American oligarchy | The Spectator

The travels of Robert D. Kaplan

Robert Kaplan’s new book, The Good American, takes as its epigraph V.S. Naipaul’s observation that ‘Pessimism... can drive men on to do wonders.’ It’s tempting to remark that this dry aphorism is as true about Kaplan’s life and work as it is of his subject, the humanitarian Robert Gersony. But in both cases this would be, if not exactly wrong, then incomplete. Robert Gersony is a man who indeed did wonders. The son of Holocaust survivors, he dropped out of high school, earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam and then, Kaplan writes, ‘spent 40 years interviewing... over 8,000 refugees, displaced persons, and humanitarian workers in virtually every war and disaster zone on earth’.

James Delingpole

Bridgerton to nowhere

Bridgerton (Netflix) is just about the worst period drama I’ve seen on television, but I’ve yet to read a single review which tells it like it is. Why could that be, I wonder? Well, here’s my theory: I think it’s because this wooden, poorly scripted, horrifically set- and costume-designed, anachronistic, clunky, cringe-inducing farrago of sub-sub-sub-Jane Austen tosh has inoculated itself against criticism by deciding that about a third of the characters in the London of 1813 should be black. We’re not just talking servants and the occasional writer like Olaudah Equinao, which would have been historically accurate. We’re talking proper toffs: even the main love interest, the brooding, Mr Darcy-like Duke of Hastings is played by mixed-race Regé-Jean Page.

Gavin Smith

Make the audience happy

His name was Igor Michael Peschkowsky. When he was five he lost his body hair after an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccination and wore a hairpiece and false eyebrows for the rest of his life. In 1939, aged eight, he escaped from Nazi Germany on an ocean liner bound for New York. He never mastered cursive handwriting. He was a cousin of Albert Einstein. Richard Avedon became his social mentor. He dated Gloria Steinem. He passed on directing The Exorcist. In the end he became an EGOT, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a staggering 10 Tony Awards. In this exhaustive, emphatically chronological biography, Mark Harris recounts Mike Nichols’s rags-to-riches life and professional and personal highs from birth in 1931 to memorial service in 2014.

David Prycejones

Oracles of the Sybille

In 1975, I was commissioned to interview Sybille Bedford, by then a leading light in the literary world. She lived in a small house in Chelsea. As I got out my notebook, she said, ‘I hope you are not going to ask me about my life.’ She spoke freely about her work, though. A Legacy, the novel she published in 1956, had become an instant classic. Evelyn Waugh had reviewed it in The Spectator with all the authority at his disposal: ‘We gratefully salute a new artist.’ In a letter to Nancy Mitford he further praised the novel: ‘What a brilliant plot!’ A Legacy was high art at a time when the Angry Young Man and the kitchen-sink style were low art or no art at all. We found that we had friends in common.

Emily Ferguson

Pod-ology

The podcast Ologies is the cure to boredom. Its host, Alie Ward, interviews the top experts in scientific fields you never knew existed. You will find yourself coming back to this podcast like a favorite book, exploring one fascinating topic to the next. To any millennial who has been driven to madness by the pandemic and is contemplating grad school: just listen to this instead. Ologies provides answers to almost every random thought that could cross your mind. Many times have I wondered whether my cat wanted to murder me. Apparently a lot of cat owners feel the same way; cats are harder to anthropomorphize than dogs. The felinologist Dr Mikel Delgado confirms to Ward what all cat owners know in their hearts: they don’t need you.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Songs of freedom

When President Donald Trump visited the Museum of African American History in February 2017, he observed, ‘I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.’ Trump added, ‘Harriet Tubman... and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.’ Trump’s apparent belief that Douglass is still alive created a stir, but he was right about Tubman. Though Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin scotched plans to put Tubman’s image on the $20 bill, the former abolitionist has been coming on strong.

Damian Thompson

The joy of listening to old pianists

One of my friends has a freakishly sharp ear for tiny nuances in the performance of classical music. God knows how he acquired it, because his personal tastes don’t extend much beyond early Madonna and late Beyoncé (‘far more vocally secure than Rihanna’). That’s sad for him but handy for me. If I catch him in a good mood I can make him sit through five interpretations of La Mer, and he’ll give me fresh thoughts on which conductor has the best grasp of Debussy’s tonal architecture. They’re fresh because he’s coming to it without preconceptions about how the piece ought to sound: he’s never heard it before and probably never will again.

Elisa Segrave

Alison Lurie, 1926-2020

I first experienced Alison Lurie’s generosity remotely. In December 1989 my friend Janet Hobhouse was renting Alison’s tiny house on Stump Lane, Key West, and I visited. Janet was terrified after a break-in. Alison, away teaching at Cornell, Kindly arranged for a private security guard. I first sighted the celebrated novelist on her deck in February 1996, breakfasting on what looked like cereal and Marmite. Stump Lane was sold, and she had bought a house on Reynolds Street, near the Casa Marina Hotel — opened in1920 for travelers on the Flagler Railway from Miami to Key West. The poet Judith Kazantzis and her husband Irving Weinman had arranged for me to rent the second part of Alison’s house, across her deck. She invited us to dinner.

Luke Haines

Confessions of a hype artist

Lately you may have noticed a conspicuous absence of pop stars ostentatiously cavorting and doing stupid stuff. This is for two reasons. One, the great distraction that is the entertainment industry — ‘The Spectacle’, as the French provocateur and Situationist Guy Debord called it — has been turned off. Two, the Pop Star currently has nowhere to do his or her pop thing. This is not for want of trying. During the early days of the pandemic, a battalion of pop stars fled to the internet to broadcast acoustic renditions of their new wares from their terrible minimalist homes. This culminated in the horrendous One World Together at Home concert.

Andrew L. Shea

Old Masters, new look

The Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art needed a new hat. The galleries are given pride of place in the expansive Fifth Avenue building, standing at the head of its enormous Beaux-Arts grand staircase. They contain many of the Met’s most popular treasures, but they weren’t showing pre-19th-century European paintings in the best of all possible lights. In 2018, Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the Department of European Paintings, embarked on the enormous project of renovating and modernizing the skylight system for the galleries. The museum is now about halfway through the four-year, $150 million endeavor. That’s a hefty price tag, but it’s a project that was long overdue.

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