Features

Baghdad You might have thought that sitting down to watch a series of filmed executions would become tedious after the tenth unfortunate victim is dragged before the camera to be slaughtered like a sheep. After all, most of the characters do not change much. There are the hooded Islamic holy warriors standing to attention, as the charges are read out to the accused, usually a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling and blindfolded on the floor before them. The sets are the same too, often a dingy cement backroom in a house probably on the outskirts of Baghdad. The build-up is tedious. A martial song in Arabic exhorts the faithful to fight and then the commander reads out a statement, often a hammy delivery that even a B-movie Egyptian actor would not get away with.

Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over with a pang of guilt-tinged longing. Once the province of spivs, gangsters and noxious tanneries, this tangle of warehouses, wharves and printworks, Victorian railway arches and council housing has, since the mid-Nineties, emerged as a hip and thriving artists’ quarter.

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing in front of St Michael’s church I can see the roof of the Reverend Keith Ward’s house. Cumnor isn’t quite the sort of parish you’d expect to find the former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a liberal intellectual whom the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘a much loved and admired thinker’. In his book The Case for Religion Keith Ward says that it is imperative that all religions accept that other faiths contain truth too.

According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the implacable revolutionary, with the beret, the Comandante star, the wispy hair and beard. I remember particularly a sickly poster version in psychedelic colours — mauve and turquoise and green — taped to the wall of a friend’s room. Even then, I thought, Che Guevara was unlikely to have had much to recommend him, a mythic fanatic adulated by ersatz revolutionaries in Cambridge.

John McEwen applauds the ‘Age of Titian’ in Edinburgh, and other Festival treats Sir Timothy Clifford celebrates the completion of the Playfair Project, uniting the 19th-century architect William Playfair’s two art temples on Edinburgh’s Mound, with an exhibition that is both a witty deceit and appropriately self-congratulatory. The Project gives Edinburgh an ‘exhibition complex’ that vies for charm and technological sophistication with any in the world. Obviously, the show celebrating such a milestone had to be something special: a ‘blockbuster’ that would not only attract sponsorship and pull in the punters, but would also draw specific attention to the significance of the Project.