Culture

The BBC was created out of the ether in 1922. Its first director general, Lord Reith, inhabited a cupboard some six feet in length and presided over a staff of four people, operating out of one long room. Reith confessed that he did not actually know what broadcasting was — an affliction which you might say, a little cruelly, has been shared by one or two of his successors over the years. The parsimonious approach was not to last, of course. Ten years on and the corporation was ensconced in the Stalinist art-deco edifice of Broadcasting House; today the BBC employs more than 20,000 people — some of them actually involved in making programmes — and struggles by on a budget of £5.1 billion.

Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian? Mind you, these days so many chart musicians are privately educated bedwetters that, shamefully, this shouldn’t be a problem any longer. I look forward eagerly to the roman à clef which reveals the backstage Babylon of Mumford & Sons. It certainly couldn’t be more boring than this stinker.

These days, there are few countries as obscure and exotic as Suriname. Perched on the north-east coast of South America, it has the same population as Cornwall but is over 40 times the size. Ninety per cent of it is covered in jungle, and new species are always tumbling out of its darkness (mostly bugs and purple frogs). The current president, Desi Bouterse, is a convicted cocaine smuggler, and during his term in office he has stood trial for multiple murders. Meanwhile, in the country’s pretty little capital, Paramaribo, they speak 20 languages and maintain 15 Marxist parties, all saying something different. During my time there, a caiman would often creep out of the park at night and eat the city’s dogs. Even stranger, all of this began with an English colony.

Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite going to hit the heights, she devotes herself to playing for the residents of an old people’s home. She’s also acquired a boyfriend, Callum, a teacher several years her senior, for whom, when Christmas comes round, she buys an electric vegetable slicer that he’s had his eye on. The couple holiday in a run-down B&B in Ilfracombe. They are not exactly living la vida loca. But Tamsin is also suffering from a kind of arrested development — still occupying her childhood bedroom in Holland Park, where she keeps a watchful eye over her mother, Roz, since Tamsin’s father, a celebrated conductor, quit the family home for another woman.

Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus as her end-of-year degree project. In the wonderful stage costume she’d designed for its central figure were three gloriously embroidered butterflies fluttering around his hat. Bats, yes, moths, maybe, but what exactly was the significance of butterflies to a man bound for subterranean hell? The answer is in Rainbow Dust, Peter Marren’s superbly distilled statement on our national obsession with butterflies. It turns out that western civilisation has projected a stream of ideas and meanings on to these creatures that have made them fertile artistic territory for centuries.

Summertime, and the living is... variable. Depends who you ask. People come to mind, of course: one in hospital, waiting for an MRI scan; another just come out of hospital having had two little frosted ova thawed out and implanted, so with a bit of luck she’ll have a baby at last. One old chap, 90-ish, with several basal cell carcinomas on his pate from his young days as an army officer in the Palestine sun, is going for a painless zap with a cryoprobe: lesions gone and a free pathology section into the bargain. And over at Cern the Large Hadron Collider has sent a new pentaquark lately to the firmament. The mind, generally, lags. It needs a book to provoke it into fresh life, into noticing old things anew.

At last, a snappy pop philosophy book which offers to sort out absolutely none of your personal issues. If anything, it will make them worse. ‘There are,’ Francis O’Gorman admits, ‘serious problems for me with the ethics of writing on worry.’ Since words are the very stuff of worry, O’Gorman (himself a worrier) suspects that reading is unlikely to provide a cure. Sufferers would do better to contemplate the sublime balance of Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ (‘a glimpse of a world without fretfulness’) or listen to Bach’s contrapuntal fugues, in which ‘Everything, whatever happens, fits.’ But O’Gorman is not really here to dole out advice: A while ago, I described this book as I was writing it to a friend.

In 1929, when Edwin Lutyens handed over the newly completed building site of New Delhi to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, many believed he had created a capital for a British empire in India that would last if not 1,000, then at least 100 years. It was, as Lord Stamfordham wrote, ‘a symbol of the might and permanence of the British empire’ that had been commissioned specifically so that ‘the Indian will see for the first time the power of western civilisation’. The plan of New Delhi was deliberately intended to express the limitless power of the Viceroy. In the words of Sir Herbert Baker: ‘Hurrah for despotism!

‘Lobbying,’ writes William Waldegrave in this extraordinary memoir, ‘takes many forms.’ But he has surely reported a variant hitherto unrecorded in the annals of politics. The Cardinal Archbishop of Cardiff (‘splendidly robed and well supported by priests and other attendants’) had come to lobby him (then an education minister) against the closure of a Catholic teacher-training college. After discussion the archbishop suggested their respective entourages leave the room. Face to face and alone with Waldegrave, the archbishop told him he had a distinguished 16th-century ancestor, who was a candidate for beatification. The unspoken implication was left hanging.