Category Archives: Personal

April 30, 2015 · 3:49 pm

Richie Benaud – My Part In His Success

“So. Farewell

Then Richie Benaud,

Unbeaten Australian

Captain and much-loved

TV commentator.

 

Dust to

Dust.  Ashes to

Ashes.”

So began E. J. Thribb’s moving eulogy to Richie Benaud in Private Eye. I was saddened to read of the death of that most urbane and modest of cricket commentators, who seemed to be a permanent part of ‘Test Match Special’ each time I returned to the UK. It was forty years ago this summer that I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting to the great man, at an occasion which may have been forgotten by all other participants, if any of them are still around. It was an event that deserves a mention in the archives of the Summer Game.

My fellow slow-bowler in the Old Whitgiftians Cricket Eleven, Bob Horn, had invited me to substitute for him in a team of ‘Cricketer Cup’ players designated to play a team of Internationals. (The Cricketer Cup was sponsored by the Cricketer magazine, and was a knock-out tournament between independent schools that was played each year.) Believe it or not, this match had been arranged to celebrate the millennium of the Little Missenden Parish Church, in Buckinghamshire (all very Wodehousian). Why this particular church deserved such recognition, I have no idea, but Wikipedia confirms that the Saxon foundations of the establishment were shown to have been laid in AD 975, which confirms that the match must have been played in the summer of 1975. Now Bob Horn had an excellent pedigree: he was in Holy Orders, editor of the Church Times, an Oxford man, who played frequently for Surrey IIs. And I? Well, I was a complete unknown quantity, having, after an undistinguished cricket career at Whitgift School, and then blossoming somewhat at Christ Church, Oxford, made my way up from the Old Whitgiftian Fourth XI to a regular place in the First XI. But Bob must have had confidence in me to recommend to E. W. (‘Jim’) Swanton of the Daily Telegraph, the non-playing captain of the Cricketer Cup team, that I would be a worthy substitute for him. I did have to telephone Jim – at his house in Broadstairs, I recall – to gain his approval, and receive instructions as to how to proceed to the game.

Now description of such events could rapidly fall into Tinniswoodian farce.  (‘What possible interest can it be to know that E. W. Swanton wears maroon corduroy underpants and has in his study the complete collection of the records of Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas?’ – Tales From A  Long Room, p 76) But Mr Swanton was kind and inviting (though I did hear ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ playing softly in the background), and put my mind at ease about the challenge ahead. Thus, a couple of weeks later, on a beautiful June day, I took a day off work, and drove up to Amersham to check out the cricket ground early. There was no one around, so I parked my 1969 Hillman Imp carefully behind a large oak-tree, and waited for everyone to arrive. When they did, everyone seemed to know everyone else – except me. There were Lords with their Ladies, and distinguished cricketers, including the Test Players Tony Lewis and Richie Benaud. I swore I espied Lord Lundy in the background: he must surely have returned from ‘governing New South Wales’, and had no doubt encountered Richie Benaud there, and plucked him out of obscurity. I suspect some of the aristocrats had never consorted with anyone in trade before, but no one asked me what I did (or even spoke to me for a while, as far as I recall), and admitting that, for a living, I administered databases in Wigmore Street would probably not have been a good conversation-starter.

I don’t recall much about the match, except that the Cricketer team batted first, and did not do very well. I went in Number 9, and notched up a few runs, but the highlight of my innings was playing a maiden over from Benaud. Benaud was fresh from his triumph at Old Trafford just fourteen years earlier, where a remarkable spell of 6-70 (including the bowling of my Old Whitgiftian captain at that time, Raman Subba Row, for 49) won the Ashes for Australia [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOLY6k1vq3A] .  He threw everything he could at me – leg-breaks, flippers, googlies, doosras, and one or two other concoctions I could not name, all in the space of six balls, yet could not dismiss me, as I refrained from trying to hoick him over mid-wicket, and kept my castle clean. I don’t think he was ever the same again, and soon abandoned the playing of the game to concentrate on his career in broadcasting.

Before lunch the great Jim (cryptonym ‘Gloria’) Swanton had addressed us in the changing-room: ‘We’ll wear our blazers, shall we?’, assuming that each would have brought his I Zingari or Free Foresters tribal uniform with him. Of course, I had no blazer, and that made me stand out as well. Anyway, I did get a bowl later, and Peter Marson (then one of the cricket reporters on the Daily Telegraph) turned down an absolutely cast-iron LBW appeal by me and the wicket-keeper, and the All-Stars won by about eight wickets. Afterwards, we listened to many highly amusing anecdotes about M.C.C. tours from Tony Lewis, while Benaud was the sole celebrity who chatted to me. We discussed bowling (I suggested that he was too square-on, and should raise his left shoulder a bit), and sundry other matters, including, if I remember correctly, Clive James’s use of metaphor and allegory. A charming man. I leave the final words for Peter Tinniswood, from The Brigadier Down Under, pp 12-13:

“Dear, dear Richie.

What a welcome he gave me when I left intelligence in his dinky little pigeon hole that I was staying at the same hotel as he.

He has literally showered me with courtesies and considerations.

I must be the only man privileged to have seen him ‘at his toilet’ as he bathes himself in asses’ milk and sprinkles his exquisite body with that rarest of rare perfumes, Essence of Sproat.

He showed me also his superb and dazzling wardrobe, which is under the personal and constant supervision of the Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dame Zandra Rhodes, second son of the immortal Wilfred.

But the highest honour of all was when he allowed me to attend the midnight devotions of Australian cricketers round the hotel consecrated barbecue.

Words cannot describe the ecstacy [sic] that overcame me as I listened to the ravishing plainsong of Rodney Marsh and the stirring tones of that finest of all evangelical preachers, the Rev. Dennis Lillee, as he launched into his celebrated sermon.

‘Take heed, all ye unbelievers  . . . . “ [We regret that we have to cut this extract short, as this is  a family-oriented blog.  Chief Webmaster, Coldspur Enterprises.]

The normal set of Commonplace entries added for the month.         (April 30, 2015)

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March 31, 2015 · 11:37 am

Isaiah Berlin – Too Hot To Handle?

Regular readers will recall that, in October 2013, I held a seminar at Buckingham University, delivering an address titled ‘Isaiah Berlin: The Undercover Egghead’. (see septemberspooks). This was an account of Berlin’s activities during WWII and after in the field of intelligence, enterprises that he severely downplayed when interviewed by his biographer, Michael Ignatieff. Soon afterwards, I wrote up my speech in article form, and sought to have it published, identifying ‘History Today’ as the most suitable outlet.

I have learned by now that the publishing world works in a most mysterious way, but, after a few months, and occasional prodding, I was delighted to learn that the editor, Paul Lay, had accepted the article for publication. I worked with his Picture Editor, and we selected a number of photographs, as well as a cartoon from Punch, for which copyright fees were paid. Then things went silent. I was surprised that no final copy was sent to me for review. However, in the September issue of the magazine, the text that appears in this image confirmed that my piece was due to appear in the October issue.

'The Undercover Egghead" is on its way!

‘The Undercover Egghead” is on its way!

The October issue came out in mid-September, but my article was not there. I questioned Paul Lay by email, but he was evasive. As it happened, I had planned a visit to the UK in October, primarily to get my degree upgraded from a M. Phil. to a D. Phil, and my supervisor had encouraged me to use the forthcoming publication as support for my case. So I informed Lay that I would be in London, and would like to meet him to discuss it. The meeting took place; I learned that the Picture Editor had suddenly retired (without informing me); Lay himself had had concerns about the controversial nature of my piece, since ‘current history’ was a sensitive topic. (He had apparently been burned by a recent article on the Shroud of Turin, and did not want any repeat). He said that he had to pass the article to another Berlin expert for review; that expert had had one or two questions about unreferenced claims I made, but, once those were cleared up, he expected he would be able to publish in the December/January timeframe. On my return to the USA, I gave him the references he wanted, and all seemed fine.

Nothing has happened since. In January, my friend Henry Hardy (who was Berlin’s chief editor at the OUP, until he recently retired) inquired of Lay when the piece would come out, and Lay indicated March. It did not appear in March, or April. A further inquiry has gone unanswered. It is all a mystery. Is Berlin too hot to handle? Did he become so much of a ‘national treasure’ that any criticism of him is off limits? Are my revelations about the indiscretions of MI5 and MI6, and Berlin’s plotting with the Soviet spy Guy Burgess too uncomfortable for the Establishment? The censorship cannot be purely out of concern over the sensitivities of Lady Berlin, as that extraordinary lady died in August 2014 (aged 99). It is all very bewildering.

But the research continues. My degree was successfully upgraded, I discovered critical new facts at the National Archives in Kew, and I plan to complete my thesis later this summer. But should I expect to be stopped at Immigration (‘just a few routine inquiries, sir’) if I were to make a return visit to the UK?

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In one of those intriguing juxtapositions, I read in the New York Times about a week ago of two events: the death of Lee Kuan Yew, and the re-burial of Richard III. According to his obituary, in 2007, the former prime minister of Singapore said: “To understand Singapore and why it is what it is, you’ve got to start off with the fact that it’s not supposed to exist and cannot exist. To begin with, we don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time. I’ve done my bit.” Well, the United Kingdom no longer has a ‘homogeneous population’ (but did it ever? what on earth could that mean, what with Celts, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, etc. etc.?), I am highly suspicious of claims about a single ‘common culture’, and I think it’s a bit capricious to talk about ‘common destiny’. But the UK does have a well-illustrated history and a strong sense of continuity, and I suspect it is that which drew so many people out for the parade and ceremony in Leicester. One does not have to be an ardent royalist, or a member of the Church of England, to recognize that there is something moving in being able to watch the body of a king who died over 500 years ago being carried through a city’s streets for a proper burial. Richard III was not a nice man, and his diabolical nature was impressed upon me (and maybe on many others) by Shakespeare, and by the account of the Princes and the Tower in Our Island Story. (I have very vivid memories of seeing, on a wet 1955 Thursday in Crowborough, Sussex, the film version of Shakespeare’s play, where Lawrence Olivier squirmed like an insect as he acted out the king’s death at Bosworth Field.) As reinforcement of that notion, I have also just read, in Nicola Lacey’s biography of the jurisprudential expert, Herbert Hart, that Hart considered Margaret Thatcher ‘the worst head of Government since Richard III’, an assertion that probably tells us more about Herbert Hart than it does about Lady Thatcher. The revisionists are already working on Richard: we shall probably soon learn that he liked to dandle young children on his knee (like Stalin), and spent most of his time quietly basket-weaving, and giving away his possessions to the poor.

The usual set of Commonplace entries: mostly about nationalism and communism. (Commonplace)

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February 28, 2015 · 11:58 am

‘All The News That’s Not Fit To Archive’

We relational database people are well-organized, methodical. We like analysis and business rules, strong notions of identity , the use of sets and non-significant keys, normalized designs and value-based links, precise versioning and time-stamps, and careful promotion of systems into production, with secure fall-back procedures. All that is tech-talk, but it means something in the real world. (One of the first articles I had published, back in 1980, in Datamation, was titled ‘The Importance of Good Relations’, which showed the link between solid database design and flexible business practices.)

Yet the Web has changed all this. When I first developed my website, under Microsoft’s FrontPage, there was some semblance of a test environment and a production environment. I would develop the site on my computer, and when I was ready, and had made sure all the links were defined, and pointed to real pages, I would upload the whole kit and caboodle to the host site, where the new system would replace the old, giving me the option of importing all pages that had changed (but admittedly with no easy fall-back to the previous version). No more. I now use something called WordPress, which I invoke on a remote server. It allows me to compose and save drafts of individual pages, but it is otherwise tightly integrated with the production system. If I promote a new page, it goes live immediately, and if I change it again ten seconds later, the page is immediately replaced, with the previous one lost for ever. (Unless it found its path to some entity called the Wayback Machine, which is described in a fascinating article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker of January 26, 2015, titled The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?)

I mention all this in connection with my last plaint from the January blog, about the New York Times, and its practice of making changes to its electronic versions of articles after they have been published in the printed version (or the late printed version, since that happens, too. We in North Carolina get an earlier version than the people up in New York, for example.) The reason this concerns me is primarily one of research integrity, since there is no longer a ‘paper of record’ on which historians can rely. I made this point in an email to the Public Editor, whose office eventually acknowledged my inquiry, promised to look into it, but then withdrew in silence. So, after a couple of weeks, I checked out the paper’s Statement of Standards and Ethics, and wrote to the Vice-President of Corporate Communications. The essence of my message ran as follows:

“For there is a vital question to be answered: ‘What is the paper of record?’ Your slogan on the first page of the printed edition is still ‘All The News That’s Fit To Print’, but apparently some of that news is Not Fit To Archive. What happens when historians attempt to use the paper for research purposes? Do they have to keep separate clippings files, since the electronic version is unreliable, and has been purified in some way for later consumption? Is there an active policy under way here that should affect your Ethics statement? How are decisions made to ‘improve’ the content of articles that have already appeared in the printed edition? Why are these not considered ‘Corrections’ that would normally be posted in the relevant section? How often does this happen?”

I received a prompt response, but it was all very dismissive and casual:

“The change you noticed was simply the result of normal editing, which takes place constantly for news stories, both between print editions and for successive online versions. In this case, additional information (including crowd estimates) was added to the story between the early print edition and the final print edition, which meant something had to be cut for the story to fit in the same space. In most cases, the final print version is the one that remains permanently on nytimes.com, though in some cases a story continues to be updated or revised online even after the final print edition.”

So I countered as follows:

“But I must state that I think that you (and I am not sure who ‘you’ are in this case) are being far too casual about this policy, simply treating the process as ‘normal editing’. Is there an audit trail? Do you keep all versions? What changes are allowed to be made after the final print version? Why cannot the on-line version (which has no size constraints) include all the text? Is there any period of limitation after which no further amendments can be made? How do you plan to explain this policy to readers, whose ‘trust’ you say you value so much?

I am sure you must be aware of the current debate that is being carried on in the world of academic research, where annotations to URLs in serious articles often turn out to be dead links instead of reliable sources. A Times ‘page’ no longer has a unique and durable identity, which I believe is an important issue.

I look forward to some deeper explanation of this policy in the newspaper.”

Well, maybe I should get out more. As Sylvia would suggest to me: “You clearly need something better to do.”  But I maintain that it is an important problem, not just concerning journalistic integrity, and getting the story right the first time, and not correcting quotations that the speaker wanted to withdraw (which we are told goes on).  It is more to do with what is known as ‘content drift’ and ‘reference rot’. As Jill Lepore’s article states: “. . .a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, ‘more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the original cited information.” A more subtle problem is that the links may work, but the content may have changed  ̶  may have been edited, corrected, improved, revised, or sanitised. For researchers like me, this can be very annoying, as books these days frequently cite URLs rather than printed sources in their references, and when those pages do not exist, one feels cheated, and may also wonder whether they have been modified. The academic process has been debased. If one has text in the New York Times that is no longer on the archive, does it still exist? Is it still valid? Do I really have to maintain my clippings files, as opposed to an index of URLs? (To make her point, the Times Vice-President had to send me a scan of the two printed versions of the relevant page in question.)

We shall see. I haven’t received a follow-up to my second inquiry yet. Either the Times doesn’t believe it is an issue, or the managers there are having a big debate about the topic, which they don’t currently wish to share. I’ll provide an update if I do hear anything.

The normal set of Commonplace Updates this month. (February 28, 2015)

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January 31, 2015 · 12:17 pm

Turing and Cripps (and later update)

In our first visit to the movies for several years, Sylvia and I went to see The Imitation Game a few days ago. (What was the last film we went to see: Lawrence of Arabia? Brief Encounter?? I forget.) We enjoyed it very much: I could forgive most of the liberties taken with history, although the decision to introduce the spy John Cairncross in a case of double-blackmail, with the claim that MI6 had installed him deliberately so that he could leak secrets to the Russians, was palpably absurd and unnecessary. I have a special enthusiasm for Alan Turing, as readers of this site will recall from my posting here at the end of last November, and Sylvia was better able to understand the links between crosswords, cryptography and espionage that occupy the dark side of my character.

Yet you may not have noticed a brief annotation I made in July 2012, when I commented that the Times had published, on the exact centenary of Turing’s birth (June 26, 2012) a Listener Crossword Puzzle (’SUM’ – geddit?) that celebrated his achievements in imagining a universal computing machine. I was a little muted about this event, because the puzzle contained a blatant error, about which I am still sorely embarrassed. Both the Puzzle Editor and I had overlooked a tiny calculation error in the encoding of one of the answers.

Now, in my more thoughtful moments, I reflect on the phenomenon of ‘deliberate’ errors introduced as a means of communicating to the receiver that something is wrong. When the Nazis turned round captured SOE agents, dropped by parachute into the Netherlands in WWII, the radio operators ignored the lack of messages that would have confirmed they were safe, because SOE staff in London did not want to believe that their efforts had been sabotaged. Thus the famous Englandspiel, in which several agents died. A similar mistake happened when the CIA tried to infiltrate agents into Albania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (See Operation Valuable Fiend, by Albert Lulushi.) And I have always wondered whether Kim Philby’s identification of the Secret Intelligence Service as MI5 (instead of the correct MI6) in My Secret War (p 32) represented a plaintive cry to his old mates that they should recognize that the whole memoir was being ghosted – or, at least, controlled  – by the KGB. Lastly, when I noticed in the National Archive at Kew that a Report on the Communist Party written by the MI5 officer Jane Sissmore in 1935 was titled ‘Investigation by SS into Activities of the CPGB and Indentification [sic] of its Members 1935’, it occurred to me that this very capable and literate person may have inserted that error to indicate that she was very unhappy about compiling such a report. So maybe the error I made could be interpreted as saying ‘I am a Prisoner in a Listener Crossword Construction Factory and Cannot Get Out’. No, it was just a really clumsy boner.

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One of the books I read in January was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land. It was rather sad. Sad, because Tony Judt, who must have been a delightful man, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at the age of 52, in 2010. But also sad, because the book is an elegy to the decline of The Left and all its aspirations, at the same time betraying all the hopeless impracticality of the so-called social-democrat Left. (I have never been a member of The Left.) It is as if Judt and his kin think that we can all have secure jobs, and nice houses, and travel to work in environmentally-friendly transport, and enjoy free childcare and expert healthcare until we retire and enjoy safe inflation-proof pensions – all without having to worry about the sordid business of actually creating any wealth. The book is scattered with a number of unexplained clichéd terms: ‘social democracy’, ‘market failure’, ‘financial stability’, ‘social market’, ‘rational market management’, ‘endemic inequality’, ‘social justice’, and is liberally strewn with a host of semi-rhetorical questions suggesting that ‘we’ have to do something. It appears to emphasise the role of the nation-state, but says hardly anything about the European Community. Etc. etc.

I think I shall have to return to this subject next month. I am no economist, but I don’t think that matters, as economists disagree about all this stuff anyway. All I know is that I hope my financial portfolio does not hold any Greek debt. When I ponder over the question of how those poor Hellenes are going to pay back their 240 billion Euro debt, I think of Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and what he said about economic slavery. (Is there a deliberate mistake here?) So, as an educational antidote to the maunderings of The Left, I borrowed David Stockman’s The Great Deformation; The Corruption of Capitalism in America from the Public Library, but, after reading one chapter, I decided life was too short for me to read 700 pages on economics, and took it back. And maybe we need Sir Stafford Cripps to remind us what Austerity really means. He was the authentic ‘Left’.

The normal set of Commonplace items appears for the month here.  (January 31, 2015)

I don’t normally add late notes to my monthly post, but an odd thing happened today. I was reading in the New York Times about Podemos, the left-wing Spanish Political party, and a march it was holding in Madrid. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, was accusing Prime Minster Rajoy of ‘wanting to humiliate our country with this scam they call austerity’. (Heigh-ho . . .) Furthermore, Rubén Aguilar, a Spanish telecom technician, was described as waving a Greek flag ‘out of solidarity’, and was quoted as saying: ‘We’re better off economically than our Greek friends, but we share their determinatiom to put the interests of people back ahead of economic goals like debt repayment.’ Yet this hardly inflammatory paragraph does not appear in the on-line version of the piece! What is going on? Is it now not allowed to suggest that debts to the EU and central banks may not be repaid?

I have sent a message to the Public Editor at the NYT to find out what is going on. (February 1, 2015)

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December 31, 2014 · 2:57 pm

Cleeseana

Back in 1980, snowed in at the Holiday Inn in Norwalk, Connecticut, I wrote a letter to the Editor of the Spectator. Its TV critic, Richard Ingrams, had come under fire from certain subscribers, as he insisted on watching programmes on an old black-and-white set, and clearly was not enamoured of the medium, showing insufficient respect to some of its transitory ‘stars’. I came to his defence, since I enjoyed his columns, and I asserted that he treated television with the importance it deserved, adding that in only one way was Mr. Ingrams seriously at fault, and that was in his ‘peculiar blindness to the talents of John Cleese.’ The magazine published my letter with the heading ‘A Cleese Fan’.

And a Cleese fan I have stayed. But when I read American reviews of his recent memoir, I wondered whether I should bother to read it. They were not very flattering. One opinion, however (in the Sunday New York Times Book Review) did catch my eye, because it repeated Cleese’s claim that, in order to write good comedy sketches, you had to steal ideas. I wanted to read more, so I encouraged my daughter to purchase a copy of ‘So, Anyway . . .’ (for that is how the book is unimaginatively titled) for my birthday, and have since read it.

It is quite good – uproariously funny in some places  ̶  but I can understand why it might not be considered a winner in the USA. Cleese is fascinating in his story of growing up in 1940s and 1950s Britain, and he tells his anecdotes with that kind of ironic self-deprecating, absurdist touch that, I suppose, is very English. I would think his account would engross anyone who grew up at roughly the same time in the same sort of middle-class suburban environment. I can well imagine, however, that it might not go down too well with the good burghers of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (It did receive a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement of December 12, which arrived in Southport, NC only a couple of days ago.)

Cleese is funnier when he is not quoting sketches that he co-wrote with his many comedic partners. Indeed, what he describes as ‘one of the ten best sketches I have written in my entire life’ (p 288) to me seems flat and repetitive. If he had one flaw, it was to hammer on one particular note a little too long, in my humble [since when? Ed.] opinion, and lose the element of surprise. One got the message, and wanted him to move on. His better sketches were when he slowly exaggerated one warped aspect of a subject’s character.

But to return to the ‘stealing’. Perhaps the most famous is the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (At Last the 1948 Show, 1967), which is a direct steal from Stephen Leacock’s ‘Self Made Men’ (Literary Lapses, 1910), as was revealed on Nigel Rees’s Quote-Unquote website and newsletter a few years ago. Over the years, I have sporadically made a note of incidents in literature and memoirs that rang a bell for me as a possible source of Cleese sketches or ideas, as expressed in anything from Monty Python to Basil Fawlty. Unfortunately, I didn’t write all these down, but my electronic files show the following:

1) ‘Two-Sheds’ Jackson (Monty Python, Episode 1: ‘Whither Canada?’: Arthur Jackson is a famous composer: his interviewer tries to establish how he gained the nickname ‘Two-Sheds’ Jackson, and shows more interest in the provenance of the sheds than in his interviewee’s musical career.)

* “As Berle noted in his diary, the only dubious information the British had succeeded in digging up was an old newspaper clipping reporting that he had ‘twin bath tubs’ in his house, which had long earned him the absurd nickname Two Bathtubs Berle.” (from Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars, Chapter 8)

2) ‘I’m so sorry I made a mistake’ (Fawlty Towers, The Wedding Party, where Basil responds to Sybil’s suggestion that he retrieve the banished members of the wedding party by telling them he ‘made a mistake’ with ‘Oh brilliant. Is that what made Britain great? “I’m sorry I made a mistake.”’)

* “One day I asked him a question [Keynes] about the British economy and his answer turned out in due course to be wrong. ‘Why’, I asked Maynard, ‘did you tell me ten days ago that we would not go off the gold standard when in fact we now have?’ His answer was characteristic and an example to all, whether savants, politicians, civil servants or ordinary folk. ‘Victor,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake.’”                  (Lord Rothschild, Meditations of a Broomstick, p 19)

3) ‘The Cat Lives!’ (Fawlty Towers, Basil the Rat, where Basil is slow to realize that, if the cat has not been poisoned, the slice of veal it started to eat is fit for human consumption. ‘Hooray! Hooray! The cat lives! The cat lives! Long live the cat!  What are we going to do?”)

* A slice of ham was tested on cat at medical research Council by MI5 (BI (c) before being given to Churchill.                                        (from Elusive Rothschild, by Kenneth Rose, p 74)

4) The Spanish Inquisition, Fang and the ‘Comfy Chair’ (Monty Python, Episode Fifteen: the ‘dear old lady’ who refuses to confess to the heinous sin of heresy, has to face the ultimate torture – ‘the comfy chair’. ‘You will stay in the comfy chair until lunchtime, with only a cup of coffee at eleven  . . .”)

* “’Sit on the sofa,’ he [Trent] advised. ‘The chairs are a job lot bought at the sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain.” (from Chapter IX of Trent’s Last Case, by E. C. Bentley)

Were these conscious or unconscious ‘borrowings’ on Cleese’s behalf? I think we should be told, and I should like to know before he ‘joins the choir invisible’ (which I trust will not be for a long while yet). Maybe someone who knows him can ask him. (I tried to contact him via his website once, but it did not encourage email access.)

As a coda, I have also noted some intriguing echoes of ‘the comfy chair’ in the creations of the MacSpaunday (and related) poets, which I recorded in my Commonplace Book back in 2010:

“And now I relapse to sleep, to dream, perhaps and reaction

Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,

Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,

Unzip the women and insult the meek.” (from Louis Macneice’s Autumn Journal, III)

 

“You above all who have come to the far end, victims

Of a run-down machine, who can bear it no longer;

Whether in easy chairs chafing at impotence

Or against hunger, bullies and spies preserving

The nerve for action, the spark of indignation – …”

(from C. Day Lewis’s The Magnetic Mountain, 32)

 

“Come with us, if you can, and, if not, go to hell

With your comfy chairs, your talk about the police,

Your doll wife, your cowardly life, your newspaper, your interests in the East,

You, there, who are so patriotic, you liar, you beast!”                       (from Rex Warner’s Hymn)

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My three grand-daughters (aged 3, 1 and 1) were imaginative and tasteful enough to buy me a copy of ‘Great Maps’ for Christmas, a beautiful coffee-table book  with ‘Smithsonian’ on the cover, which should have granted it the Golden Seal of Quality. Hence I was dismayed, when turning to page 47, to see that Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi’s remarkable world map of 1154 (now residing in the Bodleian) is described as ‘Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the  World’. This phrase appears three times on the page: it is not accidental.

Am I the last person on this earth who finds this ugly? For it should be ‘Entertainment for Him Who Longs to Travel the World’. (The pronoun goes with ‘for’, not with ‘who’.) A recent article in the Spectator predicted that the accusative case in the English language would soon disappear, and this is an excellent example of how it will happen. Some phrases take on a life of their own (e.g. ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’, ‘you and I’) with the result that one reads such abominations as this, and ‘between you and I’. A related ugliness is the inappropriate use of ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’: so many even educated writers and speakers of English have become utterly confused about the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘me’ that they nearly always deploy ‘myself’ instead. In ‘So, Anyway  . . .’, John Cleese overall does very well in this respect, using ‘me’ correctly countless time, but even he fails towards the end (p 365), when he writes: ‘like Graham and I’. (Ugh! ’Like’ is a preposition, Cleese! Don’t you remember the lessons from ‘Romanes eunt domus’, in The Life of Brian?)

I have written to the editor of ‘Great Maps’, inquiring how such a gross mistake could have passed the watchful eyes of so many writers and editors. I am not hopeful of a reply.

A very happy and syntactically pure 2015 to all my readers! The usual Commonplace updates occur, with December’s in their special file.                                                                                              (December 31, 2014)

 

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November 30, 2014 · 8:57 pm

Hugh Walpole

In a passage about the Ministry of Information in WWII, I recently read a reference to the author Hugh Walpole, and was encouraged to pick up a biography of him by Rupert Hart-Davis at the university library in Wilmington. Now, I have never read a word of Walpole’s in my life, although I do recall a rather stout and daunting work, ‘Rogue Herries’, in my father’s grand bookshelf at home. (What did that title mean? What was ‘herrying’ anyway?) In his time (1884-1941) Walpole was surely one of the most popular and fertile authors in England, but I doubt many people read him nowadays. And then, on learning more about his life from Hart-Davis, I discovered that he possessed a familiar pattern of characteristics: an almost photographic memory, especially for other authors’ plots and characters; a highly creative mind, which allowed him to visualise complete novels before they were written; a passion for collecting things, and a love of lists (he would at the end of each year compile a list of his fifteen top friends – one for you, Mark Zuckerberg); a very prickly personality, and a clumsiness and lack of tact in dealing with other people. In short, he showed all the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome (see Orwell’s Clock).

I don’t believe that anyone else has made this assessment before. And it doesn’t really matter. I believe that the autism spectrum is very wide, and that even many among us who would never think of ourselves in that category can reveal aspects of the behaviour. Asperger’s wasn’t identified until 1944, and Hart-Davis, who wrote his biography in 1952, could not have been expected to be aware of it, since it came into prominence only thirty years later. (And now, some of the experts are trying to eliminate it as a separate nameable syndrome.) But what was astonishing to me was how frankly and pointedly Hart-Davis hinted at Walpole’s homosexuality. Such behaviour was still illegal in Britain at that time, as the recent publicity surrounding Alan Turing (‘The Imitation Game’) reminds us. What is really shocking to me is how inconsistently homosexuals were treated at that time, with the hero Turing (died 1954) being hounded despite his contributions, while the exhibitionist scoundrel Guy Burgess (defected to Moscow 1951), who boasted about his treachery, was tolerated and entertained.

My practice of updating my Commonplace Book  at the end of each month will remain in place . Starting now, I shall post the last month’s entries in a separate page, so that visitors may inspect them without having to delve down into the document containing everything for the current year. Thus see Recent Commonplace Entries. (My thanks to Mrs. Ethel Blenkinsop of Murmansk for this excellent suggestion.)         [November 30, 2014]

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October 31, 2014 · 2:56 pm

October 2014

I was in the UK for most of October, and predictably was not able to complete the website conversion project. My visit was successful: I underwent a viva on my graduate thesis at Buckingham University, and gained approval from the board of professors for the upgrading of my B. Phil degree to a D. Phil (in Security and Intelligence Studies). Thus I now have a structure in place according to which I shall write during 2015. I also spent six days at the National Archive at Kew, studying government files from 1940, as well as documents pertaining to suspected communists in the 1930s and 1940s. (For obvious reasons, I cannot say any more than that  . . .)    Not a lot of Commonplace entries this month.                                                                                                                                                                                                            (October 31, 2014)

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September 30, 2014 · 2:56 pm

August-September 2014

I have not completed the task of rebuilding the website on WordPress. But progress has been made. I underwent half an hour’s training on the product last week, and have started to refine the template and populate the new site. I do, however, leave for a three-week visit to the UK on Thursday, so the completion of the project will have to wait until my return. Thus, for this month, I have merely added the normal Commonplace entries.

As part of my research towards my post-graduate degree in Security and Intelligence Studies, I have been reading a lot about espionage, as well as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. As a break from the horrors of Hitler’s oppression and exterminations, and of Stalin’s purges, I turned to Compton Mackenzie’s ‘Water on the Brain’, an absurd spoof of Britain’s intelligence services. Mackenzie wrote it in something of high dudgeon after he had been prosecuted for breaking the Official Secrets Act in his record of his experience working as an SIS officer, ‘Greek Memories’. ‘Water on the Brain’  was published in 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power, and perhaps shows that an ability to laugh at oneself, and at one’s country’s institutions, was as good a reason as any to fight for a liberal democracy. Ironically, the main theme in the novel is a (misinterpreted) fight for Scottish nationalism – something Mackenzie was himself romantically keen on. I include three brief extracts from the novel in my September Commonplace entries.                                                                                                                                                                                                              (September 30, 2014)

I have good news for the regular readers of this website. (You know who you are, even if I don’t). Ever since its inception, I have been encouraged  –  nay, implored   ̶  by many well-meaning counsellors to improve its design, so that it would lose its clunky textual feel, and include some eye-catching graphics. It has always been my intention to do so, but I am a man of words, not pictures, and the inertia against changing something that worked at an adequate level has contrived to put off that task. Well, the time has come. The tool I used to build the website is Microsoft’s FrontPage, which I acquired over ten years ago. The website of the town where I live, St. James, had been constructed with it, and at one time I was going to help out with site maintenance. But Microsoft has long withdrawn support for the product, and the company that hosts my site has issued an ultimatum that, from November 1, it will no longer support sites constructed with it. I have accordingly chosen a template design tool with which I shall reconstruct the site, and populate it with all my stuff (including some glitzy pictures, no doubt.) I hope to have this activated by October 1, as I shall be in the UK for much of October, but, if not by then, soon after my return.

I shall meanwhile keep updates to the minimum. I did receive a fascinating message from a reader in Peru, who had discovered my commentary on ‘The Enchantment’ from a Google search. He was in possession of a fuller version of this lyric work, one passed to him by his mother. I intend to post his version when I return, and offer my thoughts on where it stands in the historiography. Otherwise, just the updates to the Commonplace Book this month.                                                                   (August 31, 2014)

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July 31, 2014 · 2:55 pm

March-July 2014

July’s reading was dominated by Lord Vansittart’s monumental and extraordinary memoir ‘The Mist Procession’. This eccentric figure had a unique perspective on the political tribulations of the ’20s and ’30s, and his account has a very allusive, Macaulayesque character. His manner and style reminded me of Enoch Powell. I was surprised that none of his sayings have made the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: Nigel Rees suggests that may be because they lack an ‘X-Factor’. That could be so, but I would reply that there are a helluva lot of quotes in the Dictionary which would fail on that metric. Anyway, I have included in the July Commonplace entries a number of his observations that caught my fancy.

For those ardent addicts tracking the Ruthenian story, I have added a postscript (Ruthenia). More to come next month!                                         (July 31, 2014)

Ditto. Just a few Commonplace entries added.                                                                                                                                                      (June 30, 2014)

Another quiet month. Commonplace entries added, and a couple more examples of Hyperbolic Contrast.                                                               (May 31, 2014)

A quiet month. Just the regular Commonplace entries added.                                                                                                                                  (April 30, 2014)

I have added an essay on Ruthenia – that mysterious territory situated in the centre of Eastern Europe, and now in the Ukraine. The normal updates to my Commonplace file appear, as well as a few minor additions and edits.                                                                                                                                                  (March 31, 2014)

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February 28, 2014 · 2:54 pm

December 2013-February 2014

Two articles in the January Prospect caught my eye. In the first, a summary of a survey by YouGov on religious opinion in Britain reported that “Today there are almost exactly the same number of religious as non-religious Britons. And atheists easily outnumber believers in a personal God.” So far, so good. In the second, a report on the fresh flaring up of troubles in Northern Ireland, I read that “in 2012, Protestants ceased to be a majority and now form just 48 per cent of the population” [Catholics presumably having overtaken them].

So, how can these two statements be reconciled? Either:                                                                                                                                                                                     a) a) Northern Ireland is not representative of the totality of the United Kingdom, and has a dramatically different religious profile. (Yes, I realize that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but not part of Great Britain. YouGov did not explain what populations they used for their surveys.) But then I might have expected YouGov to explain any significant variations by geography; or                                                                                                                                                                                                                  b) People lied in their responses, in quite a consistent pattern; or                                                                                                                                                                          c) The terms ‘Protestant’ and Catholic’ have lost some of their religious connotations, and are just tribal signifiers.

It seems to me that the third explanation is the most likely. Now, I am not somebody who is hot on ethnocentric notions, since such cultural traditions and beliefs are not ‘inherited’, but acquired through parental and ‘community’ influence, and tribalism has no place in a pluralist democracy. Yet I can see some people attaching themselves to such ideas. For example, while I do not understand the concept of who or what a ‘Jew’ is (I get very upset if I am classified as a ‘Gentile’), the idea of Jewish culture is vaguely apparent to me, even though I find all the pseudo-history and mysticism a bit hard to accept. As Arthur Koestler wrote in Judah at the Crossroads: “Take away the ‘Chosen Race’ idea, the genealogical claim of descent from one of the twelve tribes, the focal interest in Palestine as the locus of a glorious past, and the memories of national history perpetuated in religious festivals; take away the promise of a return to the Holy land – and all that remained would be a set of archaic dietary prescriptions and tribal laws.” But Koestler believed that Jews were defined by Judaism, as a religion, while there are probably as many Jews today who would define themselves as agnostic or atheist as there are believers.

So have Protestantism and Catholicism gone along the same route? Are there now ‘ethnic’ Protestants and Catholics? Isn’t that rather silly? Or, with a slightly different spin, ‘Can you be an atheist priest?’, as Jessica Abrahams asked in the same issue of the magazine. I wrote a letter to the Editor on this question, describing my puzzlement at the information she was promulgating, but she failed to consider my observations worthy of publishing. Again, I don’t expect every editor to whom I write letters to print my submissions [is that really true? Ed.], but I would expect the Editor of Prospect – which is a fine magazine, though earnestly think-tanky – to have some opinion on the issue. I think we should be told.   (The regular Commonplace entries have been added.)                                                                                                                                  (February 28, 2014)

My research this month has focussed very much on the lead-up to Munich in 1938. I have accordingly posted a short piece on Mein Kampf, as well as started a newCommonplace file for 2014.                                                                                                                                                                                   (January 31, 2014)

We have just returned from a very enjoyable stay in California, seeing James and Lien and their three daughters – Ashley and the twins, Alexis and Alyssa. I have added a  postscript to Emily Davison’s Wig, and the December set of Commonplace entries to the 2013 document. A very happy New Year to all my readers! (January 1, 2014)

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