for political offences. The two "thieves" between whom Jesus was pinned up were probably Zealots, members of the underground anti-Roman insurgency. The point of displaying these tortured bodies in public was to deter other potential militants. Widdecombe has much to say about Christ's agony on Calvary, but doesn't mention the fact that as crucifixions go, he got off fairly lightly. If he really spent only a few hours on the cross, he was remarkably lucky. Most victims of crucifixion thrashed around for days. He was probably helped on his way by a massive blood loss caused by his scourging.

As for the Zealots, there were probably a few of them among Jesus's disciples. They would have been drawn to a man who believed in traditional Judaic style that God would fill the poor with good things and send the rich empty away. Perhaps Widdecombe is drawn to him for the same reasons, in which case she has spent her life in the wrong political party. It's doubtful that the Romans actually saw Jesus as a political threat; but the Jewish leaders may have feared that he was about to trigger a riot that would do their own people no good, and convinced their imperial masters to do away with him. Widdecombe sees Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who condemned him, as a hypocrite, but he was actually a monster. He was the kind of tyrant who executed at the drop of a hat, and was finally dismissed from the Roman imperial service for disreputable conduct. And you had to be pretty disreputable to be fired by the Romans. The gospel writers present him as a bemused but well-meaning liberal because they are out to shift the blame for Jesus's death from the Romans, whose goodwill the early church was anxious to secure, and dump it on the Jews instead.

Conservatives such as Widdecombe believe in economic liberty, but not for the most part in moral or social liberalism. They champion a social order that breeds self-interest, then protest self-righteously against the moral rot this creates. This book is rightly perturbed by the hedonism and self-obsession of modern society, but has nothing to say about the property system that lies at its root. There is a lot of stuff about prisons, but no suggestion that a good many financiers ought to be banged up inside them. We may well live in a world prepared to go to almost any length to save itself trouble, but Widdecombe's nostalgia for the days when we darned our own socks may not prove enough to overthrow consumerist culture. Britain is "full of yearning for instant fame and wealth, chasing instant gratification, surrendering to excess", but this, it would seem, has nothing to do with the free market which she herself has championed throughout her life. Moralism thus takes over from political critique. Indeed, Widdecombe has built a successful second career for herself as one of the country's moralists-in-chief, descending like an avenging Fury on some den of vice or hapless council estate and dispensing brisk, Girl-Guide-like advice to the cowed occupants before sweeping off on yet another lucrative media mission. She is both a believer in self-sacrifice and a relentless self-publicist. Since the English love a character even more than they love a lord, her Dickensian idiosyncrasies as a Doughty Little Battler provide a useful cover for some of her more unpleasant social attitudes, such as dreaming of closing down every abortion clinic in the country.

All the same, it's rare to find someone these days, not least a former politician, who actually believes so much. Too much, perhaps. Widdecombe may be a touch ridiculous, but she believes in pressing on with a cause in the teeth of jeers and failures, keeping the faith and refusing to compromise. One is inclined to take her at her word, even if one suspects that the cause in question may be pretty dubious. She is sound on environmentalism, and most of what she has to say about prisons is thoughtful and compassionate, about as far from the flog-'em brigade as one could get. Forgiveness is in too short supply, she argues, and most of those behind bars have been "failed catastrophically by the state".

The dust jacket of this book refers to Widdecombe as an "author", a pardonable exaggeration in the context. She should be compelled to parade in sackcloth and ashes for her excruciating prose style. "Eyebrows are raised at members of Opus Dei who still practise self-flagellation and I admit mine wander upwards too and I tut-tut about remnants of the Dark Ages but is penance really now no more than 40 days without a glass of wine or 10 Hail Marys between confession and Coronation Street?" This is Molly Bloom-style stream-of-consciousness without the swear words. Widdecombe seems as averse to commas as she is to communists. One must also convict this most orthodox of Catholics of rank heresy. She writes more than once of God being "offended" by sin; but being offended involves a change of state, and God cannot change any more than he can brush his teeth. A few quick Hail Marys seem in order.

• Terry Eagleton's latest book, Culture and the Death of God, is out from Yale.

ReligionAnn WiddecombeConservativesTerry Eagleton
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Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for | Terry Eagleton

Students occupying Ulster University's common room are defending higher education against creeping corporatisation

Common rooms are vital places in universities. In today's corporate-minded, technocratic colleges, where professors are senior managers, junior staff dogsbodies and students consumers, they represent a dim memory of a time when higher education was a rather more collegiate affair. The senior common room in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, run jointly by staff and students on a non-profit basis, is one of the few such places left in the UK. During the years of the Northern Irish Troubles, it provided a safe haven in which Catholics and Protestants could speak to each other across the sectarian divide. Today it represents the sole remaining public space on the Coleraine campus, apart from a dingy entrance hall that looks like a Ryanair departure lounge. It is also one of the only centres open to the general public on a campus that has become increasingly privatised and off-limits to them. Town events have been staged there and local people taking evening classes use it for recreation, as do a host of clubs and societies. In a part of the world where commonality is at a premium, the Coleraine common room has kept alive a notion of the university as a place of dialogue, criticism and open-ended debate, and has recently acquired learned society status.

All this will soon be ancient history if the Coleraine administration has its way. Some time ago, they announced they were appropriating the common room as a corporate dining area. In a magnanimous gesture, however, they offered to replace the room with one containing a kettle and a microwave. Coleraine students, stemming as they do from a deeply conservative region of the world, are hardly noted for their political militancy, but a group of them occupied their common room last week and are set to stay. Some of them are sporting T-shirts reading "Ulster Says Know", an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan. They have had messages of support from such diverse sources as Alec Baldwin and the university rugby club, while supportive academics and stout-hearted mums have baked them brownies and made them soup.

While negotiations for the executive dining room were afoot, the university bosses steadfastly ignored expressions of student alarm, along with a number of requests to meet with them. Now they have been forced to put out a statement declaring that they intend to convert the common room into teaching suites, an idea they seem to have plucked from thin air. Even if this is true, which no student or staff member I've spoken to believes for a moment, it will still mean the destruction of a precious space.

I gave a talk to the occupying students last week, and the vice-chancellor was invited to attend so we could hold a public debate. He didn't show up, but 10 minutes into my talk three senior officials from the university physical resources department barged in threatening to have protestors removed by the police. Since the protesting students are occupying a room that's theirs to sit and talk in anyway, it is hard to see what law they are breaking.

A good many universities these days breed a climate of bullying and intimidation. The student occupation took place around the time of the national strike called by the Universities and Colleges union, an event that spurred the Coleraine administration to send an email to its staff reminding them of the dire effect this exercise of their democratic right might have. Since Coleraine has scarcely any tradition of student militancy, the students who are determined to hang on to their common room deserve special congratulations for their courage. It is they, not the technocrats – who understand nothing but measurable outcomes – who are standing up for the true idea of a university.

University of UlsterHigher educationProtestStudentsNorthern IrelandTerry Eagleton
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Autobiography by Morrissey – review

The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess".

Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Some of his bloody-mindedness springs from a damaged childhood. Born into a working-class Irish-Mancunian family, Steven Patrick Morrissey sang his way out of what struck him as a soulless environment, as other working-class Irish Mancunians have written or acted their way out. The vitriol started to flow early: his bleak mausoleum of a Catholic primary school was ruled by Mother Peter, "a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk", and by the time he was 17 he was already emotionally exhausted. Manchester, still in its pre-cool days, was a "barbaric place where only savages can survive … There are no sexual guidelines, and I see myself naked only by appointment." His eloquent contempt for his fellow citizens is terrifying: "non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester's armpit." The final indignity is to be turned down for a job as a postman at the local sorting office. At the hour of the birth of the Smiths, which gave him the exit from Manchester he craved, he felt himself dying of boredom, loneliness and disgust. "I would talk myself through each day," he writes, "as one would nurse a dying friend."

Not long afterwards, hordes of young people throughout the world are wearing his face on their chests. He returns to the streets where he grew up, now with a police escort, to sing to 17,000 fans from a stage overlooking an odious Inland Revenue office where he once worked. Having failed to find love from one man or woman, he can now find it from thousands. Mick Jagger and Elton John are eager to shake his hand. He enjoys his celebrity, but the sardonic self-irony of the book seeks to persuade us otherwise. There is a relish and energy about its prose that undercuts his misanthropy. Its lyrical quality suggests that beneath the hard-bitten scoffer there lurks a romantic softie, while beneath that again lies a hard-bitten scoffer. Implausibly, he claims to be "chilled" by road signs reading "Morrissey Concert, Next Left". It's true, however, that having spent years yearning to be seen, he now spends years longing to be invisible. Living in Hollywood is hardly the best place for that. He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.

Even so, he remains for the most part icily unillusioned, like a monk passing through a whorehouse. His contempt for the music industry is visceral, and he prefers to spend his time reading Auden and James Baldwin. (Spotting Baldwin in a Barcelona hotel, he decides not to approach him, since even the mildest rejection would apparently mean he would have to go and hang himself.) The solution to all problems, he tells us, "is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books". David Bowie tells him that he's had so much sex and drugs that he's surprised he is still alive, to which Morrissey replies that he's had so little of both that he feels much the same. Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but Morrissey doesn't know who he is. The press lie that he is a racist, that he opened the door to a journalist wearing a tutu, that he hung around public toilets as a youth and that he would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian runs a disapproving piece on him adorned with a photo of somebody else. When he discovers that a Smiths record released in Japan includes a track by Sandie Shaw, he begs the people around him to kill him. "Many rush forward," he adds.

"Although a passable human creature on the outside," he comments of himself, "the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet", of whom he himself ranks among the most adept. He is one of the great curmudgeons and contrarians of our time. He even puts in a good word for the Kray brothers.

Surprisingly, he goes easy on his passion for animal rights, but observes no such restraint when it comes to George Bush ("the world's most famous active terrorist") and Tony Blair, at whose feet he lays the London deaths of 2005. At least the vindictive music industry has taught him how to hate, though one suspects he didn't need much tutoring. The music impresario Tony Wilson "managed a lengthy and slow decline which some thought was actually an ongoing career". There is a cameo of Julie Burchill of such sublime savagery that one expects the page to ignite. The former Smiths who took him to court are subjected to 50 pages of devastatingly articulate venom.

Though he is careful to inform us that he drives a sky-blue Jag, fame hasn't changed him much. He is still the same miserable old Mozzer he always was. The death of friends leads him to wonder movingly whether life isn't "all too burdensome, with so much loss taking its root in the heart, as the body goes spinning on towards a dreadful cessation". It isn't the kind of sentence Robbie Williams would come up with. His interest in the dead, his father warns him, outstrips his affection for the living. He sees a ghost on Saddleworth Moor, burial ground of the Moors murders, and narrowly avoids being kidnapped in Mexico. Everywhere he looks he sees violence: "military science whaling, nuclear weapons, armed combat, the abattoir, holy war … riot police assaulting innocent civilians." When a small, flightless bird comes to live in his back garden, he fences it in with boxes to ward off predators. He has quite a few such boxes of his own.

Perhaps the time has come for a new career. If he could get treatment for his addiction to alliteration and stop using phrases like "for you and I", this prodigiously talented "small boy of 52", as he described himself two years ago, could walk away with the Booker prize.

Autobiography and memoirMorrisseyThe SmithsIndieManchesterTerry Eagleton
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Colin Wilson's glumness entranced me as a budding teenage existentialist | Terry Eagleton

The Outsider's theme of artistic alienation was perfect for someone trying and failing to grow a beard and get a girlfriend

When I was 16, I tried to grow a beard and fancied myself as a bit of an existentialist. There was a good-looking girl at a local convent school who not only fancied herself as an existentialist but fancied existentialists, which gave me a strong motive for proclaiming the essential futility of human existence. Looking back, it's possible that I mistook adolescence for metaphysical angst.

I was also fascinated at the time by the so-called angry young men, most of whom were to end up as dyspeptic old reactionaries. I read Look Back in Anger, Lucky Jim and Room at the Top, and tried to imitate their truculent, iconoclastic style in my own unglamorous existence. This wasn't easy, given that I wore a school blazer and had only recently graduated to long trousers. I wasn't exactly sure what these writers were angry about, and later came to see that they weren't either. In fact, most of them weren't angry at all. It was mostly media hype. But they were putting what I saw as my own culture – provincial, working-class, vaguely leftist, chip-on-shoulder – on the map, and this was deeply exciting. In the evenings I took to wearing a cravat, a piece of clothing that I had seen the elegantly disdainful John Osborne wear on TV. It seemed to signify a certain cosmic dissidence.

My Sartrian gloom hit a new low when the convent schoolgirl took up with an 18-year-old Nietzschean from Rochdale. I found solace, however, in the appearance of Colin Wilson's The Outsider in 1956. It was one of the first books I ever bought, and I can still recall the awe with which I read on the dust jacket the portentous words "This is the most remarkable book on which this reviewer has ever had to pass judgment". Perhaps the guy had only previously reviewed Enid Blyton, given that The Outsider is second-rate, off-the-peg philosophy from start to finish. There was also a glowing commendation from Cyril Connolly, who later confessed he hadn't read it. The book was declared by one commentator to have turned its 24-year-old author into the most controversial intellectual in Britain. So it did, but only for about six weeks. He went on to publish a rather dismal series of potboilers on crime and the occult.

I knew that Wilson had written the book in the Reading Room of the British Museum while spending his nights in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, and thought vaguely of camping out on the Salford playing fields in solidarity. He didn't wear a cravat, but I saw the odd photo of him in a turtleneck sweater, which was almost as insurrectionary. In those days, not even bomb-toting anarchists would have dared to appear in public without a tie, so the cunning of a turtleneck sweater was that it allowed men to be open-necked without rubbing the fact offensively in your face. Astonishingly, he also wore white sneakers on television, which struck me as only slightly less subversive than the storming of the Bastille.

The Outsider is a ragbag of modish nihilism, ranging from Camus, Sartre, Hermann Hesse and TE Lawrence to Blake, Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. TS Eliot rubs shoulders with Vaslav Nijinsky, and Ernest Hemingway sits cheek by jowl with Franz Kafka. Most of the figures it deals with have absurdly little in common with one another. It is just that the pure Romantic cliche of its main argument – that some artists feel alienated from mainstream society – is nebulous enough to apply to almost anyone who lifts a paintbrush or a pen, including at a stretch the anonymous author of the Rupert Bear annual. It is the kind of book you might expect from a gloomy autodidact who had been locked for some months in a second-hand bookshop.

It was the glumness above all that entranced me. It is a common mistake to imagine that pessimism is somehow more mature than cheerfulness. In the 20th century, melancholy is modish, whereas there is something incorrigibly naive about hope. For an adolescent in search of maturity, then, metaphysical meaninglessness seemed to be just the ticket, not least after the convent schoolgirl had decamped to the left bank of Rochdale. Rather oddly, The Outsider concludes by arguing that western philosophy is afflicted with a "pessimistic fallacy", hence taking a smart step back from its own prevailing mood. I tried, however, to set this positive note aside, for fear it might undermine my dejection.

The book was one of the first fruits of a genre of pop philosophy that has since produced some first-rate stuff. Yet it is not a form of writing I can think of without embarrassment. I was once browsing in an Oxford bookshop when I came across a display of books offering simplified accounts of various subjects: Physics Made Simple, Astronomy Made Simple and so on. I caught a glimpse of a friend of mine standing before the display, a distinguished Oxford philosopher, who was leafing idly through the Philosophy Made Simple volume. Seizing the chance of a jest, I crept up behind him and murmured in his ear "That's a bit difficult for you, isn't it?" He swung round in alarm, and my first thought was that he had had cosmetic surgery. But it was not my friend at all. It was a complete stranger. Muttering a few words of apology, I scampered out of the store.

Somewhere in the world, there is a man who believes that people in Oxford are so obnoxiously elitist that they jeer openly at the efforts of total strangers to improve their minds.

Terry Eagleton is visiting professor at Lancaster and Notre Dame universities. This series, A book that changed me, will run throughout August

PhilosophyTerry Eagleton
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The Frontman: Bono (In The Name of Power) by Harry Browne – review

Bono the philanthropist is nothing but a crony of bankers and neocons, argues Terry Eagleton

It is no surprise that Bono and Bob Geldof, the two leading celebrity philanthropists of our time, are both Irish. The Ireland into which they were born in the 1960s was caught between third and first worlds, and so was more likely to sympathise with the wretched of the earth than were the natives of Hampstead. As a devoutly Christian nation, it also had a long missionary tradition. Black babies were a familiar object of charity in Ireland long before Hollywood movie stars began snapping them up. Bono himself was a member of a prayer group in the 1970s, before he stumbled on leather trousers and wrap-around shades. Scattered across the globe by hunger and turmoil at home, the Irish have long been a cosmopolitan people, far less parochial than their former proprietors. Small nations cannot afford the insularity of the great.

Besides, if you were born into this remote margin of Europe and yearned for the limelight, it helped to have an eye-catching cause and a mania for self-promotion. Rather as the Irish in general were forced by internal circumstance to become an international people, so men like Bono and Geldof could use their nationality to leap on to the world stage.

Bono belongs to the new, cool, post-political Ireland; but by turning back to the old, hungry, strife-torn nation, now rebaptised as Africa, he could bridge the gap between the two. Even so, he has not been greatly honoured in his own notoriously begrudging country, or elsewhere. Harry Browne recounts the (perhaps apocryphal) tale of the singer standing on stage clapping while declaring: "Every time I clap my hands, a child dies." "Then stop fucking doing it!" yelled a voice from the crowd.

Paul David Hewson's rise to fame also coincides with the postmodern decline of politics into spectacle. What more suitable politician than a rock star in an age of manufactured sentiments and manipulated images? Having strayed in from showbusiness, Bono can present himself as outside the political arena, speaking simply from the heart; but his fame as a musician also means that he has a constituency of millions, which means in turn that the political establishment are eager to have him on the inside. For all his carefully crafted self-irony (how ridiculous for me, an overpaid rock star from working-class Dublin, to be saving the world!), the inside is a place he has never betrayed any great reluctance to occupy. Since an outsider is unlikely to know much about global economics, he is likely to take his cue from the conventional wisdom of the insiders, which is why Bono is both maverick and conservative.

One result of his campaigning has been a kind of starvation chic. In this impressively well-researched polemic, Browne recounts how Ali Hewson, Bono's wife, praised the work of her company's Paris-based clothes designer for being influenced by dusty African landscapes. She admired "the way some of the clothes look like they've been worn before and sort of restitched … to incorporate the continent, in a sense". Hewson's Messianic husband, or "the little twat with the big heart", as Viz magazine once dubbed him, has been trying to incorporate Africa into his image for a good few decades now. Like Geldof, he inherited the social conscience of the 1960s without its political radicalism, which is why he has proved so convenient a front man for the neo-liberals.

In fact, as Browne points out, he has cosied up to racists such as Jesse Helms, whitewashed architects of the Iraqi adventure such as Tony Blair and Paul Wolfowitz, and discovered a soulmate in the shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. He has also brownnosed the Queen, sucked up to the Israelis, grovelled at the feet of corporate bullies and allied himself with rightwing anti-condom US evangelicals in Africa. The man who seems to flash a peace sign every four seconds apparently has no problem with the sponsorship of the arms corporation BAE. His consistent mistake has been to regard these powers as essentially benign, and to see no fundamental conflict of interests between their own priorities and the needs of the poor. They just need to be sweet-talked by a charmingly bestubbled Celt. Though he has undoubtedly done some good in the world, as this book readily acknowledges, a fair bit of it has been as much pro-Bono as pro bono republico.

If Bono really knew the history of his own people, he would be aware that the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was not the result of a food shortage. Famines rarely are. There were plenty of crops in the country, but they had to be exported to pay the landlords' rents. There was also enough food in Britain at the time to feed Ireland several times over. What turned a crisis into a catastrophe was the free market doctrine for which the U2 front man is so ardent an apologist. Widespread hunger is the result of predatory social systems, a fact that Bono's depoliticising language of humanitarianism serves to conceal.

Browne's case is simple but devastating. As a multimillionaire investor, world-class tax avoider, pal of Bush and Blair and crony of the bankers and neo-cons, Bono has lent credence to the global forces that wreak much of the havoc he is eager to mop up. His technocratic, west-centred, corporation-friendly campaigns have driven him into one false solution, unsavoury alliance and embarrassing debacle after another. The poor for him, Browne claims, exist largely as objects of the west's charity. They are not seen as capable of the kind of militant mobilisation that might threaten western interests.

Bertolt Brecht tells the tale of a king in the East who was pained by all the suffering in the world. So he called his wise men together and asked them to inquire into its cause. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and returned with the news that the cause of the world's suffering was the king.

• Terry Eagleton's Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America is published by Norton.

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