The party's over | The Spectator

Birth of a nation

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The 20th century was a crowded century. Event piled upon world-historical event to produce a mass of history so heavy with the prospect of annihilation and so alive with the possibilities of individual emancipation that one of humanity’s most extraordinary accomplishments, the constitution of a liberal democratic republic on the Indian subcontinent, went largely unnoticed in the West. The significance of India’s birth was, however, not lost on a colonial world clamoring for freedom, or African Americans striving to unlock the full promise of America. India’s founding on August 15, 1947, W.E.B. DuBois rhapsodized, would be ‘remembered as the greatest historical date of the 19th and 20th centuries’.

James Delingpole

Cats: The Snuff Movie

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the 1970s, the English humorist Alan Coren set out to create the grabbiest literary cover package in the history of bestsellerdom. He titled his book, a collection of funny essays, Golfing for Cats and hit the trifecta by putting a massive, and otherwise totally irrelevant, swastika on the front. Needless to say, the book sold well. Golf isn’t as big now as it was then, but Coren’s other two ingredients remain staples of popular entertainment.

Benjamin Riley

An old master who still feels new

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Velázquez prized his work, but El Greco’s reputation fell quickly after his death in 1614. Another Spanish painter, Antonio Palomino (1655-1726), called The Greek ‘contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors’. In the 1800s, ‘The Burial of the Count of Orgaz’, now regarded as one of his masterpieces, lay rolled up in the basement of a Toledo church.

Jay Elwes

Uniform beats

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Right from the beginning, everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no frontman, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic music owed nothing to blues, soul or any of the other forms of music that underpinned 20th-century pop. Instead, a Kraftwerk gig consisted of four gauche-looking fellows from Düsseldorf standing in a row, each poking at a synthesizer while strange, apparently unconnected images appeared on screens behind them. A Kraftwerk album could be just as confounding. The cover of 1977’s TransEurope Express featured the band in suits and ties, looking more like the partners at an accounting firm than a pioneering electronica band.

Luke Haines

‘All rock ’n’ roll starts and ends with Lou Reed’

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.March 2013 I have written a song called ‘Lou Reed, Lou Reed’. It’s a hymn to the man in the title — a petition, as Jim Morrison would have it, to the gods of rock ’n’ roll. The song runs for just two minutes and consists of a three-note, sub-moronic riff and a two-word mantra repeated 71 times. The two words are ‘Lou Reed’. The song isn’t a hit, but it does cut a bit of a dash. The song’s subject even hears it. I hear from someone who hears that he heard it that he likes what he heard. Then, in October 2013, the subject of my song dies. My song, a throwaway, begins a strange afterlife.

David Bahr

Around the world in 49 days

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. No one remembers Wendell Willkie. If you don’t believe me, mention him as a man worth looking up at your next cocktail hour. Then watch as even well-informed acquaintances wonder when, exactly, you started taking an interest in adult-entertainment performers or bothered to locate the inspiration for Arrested Development’s hit ‘Mr Wendal’. Even the learned (and let’s throw in friends who subscribe to the New Yorker to even things out), will struggle to recall that Willkie was not only referred to as ‘Private Citizen Number One’ by FDR.

Madeleine Kearns

Mass appeal: Stanford in Stamford

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The exterior of the basilica of St John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut, looms large and gray. Built in 1875 by Irish immigrants who mined and hauled rocks from a nearby quarry, its interior bursts with greens, reds and golds. The saintly lives in its stained-glass windows are said to comprise one of the largest collections of its kind on the East Coast. I was one of 12 singers to perform here at the American premiere of the Mass in G Major by the Dublin-born composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). Stanford’s Mass was first performed at London’s Brompton Oratory in 1893, but, like The Spectator, it took its time coming to America.

Eric Gibson

The human clay

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.The topics in The Necessity of Sculpture emerged randomly, thrown off by successive exhibition calendars and coming to range in time and place from ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century Manhattan. As I made the selections, what began to take shape, beyond a conventional anthology, was a synoptic history of the art form. The title is a belated riposte to Ad Reinhardt’s famous dismissal, in around 1960, of sculpture as ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’.

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