Culture

Acclaimed author Evgeny Morozov is in London promoting the new edition of his book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. It argues that internet freedom is an illusion and that everyone’s freedom is at stake. It is timely, then, that his trip has coincided with the web surveillance row that has been shaking the coalition. Morozov met with the Spectator this afternoon, and this is what he said about ‘email snooping’:  DB: With email snooping, I’d assumed that the security services did that already? EM: They do it already, but they do it retroactively.

I haven't been much drawn to erotica or political allegory, but Chen Xiwo's I Love my Mum changed that. Relaxed, in an open necked shirt and jeans, at a recent English PEN event in Bloomsbury, Xiwo looked the antithesis of a persecuted writer. He appeared with a range of other speakers, from exiled writers to documentary filmmakers, to discuss contemporary literature in China. Many writers at the event are trying to provoke, trying to inspire change. Xiwo, for instance, penned a novel gilded in matricide and incest to comment on the Chinese state, aptly titled, I Love my Mum. It was banned in 2007; the reason why was ‘classified information.

In his new book, Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel — a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading — argues that social structures and culture are vital components in human evolution. Human beings are altruistic, helpful, and cooperative in ways that other mammals are not. Pagel says our facility for culture is the key to our success as a species. Without a propensity for culture, the traits that make us stand above other mammals — in Darwinian terms — such as: consciousness, language and intelligence, would not exist. He spoke to The Spectator about the idea of “the self” as an illusion, how most human behaviour is a form of copying, and why religions have been beneficial to humanity.

There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough.  There have also been huge numbers of words written trying to explain their revival.   Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War, one of the most successful attempts to galvanise the public into action.    There were 1.4m allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tons of vegetables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and waste land.  There were radio programmes (3.5 million people tuned into C. H. Middleton’s gardening slots), even Dig for Victory anthems.

Perhaps one of the best things to come out of Birmingham, Mike Skinner, mastermind behind The Streets, lets us know what he's reading in this week's Shelf Life. He reveals an interest in 20th Century history, what he once managed to get 10,000 people to do and a fondness for Philip Marlowe's bon mots. His memoirs The Story of the Streets are out now. He tweets @skinnermike.  1) What are you reading at the moment?  All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Both in their different ways incredibly well researched. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?  I didn't read really. Actually I did read a lot of magazines but books didn't work for my attention span when I was young. Though I used to write a lot.

Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last word is strange. You might imagine that Updike sold novels in bulk, bought by the Main Street masses of whom he wrote. But Updike sold quite modestly in his lifetime — Couples was a major commercial success, earning him a place on the cover of Time in April 1968, but beyond that he struggled to crack the top 50 in America.

As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Britain’s victory is justly recalled. That the war came near to disaster is conveniently forgotten. How well-placed are we to hold the islands today? When the 127 ships of the Task Force — a number that could not be assembled now  — returned in triumph to the home ports in 1982 no one wished to talk about how near the venture had come to grief. Without detracting from the courage and skill of the British forces, victory came because of three unpredictable weaknesses on the Argentine side: they ran out of Exocet missiles, many of their 1000lb bombs failed to explode, and they foolishly attacked the warships instead of the troop transports at San Carlos Bay.