Features

Thursday

Ian Williams

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

This should have been a busy holiday period for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery was due to open last month and others were planned in New York, Paris and Berlin. They have all now been cancelled because Ai himself has been cancelled – not by the Chinese Communist party this time, but by the ‘free’ West. Weiwei had posted on X (formerly Twitter) his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war. However, his comments appeared to more generally attack Jewish influence and power. He wrote: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world. Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States.

Brian Cox

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

One thing upon which my friend Jeremy Clarke and I always agreed is the value of seeing the world from different points of view. In that sense we partially agreed on everything. This essential skill needs to be learned, and I assert that nature is a wonderful teacher. Perhaps the most surprising and bamboozling example can be found in the study of black holes.   Here are two apparently contradictory properties of black holes. When viewed from the outside, time stops on the event horizon – the boundary that marks the black hole’s edge, beyond which light cannot escape – and anyone attempting to cross into the interior would be seen frozen there forever.

Grayson Perry

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in a Labour voter’s body. I also talk about the dangers of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, then I ask the audience if they would support proportional representation.

Yascha Mounk

The case for photo-bombing

A few months ago, I visited Angkor Wat, the majestic temple in present-day Cambodia that once stood at the centre of a vast empire. As the five towers of the palace came into view, I was, despite the intense heat, fully immersed in the beauty of the place. I imagined how excited a visitor from a faraway land in the 12th century, full of anticipation for a meeting at court, would have felt arriving at what was then the largest settlement on Earth. And like that imaginary visitor, I felt propelled forward, impatient to cross the moat that separated me from the edifice, to get a closer look. At that moment, I heard a confident American voice. ‘Excuse me,’ the man shouted, as he crouched on the floor, phone in hand. ‘I’m taking a picture.

Nigel Kennedy

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

My dog Sonny broke my finger earlier this year. He’s a Chart Polski, which translates as ‘Polish sighthound’, and he’s one of about 700 in the world. I was trying to stop him from going after a deer. Even with a muzzle, he could’ve felled it. Chart Polskis hurl themselves in front of the deer’s legs to trip it with their impossibly strong necks. On this occasion, Sonny, who I named after the boxer Sonny Liston, pulled me down a mountain. Because of my broken finger, I came up with a new temporary playing technique. I figured that if the jazz great Django Reinhardt could play guitar with two fingers, then I could have a go on the violin with three. I played a couple of gigs in Germany and no one noticed the difference.

Laurie Graham

The hell of putting on a Christmas play

In July, when I was asked to confect ‘another Christmas entertainment’ for my community, I viewed such a distant elephant with equanimity. Like memories of the pain of childbirth, the nightmares of amateur dramatics soon fade. Besides, I’d done this many times and survived to tell the tale. All I needed was to reassemble last year’s cast and then write something for them to perform. A piece of cake.  By October I was seeing things differently. The steepness of the gradient we had to climb was becoming all too clear. Amateur dramatics are held together by string and paperclips. There are no understudies Very few of this year’s cast are seasoned performers.

Ben Schott

Where are all the proper members’ clubs?

‘How would you like your hair cut?’ ‘In silence.’ So goes the ancient joke. My answer, however, is ‘at home’. You see, this week marks the 15th anniversary of having my hair cut in my Highgate flat by the great Jane Davies, peripatetic barber to London’s loucher gentry. (Just as Jeeves is not a butler, so Jane is not a hairdresser.) In 1970, Jane left her Cromwell Road convent and, with scissors in hand, descended to a smoke-filled basement on Sloane Street. Here Vidal Sassoon had established a speakeasy barbershop for men who wanted their locks left groovily long. Some 15 years later, Jane went freelance, but rather than open a salon or hire a chair, she visited her clients at home.

Quentin Letts

48 ways the Tories could win

Conservative strategists gawp at their end-of-year opinion-poll ratings like European space officials watching another Ariane rocket plop into the ocean off French Guiana. Fret not! To misquote Emperor Hirohito, electoral fortunes may have developed not necessarily to their advantage, but extinction could yet be averted by adopting the following measures: Be more cheerful and stop Rishi doing his ‘your cat just died’ voice. Scrap the government car service and tell ministers to take National Express coaches or hitchhike. Give National Express coach drivers a small pourboire as compensation for having to accept these difficult new passengers. Short, sharp Bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords. Bishops to be given the heave-ho, too.

Catriona Olding

Remembering Jeremy Clarke through his books

On a hot afternoon in October, I joined a lunch party. By the time I arrived, the company was on coffee and liqueurs. A pretty woman in her seventies mentioned an academic friend who was downsizing and how the prospect of getting rid of thousands of books had upset him so much he sought help from a counsellor. The counsellor had said: ‘But they’re only books.’ My husband, Jeremy Clarke, wrote the Low Life column in this magazine for 23 years until his death in May. In one of his columns, he wrote about how, after the sale of his mother’s house in Devon (where he’d lived for 30 years), he sent two Mercedes Sprinter van loads of stuff, mostly books, here to Provence. Seventy boxes arrived, containing around 2,500 volumes.

James MacMillan

I’ll never take culture for granted again

‘Has this been the happiest year of my life?’ I found myself asking recently. It has certainly been topped with the arrival of a third granddaughter last month. (My first, little Sara Maria, died a few years ago.) The birth of Rosie Elisabeth has taken our joy to cosmic levels, but 2023 has been a succession of delights, mainly connected to the concerts I’ve been able to conduct around the globe, from St Louis to Tallinn. After the evils of lockdown, many of us worried that musical life would never return. But it has. I will never, ever take cultural life for granted again. One highlight this year was the culmination of a huge project at my festival in East Ayrshire, the Cumnock Tryst.

Paul Dacre

My advice for King Charles, my ‘twin’

Truly, Harry, who is engaged in a preposterous legal contretemps with the Mail, is his mother’s son. While the Prince is filling his boots by turning his self-pity into an industry, his mother, I would argue, invented the art of victimhood – that insidious, debilitating, very modern malaise. The irony is that, unlike Harry, whose hatred for the Mail is almost as great as that for his father and brother, Diana was rather fond of us. She assiduously read the paper and so did her friends. In the vicious post-separation propaganda wars between Charles and her (‘She’s nuts, you know, old boy’), the Mail, whose target audience has always been up-market women, unashamedly took Diana’s side.

Julie Burchill

Why I’m bored of National Treasures

Here they come, see them run, twinkling away like a bunch of irritatingly flashing fairy lights, the milk of human kindness curdling on their breath and dollar signs in their beady little eyes. I’m referring to the National Treasures, wheeled out every Christmas as we huddle around the television. A quick list of those who come immediately to mind – though other NTs are available, if the price is right – are Ant, Attenborough, Balding, Beard (Mary), Carr (Alan), Coles (Richard), Colman (Olivia), Church, Dec, Dench, French, Fry, Izzard, Lineker, Margolyes, Norton, Oliver (Jamie), Osman, Peake, Perry (Grayson), Robinson (Tony), Rosen (Michael), Sayle, Staunton, Thompson (Emma), Toksvig.

Leila Sansour

This Christmas in Bethlehem will be the saddest yet

I am on my way to Bethlehem, which is where I come from and where I tend to spend Christmas. When I visit from London, I am given strict instructions to bring with me a generous amount of cheddar cheese, a good whisky and, as unlikely as it sounds, Yorkshire tea. I have made it into a local tradition and there is no one else but me to supply the tea in the quantities required. Normally, my biggest concern is trying to find enough space in my suitcase for all these supplies. I so wish this was my main concern this time round. Since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, life in Bethlehem has been turned upside down. The place has known sad Christmases but this one will be unlike any other.

Lee Child

‘Many happy returns’: an exclusive Jack Reacher story by Lee Child

Tony Jackson had worked 30 years for MI5. He was a grammar-school boy recruited straight out of his redbrick university, after sitting a fast-track civil service exam. His results had not impressed the civil service itself, but clearly something in his psychometric paper had caught someone’s eye. Two weeks after his formal rejection he received a plain and enigmatic letter inviting him to an appointment at a hotel near Regent Street. Just after his arrival he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Just before his departure he had become a government agent. Thirty years later he still was, now an Assistant Director, in charge of all his nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

Mary Wakefield

‘The culture of complaint disgusts me’: Werner Herzog on walking without a backpack and the kindness of strangers

When the American director Errol Morris saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana for the first time, he was heard to mutter: ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like this.’ I didn’t know anyone was allowed to live like this. Herzog’s new memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is astonishing and – whether you know his films or not – potentially life-changing, at least for me. I made a list as I went along of all the situations in which Herzog has nearly died: in a crevasse on K2; under the hooves of a bull in Guanajuato, Mexico; in a giant wave in Peru; shortly after his own birth, when an Allied bomb hit his home in Munich.

Howard Jacobson

The moment I realised the study of literature was over

I’ve run away. I’m not saying where I’ve run to because then they’d be able to find me. I’m not saying who ‘they’ are either. So far no one has noticed I’m missing. I shuffle along with my head down, my old-geezer Woody Allen bucket hat sheltering my face, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my shorts. Damn! The mention of ‘shorts’ gives away that I’m somewhere hot. You have to be careful writing a clandestine piece. Fearing I’ve been spotted, I veer off the path, clamber over rocks and find myself on a black volcanic beach. It’s like walking on a fire that everyone hopes has gone out. That’s another clue. Which volcano? Anyone would think I want to be found.

Andrew Roberts

‘A war for Middle East stability’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on what’s at stake in the conflict with Hamas

President Isaac ‘Bougie’ Herzog is Israeli aristocracy. His father, Chaim Herzog, was the sixth president, serving between 1983 and 1993; his grandfather Yitzhak Herzog was chief rabbi; his maternal uncle was Abba Eban, the most famous of the country’s foreign ministers. After leading the Israeli Labor party and the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset between 2013 and 2017, Isaac became Israel’s 11th president in July 2021. He is the first to be born in Israel since the Declaration of Independence 75 years ago. My first question rather asks itself: how is the war going? ‘Depends on what you mean by war,’ Herzog quickly replies, before turning the discussion away from Gaza to ‘the grand picture’.

Rebekah Vardy

Christmas as a Jehovah’s Witness

When I was growing up, there was no Christmas – at least, not one that was recognised in our household. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were taught that it was a dressed-up pagan festival that had nothing to do with the Bible and should be avoided. At school, I’d even be hauled out of any Christmas assemblies and made to feel alienated from the other kids. When the big day came, my family just went out knocking on doors as usual, looking for souls to save. I’d skulk behind them, praying that none of my schoolfriends were on the other side of those doors. To Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christmas is ‘worldly’. That is to say: a bad thing. I left all this behind as a teenager and my life is now, well, more ‘worldly’.

Ed West

The New Theists

One of Professor Richard Dawkins’s most influential ideas was the concept of the ‘meme’, which he coined in The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea or form of behaviour that spreads by imitation from person to person. Memes can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and the wider community. The most successful have some great psychological appeal. Memes are a form of contagion, and with 21st-century technology, the power of that contagion has grown. Yet people are not merely passive recipients of ideas. Indeed, one aspect of human psychology clearly visible on social media is the willingness of people to meme themselves into belief.

Niall Ferguson

Students annoyed their elders in the 1930s, too

Astriking generation gap in the western world has been revealed by the responses to the 7 October atrocities in Israel. Noting in these pages the surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment among young people on both sides of the Atlantic, my old friend Douglas Murray worries that ‘When it comes to Palestine, the kids aren’t all right’. Murray is correct to say that something has changed. He is also correct that it is mainly a phenomenon in the English-speaking world. In the UK and the US, young people are far less well-disposed towards Israel than a decade ago.