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Visions of England by Roy Strong - review | Terry Eagleton

The pastoral has political uses

The vision of the English countryside as an Arcadian paradise of rosy-cheeked peasants was largely the creation of town dwellers. It is the myth of those for whom the country is a place to look at rather than live in. Thomas Hardy, one of the finest of all memorialists of rural England, knew that there were scarcely any peasants to be found there at all, if by "peasant" one means a farmer who owns and works his own land. Most of them had been reduced to landless labourers by market forces and the Enclosure Acts, or driven into the satanic mills of early industrial England. There was nothing timeless or idyllic about this landscape of capitalist landowners, grinding poverty, depopulation and a decaying artisanal class, which is one reason why Hardy is not the most cheerful of authors.

Roy Strong's vision of England, by contrast, is a dream of rural harmony. His book begins with a florid gush of praise for Elizabeth I, a woman one suspects he would dearly like to have moved in with, and takes us by way of Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable to Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, folk music and the National Trust. Not much for your average British Bangladeshi there. In an elegiac epilogue, the author laments the fact that so much history teaching today passes over this national heritage for such unpatriotic topics as the Russian revolution, the two world wars and the Holocaust. Our children are having their heads filled with Trotsky rather than the Tudors.

Strong may be a Romantic conservative, but he is not a fascist beast. In fact, the most astonishing aspect of his book is the way it stealthily undermines its own thesis. He is chary of history lessons that focus on Rommel rather than Rupert Brooke, but admits that his own education was excessively Anglocentric. He also welcomes multiculturalism, even if he would clearly like Pakistanis to learn all about manor houses and morris dancing. Nor is he far from confessing that the proud lineage of British Protestantism might more accurately be described as visceral anti-Catholicism. Despite an anodyne reference to the "heroic voyages" of such squalid adventurers as Drake and Raleigh, he is well aware of the role played by imperialism in the formation of British identity. He also notes that one of the keynotes of that identity was a sense of "external threat", a polite way of describing a pathological racist revulsion at all things French. Without the French to execrate, the British would have had no more idea of who they were than a spaniel.

Most astonishingly of all, Strong sails close to acknowledging that the subject at the heart of his book is all a con. It is an "invented paradise", which glosses over the social inequalities and "appalling depression" of rural England. The great 18th-century landscape painters may show the landowner gazing benignly on his flocks of sheep and abundant harvest, but Strong reminds us that there is no sign of those who actually till the soil. (He might have added that much the same is true of Jane Austen, who has a remarkably astute eye for the value and size of a landed estate, but never sees anyone working there.) Paintings that romanticised rural life, the book points out, were displayed on the walls of some of the very landowners who, by mechanising and enclosing the countryside, were helping to destroy the communities these images commemorated. The former director of the Victoria & Albert museum seems to teeter on the very brink of Marxist talk about social contradictions.

The pastoral, in short, is the invention of patricians. Nostalgia can serve the purposes of the hard-headed, as with today's heritage industry. Because rural landscapes do not change all that much, Box Hill being pretty much the same place today as when Austen wrote about it, it is easy to imagine that the way of life which goes on in their midst is eternal as well. Strong is alert to this mistake, as well as to just how much these dewy-eyed icons of England exclude. The industrial revolution is written out of the nation's self-image, and along with it more or less everything north of Warwickshire. Englishness is more a matter of the south Downs than the Yorkshire moors. Our sense of the nation is the imaginary construct of poets, Strong concedes, not a reflection of reality.

The idea of a timeless rural England emerged at exactly the point when the country was becoming the first in the world to undergo industrialisation. The countryside, in short, became changeless just when it started to shrink. A couple of centuries earlier, when Shakespeare's John of Gaunt delivered his famous eulogy to "this scepter'd isle"', he was, so Strong points out, lamenting the passing of an England which was in fact being defined for the first time at that historical moment. As the critic Raymond Williams was fond of insisting, the only sure thing about the organic society is that it has always gone.

What is truly stunning about the book is that none of this in the end is allowed to count against the delusion of England as Arcadia. It may leave out rather a lot, but that is the way with myths. The exclusion of "factories and furnaces, slums and human degradation" from the nation's sense of selfhood is no great problem, since all such images are works of the imagination. One wonders whether Strong has ever heard of Dickens and Joyce, those mighty mythologists of the city. Why should the imagination not draw its inspiration from diesel engines as much as from haylofts? For all its bogusness, much of it well examined here, this preposterous vision of English society must be allowed to stand. It speaks, Strong informs us, of a "peaceful and tranquil" society, "that exists in harmony and where life follows the cycle of the seasons". Whenever one hears talk of social harmony, one can be sure that someone's interests are under threat. The fact that England is neither tranquil nor harmonious, and never has been, is no objection at all to this fantasy. Ideologies are not to be loused up with the facts. The rural vision remains the key source of the nation's identity.

There is, perversely, something to be said for Strong's decision to persist in this neo-Georgian delusion. Ruling-class English ideology has always involved a curious mixture of the rural and the imperial – which is to say, the peaceful and the bellicose, or even, stereotypically speaking, the feminine and masculine. Strong plumps for the former partly because he dislikes the idea of a national identity bloated with imperial mythology. As a spiritual aristocrat, he has no truck with the complacent notions of progress and conquest of a Whiggish middle class.

What this overlooks is the fact that these two visions are really sides of the same coin. The common soldiers who fought in the two world wars, Strong argues, may have come from factories and offices, but they fought in the name of Chipping Campden and Lavenham rather than Manchester or Birmingham. This isn't actually true. The great majority of these men would never have heard of Lavenham and fought because they were forced to. Yet in a garbled way, the point captures a kind of truth. Visions of peace and harmony are the agreeable illusions of which war and imperialism are the nightmarish underside. The thought of gathering lilacs in the spring again may be just enough to sustain you through Flanders or Dunkirk. In this sense, all utopia has an element of truth. When Strong writes of the English love of gardens in this book, he sees that there may be some race memory at work here, by which the citizens of post-rural England may find a fragile link back to the agricultural past of their ancestors. Not all nostalgia is morbid. But neither are we defined by the past, as this book dubiously suggests.

Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale University Press.

HistoryBritish identity and societyTerry Eagleton
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AC Grayling's private university is odious | Terry Eagleton

The money-grubbing dons signing up at the £18k a year New College of the Humanities are the thin edge of an ugly wedge

A group of well-known academics are setting up a private college in London which will charge students £18,000 a year in tuition fees. There will, as usual, be scholarships for the deserving poor. As a kind of Oxbridge by the Thames, the New College of the Humanities will offer students weekly one-on-one tutorials. For that kind of money, I would demand a team of live-in, round-the-clock tutors, ready to fill me in about Renaissance art or logical positivism at the snap of a finger. I would also expect them to iron my socks and polish my boots.

There will, however, be teaching from 14 "star" professors as well, including Linda Colley, Christopher Ricks, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and David Cannadine. Somehow it's hard to imagine these guys rolling in at 9am and teaching for 12 to 15 hours a week, which is what you do in the real Oxbridge. Prospective students should talk to these professors' travel agents and insist on obtaining photocopies of their diaries. Students can, however, be fairly relaxed about the prospect of being kicked out. It would be like JK Rowling being kicked out by her publishers.

The master of the college will be public sage and identikit Islington Man, AC Grayling. Many observers, he comments, will be surprised to see a group of "almost pinko" academics pitching in to the project. If Dawkins, Colley, Ricks and Ferguson are pinko, I'm a deep shade of indigo. Anyway, why should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, British society has held the view that the education of doctors, teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

This piece of the so-called private sector will actually be parasitic on the public one, rather like surgeons who use public facilities for private operations. The college's degrees will be awarded by the University of London, which ought to know better than to collude in an enterprise which could result in seeing its professors poached by those with the biggest bank balances. London Uni will share its libraries and other facilities too, thus ensuring that its own students are forced to share resources with those who have bought their way in.

Grayling and his colleagues, good liberals all except for the flag-waving Ferguson, are naturally committed to the ideal of following the argument wherever it leads. The only problem is that under these circumstances it leads straight to the bank. If education is to be treated as a commodity, then we should stop pussyfooting around. I already ask my students at the start of a session whether they can afford my £50 insights into Wuthering Heights, or whether they will settle for a few mediocre ideas at £10 a piece.

The new college, staffed as it is by such notable liberals, will of course be open to all viewpoints. Well, sort of. One takes it there will not be a theology department. It is reasonable to suppose that Tariq Ali will not be appointed professor of politics. The teaching of history, if the work of Dawkins and Grayling is anything to judge by, will be of a distinctly Whiggish kind. Grayling peddles a Just So version of English history, breathtaking in its crudity and complacency, in which freedom has been on the rise for centuries and has only recently run into trouble. Dawkins touts a simple-minded, off-the-peg version of Enlightenment in which people in the west have all been getting nicer and nicer, and would have ended up as civilised as an Oxford high table were it not for a nasty bunch of religious fundamentalists. Who would pay £18,000 a year to listen to this outdated Victorian rationalism when they could buy themselves a second-hand copy of John Stuart Mill?

To mention Mill in the same breath as Grayling, however, is to do a great liberal a grave disservice. Mill refused to allow his passion for freedom to blind him to gross inequality. By contrast Grayling is the kind of liberal who is prepared to let equality go hang. Freedom from state intervention for him means freedom to charge students sky high fees. If this catches on, the current crisis in universities will escalate into educational apartheid of the kind that we already have at secondary school level. There will be a number of private unis where students are assigned fags and expect to stroll into the Foreign Office with a third-class degree, and a lot of other places which cannot afford to paint the walls. Just when the real Oxford and Cambridge have been dragging themselves inch by inch into the modern democratic world, an ultra-Oxbridge is being proposed which will probably have an even lower intake of working class students than Cambridge did when I was there in the 1960s. Grayling's scheme is odious.

Higher educationUniversity of LondonTuition feesStudentsLecturersNiall FergusonRichard DawkinsTerry Eagleton
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The death of universities | Terry Eagleton

Academia has become a servant of the status quo. Its malaise runs so much deeper than tuition fees

Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question is absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear from pubs, or egoism from Hollywood. Just as there cannot be a pub without alcohol, so there cannot be a university without the humanities. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Neither, however, can there be a university in the full sense of the word when the humanities exist in isolation from other disciplines. The quickest way of devaluing these subjects – short of disposing of them altogether – is to reduce them to an agreeable bonus. Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name. The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties. If the humanities are not under such dire threat in the United States, it is, among other things, because they are seen as being an integral part of higher education as such.

When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.

From time to time, as in the late 1960s and in these last few weeks in Britain, that critique would take to the streets, confronting how we actually live with how we might live.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

How can this be achieved in practice? Financially speaking, it can't be. Governments are intent on shrinking the humanities, not expanding them.

Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.

HumanitiesUniversity fundingHigher educationStudentsUniversity teachingTuition feesTerry Eagleton
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Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World by HRH The Prince of Wales – review

Prince Charles is calling for a revolution – but is he radical enough, asks Terry Eagleton

Never afraid to stick his ears above the parapet, Prince Charles has produced a book he proudly describes as "a call to revolution". Throwing moderation to the winds, he comes out in favour of happiness, sustainable development and cities fit to live in, while opposing greed, ugliness and environmental catastrophe. Has his old man got wind of this subversive stuff? Has the prince taken to selling Socialist Worker to the toilers of Clarence House?

Harmony is a hard book to summarise, since apart from Jedward and Marxist literary theory there is very little in what Charles describes as "being aware and alive in this extraordinary universe" that it leaves out. The unifying thread, however, is the need to abandon a soulless modernity for a traditional spirituality.

The book ranges from the mating habits of the albatross to the Sufi brotherhood, from carpet-weaving in Afghanistan to the mysterious five-pointed star you get when you superimpose the Earth's orbit on Mercury's. There is a quotation from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes ("that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above"), which might just be a coded offer to swap Highgrove with a council house tenant. We move from reflections on the "grammar and geometry" of nature to the "magical mountain kingdom of Bhutan", where, as the book fails to point out, democracy is only recently known. There is some grudging admiration for the Large Hadron Collider ("will it enable us to re-find our place in nature? "), along with some unqualified approval of termites, Thomas Aquinas and the garden the prince has created at Highgrove "planted with fig, pomegranate and olive trees because they are mentioned in the Qur'an". This, one takes it, is his contribution to the war on terror.

There are, to be sure, limits to Charles's revolutionism. He wants the kind of change radical enough to do away with polluters and modernist architects, but not radical enough to do away with himself. Meanwhile, he is eager to share his thoughts with us on Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, Ficino's tome on Platonic theology, Marinetti's Futurist manifesto and a number of other texts he has almost certainly not read. He also offers us some incisive insights into figures such as Justus von Liebig, David Bohm and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he has very probably not heard of.

This is because, being a royal, he can employ people to do his reading for him. Two such loyal readers-cum-scribes, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, presumably wrote the hard bits of this book, such as how many power stations there are in the world, while the prince mixed in a number of high-minded platitudes reminiscent of a Get Well Soon card.

Like many a coffee-table creation, one of the volume's most alluring aspects is its smell. But there are also some rather fetching pictures of the Egyptian goddess Ma'at, the prince sitting on his sofa gazing benignly at a frog and various astrological diagrams of the cosmos. In somewhat more dubious taste is a photograph of the twin towers of Chartres cathedral, which are said to "resemble Christ's two fingers held aloft".

Discovering the same organic patterns everywhere you look is a familiar symptom of paranoia. In the prince's case, however, it represents an insight into the fundamental rhythms of the universe. If you press your face on a large piece of paper on a wall, he tells us, and let your arms describe natural arcs with a couple of pencils, you would find yourself creating certain cosmically symbolic circles. He forgets to add that you would also look a complete prat. Charles, to be sure, has the leisure for such communings, as others may not.

The point of having an enormous amount of money is not to have to think about the stuff and thus to be free to turn one's thoughts to more spiritual matters, like the mystical proportions of the Golden Ratio and why everyone in the depths of a recession keeps banging on unpoetically about growth and unemployment. The prince is darkly suspicious of economic growth – which is to say of other people's hunger for possessions rather than his own.

Old-style Tories like the prince support a system that breeds materialism and cultural cretinism, then throw up their hands in well-bred horror at what they have helped to bring into existence. Despite almost certainly never having heard of him – a deficiency that doesn't hold him back here – His Royal Highness should recall Bertolt Brecht's parable about the troubled king of the east who summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into the source of all the miseries in the world. The wise men duly investigated, and returned to the king with the answer that the source of the miseries was him.

Terry Eagleton's On Evil is published by Yale.

Prince CharlesTerry Eagleton
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Ideas for modern living: virtue

Why evil is so sexy…

The devil, so they say, has all the best tunes. Nobody would take a guided tour of Dante's Paradiso if they could have one of the Inferno instead. Milton's God sounds like a bureaucratic bore, while his Satan shimmers with mutinous life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could have a beer with Fagin instead. So why is evil so sexy, and good so profoundly unglamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring?

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of...

The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses by Geoffrey Robertson | Book review

Terry Eagleton welcomes a coolly devastating inquiry into the Vatican's handling of child abuse

The first child sex scandal in the Catholic church took place in AD153, long before there was a "gay culture" or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of "erring" priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on.

What has made a bad situation worse, as the eminent QC Geoffrey Robertson argues in this coolly devastating inquiry, is canon law – the church's own arcane, highly secretive legal system, which deals with alleged child abusers in a dismayingly mild manner rather than handing them over to the police. Its "penalties" for raping children include such draconian measures as warnings, rebukes, extra prayers, counselling and a few months on retreat. It is even possible to interpret canon law as claiming that a valid defence for paedophile offences is paedophilia. Since child abusers are supposedly incapable of controlling their sexual urges, this can be used in their defence. It is rather like pleading not guilty to stealing from Tesco's on the grounds that one is a shoplifter. One blindingly simple reason for the huge amount of child abuse in the Catholic church (on one estimate, up to 9% of clerics are implicated) is that the perpetrators know they will almost certainly get away with it.

For almost a quarter of a century, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man who is now Pope, was in supreme command of this parallel system of justice – a system deliberately hidden from the public, police and parliaments and run, so Robertson maintains, in defiance of international law. Those who imagine that the Vatican has recently agreed to cooperate with the police, he points out, have simply fallen for one of its cynical public relations exercises. In the so-called "New Norms" published by Pope Benedict this year, there is still no instruction to report suspected offenders to the civil authorities, and attempting to ordain a woman is deemed to be as serious an offence as sodomising a child. There have, however, been some changes: victims of child abuse are now allowed to report the matter up to the age of 38 rather than 28. If you happen to be 39, that's just tough luck. As Robertson wryly comments, Jesus declares that child molesters deserve to be drowned in the depths of the sea, not hidden in the depths of the Holy See.

How can Ratzinger get away with it? One mightily important reason, examined in detail in this book, is because he is supposedly a head of state. The Vatican describes itself on its website as an "absolute monarchy", which means that the Pope is immune from being sued or prosecuted. It also means that as the only body in the world with "non-member state" status at the UN, the Catholic church has a global platform for pursuing its goals of diminishing women, demonising homosexuals, obstructing the use of condoms to prevent Aids and refusing to allow abortion even to save the life of the mother. For these purposes, it is sometimes to be found in unholy alliance with states such as Libya and Iran. Neither is it slow to use veiled threats of excommunication to bend Catholic politicians throughout the world to its will. If Pope Benedict were to air some of his troglodytic views with full public force, Robertson suggests, the Home Office would have been forced to refuse him entry into Britain.

In fact, he argues, the Vatican's claim to statehood is bogus. It dates from a treaty established between Mussolini and the Holy See, which Robertson believes has no basis in international law. The Vatican has no permanent population, which is a legal requirement of being a state. In fact, since almost all its inhabitants are celibate, it cannot propagate citizens at all other than by unfortunate accident. It is not really a territory, has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in its precincts and depends for all its essential services on the neighbouring nation of Italy. Nor does it field a team in the World Cup, surely the most convincing sign of its phoniness.

"Petty gossip" is how the Pope has described irrefutable evidence of serious crimes. His time as the Vatican official in charge of overseeing priestly discipline was the period when, in Robertson's furiously eloquent words, "tens of thousands of children were bewitched, buggered and bewildered by Catholic priests whilst [Ratzinger's] attention was fixated on 'evil' homosexuals, sinful divorcees, deviate liberation theologians, planners of families and wearers of condoms".

Can he be brought to book for this? As a widespread and systematic practice, clerical sexual abuse could be considered a crime against humanity, such crimes not being confined to times of war; and though Ratzinger may claim immunity as a head of state, he is also a German citizen. The book comes to no firm conclusion here, but the possibility of convicting the supreme pontiff of aiding and abetting the international crime of systemic child abuse seems not out of the question. The Vatican, in any case, is unlikely to escape such a fate by arguing, as it has done already, that the relations between the Pope and his bishops are of such unfathomable theological complexity that no mere human court could ever hope to grasp them.

This is a book that combines moral passion with steely forensic precision, enlivened with the odd flash of dry wit. With admirable judiciousness, it even finds it in its heart to praise the charitable work of the Catholic church, as well as reminding us that paedophiles (whom Robertson has defended in court) can be kindly men. It is one of the most formidable demolition jobs one could imagine on a man who has done more to discredit the cause of religion than Rasputin and Pat Robertson put together.

Terry Eagleton's latest book is On Evil (Yale).

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Football: a dear friend to capitalism | Terry Eagleton

The World Cup is another setback to any radical change. The opium of the people is now football

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football...

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes | Book review

Terry Eagleton finds himself uneasy with a score-settling 'autobiography'

There are some things, like clearing your throat or falling in love, that you can only do for yourself. Even Prince Charles can't delegate dying or digesting to a valet. Writing your autobiography would seem to fall squarely in the category of the undelegatable; yet here we have an autobiography of Fidel Castro written by somebody else.

And not just any old somebody, either. Norberto Fuentes, one of Cuba's most distinguished writers, fought with Castro in the Cuban revolution but later fell out with him, narrowly escaped a death sentence and now lives in exile. His revenge is to steal his former comrade's psychological clothes, hijack his life-history and tell his story more truthfully than Castro presumably would himself. By donning the mask of his former political master, Fuentes can out-Castro him, confronting the reader with what he sees as the real rather than mythological figure. Fidel himself is a political fiction, an icon whose face adorns T-shirts; this novel masquerading as a life story claims to be the truth.

Continue reading...

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes | Book review

Terry Eagleton finds himself uneasy with a score-settling 'autobiography'

There are some things, like clearing your throat or falling in love, that you can only do for yourself. Even Prince Charles can't delegate dying or digesting to a valet. Writing your autobiography would seem to fall squarely in the category of the undelegatable; yet here we have an autobiography of Fidel Castro written by somebody else.

And not just any old somebody, either. Norberto Fuentes, one of Cuba's most...

Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole | Book review

Terry Eagleton on the corruption and bungling that have led to Ireland's economic woes

The luck of the Irish has finally run out. Having roared away lustily for a decade or so, the Celtic Tiger has now rolled over on its back, all four paws stiffly in the air. In the late 1990s, Ireland became well-heeled for the first time in its wretched history, and in some respects even outstripped its former colonial proprietors. In this newly affluent nation of software and low taxes, bent bankers and...