Buckle up! | The Spectator

Dead letters

In a plea for vocational education, Sen. Marco Rubio famously remarked that we could use ‘more welders and less philosophers’. Doesn’t everyone know that ‘skills pay the bills’? If things weren’t bad enough, the rise of deconstruction and critical theory has created a generation of humanities scholars who themselves see little value in the works they study, insisting that famous art and literature emerged from racist and sexist power structures. What sensible young person would borrow $100,000 to be educated in these pointless disciplines? Eric Adler, a classicist at the University of Maryland, has the answer: anyone who wants to understand his own humanity. Adler’s invaluable survey not only defends the humanities: it even lays out how their allies have fallen short.

James Delingpole

Pawn show

I’m thrilled to tell you that my latest novel has been optioned by Netflix. Grand Prix Grandpa is the inspirational story of an ordinary journalist in his mid-fifties who reboots his life by becoming a world motor-racing champion. It’s tough at first driving round racetracks at 230 mph when your eyesight is going and your reflexes aren’t what they were. But with a little practice and a lot of determination, Grand Prix Grandpa — whose name is James, by the way — becomes F1 champion, then triumphs heroically over the resulting problems: semi-naked women hurling themselves at him; having so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it; the loneliness of tax exile in Monaco, etc. No, not really.

James Panero

Hungry like the rabbit

In the darkest hour, there emerged a new light. It was 1940 when the double-barreled shotgun of the world first took aim at a little hole called home. At first, it seemed as if the hole’s inhabitant would be taken in by the old carrot trick. At least he would be careful enough not to stick his neck out. With an unblemished, white-gloved, four fingered hand, he feels around his immediate borders and takes the carrot. Of course, it’s a trap to draw him out. Did he know that all along? He would soon enough. The next time, it’s not a carrot but the hard steel of a gun aiming straight down his burrow. He flicks the barrels with his finger — plink, plink, plink — just to be sure. He tosses back the half-eaten carrot and pats the gun, but it is too late.

Nicholas Shakespeare

The man who hunted himself

The death of Joseph Conrad made Graham Greene feel, at 19, sitting on a beach in Yorkshire, ‘as if there was a kind of blank in the whole of contemporary literature’. Greene’s own death in 1991, aged 87, had a similar effect on many younger writers, myself included. For John Le Carré, his most obvious successor, Greene had ‘carried the torch of English literature, almost alone’. His cool fugitive presence, in Martin Amis’s phrase, had been there all our reading lives. In an age of diminishing faith, he had used Catholic parables in a way that lent them a power beyond their Biblical origins, mining the Gospels rather as Le Carré has mined the Cold War.

Hugh Thomson

Wish you were there

‘Well, that’s you shafted,’ said one friend kindly at the start of the worldwide lockdown. ‘Not a good time to be a travel writer.’ Yes and no. Obviously there’s not much actual travel possible at the moment. But the ratio in ‘travel writing’ between ‘travel’ and ‘writing’ has always been grossly disproportionate — too little time spent traveling and far too much time having to write about it when you get back. In my case, I only did just get back. I was writing a piece about the sunny beaches and boho resorts of northern Uruguay — one of those gigs which leads to envy and resentment, particularly in March — when they introduced the sudden guillotine on air travel.

Katrina Gulliver

Heroine problem

The antihero began as the ‘Byronic hero’ and was represented in the prestige television era by unlikable men in gritty dark dramas. Not completely unredeemable and usually handsome enough to catch the female viewer’s eye, this formula gave us Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), Dexter Morgan (Dexter), Walter White (Breaking Bad), Don Draper (Mad Men) and Gregory House (House). But their distaff counterparts were still villains or maidens. What we didn’t have was many antiheroines. Until quite recently, the closest thing TV had to an antiheroine was Carrie in Sex and the City. It was hard to sympathize with her: most of her problems were her own fault. She cheated on her boyfriends, then wrote narcissistic newspaper columns telling us all about it.

Daisy Dunn

Peake practice

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island.

Madeleine Kearns

Lullaby in Birdland

In the dressing room at Birdland, the ‘jazz corner of the world’, a singer plants her baby on the counter, an actor strips off his shirt, and a cellist leans in to apply her lipstick before a light-bulbed mirror. I slip out to the bar for just a shot or two of whiskey and await my turn. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf, a cellist and fellow Scot, asked me if I might sing one of my songs at her show. It’s part of the ‘Broadway at Birdland’ series, the brainchild of Jim Caruso, the club’s host, producer and performer extraordinaire who, he says, can either be ‘credited or blamed’ for having brought every flavor of pop, folk, country, theater and comedy into a club that’s legendary for jazz.

Grayson Quay

Kurt Vonnegut: atheist, socialist, trad

Kids who read Kurt Vonnegut in high school are often the kind of people who have trouble being earnest about anything. These arch-ironist teens sneer at the narrow-mindedness of their families and hometowns and place basketball pep rallies on the same continuum of fascist conformity as the Iraq War. They aren’t what you’d call ‘joiners.’ I should know. My own teenage reading habits tended toward edgy counterculture (including plenty of Vonnegut), and I half admired the kids at my white-bread Presbyterian high school who smoked cigarettes and experimented with Buddhism. Only my ingrained sense of Lutheran guilt and my distaste for excessive cynicism prevented me from truly becoming one of them.

John Waters

The king is dead

An inescapable insight emerges from the lockdown: today’s young are not what the young once were. Scanning western streetscapes, it is hard to miss that the ones wearing face masks are not overwhelmingly — as one might expect — the old and vulnerable, but include a disquieting number of youngsters, all but immune to SARS-CoV-2, who wear their acquiescence in the current plunge into tyranny like a pendant of courage along with their Nike Airs and Buck Mason Mavericks. It’s like rock ’n’ roll never happened. Or, rather, as if the rock ’n’ roll spirit had never proclaimed the rejection of slavery and subjugation.

Craig Raine

Epic of gossip

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug.’ After two turbulent years, Jacquetta decided to have a baby by Lucian, ideally to be born on his birthday. Her husband agreed to bring up the child as his own, provided the matter was not mentioned again. The laissez aller attitude is partly accounted for (though not by William Feaver) by the 1960s, and the way the young aristocracy embraced the hippy-trippy counterculture. Jacquetta mentions smoking an opium spliff in Paris with Freud.

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