Culture

Pope Pius IX, to the ‘liberal’ mind, is the archetypal Catholic reactionary. When the present Pope beatified him, it was seen by his own critics inside the Church (a dwindling but, as John Cornwell’s latest anti-papal offensive demonstrates, increasingly ill-tempered band) as the final proof of their now largely discredited claim that the underlying purpose of John Paul’s pontif-icate has been to reverse the reforms of the second Vatican Council and to ‘restore’ the Church to what the first Vatican Council, the Council of Pio Nono, had made it.

When Lords Hutton and Butler were successively appointed to enquire into aspects of British participation in the invasion of Iraq, the more sensationalist elements of the media each time rejoiced. Incorruptible, fearless, Hutton and Butler would expose the rottenness at the heart of Whitehall and, if not actually bring down the government, at least give it a fearful pasting. When each enquiry in turn did nothing of the sort, the response was equally predictable. ‘We told you so,’ proclaimed the media. ‘Lickspittle, time-serving lackeys of the establishment! What could be expected but a whitewash?’ After such excesses it is a relief to be confronted by this thoughtful and dispassionate analysis of the issues most in question.

It is half a millennium since tobacco was launched upon the world, on 2 November 1492, when Columbus’s men captured their first American and were saddened to find that his most prized possession was not gold but a smelly bunch of herbs. Now that the weed’s reign is almost over it is time for a solemn history of the stuff, whose effects included the prosperity of English settlements in territories claimed by Spain, and eventually the rise of their world-dominating successors. This is not that kind of history. Instead, professors of this and that, from departments of ‘cultural studies’ here and there, contribute theses on the origins and consequences of smoking, plus lots of jolly pictures, mostly from advertising.

There is nothing new about the ‘had-it-all, lost-it-all’ plot. It provides common ground for the story of Adam and Eve and the labyrinthine ramifications of any high-gloss American soap opera. It is also the stuff of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, a fairytale for adult readers with a sting in its tail, a bite in the telling. Ruby Ferguson’s novel was first published in 1937. It is the story of Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Grahame-Rooth-Targenet, ‘the happiest little girl in Scotland’ and also its most materially blessed, heir to the ‘dream mansion’ of Keepsfield on the shores of Fife and its park stretching ‘as far as the eye could see, as they always say in books’.

In this ingenious ‘double biography’, which covers not only her own life and that of her late husband, the peerless television actor John Thaw, but also their life together, the actress Sheila Hancock has achieved an impressive and affecting work of art. Unfort- unately, though, it is flawed by the author’s self-indulgence in ranting on about her tiresome Bel Littlejohnish political views by way of furnishing what her publishers (who really should have told her to chuck it) quaintly call ‘a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present’. It is as if a subtle and beautifully executed painting has been spoilt by being daubed with cheap political slogans. Here are a few samples of Hancock’s excruciating ‘takes’ on modern history.

The inconsistency between how they lived their own lives — the sort of people that they seemed to be — and the virtues they championed in their heroes and heroines, so much greater in male than in female authors (from which category I exclude George Eliot) is possibly nowhere more marked than in the case of Thomas Hardy. The creator of Marty South, Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak was himself a stinker. ‘ ’E didn’t ’ave nothing to say to the likes o’ we,’ our old gardener used to say. Born in Bockhampton, and familiar in his boyhood with the presence of the great man if not his notice, he had no opinion of him.