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Saturday

Robert Stewart

The unkindest cut

From the day in 1513 that Balboa stared at the Pacific from a peak in Darien men dreamed of cutting a path from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the ‘Golden Isthmus’ of Panama. Not until the 19th century did the dream become a realistic engineering possibility. We have become blasé about scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation, but men and women of that age marvelled at the broad prospect opened up to humanity by the application of science, which would increase trade and wealth and, in their wake, foster international co-operation and lead humanity to ever-higher levels of civilisation. Ironic it was that the Panama Canal, the crowning achievement of 19th-century technology, was open on 14 August, 1914, just when such optimism was falling to earth.

Stuart Wheeler

Only obeying orders

Would you ever torture somebody? ‘Of course not’, you say. The author, Professor (of psychology) Philip Zimbardo, disagrees. His view is ‘any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us — under the right or wrong situational forces’. The evidence he adduces for this shocking proposition is formidable. Take two pieces of research, starting with the Stanford Prison Experiment. Twenty young male volunteers in Palo Alto, California, most of them undergraduates, none with psychological abnormalities, were divided at random in 1971 into ten ‘prisoners’ and ten ‘guards’. The guards were instructed to be tough.

Blair Worden

The end of merriment

‘Political correctness’, which divides and galls our society, is a modern manifestation of an old impulse which periodically demands, in the cause of social improvement, the curtailment of pleasure and the inhibition of language and thought. It happened with the rise of Puritanism midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, when stage-plays and popular enjoyments came under fire. Something like it occurred a century or so later, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, with the cult of ‘politeness’. Ben Wilson’s subject is the emergence of what contemporaries called ‘cant’ over (roughly) the first three decades of the 19th century, when the preconditions of Victorian propriety and conformity were established.

Andro Linklater

Notes from the Underground

Armadillos dig, that’s what they do best, but the three-banded variety from South America — and anyone brought up on the Just So stories will know this already — can also curl up like a hedgehog, and protect its back with layers of leather armour- plating. So the heroes of Malvinas Requiem, a band of Argentine deserters who dig themselves an underground hiding-place from the horrors of the Falklands war, are bound to call themselves ‘dillos’. To convey the flavour of their fight for survival, as Brits grapple with Argies for control of the islands, there is one other fact, or fiction, about the armadillo that needs to be known. To get it to uncurl, according to a human dillo, ‘you grab its tail like a starting-handle, and shove your thumb up its arse.

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

Extraordinary champion of ordinary people

Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.   Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the telephone kept ringing: one of his reporters had been arrested in Chechnya. Since another Novaya Gazeta reporter had recently died in mysterious circumstances, and since yet another had been beaten up quite badly, he was worried. The Russian authorities, he said, were capable of anything. That reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was later released. But as it turned out, her editor was right to be worried.

Philip Ziegler

Succeeding in spite of itself

This is a success story. In the 60 years since Nehru proclaimed India’s tryst with destiny all has not gone as he would have wished. Only just over 60 per cent of adult Indians are literate, far less than the comparable figure for China. Life expectancy has nearly doubled since independence, but here again China has done much better. Many millions of Indians still live in degrading poverty. Child mortality remains high, leprosy is rife, 15 million Indians suffer from tuberculosis, Aids is a new and yet more fearful threat. The barriers of caste and class have not been exorcised. The open sore of Kashmir remains unhealed. But, against all the odds, India has remained unified. Economically it is flourishing as never before.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 28 April 2007

Any new novel by John Harvey is cause for celebration. He produces beautifully written, solidly engineered crime stories that probe the flaws and sensitivities of British society. Gone to Ground (William Heinemann, £12.99) begins with the murder of Stephen Bryan, a lecturer in media studies bludgeoned to death in the shower of his house in Cambridge. The narrative focuses on the investigations of two police officers and of Bryan’s sister, a journalist. The victim was homosexual, and the police are open to the possibility that either a former lover or a casual pick-up may have been responsible. But Bryan’s laptop is missing, and another line of investigation leads to a book he was writing.

Charles Moore

The bicentenary of the Literary Society

Next month, the Literary Society will celebrate its 200th birthday. The monthly dinner at the Garrick Club will be bigger than usual, but otherwise there will be nothing unusual. The membership has often been distinguished but, as is perhaps typical of English letters, the club has never done anything other than dine. It is not clear that its founding members, who included Wordsworth, ever intended anything in particular by starting it. Most Spectator readers have probably never heard of it. Past members include Walter Scott, George Crabbe, Matthew Arnold, J. M. Barrie, John Betjeman, Hilaire Belloc, Siegfried Sassoon, John Galsworthy, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Anthony Powell, A. A. Milne and Kingsley Amis. There have been composers (Elgar and Parry), historians such as G. M.

Allan Massie

Is Hilaire Belloc out of date?

A. N. Wilson, in his admirable  biography, concluded that Belloc  was more remarkable as a man than in his writings. No doubt he was, and his case is not unusual. The same has been said often of Dr Johnson and of Byron, while I know people who return frequently to Walter Scott’s Journal, fascinated by the man who presents himself there, but who never open any of the Waverley novels. Likewise Hemingway and Fitzgerald have now been the subjects of more biographies and memoirs than the sum total of the books they themselves wrote, evidence at least of the magnetic influence of their personalities. Of course there are those of whom the opposite is true: Shakespeare obviously, perhaps Proust, despite all that has been written about the man; Wodehouse certainly.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Not a barrel of laughs

What a peculiar life it was: born in Poland, exiled to Russia, orphan- ed at 11, and sent to sea at 16. A decade and a half of salt water and solitude in the merchant marine. Then the rest of it spent as an English gent, writing literary novels in his third language (English) under the strong influence of the writers of his second (French). And yet, there he is, slap-bang in the Great Tradition. This biography, first published here in 1983 and now updated and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth, has quite some heft to it. Coming to it as an enthusiast, rather than a scholar, of Conrad, I consulted a friend whom I knew to be a Conrad nut to ask roughly where Najder’s book stands in the Conradian conversation.

Clive James

Tramps and Bowlers

In the park in front of my place, every nightA bunch of tramps sleep on the wooden porchOf the bowling green club-house. They shed no light.No policeman ever wakes them with a torch, Because no one reports their nightly stay.People like me who take an early walkJust after dawn will see them start the dayBy packing up. They barely even talk, Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place:This lot make sure that, when the bowlers come, There’s not a beer-can to pollute the scene.And so, by day, neat paragons of thriftAnd duty bow down to the very greenWhich forms, by night, for scruffs who merely drift, Their front lawn.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

How Stephen the Small came to save Montenegro and afterwards

In 1766, a diminutive adventurer appeared in Cetinje, the capital of the mountainous principality of Monte- negro, and managed to supplant the rightful claimant to the position of Vladika, the ruling Prince-Bishop. The adventurer was remarkable in many respects. Firstly, he was known as ‘Scepan Mali’, ‘Stephen the Small’, in a country where physical stature and strength were highly prized. Even more bizarrely, he claimed to be Tsar Peter III of Russia, who had been deposed by his wife Catherine the Great in 1762 in St Petersburg and strangled shortly afterwards by the brothers of her lover, Grigory Orlov. In fact he was neither a warrior nor a Russian but a snake-oil salesman, quack and purveyor of medicinal herbs.

Anita Brookner

What Henry knew

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly.

Lloyd Evans

No longer a friend of the famous

Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The Insider, Morgan’s chronicle of his first 20 years as a tabloid journalist, the new memoir covers barely 20 months. There’s enough padding here to insulate a barn. Morgan reprints in its entirety a Mother’s Day article listing ten important things Mrs Morgan taught little Piers when he was in shorts. The chaste details of his fling with Telegraph gossip columnist Celia Walden will make fascinating reading — for Piers and Celia.

Alberto Manguel

The survival of literature

Shelley (and later Paul Valéry) suggested that all literature might be the work of a single Author and that, throughout the ages, writers have merely acted as His (or Her) amanuenses. A visit to any large bookshop today seems to confirm this thesis: an infinitude of almost identical accounts of Da Vinci conspiracy theories, immigrant life in London or Los Angeles, dysfunctional families in Brooklyn or Glasgow, offer readers the impression of bewildering déjà vu. If literature has one Author, it’s time for Her (or Him) to change subjects. The figure in the carpet is wearing thin. Enter Enrique Vila-Matas.

Michael Gove

Winning the Cold War

John O’Sullivan has done much more with this book than provide three potted biographies; he has laid out a compelling account of how the Cold War was won, furnished us with a manual of political leadership and told us the inner secrets of a love story. At the heart of this story of the Eighties, a decade O’Sullivan rightly champions, is the remarkable relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The strength of their bond was at the time regarded as semi-scandalous, a betrayal by the British Prime Minister of her first loyalty, to her country, in favour of a wild ideological fling. For those of us who were undergraduates when both were in power one of the trials of university life was finding one particular poster in all too many student bedrooms.

William Boyd

All at sea

On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Medusa, en route for Senegal, ran aground on the dreaded Arguin sandbank off the west coast of Africa. Incompetent seamanship had landed the vessel there and attempts to refloat the Medusa over the next couple of days proved to be in vain. The decision was therefore taken to press on for St Louis in Senegal, a couple of hundred miles to the south, in various of the ship’s boats and barges but, as they couldn’t carry all the passengers and crew, a large raft was constructed, from spars and timber lashed together, which would be towed behind four of the larger boats. The raft was substantial — 20 metres long by 7 wide — had a mast with a sail and even a small raised deck at the centre.

Eric Christiansen

One of the last Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life

This book is about the Cowley Road, which runs for about a mile and a half south east out of Oxford towards a place where they assemble motor cars. Most of it was built up between 1830 and 1940, in many varieties of cheap and sometimes cheerful brickwork for the housing and lodging of ungenteel and downright working-class newcomers needed by but not welcome inside the well-fenced seat of learning across the river Cherwell. The far end crossed a marsh and was colonised and re-routed by Morris car workers between the wars; the dividing line was marked by the grandiose Regal cinema, which dwindled into a bingo hall in the 1970s and is now a huge, padlocked nothing.

Toby Young

Nothing to declare but his genius

Poor Colin Wilson. Has there ever been such a spectacular decline in an author’s fortunes? His first book, The Outsider (1956), was an overnight sensation. Hailed as a literary breakthrough by Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly, it earned him £20,000 in its first year of publication — the equivalent of £1 million in today’s money. ‘I have just met my first genius,’ declared Daniel Farson in the Daily Mail. ‘His name is Colin Wilson.’ He was only 24 at the time and, on the back of such fawning attention, seemed destined for a long and distinguished career. In fact, Wilson fell from grace within a year. To a large extent, he brought this on himself.

Tom Holland

Business as usual | 21 April 2007

Protests against international business are nothing new. Probably the wittiest, and certainly the most brutal, took place long before the first trashing of a Starbucks, way back in the early 1st century BC. This was a period when the Roman Republic, lacking a bureaucracy of its own, had opted to privatise the provincial tax-system — and huge conglomerates, complete with share options, board directors and AGMs, duly reaped spectacular profits. A spectacular whirlwind too, for in 89 BC, the entire province of Asia rose in revolt, and a year later, when the Roman commissioner was taken prisoner, he suffered a memorably hideous fate. ‘The Romans,’ pronounced his judge, ‘have only one abiding motive: greed.