Peter Stothard's Blog, page 30

Jan Kott (and other sages of the Sixties)

By MICHAEL CAINES

Thinking about novels of ideas has led me back to influential books, and specifically the list published twenty years ago in the TLS; and this list in turn puts me in mind of one highly influential book (pictured above) dating from the early 1960s that didn't make the cut . . . .

Michael Bulley rightly pointed out last time around that you need proof of a book's effect to call it influential – of how many people Lucien Febvre's Struggle for History reached, for example, and its "particular consequences". Perhaps when we talk about influence, we're talking about a kind of excess – about Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom falling, some would say hazardously, into the hands of pundits and policy wonks as well as economists. The existence of new editions and translations is taken as proof of popularity. (Publishers' catalogues also hint at what counts as a lasting influence: see the "fortieth anniversary" edition of Capitalism and Freedom, the "fiftieth anniversary" Death and Life of Great American Cities, or the "Routledge Classic" edition of Purity and Danger.) And there's informed critical opinion, of course; in this week's TLS, Lawrence Douglas refers to the controversial first book on this 1960s list: "when we speak about Adolf Eichmann we inevitably also speak about Hannah Arendt".

Influence takes other courses, too. A week ago, I was at the Rose Theatre in Kingston for a conference that showed what curious courses it can take: "Jan Kott Our Contemporary", hosted by the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar, the Polish Cultural Institute and the Battersea Arts Centre.

The conference's title alludes to Kott's most famous work: Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Drawing on personal reflections and a sense of Shakespeare's affinity to Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, it was the outcome of Kott's many frustrating years of reviewing staid Shakespeare productions and trying to relate this supposedly universal plays to the world Kott knew, namely post-war Poland.

If Kott's book is filled with highly subjective, existentialist views, they were highly productive ones nonetheless, carried along with the 1960s Zeitgeist. Peter Brook famously wrote of Kott that he was the only Shakespeare scholar to assume that his readers "will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night". Opposite a chapter on "The Kings" a reader could have found a photograph of Stalin's funeral; the coffin-bearers being would-be kings themselves, hoping to rise through the "Grand Mechanism" of history to claim the throne. Yet what was the point? With a Warsaw production of Richard III in mind, Kott could imagine a tyrant to be an absurdist clown: "Buffoonery is a philosophy, and the highest form of contempt: absolute contempt".

Although qualified in its praise, the TLS recognized the book's importance, devoting a page to the French edition published in 1962, two years before the English translation appeared (it has been translated into at least twenty languages): "he is sound in his analysis of what Shakespeare saw", the actor Robert Speaight wrote (anonymously), "but far more questionable in his assumption of what Shakespeare thought". Nonetheless,  Kott's influence on Brook, among others, is well-documented; it was with his ideas in mind that Brook staged his celebrated "endgame of the heath", as one critic called his RSC King Lear of 1962.

Yet here was also a case of perfect timing: Brook had long held similar convictions about the need to make such classic dramas speak to their moment. That Kott could write a whole chapter about Lear and not mention Cordelia once hardly mattered. He flatteringly invited his own contemporaries to see themselves in these great dramatic works, and to see the moral urgency of doing so: "One must find in [Richard III] the night of Nazi occupation, concentration camps, mass murders".

This linking of history to history plays partly explains why Ken Pickering, speaking at the Rose Theatre, could assert that there are simply pre-Kott and post-Kott ways of staging a classic, as the spirit of clunky antiquarianism gave way to modern dress, say, with visible references to present-day politics. (Although is this perhaps just a lesson that needs to be repeated from time to time? Think of the flap about "Hamlet in plus fours" and the modern Cymbeline staged by the Birmingham Rep in 1925; and the current fetish for candles, jigs and what-have-ye.) As became clear over the course of the morning's panels, Shakespeare Our Contemporary remains relevant to both theatre and the educational institutions that once came so grudgingly to the realization that theatre could be a worthwhile object of study. In Belgrade as in Stratford-upon-Avon, I learnt, students can appreciate the appearance of Rumour in Henry IV part two as a comment on our own age of misinformation moving at the speed of 4G, while Bucharest has seen Shakespeare "remixed" in the violent style of video game.

During the 1960s, some paid Kott the backhanded compliment of disagreeing furiously with him – whereas since then, many times over, his work has often been dismissed as outdated or irrelevant. At the Rose, Graham Holderness wisely pointed out that we shouldn't be so sure of history's straightforward shedding of the bad old ways, and of the irrelevance of Kott's readings; in the background, he had a slide in which the image of Dubrovnik as a hedonist's tourist destination which gave way to the same picturesque ramparts under siege, a Serbian-blasted city on fire. There was an anger to the discussion of Kott in relation to the violent struggles of today – which buffoon will step forward next, you might ask, as the Grand Mechanism turns?

Perhaps the ultimate compliment is to be able to say that his ideas have long been taken for granted. Re-reading Shakespeare Our Contemporary a few years ago, Michael Billington could describe himself as "stunned by how much of it has been absorbed into our theatrical culture": "I can't think of anyone today who influences production in quite the same way as Kott", even if the Polish scholar has been himself "largely forgotten". Major innovations do have a habit of outliving the innovators, you could say. Influence ebbs into the immeasurable.

 

*

 

BOOKS OF THE 1960s

48. Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil
49. Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
50. Isaiah Berlin: Four Essays on Liberty
51. Albert Camus: Notebooks 1935–1951 (Carnets)
52. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
53. Robert Dahl: Who Governs?: Democracy and power in an American city
54. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
55. Erik Erikson: Gandhi’s Truth: On the origins of militant non-violence
56. Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie a l’age classique)
57. Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
58. Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
59. Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) 
60. H. L. A. Hart: The Concept of Law
61. Friedrich von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty (Die Verfassung der Freiheit)
62. Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
63. Carl Gustav Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken)
64. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: The Peasants of Languedoc (Les Paysans de Languedoc)
66. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind (Le Pensée sauvage)
67. Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (Das sogenannte Boese)
68. Thomas Schelling: The Strategy of Conflict
69. Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
70. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class

 

Dishing the dirt on John Aubrey

 

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

Without John Aubrey – the seventeenth-century antiquarian, toponymist, playwright, astrologer, folklorist, educational theorist, assiduous collector – we wouldn’t know much about the personal, curious traits of many of the most important figures (mainly men, but some women, too) of his age (and the one before it). Posthumously published as Brief Lives, Aubrey’s notes on people such as Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Elizabeth Danvers, René Descartes, Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare are the work of a journalist before the age of journalism, uniquely voicing a vanishing past (he lived through the Civil War and the Great Fire of London). Yet what do we know about Aubrey himself? His own life has always been overshadowed, perhaps understandably, by those of his more famous subjects.

In this week’s TLS, Stuart Kelly reviews Ruth Scurr’s new Life of Aubrey, “an experiment in the art of biography” that illuminates both its shadowy subject and “the unquestioned presumptions” behind the genre. Scurr's clever conceit is to write the biography as if it’s the diary Aubrey might have written, if he’d kept one. Recently, she joined me in our studio for the latest in the TLS Voices series (listen above) to tell us a little more about this unconventional approach. She gives us a wonderful sense of Aubrey’s brutally honest Lives and reads some excerpts, including one on the “sanguine and tractable” Venetia Stanley, who died in her bed suddenly: “When her head was opened there was found but little brain, which her husband imputed to her drinking of viper-wine; but spiteful women would say 'twas a viper-husband who was jealous of her that she would steal a leap . . .”. Is this just speculation? And why should we care about it? Well, after all – in the words of Truman Capote – isn’t all literature gossip?

You can subscribe to the TLS Voices series, for free, via iTunes .

Under the influence (of the 1950s)

 

"The hundred most influential books since the war?", part two – the Central and East European Publishing Project (CEEPP) being responsible for compiling this list, and the question mark being my own twenty-years-on addition. . . .

As mentioned last week, with the selected influential titles of the 1940s in mind, this "consciously arbitrary" account of intellectual influences in the West since 1945 suggests that fiction's influence has faded away over the years. A novel of the 1950s such as G. F. Green's In the Making has had its day, it seems (or has it?). Its near-contemporary The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 has had the enduring effects predicted by E. H. Carr in his TLS review: "his interpretations and conjectures, whether accepted or not, will have to be taken account of by future historians".

Fiction aside, though, I'm struck by the reminder here that the Two Cultures debate dates from the same decade as Mythologies, which I now realize I date to completely different intellectual eras, one considerably more tweedy than the other. And by the unlinking of books' lives from those of their authors: Wittgenstein's influence could be said to have only grown after his death in 1951 (Philosophical Investigations appearing two years later, that is, in G. E. M. Anscombe's translation), and it would be over a decade before If This Is a Man would make an impact in the anglophone world (it was published in 1947 in Italy, but only appeared in English twelve years later).

Anyway, see what you think . . . And prompted by the credit given to Doctor Zhivago, here are two tributes to the novel's author by two poets closely associated with him: the personally complicated acknowledgements of influence, you might say, of Anna Akhamatova and Marina Tsvetayeva.

 

*

 

BOOKS OF THE 1950s

22. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
23. Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels)
24. Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
25. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
26. Winston Churchill: The Second World War
27. Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
28. Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An analysis of the Communist system
29. Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols (Images et symboles)
30. Erik Erikson: Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history
31. Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History (Combat pour l’histoire)
32. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
33. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
34. Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six studies in Communism
35. Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (Se questo un uomo)
36. Claude Levi-Strauss: A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques)
37. Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysl)
38. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
39. David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
40. Herbert Simon: Models of Man, Social and Rational
41. C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
42. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
43. J. L. Talmon: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
44. A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
45. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
46. Karl Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power
47. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)

 

 

*

 

Please join us for Is There Life in the Novel of Ideas? – a discussion on Saturday, February 28 2015, 5–6.30pm, in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Speakers: Professor Peter Boxall, Jennie Erdal, Andrew O’Hagan

Chair: Michael Caines

LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2015

Glottal adventures

By DAVID COLLARD

If you don't admire the American animated cartoon series Adventure Time it's almost certainly because you haven't seen it yet. In the post-apocalyptic land of Ooo, Jake (a protean dog) and Finn (a boisterous boy) share a treehouse from which they set out on pocket odysseys, often involving the monstrous Lemongrab, a maniacal dictator whose catch phrase is a shrieked "Unacceptable!" It's wildly original with more wit, intelligence and flair in each eleven-minute episode than you'll find in a clutch of modern novels. That the two leading characters share their names with the protagonists of Iris Murdoch's debut novel Under the Net (1954) is part of the charm.

One of the many memorable minor characters is the shallow and self-absorbed Lumpy Space Princess, an airborne purple blob with a tiara. Her voice combines a strangulated babble of high-rising terminals (i.e. the upward inflection? At the end of declarative statements?) with a now-commonplace linguistic trait, originating in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and known as “vocal fry” – or, variously, as “pulse register”, “laryngealisation”, “pulse phonation”, “creak”, “popcorning”, “glottal fry”, “glottal rattle”, “glottal scrape” and “strohbass”. 

Vocal fry is produced when the airflow through the glottis is very slow and the vocal cords vibrate irregularly, about two octaves lower than the frequency of normal vocalization. It usually occurs at the end of a long utterance. It seems  impossible to reproduce here but you can hear it performed (and amusingly deconstructed) in this video by a droll American vlogger called Abby Normal:

Normal suggests that one aim of vocal fry is to express affiliation with a hypothetical elite by adopting a cool, detached and “unimpressed” register, suggesting a jaded cultural palate and a snooty if unfounded omniscience. It has been further suggested that vocal fry is an attempt to add gravitas by adopting a deeper, more “masculine” register. (This is nothing new to those of us who recall the extraordinary recalibration of Margaret Thatcher's range.)

This creaky vocalization has been on the rise among British speakers for some time now, especially, on radio programmes involving youngish contributors acting in a critical capacity, or speaking as a representative of some body or enterprise. It can be difficult to understand speech acts in which the real emotional or intellectual content is veiled by an aura of ennui.

A challenge to contemporary authors is to represent linguistic phenomena such as this in written form. Punctuation and a few long-established tropes aside (CAPITALS for shouting, italics for emphasis, an unspacedstreamofwords suggesting breathless excitement), mainstream writers haven't gone far in the search for new ways of representing speech. Authentic utterance is full of repetition, redundancy and hesitation – “to ‘er’ is human”, as the poet Michael Rosen says. These are usually removed from otherwise “naturalistic” dialogue and from (say) transcribed interviews for the simple reason that they would drive the reader nuts.

A few recent innovations aside (Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, rendered in an Old English “shadow tongue”, springs to mind), contemporary novelists tend to avoid engaging with the potential of human speech beyond declarative utterances, and the kind of eloquent exchanges in which the interlocutors are all but indistinguishable.

Perhaps one way ahead can be found in graphic novels. I recall, for example, Big Numbers, an incomplete series written in the 1990s by Alan Moore, in which a particular Northamptonshire dialect was represented by the word “T'choh”, first inked and then smeared to suggest the slurred vocal elision of the non-verbal utterance. Could a similar approach be applied to (say) vocal fry? Will Lumpy Space Princess ever find a voice in prose fiction?

 

The hundred most influential books since the war?

 

By MICHAEL CAINES

The novel of oh dears, an aside, a deviation, a digression, a pulling-back of the camera:

It's not so long ago that the phone would ring with a request for a photocopied page or two from the archives. A colleague could be sensibly firm if such requests unluckily came through to him ("no, we're not a public service. Goodbye!"); if you diplomatically helped out, you were marked out as a soft touch. I remember sending somebody a copy of the TLS review of Casino Royale. He called the next day with a request for me to track down the reviews of every other novel by Ian Fleming . . . .

For a little while, the single most frequently requested item was a list – the first part of which is reproduced below, along with its rationale – of the hundred most influential books published since the war (I hope one list every year or so isn't clickbaitishly overdoing things; I mean, this is my first since, oh, 1898).

As you'll see if you read on, this list, published twenty years ago, isn't the TLS's "official" selection – as if there could ever be such a thing – and it can only be understood, in context, as the compilers' "consciously arbitrary" jeu d'esprit. "Works of fiction" – my particular interest here, and the reason I went to look at it again for myself – "are included only when they had a wider impact." That wider impact may be partly a question of time passing, and lasting influence becoming obvious – hence the falling away of novels of ideas in this list, from the expected presence of George Orwell, Albert Camus et al in the earlier decades, to Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting in the 1980s. Would you even describe Kundera's show of fragmented virtuosity as a novel? And so the discussion that's really the point of such lists, that gesture towards objective certainties, goes on.

The TLS history editor David Horspool wrote a few years ago about how such a list might look today, and of course there are numberless variations on the list-making theme – our International Books of the Year, for example – offering many possible answers. The Selfish Gene and Orientalism, as David suggested, appear in such answers with unerring regularity. Economics disappeared for a while, but Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century alone would surely represent its return to a wider, anxiety-driven prominence. And I suspect that today it would be, to put it mildly, somewhat odd to limit the acknowledgement of feminism since the war to The Second Sex.

As for the novel – or even the chimerical "novel of ideas" – did it carry influence during the Cold War alone, as a vehicle for political outrage? Or would signs of a resurgence figure in a new account of the intellectual landscape of the recent past?

Let's start with the 1940s; I'll post the subsequent decades over the next week or so. That should be enough time for us to catch up on the titles we may have failed to be influenced by thus far, of course . .  . .

*

 

This list first appeared in the TLS of October 6, 1995.

Most people enjoy making lists. But who would produce a list of "A hundred books which have influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War"? A brief explanation is called for.

In 1986, a diverse group of writers and scholars came together to try to assist independent East European writers and publishers both at home and in exile. The Chairman was Lord Dahrendorf, Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Other members were the French historian Francois Furet; Raymond Georis, Director of the European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam; Laurens van Krevelen of the Dutch publishing house Meulenhoff; the Swedish writer Per Waestberg, at the time President of International PEN; the European correspondent of the New Yorker, Jane Kramer; and the historian and commentator, Timothy Garton Ash. It was envisaged that support would take two forms: first, to ensure publication in the original languages, and second, to encourage more translations.

One of the basic tenets of this initiative, which came to be known as the Central and East European Publishing Project (CEEPP), was that the geopolitical division of Europe the Iron Curtain was then still very much a reality had interrupted the normal and healthy flow not just of people but also of books and ideas. Its aim, in the words of Ralf Dahrendorf, was to foster a "common market of the mind" throughout the whole of Europe. After 1989, CEEPP was able to expand its activities and organize workshops and in-house training for those involved in publishing, but its main concern remained to facilitate the publication of worthwhile books and journals.

At Trustees’ meetings, titles submitted by publishers for consideration were scrutinized for their quality and relevance. Not surprisingly, there were, among the Orwells, Poppers and Hannah Arendts, some very odd works, and also some strange omissions. Inspired and provoked by the perusal of these lists over the years, the Trustees decided that in their final year of activity (the Project disbanded at the end of 1994) they would respond to the challenge of producing, as a jeu d’esprit, a consciously arbitrary list of the 100 books which have been most influential in the West since 1945. (This list is included in the forthcoming book, Freedom for Publishing: Publishing for Freedom: The Central and East European Publishing Project, edited by Timothy Garton Ash. 201pp. Budapest: CEU Press; distributed in the UK by OUP. 1 85866 055 6.)

An initial list was put together by a small panel consisting of Robert Cassen, Dahrendorf, Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff, Leszek Kolakowski and Bryan Magee. It was then revised, following an extensive discussion at the last meeting of CEEPP Trustees. Works of fiction are included only when they had a wider impact. Titles are grouped in decades by the date of their first appearance. In all cases, the English title is mentioned first and the original title in brackets. Within decades the order is alphabetical.

Certain seminal works which were published before the Second World War but which have had a major influence since the war were set aside. That list would certainly include:

 

Karl Barth: Credo
Marc Bloch: Feudal Society (La Société féodale)
Martin Buber: I and Thou (Ich und Du)
Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process (Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation)
Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)
Elie Halévy: The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on socialism and war (L’ire des tyrannies: Etudes sur le socialisme et la guerre)
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time (Sein und Zeit)
Johan Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Franz Kafka: The Castle (Das Schloss)
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Lewis Namier: The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses (La Rebelion de las masas)
Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung)

The final list was:

 

BOOKS OF THE 1940s

1. Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe)
2. Marc Bloch: The Historian’s Craft (Apologie pour l’historie, ou, Metier d’ historien)
3. Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II)
4. James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution
5. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
6. Albert Camus: The Outsider (L’Etranger)
7. R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History
8. Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom (Die Furcht vor der Freiheit)
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklaerung)
10. Karl Jaspers: The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (Der philosophische Glaube)
11. Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
12. André Malraux: Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine)
13. Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism
14. George Orwell: Animal Farm
15. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four
16. Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
17. Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
18. Paul Samuelson: Economics: An introductory analysis
19. Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme)
20. Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
21. Martin Wright: Power Politics

Fifty years late for Feynman’s lectures

Richard Feynman at CalTech in 1959; by Joe Munroe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By LUCY DALLAS 

“You get the impression that he could read nature like a book and simply report on what he found, without the tedium of complex analysis”: so says Paul Davies, in his introduction to Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces, extracted from the legendary Feynman Lectures on Physics. 

Feynman died on February 15, 1988; it is a little morbid to remember him only on this date – perhaps I'll post again on his birthday, May 18. By then I should have finished Six Easy Pieces, a series of lectures he gave fifty-odd years ago at CalTech to first year students (freshmen, a delightful word – are they not so fresh by the time they leave?). I am ashamed to admit I have not read it before, and it is taking a while – not because it is boring or badly expressed, quite the opposite, but it does take a bit of concentration.

Feynman was, of course, the great communicator, and you can see snippets of him in action online (here, for example); relaxed, conversational and engaging, throwing out cracks and hypotheses in his Noo Yawk drawl. He found giving the lectures useful as he believed that in order to understand something properly, you have to be able to explain it simply, and he was happy to start from first principles. There is no mystification, no jargon; he talks about atoms “jiggling” around, explains why elements are named the way they are, tells you that a drop of water is round because all the guys on the outside are trying to get to the middle. Simple, but not simplistic; he moves quickly inwards to questions of quantum behaviour, outwards to universal gravitation, expects you to keep up, and stops whenever he wants to point out something interesting.

And if the humble non-scientist concentrates, it is wondrous stuff; I thought I understood a little about some of the more resonant or crazy-sounding ideas – the uncertainty principle, waves and particles (our band, Spirit of Play, have a song of that name which made it onto the Nature podcast, a high point for me)  – but Feynman talks you through the basic principles, clearly and with no fuss. The ideas are beguiling, and the language is, too; who knew particles have a number assigned to them which quantifies their “strangeness”? Well, lots of people, but you take my point.

The freshmen were, in fact, not necessarily the people who benefited the most from his lecture series; quite a few dropped out, but they were replaced by postgraduates and Feynman’s peers and colleagues, who were gripped by the way he approached the biggest and smallest questions in science and reformulated the teaching – and understanding – of physics.

The best kind of guide, then; fully engaged in explaining why his subject, which he knows from the inside out, is so important, so beautiful and so fascinating.  The day he died, some of his students at CalTech climbed up the library building and hung out a banner that said “We love you, Dick”.

 

Drinking with Dickens

George Cruikshank's illustration of a gin palace, for Hard Times (1854): © Alamy

By THEA LENARDUZZI

Drinking always tastes better if you can find some literary justification for it. Just think of the mass appeal of Burns Night. I spent much of last night at the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury sipping gin (much of it more or less neat) as part of a gin-tasting evening organized by the London Gin Club. That was in the basement, in Dickens’s kitchen. There was a “pop-up” gin bar upstairs in what is usually the café (pop-up, here, in its most proper sense, as it’s moved on after only one night). That’s diversification for you.

There’s a new exhibitions – “Dickens’s First Love” –  just down the hall, too, bringing together some of the writer’s earliest literary efforts, including love poems about Maria Beadnell  (a banker’s daughter whom the young journalist courted, ultimately without success, for three years), as well as comic verse written for her sister Anne. (The organizers’ hope that visitors will “pen their own love poems and try to better the great Victorian novelist” seems a touch ambitious, especially if there’s gin involved.)

Back in the kitchen, we tasted Old Tom –  a popular eighteen-century recipe, which was sweetened with sugar (or whatever else was to hand when the price of sugar soared)  – and London Dry, a much drier variant with no added sugars or botanicals, favoured since the mid-1900s. Both, we were told, are having something of a revival, though I’d never realized they were dead. (Olivia Williams gives a good account of all this in her book Gin, Glorious, Gin.)

There was gin blended with cardamom, another with coriander, and a few others too (the lack of greater detail is perhaps self-explanatory), all loosely pinned to the master’s own taste for the old comfort. Rare is the work by Dickens’s that doesn’t make some mention of drink: Mr Micawber’s lethal rum and brandy punch, for example, or Bob Cratchit’s more frugal “hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons”, which he turns up his cuffs – “as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby” – to serve.

Bob Cratchit was the kind of person whom Dickens would probably have encountered on his journey into the “narrow streets and dirty courts” of High Holborn, described so memorably in his article “Gin Shops”, published in the Evening Chronicle in 1835; the kind of man who, had his morals been less steady and his family life less wholesome, might have joined the fellows Dickens found there, “who came in ‘just to have a drain’” and “made themselves crying drunk”.

There was no such riotous behaviour last night, arms, legs and staves remaining easily defined and our coats untorn. When we left our faces were shining like Micawber’s – personal finances and some vague sense of propriety having prevented us from drinking ourselves into the oblivion Dickens had witnessed. Time for a hot chocolate, perhaps . . . ?

 

Peerless Viv Richards

Adrian Murrell/Allsport

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

The cricket World Cup starts tomorrow, hosted this time by Australia and New Zealand. India, the holders, beat Sri Lanka in a pulsating final in Mumbai four years ago. Under no pressure whatsoever from an estimated Indian television audience of 400 million, their nerveless captain MS Dhoni promoted himself inthe batting order as India chased an imposing target. He finished the game with 91 runs and a six, sending the ball soaring into the Mumbai night sky.

There appear to be no clear favourites this time around – Australia maybe, New Zealand, or South Africa? – but it would be nice to think that the victorious captain will dedicate his team’s victory to the memory of Phillip Hughes, the talented and popular twenty-five-year-old Australian batsman who was tragically (and freakishly) killed by a short ball that struck him in the neck, in a match last November. 

The West Indies won the inaugural World Cup in 1975 and its follow-up four years later, beating Australia and England respectively (in 1983 they rather complacently lost the final to India).The first three competitions were held in England, the final at Lord’s, of course, and the West Indies captain on all three occasions was the formidable Clive Lloyd, seen below receiving the trophy in June 1975, from Prince Philip – or Sir Prince Philip as we should perhaps now call him since the Australian prime minister Tony Abbott recently decided to bestow a knighthood on him.

 Patrick Eagar/Patrick Eagar Collection via Getty Images

Lloyd was man of the match in the first final for his sublime match-winning innings of 102, but a significant contribution was also made by a young Viv Richards, who ran out three Australian batsmen with his lightning-fast fielding. Four years later Richards scored a majestic 138 not out against England (in 1983 he was carelessly out for a rapid 33, precipitating the West Indies’ totally unexpected collapse against unthreatening Indian bowling).

A devastating one-day batsman (and one who would surely have taken eagerly to Twenty20 cricket), Richards was of course peerless in Test cricket. He made his Test debut in November 1974, scoring 192 not out against India in Delhi in his second game, but it was against the fast bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in Australia in the winter of 1974–5 that he truly advanced his reputation, moving up to the top of the batting order and successfully taking on the fearsome duo. By the time the West Indies came on tour to England in the summer of 1976, Richards, with a further three centuries against India in the Caribbean, was the team’s main man. And he confirmed it that summer with a mountain of runs on England’s drought-parched wickets. West Indies won the series 3–0 but it could easily have been 5–0 (and Tony Greig, the South African-born England captain ended up both physically and metaphorically on his knees on the outfield at the Oval, having earlier unwisely asserted that he intended to make the West Indies “grovel”).

It’s a truism to say that there will never be another cricketer like Viv “the Masterblaster” Richards. With his aquiline profile set off by a proudly worn maroon West Indies cap (never a helmet), Richards would saunter out to bat with intent – to impose himself on the opposition’s bowlers. Indeed, many bowlers have attested  to the “eerie” feeling of preparing to bowl to him, as he stood stock-still at the crease and stared them down. Richards trusted his eye to play shots that were beyond lesser mortals: the casual flick across the stumps of a straight and fast ball through mid-wicket, the step-away to the leg side to launch the ball sailing over cover.

In his profile of Richards in the Millennium Edition of Wisden (where Richards was voted one of five cricketers of the century), his Somerset county colleague Vic Marks summed him up thus: “Bowlers had to be subjugated, to recognise that he was the master. There were occasions when he might sleepily tap back some medium-pacers from a novice who had just graduated from the second team – for Richards was not primarily an avaricious gleaner of runs. But he would always launch a fearsome assault on anyone with an international reputation  . . . .  It was a compliment to be on the receiving end of an onslaught from him”. 

Richards inflicting further punishment on an England bowler, this time his old Somerset mucker Ian Botham, at the Oval, August 1984   Getty Images

If Richards seemed to reserve his best (or worst) for England’s hapless bowlers this probably had a lot to do with wanting to get one over the old colonial masters. A proud man from the small island of Antigua, he saw the West Indies’ unprecedented run of cricketing success from the late 1970s to the early 90s as a defiant political act. As a captain he was ruthless, to the point where he had to contend with charges of gamesmanship on one occasion against England. And he had little time for those who chose to go and ply their trade in apartheid South Africa.

Later in his career Richards’s run-scoring tailed off. It was almost as if he would content himself with a brutal century at the start of a series to make a statement before letting others around him do the bulk of the run-scoring (and the West Indies batting was so strong that this invariably happened). But he never shirked a challenge and when the young and powerfully built Jamaica-born England fast bowler Devon Malcolm was picked to play in Richards’s last home series (in 1990), the Masterblaster took him on spectacularly (you can see it on YouTube, along with several other of his most thrilling moments at the crease). Malcolm once got his man – a triumph to be cherished indeed, but he could be sure that Richards would seek redress. And in his last series, in England in 1991, with five half-centuries in five Test matches, Richards was a model of consistency. Maybe he did go out at the top then. Certainly undefeated.

 

Antonia Fraser: A life-writer’s life

Photo: Ben Knight

By MICHAEL CAINES

If she had the chance, Lady Antonia Fraser, whose title derives from her family's Anglo-Irish inheritance, would throw the hereditary peers out of the House of Lords. She has stories of archival research under the suspicious gaze of two gendarmes, and being advised by royalty to "have a fling" when she goes up to university (to Oxford, that is, where she grew up). She falls gleefully on page 286 of her latest book, to read out a howler that the reviewers have all, so far, missed.

I make that new book, My History: A memoir of growing up, Antonia Fraser's twenty-seventh. As a "prequel" to her memoir about life with Harold Pinter (Must You Go?, written soon after his death), she describes it as a nostalgic exercise – as "fun". . . .

Among those who heard her speak on Monday night – as guest of honour at the Hidden Prologues salon, held at the lengthily named Radisson Blu Edwardian, Bloomsbury Street Hotel (where "reading dangerously" is also encouraged) – the same word would probably come to mind. Fraser made sure that everybody had a fairly gentle sort of fun, in more intimate surroundings than those of the usual canopies adopted by the big literary festivals. It was a serene way to learn about her rationing-inspired hatred of cod, as well as the buried logic of following a biography of Marie Antoinette with a history of the Reform Bill – only Fraser's fiction was left out of the conversation – and there was some enjoyable chutzpah from a young journalist who stuck up a paw and asked "so did you have that fling at Oxford?"

A proper TLS review of My History is on the way (although any reference to that howler on p.286 will be too late: it has been corrected in a second printing), so this is just to say: what a strange experience it is to hear an author interviewed in this relaxed way, by the adept Sam Lith [sic]* of the Spectator, and find her to be as charming self-deprecation personified, straight after reading a review that condemns that same author for sheer vapid self-regard.

I think I can see what Rachel Cooke is talking about, after only leafing through the book, but suspect that's a fair comment below Cooke's review: she doesn't appreciate Fraser's "rather delicate form of irony".

Despite wartime and peacetime hardships, enviable privilege is certainly something apparent from Fraser's recollections of her early life. She grew up in North Oxford (that's a privilege in itself, I hear), the eldest child of the biographer Elizabeth Longford and the peer (yes, a hereditary one) and Labour politician Lord Longford. She holidayed in castles (Lord Dunsany was her great-uncle). She decided for herself when she was finished with school, and steered her mother away from writing about Mary Queen of Scots, the biographical subject she coveted (Barbara W. Tuchman had beaten her to another early theme, and an all too familiar one now: the outbreak of the First World War). With lifetime membership of the smart set, she was well-connected enough to land a suitable job in publishing, and in the 1960s, could be glamorously mistaken for Julie Christie, don't you know . . . and so on, towards a Craig Brown parody.

Nonetheless, what I can't now believe is that "Antonia" (she immediately waved away any notions about forelock-tugging and all that crap) could be at all blind to what blind luck, an aristocratic background and life's other little kindnesses have done for her. She spoke warmly, for example, about how her mother taught her to read, having nothing else to do at the time, so that, at the age of four-and-a-half, Our Island Story could serve as her introduction to history. She recalls vividly, but with a pinch of self-mockery, the imaginative enthusiasm this discovery kindled, not least when it came to the story of Queen Matilda besieged in Oxford, and how certain the young Antonia was that she would have managed to make a similar escape from the enemy:

"During the frightful hard winters of the early Forties, I never failed to think about Matilda's escape: since I knew how to skate, I was confident that I would have draped myself in white and broken out of Oxford Castle."

In the same spirit, in My History, Fraser tells how it was announced that she had won the History Prize at her convent school in Ascot: "I . . . have to tell you that no one else went in for the History Prize". She tried to "create a sensation" by announcing that she wanted to become a journalist on the Daily Express (the Beaverbrook press then being banned at the school). The nuns duly taught her to touch-type.

If not in the book, then at least at the (here we go) #RadissonBluEdwardian,BloomsburyStreetHotel on Monday, this knowing attitude to her own history was a saving grace – well, that and her admirable powers of recall, in her early eighties, for events of the 1940s and 50s, and a seemingly undimmed passion for history, including the right and proper work of breaking one's eyes reading cramped hand-writing in manuscript rooms.

I would throw out the Tories and the other lot from the Commons myself, as well as the hereditary peers from the Lords (don't get me started on "royalty"), but there's no arguing with a lifelong commitment to the art of the historical biography. . . .

 

 

* I'm deferring to the Speccie's superior ruling on the letter e here.

Remembering Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall (1996), who died a year ago today: © Donald Maclellan/Getty Images

By BENJAMIN POORE

In late November last year, in an airy, skylit central hall at Friends House, opposite Euston Station, I was an usher at a memorial service for Stuart Hall. The service brought together close friends and colleagues who spoke movingly to the gathered crowd about their memories of the man, and attempted to give some sense of scale to an extraordinarily productive life. Speakers included Martin Jacques (the editor of Marxism Today), the philosopher Charles Taylor, the filmmaker John Akomfrah and the activist Angela Davis.

It was a long and contemplative afternoon, and many of Hall’s former comrades had not seen each other for many years. Along with spoken tributes, there was music – Hall’s beloved Miles Davis to start; a boisterous, communal “Jerusalem”at the close – and excerpts from Hall’s broadcasts and films, including a new contribution – The Partisan –  from Akomfrah, who was responsible for the BFI’s documentary The Stuart Hall Project  in 2013.

Afterwards, the more steadfast among us headed over to Rivington Place in Shoreditch, for a restorative drink and the opportunity to view Black Chronicles II, an exhibition by the black cultural identity foundation Autograph ABP. On display were nineteenth-century photographs depicting black figures drawn from across Britain’s colonial history;“They are here”, Hall wrote in his contribution to The Missing Chapter project –  the visual archive research programme which underpins the exhibition – “because you were there”. 

The memorial also marked the launch of the Stuart Hall Foundation, based in the same building, which aims to fund researchers, activists and artists working in Hall’s most cherished areas of enquiry – music, popular culture and the visual arts.

A series of clips was screened from Isaac Julien’s film Black Skin, White Mask (1995), about the Marxist Martinique-intellectual Frantz Fanon. Here, Hall, narrating with his usual gravelly gravitas – cheerfully offset by a lime-green shirt – reminds us of Fanon’s argument: “Racism depersonalizes . . . it is a denial of recognition . . . . It is the master saying, ‘I do not see you at all’”.

In one sense, this might be the struggle at the heart of all of Hall’s writings. He was a black intellectual on television when Enoch Powell and law-and-order Toryism imagined young black men as “muggers”, a political and ideological rhetoric unpicked in Hall’s collaborative classic Policing the Crisis (1978). His very presence was an assertion of the rights of black people to a place in the public conversation. And this same struggle for recognition, in the individual and collective sense – a part of which must be what Beatrix Campbell that day described as “the liberating concept of articulation” – is, as recent events in the United States have shown, as vital as ever. 

As David Scott noted, Hall’s education – first at Jamaica College in Kingston and then at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar – made him especially aware of the “moral labour of civilizing subjects” that concerned colonial literary education. It seemed especially apposite then when, late in the afternoon, the historian Sally Alexander read from The Tempest. Voicing Caliban, Alexander read: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”.

Here Caliban may become something other than that which he is expected to be; he turns the language taught to him by Prospero to imaginative invention as well as cursing. The suggested parallel with Hall is that he, too, was surely intended to be the ideal product of the British colonial education system. He was not. He did not, to paraphrase Beatrix Campbell, surrender to the language that he was taught to speak. Hall’s language was creative, generous and never deferential; when he spoke, it was often punctuated by unruly chuckling. 

The Derek Walcott poem quoted in the memorial programme describes how we might see Hall’s legacy. “Winding Up”, from Walcott’s collection Sea Grapes (1976), draws together beginnings and endings. The expression suggests sorting things out, setting one’s affairs in order: “we shed freight”, Walcott wrote, “but not our need // for encumbrances”. Things that are wound up need release, indeed, they almost promise it. We wind up a clock so that it continues to tick. An encumbrance is burdensome, something that will not be shifted easily; in legal terms, it is an obligation to the future, a debt to be repaid. Stuart Hall’s attitude of trenchant and insistent critique – of culture and ideology – is, in these senses, both encumbrance and promise.