Westminster Wisdom

Alexandra

2012-01-02T14:09:00.005Z

Films often remind me of other works of art- poetry, novels or paintings. Alexandra, a film by the Russian director Alexandr Sokurov, reminds me of nothing more than a painting, a still. An old woman visits her grandson fighting in the Second Chechen war. Her eyes become our eyes looking in on the life of the camp and on the relationship between grandmother and grandson. They enable us to understand the nature of what it is to be a soldier in the 21st Century in particular conflict. Like a painting, the film does not explore the 'before' or 'after', the tragic history of colonialism and terrorism that has brought Russia into Chechnya and Chechnya into Russia: rather like a painting it provides a still of what life has to offer for the soldier on the front line from the civilian perspective.

The first thing you notice about the film is the heat. Sitting in the British Film Institute, watching the film, all I could think about was how much I required a glass of water. Characters, especially our grandmother are continuously complaining about the heat. Beads of sweat run down the heads of the young soldiers. The dust is ever present and the barren land reinforces the image of heat. Within the camp, the world is sterile, metallic and dusty. Sand and fire are the materials of a particular type of nightmare: there are no trees here and I immediately thought of the science fiction horror of Visitor to a Museum as a natural counterpart. There is something of hell in every military barracks.

Alexandra comes into the barracks and meets the troops and her own grandson. Two things immediately strike you: the first is that this is a world of young men without any women- old or young. The young men behave as any young men do: but you can see they are bored. They are condemned to wait in the dust for whatever is coming next. Furthermore their boredom is bleak. Alexandra's grandson tells her that he will never marry: firstly because he knows that marriage in his own family has turned to disaster (a comment by Sokurov on Russian marriage as a whole) and secondly implicitly because he knows he will die in Chechnya. So he makes do with a succession of girlfriends from St Petersburg. The barracks has removed him and his fellows from the civilisation of their contemporaries- and plunged them into a strange half light, bored they wait for a bomb at the side of the road or to be ordered into committing an atrocity.

We follow Alexandra discussing with her grandson their own family and we glimpse the loss from the other direction. Having lost her own husband, living in loneliness and confronting her own mortality the old woman wants and requires companionship. As the light dims, she wants to see her family- war has taken this as it takes all other things away. As she departs on the train to the north, the viewer of the film knows both that this is the last time that grandson and grandmother will ever meet, and that this is a tragedy.

Sokurov never comments directly on the war itself- but affords us one last glimpse of the tragedy that it embodies. Alexandra leaves the camp and goes to a market one day: she meets there a Chechen woman and goes back with the Chechen woman to her house and has tea. The ties that bind are more powerful in this case than the division of war and nationality: so Alexandra relates to the Chechen woman who comes to bid her farewell at the station and her son whose political protests she treats with patient, stoic, grandmotherly practicality.

Sokurov never tells us that the war is unjust, never says that Russia should not be fighting it. He just shows us the cost of the war. A viewer inclined to optimism might say that the last exchanges show that war should never happen. A viewer inclined to pessimism might say that wars like the poor are things that we always have with us. The gods play dice and make us their sport- despite the cost to us all and there is nothing we can to stop the roll of the die. Sokurov allows us to understand the costs and pity the individuals who bear them: perhaps that is all that we can do.

Old Soldiers and women

2011-12-13T22:38:00.006Z

I noticed in browsing tonight an interesting case at the Old Bailey from 1735. As usual it is interesting for what it doesn't say rather than what it does. The indictment is clear: three men, Charles Hooper, Thomas Baugh and James Farrel robbed a third John Wood. The robbery was performed with masks- though Wood was able to identify Farrel and at gun point. Hooper and Farrell were found guilty when Baugh turned the King's evidence and they were sentenced to die.

That isn't what I found interesting. Two things in particular struck me about the case. The first is this, Farrell was wearing according to Baugh a red waistcoat because he was in the third regiment. Farrell called some witnesses up to the bar to give information about his character. John Postern, Joseph Walker and Francis Patterson all testified that he had had a job, making earthen wear pots but had enlisted recently. Baugh also testified that he, Hooper and Farrel had met that evening to go out to rob. The picture we get from this small fragment of evidence is that Farrel had enlisted in the army following an unsuccesful career and now was on the way out to rob. That tells us a lot about the life of a soldier in the eighteenth century.

The second interesting thing about the case is that there was a dispute between Wood the victim and Baugh the witness. Wood deposed that he had been wandering about on a field near Highbury around 3 or 4 in the morning when he was robbed. Baugh agreed with him but said that there was a woman there with him. Wood states as soon as Baugh gave that evidence that the woman was with the gang not him and the trial leaves the matter unresolved. What's so interesting is the vehemence with which Wood rejects the allegation. All we have here is a fragment and there is no way of saying who that woman was or what she was to the gang or to Wood, but it is an interesting detail none the less.

One might speculate about what more it tells us about Wood and his encounter with the gang on the field near Highbury that the court never heard.

Bismark's ideology

2011-11-26T17:15:00.002Z

Democracy encourages truth telling by politicians about their priorities. We'll hear a lot in 2012 about flip flopping- especially if Mitt Romney runs for the Republican nomination and a fair number of people on the right in the UK deride David Cameron as a communist, just as I'm sure the knives will be out for Ed Miliband should he win an election. Those perceptions may well be fair- and there are good institutional reasons for wanting politicians who believe what they say before the election and then do it after the election. Often one way of ensuring that is obtaining people with a strong ideology whose ideology frames both their rhetoric and their politics: to use a phrase beloved of a conservative friend of mine, if someone is 'sound' they are more likely to be predictable in their political conduct and if you believe in the ideology that probably will make them more effective too.

The interesting thing is what this leads us to underrate- political flexibility and nous. The career of Bismark illustrates this perfectly. According to Jonathan Steinberg's recent biography, when Bismark was first selected for a political career he was brought in by the influence of the hardline conservatives in the Prussian state. This influence guarenteed him his first job and guarenteed him his Chancellorship in 1862. Bismark though was never a real conservative: he was in favour of breaking the German states and was capable of appealing over the heads of the pro-Austrian princes to their subjects. In the late 1860, his mentor Leopold von Gerlach wrote to Bismark saying that 'It depresses me that through your bitterness towards Austria you have allowed yourself to be diverted from the simple choice between right and revolution'. Bismark had nothing but contempt for conservative solidarity though: 'The system of solidarity of the conservative interests in all countries is a dangerous fiction' he wrote ' we arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative party'. The gap between these two writers- the first who wishes to side with anyone who opposes the French Revoluton and the second who sees ideology as unimportant in foreign policy is largely a division between someone for whom ideology is a central principle in foreign policy and someone for whom that central principle is statecraft.

The interesting thing about Bismark's attitude is that whilst he won the battle (surviving in power whereas Von Gerlach did not), he has not won the war. In Bismark's lifetime he never managed to sustain a political party with even a fractional support base. There have not been many Bismarkian politicians since- Henry Kissinger is a possible candidate and there will be others- but they are few. Most politicians today appeal to their electorate's interest or morality overseas- few see statecraft as a species of separate activity. Bismark's politics therefore died possibly when democracy was installed as the governing mode in the West. But its interesting nonetheless because I think his behaviour throws into relief the kind of politician that a democratic society finds difficult to sustain.

Melancholia

2011-10-24T23:47:00.004+01:00

Kirsten Dunst is said to be a candidate for an Oscar for her performance in Melancholia, the latest film from Danish director Lars von Trier. She deserves the accolade but it says something about the film that the first thing to admire, the first thing I felt when I left the cinema, was admiration and pity for the actress who played in what I had just seen. For Dunst is the vehicle with which Von Trier takes us on a journey right into the heart of a particularly desperate depression. Dunst's character is implicated in two narrative arcs, the second of which takes place days after the first. The first concerns her character- Justine's- wedding to Michael (played by Alexander Skarsgard). The second concerns Justine's relationship with Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), her sister, and Claire's husband and son as a planet, Melancholia, heads towards the earth for a collision which will end everything. There are three interesting films at least here- one about depression, a second about a bourgeois wedding and the third about the day at which the world ends. The real issue that Von Trier faces throughout the film is how to draw these three films together. He does it, if he does it through the relationship between the conventional Claire and the depressed Justine.

That contrast runs through the film. It could be Trier wants us to understand Justine's predicament: I'm not sure that without understanding whether his portrait of depression is accurate, I can draw useful lessons about depression from the film. I am not a psychologist and therefore cannot really comment on how depression works in this scenario. What I think is more interesting is the set of questions that Justine's behaviour pose about our own conventional society. During the wedding her listless behaviour mocks the ceremony surrounding her. One of the comic master pieces in the film comes from Udo Kier, a wedding planner, who won't look at Justine because she has ruined his wedding! But there is a sense in the wedding scene that Kier's character is not alone. All these middle class sophisticated individuals are not demanding that Justine and Michael marry but that they satisfy their expectations of how you marry. The theatre of the wedding is important to them. Justine's behaviour turns those expectations on their head and you feel the embarrassment of the guests as she and her family manage to destroy their theatre. Nowhere is this frustration more evident than in John Claire's husband who like a stage director imagines the wedding as his production and is furious when Justine mangles her lines.

The second story line about the planet is equally a stage production and this time it is nature not a woman who fails. John has designed a scientific (it could be a theological, historical) explanation about why Melancholia won't hit the earth. Again he is trying to stage manage and control the world. Again he fails. His response is fatal. His wife's response is to retreat into anxiety. Justine though becomes calmer and calmer, more and more sublime, till at the end she creates a religious retreat- a golden cave- for her family. In this sense the conventional pieties cannot protect the other characters. Claire who has so much to lose- a husband, a son- cannot relinquish her ideals about life. Her very kindness acts against her- as she prepares to greet the end of the world with a glass of chardonnay. Two situations reveal the powerlessness of the bourgeois individual: in the first human artifice can be undermined, in the second natural forces twist the carefully created bourgeois world apart. Artifice hence becomes as Trier argues the centre of the world that we all believe in: the world of jobs and marriages is a world of human creation and due for inevitable destruction- the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

This is a nihilistic film. There is no hope for humanity post the apocalypse and all our creations- divine and scientific will fall before the end of the world. It did make me wonder, what it will be like billions of years hence when your and my children look out their windows to see the Sun expand in fire or die in silence. This is a beautiful film but its nihilism makes it incredibly hard to watch.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-10-13T22:26:00.002+01:00

One of the odder things about talking to people about politics today is the sharp generational divide. There are people who became politically aware before 1990, who remember the Soviet Union and there are those who became aware in the 1990s and 2000s. It seems almost amazing now, looking back through depression and terrorism, that in 1990 the world was transfixed by the fact that President Gorbachev had been kidnapped in his dacha and that the Soviet Union might be whirling back into disaster. The geopolitics of Brezhnev and of Stalin seem far off- shadows that have faded into the past and the haunting fear of the bomb has been replaced by the fear of the reemergence of the 30s. Keynes has replaced Kennan as the intellectual de jour. In that context, it appears strange that the political film of the year focusses not on tax and spend and the consequences of depression, but on intelligence and super power politics. John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor was dramatised brilliantly in the 1980s on the BBC of course- it returns to a very different world and its lessons are perhaps different.

The story of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was modelled on Le Carre's experiences as a British agent in Berlin in the 1950s when Kim Philby defected. Those shadowy events are transferred in the film to the 1970s and based around the character of George Smiley. Smiley the deputy to C, Head of the Secret Intelligence Services of the United Kingdom, is sacked with his master when an operation to find out the mole is botched. Years later, he is recalled to the Circus (the code name for MI6) to find out who the mole is. The story is convoluted and worth watching as a thriller. This is not a mindless film though. It leaves the viewer in no doubt what the cost of a double agent is: he spends not merely his treachery to his country but also his treachery to those he knows and loves the most. Matt Damon in another film dealing with the Philby episode said to the Philby equivalent that after betrayel he would always be alone. That truth is what Smilley and the others know about their double agent.

They also know it about themselves. This is a darker film than the original series. In that original series Alec Guiness fenced in the dark mentally with his Soviet opponent, Carla. In the film, Gary Oldman's Smilley does not fence intellectually: he sits like a Spider, like a Domitian in the centre of a vicious web of torture and broken images. There is no doubt in this film that Smiley is cruel. He lets people know that he knows their weaknesses- he reminds one not so much of a distinguished Oxford academic as of a deranged Strangelove. Gary Oldman's performance in this film is the supreme opposite of Guiness's performance: Guiness made Smilley a hero, Oldman makes him an anti-hero. Smilley has lost any sense of a private life and private redemption: we never see his estranged wife in the entire film, even Smilley's memories have cut her out- we see her back, we see her hair but never her face. Its significant because Smilley never shows himself to love or respect any other man or woman.

Loneliness is one feature of this adaptation but so is viciousness. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a post Guantanamo adaptation of the novel. The British agents in Soviet hands are tortured and we see it. A Soviet defector's guts spill into his bath- and the audience briefly sees his intestines flowing in the water. Smilley smiles as his friends cry. The mole maintains his sang froid as he sends his friends to hell of the Lubyanka and we are left in no doubt of what he has done. In that sense the film represents a time much more disposed to confront rather than endure its suffering- the rhythm of the 1980s was, for good or ill, different to that of the 2000s. Post Diana, Britain has changed: we are no longer a society in which it is axiomatic that agents are tortured and killed, but one that requires to see that torture, that death. This brutality reinforces the earlier theme: if Smilley must always think of darkness, then his character, smiling under its glasses becomes darker. Guiness's Smiley remained avuncular, Oldman's Smiley is vicious.

I think the medium of film suits this new darker Smiley. He is given fewer words to say, fewer things to understand. The social atmosphere of the series- the Oxbridge sophistication of the higher circus- has disappeared. Class is absent. Films cannot be as subtle or as drawn out as tv serieses but this leaves the characters within the film exposed, they can no longer talk to hide what they do. They have less time to give us excuses, to make us forget in the complexity of the character the simplicity of the role. Perhaps as well there is less time to develop the sense in Tinker Tailor of the ideology of the thirties- that low dishonest decade which created Philby and the rest was a profoundly serious decade. There isn't that sense of the disillusion with the West, of old men grown old who were once picked for their idealism and their youth but have now grown wrinkles over both the idealism and the youth. That's not there in the film and it darkens further the picture.

Fire in Babylon

2011-10-04T23:11:00.004+01:00

Cricket has often become a metaphor for politics- it did so in the 1930s when the famous Bodyline series became part of Australian national identity and Sir Donald Bradman the first Australian icon. Its done so several times on the sub continent- I was at the Oval Test Match this summer to see Tendulkar score 91 and saw a devotion to him that eclipsed the purely sporting. Fire in Babylon is about another such moment- when West Indian cricket came to dominate the sport for a twenty year period. Led by their thoughtful captain Clive Lloyd the West Indies moved from being a team of talented individuals to becoming a team of amazing players who bonded and played together like a team. Having been scarred by Australia in 1976, Lloyd found a group of fast bowlers- famous names that will endure- Holding, Croft, Garner, Marshall, Roberts and the rest who put the world's cricket teams to the sword. Just look at the clip above where Brian Close confronts HOlding at the Oval: you can feel the aggression in Holding's bowling.

Fire in Babylon tells the story of the transition from Calypso Cricket to this new more fiery and determined West Indian side. It puts it into the context of the racial and colonial politics of the late 20th Century. The story suggests that West Indian cricket was partially motivated by a national struggle to put the West Indies on the map. Independence was only managed in the late 1960s so the teams that played England in the seventies and eighties were teams that came from a very new set of countries. Furthermore they were filled with the ethos of the American civil rights movement. Interview after interview- particularly with Viv Richards- proclaims the importance of Luther King and of Bob Marley. These men when they came to England or Australia were racially abused by the crowds who would shout insults at them: some of which stunned a West Indian team brought up in a newly independent world. They knew about South Africa and events happening under Apartheid. They understood themselves in some sense as messengers from the third world, coming to beat the first world English and Australians. Part of the story of the cricket of that generation was as Michael Holding argues, putting their cricket up with English and Australian Cricket: saying to the English and Australians that West Indies Cricket had to be taken seriously. Fire in Babylon is metaphor used by a rastapharian member of the Wailers and friend of Richards to describe what the cricketers were doing. Running through the film are interviews with Richards’s teacher, with the Wailers, with others who were involved at the time.

This part of the story was definitely there- you can see it in the interviews with Roberts and Richards and the rest- they cared and thought about this stuff and were politically motivated. The film neglects though to develop two important angles on the cricket of the time. The first is that it doesn’t show that the West Indies were a clever cricket team. This wasn’t just a matter of getting together four guys who could bowl at 90 m.p.h: that’s happened before and will happen again, it was that these young men were intelligent cricketers. They could think as well as blast batsmen out. That cricket sense is actually not given the attention it should have: consequently you don’t develop during watching the film the admiration you should develop for these guys. They aren’t political philosophers- their political theory is bound to be less developed- but they were amazing cricketers so should be interviewed about how they worked out how to get batsmen out and intimidate bowlers. It wasn’t just brute strength. Secondly the political aspect isn’t allowed the complexity it needs. There are hints during the film that things were not so straight forward. Colin Croft and Clive Lloyd toured South Africa in the early eighties- they aren’t allowed to explain why. There is a political edge that some of the interviews belie. Furthermore lots of the politics comes from those who were hanging around Richards: its not to deny that it was there but equally the multiplicity of experience that went to make up that team has to be appreciated.

Fire in Babylon is ultimately disappointing because it doesn’t focus on the cricketers and the cricket enough. It presents a story whereby West Indian nationhood was remade by cricket- that’s partly true and its important that the West Indian team demonstrated that a third world, black team could play the white first world teams at their own game and win. It was a reminder that its not the colour of your skin, but in this case the content of your cricket character that determines your life. But its also important to note that the team was not a political movement but filled by individuals who had different perspectives on their times. What propelled them to the top wasn’t just their brute strength and speed, it was skill and intelligence. Ultimately these men were phenomenonal- just look at the clip above again, when you see Close duck and dive you are seeing the last of the cricketers of the 1950s dive out of history and when you see Holding bowl, you see the twenty first century. That the twenty first century cricketer was created not in England, nor in Australia or South Africa or India, but in a set of small islands out in the middle of the Caribean is testament to the brilliance of the individuals who performed that task. In that process they overcame the hideous racism of the cricket establishment and also assisted in the creation of nations in the Carribean (and it would be interesting to know how the different islands saw the team- something the film doesn't get into). Ultimately though I wanted more cricket and less politics.

Secularism or how to change the subject

2011-09-29T23:19:00.002+01:00

One of the great myths of modernity is that the battle between secularist politics and religion is a battle in which one side roars about evolution and science and the other counters with revelation and faith. To argue this is to frankly misunderstand the nature of both secularism and religion. It is not conclusive but often instructive to look at the origins of discussions. Mark Lilla in his study of the rise of secular politics identifies the important switch as being made, not by those who opposed religion, but by those who wished to ignore it. Lilla's argument is that the seventeenth century thinkers who created modern secular politics- specifically Hobbes and Locke- did so by suggesting that those who discussed the nexus between religion and politics did not offer the wrong answers, they got the questions wrong.

The traditional set of questions about the interrelationship between religion and politics focussed on the divine nature of rule and rules and the roles of church and state within an entity that recognised the authority of God. Calvinists and Lutherans alike wished the realm to be based upon divine law- or as William Sedgewick said for example to create an English or a European Isreal. Hobbes in Leviathan- according to Lilla- said that the problem with this wasn't that it was wrong but that it answered the wrong question. For Hobbes the sixteenth and seventeenth century had shown that polities built upon religion swiftly became polities built upon confessional identity. He argued that the real question for men to understand, if they were to enter politics, was not how religion and politics should relate, but what were the reasons that men believed. He turned the study of the relationship of politics and religion from a question of theory- a question of bringing theology into the world- into a question about anthopology, a question about how religion influenced the world.

Lilla's complication of the secularist narrative is not enough: I reccomend Katznelson et al's recent volume on the subject. However I think it is important because it establishes a feature of secular thinking that is less understood today. Grotius famously argued that his theories were independent of his own religious beliefs. He argued this, and Hobbes argued this, because they believed that conflict over religious belief had rendered European society after the reformation impossible to live within. You may disagree with their point of view- however the historical change caused by their reaction to the English Civil War and Thirty Years War is profound. The profoundity is not caused by either thinker's attack on religion (Hobbes's religion is a fascinating subject) but by the fact that what they were interested in was religion's role in politics. In this sense, they pick up on the interest of Machiavelli centuries earlier who also was interested in asking the question, what does religion do to society, rather than asking the question, what would God ask me to do within politics.

I think Lilla is right to mark this as an important move in the argument. As my citation of Machiavellli suggests- there are antecedents to this train of thinking. But the suggestion that secular politics represents not so much a change of thought as a change of subject is one that I think is interesting and worthy of consideration. Definitely looking at today's politics and seventeenth century politics, the main difference I can see is the refocussing of the subjects that politics talks about. One of the difficulties of working on earlier periods is looking across that chasm- between a politics of economics and society to a politics of confession and godliness.

The Glamour Boy

2011-09-25T20:56:00.002+01:00

In the 1930s, Conservative MPs would refer to Anthony Eden and his coterie of friends as glamour boys, good looks but not many accomplishments to back them up. Whether you think that's true or not of Eden, its something that Peter Green argues is true of Alcibiades, the Athenian politician. Green doesn't think much of Alcibiades- the great defector of Athenian politics, the designer of the Sicilian expedition- who seduced everyone in Athenian politics, bar Socrates, and never, according to Green, succeeded in any of his projects. Alcibaides is an interesting figure- he is an important character both in the history of Thucydides and in the philosophy of Plato. What I find fascinating about Green's article though is how the glamour of Alcibiades has lingered down the years, warping the analysis of the historians who have studied the politics of the late fifth century BC.

I find this fascinating because I think its something that effects us all as we look at the past. Strong images and attachments form as you read about actors within history. Anyone who honestly confesses to themselves about how they read or understand history will confess to that attraction to a cause or personality within the past. The personal glamour of someone like Cleopatra for example has warped judgements of Egypt in that period- do you know any other Ptolemaic sovereigns? We see Egypt in the first century BC sometimes through the lens of two relationships- rather than seeing it as a declining power but a power nonetheless. The thing is that glamour is also something that arises from histories- Gibbon acknowledged in his own history of the decline and fall of Rome that he found the histories following Tacitus boring and dull. The primary sources form our judgements particularly of early history: one of the effects of television is perhaps that the glamour of a Blair doesn't have to be transmitted to a future historian through the pen of a Plutarch. One wonders how that direct impact of charisma will affect the judgementsw of future historians.

Gladstone's books

2011-09-20T22:52:00.003+01:00

When did you last buy a book? How often do you buy books? How often do you go to libraries- I spent the weekend in the British library thumbing through newly published works about the seventeenth century- when did you last go? How often do you read a book- on the train to work, at dinner, in a captured moment in a lift, for work? I'm not turning into Italo Calvino here but if any of the answers to those questions are yes or I frequently read or buy books, then you fall into a category that Gladstone defines in his essay on books. The nineteenth century statesman stated in an essay that 'I shall assume that the book buyer is a book lover, that his love is a tenacious not a transitory love and that for him the question is how to keep his books'. Gladstone's essay is about how to build a library- what sort of room should it be, how should the shelves be positioned. Its not a thought we all have all the time- but as someone who loves books it might be one you have had. I've definitely wondered about it- all my life- the dream library has filled my imagination. It would be cosy, have plenty of alcoves and niches, an endless supply of tea which would never spill and include plenty of writing materials and be indexed (by magic).

What's interesting about Gladstone's essay isn't his invocation of an ideal library. He talks of a library of 10,000 volumes sorted under the major headings- philosophy, history et al. That might be possible at Hawarden but in crowded central London, Manhatten or Moscow its probably out of the ken of most ordinary mortals. No its not the explicit subject that I loved about Gladstone's essay: its the fact that he loved books and what he writes about he writes with a sense of why he loves books. Firstly take this passage,

books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of comunion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher components of our threefold life. In a room well equipped with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none as friends to the individual, they are first and formost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race onward form that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia Minor and the monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr Pickering and Mr Froude.

There is a lot of hyperbole in this first passage. I'll quite freely admit I have felt alone in a room filled with books. I'll also quite freely admit that there are times when I'd prefer they offered some consolation bar a wall of letters. But in the moments when I truly love books, I think Gladstone is right. My fairly squat Everyman edition of Gibbon for example carries with it real affection. It is the writers of the books, the spirits which live in the pages which I care about and am linked to as I read.

Gladstone gets to this when he talks about the differing characters of books. Some he says can never be stored in the back of a shelf (Gibbon for example) but as he comments 'neither all men nor all books are equally sociable. For my part I find but little sociability in a huge wall of Hansards or (though a great improvement) in the Gentleman's magazine, in the Annual Registers, in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Review or in the vast range of volumes which present pamphlets innumerable'. The point he is making is that we relate to books in different ways- the sign of a true lover of books in a way is the sense that she relates to the books she owns and she reads in a different way. So Hansards or old copies of the Gentleman's Magazine (a serious journal) deserve different treatment from old friends like Austen and Bronte- one is written for ephemera, the other for eternity. You don't have to agree with Gladstone about his library or even be able to maintain it to understand that central point. And ultimately having understood that, it really doesn't matter how or what you read- just that you feel what Gladstone self evidently felt. That the printed page is a door from your mind into other minds, from your world into other worlds.

Fiscal Constitutions and the Coming of Dark Times

2011-09-18T12:39:00.002+01:00

Ira Katnelson's formidable book "Desolation and Enlightenment" studies the reaction to the second world war. Katznelson is interested in those thinkers who responded to the destruction wreaked by Europe's thirty years war and genocide, not by abandoning the enlightenment and its analysis of society (as did say Leo Strauss) but by seeking to buttress it and reconstruct it. Katznelson identifies in particular one diagnosis of the mid century crisis: he argues that Karl Polanyi in particular identified the institutional framework of 19th century liberalism as one of the safeguards for that period against crisis. When that institutional structure collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist and communist competitors rose to challenge not merely the structures of liberalism, but also its very essence- the idea of personal freedom. This aside in Katznelson's book prompts a reflection- what were those institutions of freedom in the 19th Century which supported and sustained liberal democracy. In this post I want to reflect on one such institution- the fiscal constitution drafted by the Earl of Liverpool (PM 1812-27), Sir Robert Peel (PM 1841-6) and William Gladstone (PM 1868, 1868-74, 1880-86, 1892-4).

At the end of the Napoloeonic war, the UK's public sector debt was over 250% of GDP, the UK's politicians were accused of massive corruption and the UK itself ceased in 1828 to be a confessional state. These three massive factors drove the creation of this fiscal constitution. The fiscal constitution depended on three innovations: the creation of the consolidated fund, the creation of the virement system and the introduction of annual expenditure targets. The creation of a central fund into which all revenues were paid and from which all expenditure came, took power from the Departments to the Treasury. This meant as well that Parliament had a simple view of what the government was spending and what it was not. Virement meant that Departments were voted money from that central fund to specific heads of expenditure- its still true within the UK that Departments have to stay within their allocated levels for each budget they are voted and have to apply to Treasury to vire money from one head to another. Lastly the idea that expenditure was always annual meant that a surplus could not be reallocated for a politician's pet project: instead a surplus went straight to the sinking fund. These three rules meant that the Treasury was in full control of public expenditure and through them so was Parliament. They created an environment in which debt was cut from 250% of GDP to 25% by the end of the century. They fortified a Gladstonian sense of how politicians should behave.

Polanyi said that institutions and institutional behaviours protected liberalism (at least that's what Katznelson argues he said). The institutions described here survived the nineteenth century. Daunton suggests that they assisted in the development of the welfare state- noone in British politics in the 1910s or 1940s criticised the expansion of government because it would create jobs for MPs and not go towards the purposes that it was voted. The Gladstonian system worked. More importantly towards Polanyi's point: it also worked in that British politicians were able to pay for both the First and Second World War. The Gladstonian financial state financed the wars which assisted in the protection of liberalism: in that sense they support an argument which says that the institutions created by the nineteenth century and their survivial were key to the survival of that characteristic ideology of the nineteenth century- liberalism.

Blackstone and Oxford: a polemical claim

2011-09-12T00:11:00.004+01:00

The continuity of English law is important for Blackstone as it was for most common lawyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its importance is both political and theological. We have covered some of the political angles in some of the articles I wrote back in June about the Commentaries. Early on though Blackstone also introduces religious reasons for seeing that continuity as important. In particular he comments that at William's introduction as a King in England, he was followed by numerous foreign clergy who were 'utter strangers' to the British constitution. These clergy men so Blackstone argues had their heads filled with the papal adoption of Justinian's Analects, attractive as continental law unlike English law had been interrupted by alien conquest, and became the basis of papal canon law. This law, Blackstone argues was rejected by the English Barons at the Parliament of Merton and a century later when he quotes them declaring that 'the realm of England hath never been unto this hour, neither by consent of our Lord the King and the lords of Parliament shall it ever be, ruled or governed by the civil law'. Blackstone argues that as a direct consequence the clergy developed the law of equity and the universities studied civil rather than English law- as they were controlled and in some cases (Trinity Hall, Cambridge) founded by the Church. This accounted for the exile of the common law to the inns of court in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

Blackstone's account is meant to place common law in the inns of court and canon law in the universities. He is trying to explain the reason why the latter ought to embrace the subject of the former. Oxford should in his view admit common lawyers and he argues that there are civic reasons for the university to behave in this way. However he also argues that the reasons for the university to do this are tied up with its Anglican nature. Canon law he seems to be suggesting is the law of Rome, a law rejected equally by all English communities in the past as by good theological scholars. The point of his argument is to assert both the independence of common law- and the imposition of canon law by the Church. It is interesting to read this because of what the argument ellides- there were Englishmen in the courts of Chancery who were content in the seventeenth century at least with canon law- Blackstone's rhetorical ellision places Charles I or even more impressively Francis Bacon and Lord Ellesmere on the side of Roman Catholicism. This should suggest to us the polemical nature of the union that Blackstone is promoting: by linking hte common law to anglicanism, Blackstone like St Germain before him is making a case.

The Roman People

2011-08-14T21:55:00.003+01:00

Roman history can often be seen as a progression from monarchy to republic and then to principate- from imperial expansion to imperial contraction. This neglects another way of seeing the development of the Roman state- a crucial way of seeing that state indeed because it focuses on the internal politics of it rather than its external or symbolic politics. This is to see the Roman experience as mediated through the interpretative prism of class. Rome was divided constitutionally into two groups- senators and populares- however we can also see within the later Roman world an economic division that bulked as large- between the rich (generally of the senatorial class but including many equites as well) and the poor. T.P. Wiseman in a recent collection of essays argues this point very strongly. He suggests that we need to see key moments in Roman history- from the murder of the Gracchi brothers in the 100s to the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC- as part of a story of conflict between the classes within Rome. The senate and its supporters from Scipio Nasica to Cicero set themselves up as, and described themselves as, defending the constitution when actually they were really defending a partisan idea of that constitution.

This is important. Firstly it is an old understanding of the history of the Roman world. No less a figure than Machiavelli argued that Rome's politics were about class conflict and that conception that he had, derived from ancient authors, was what he believed was the motor of Roman politics. Machiavelli as much as Wiseman and Fergus Millar thought that Roman politics was essentially democratic- at least when compared with his other archetypes of Republican government- Venice and Sparta. Machiavelli argued that this conflict riven society was impelled towards universal empire by the fact of the conflict taking place within it. Wiseman doesn't make such a generalisation but what he does to is throw a light back on what Machiavelli does not describe and that is the process which culminated in the principate. His description in an essay on political assassination of the role of election in the rise of Caesar to dictator makes it clear that he people supported the General in order that they might balance aristocratic power. In a sense what we see here is the transition from democracy to monarchy: that transition was made possible by a senatorial class who turned to violence to support oligarchic ambition.

This is far too schematic- and many a historian of Rome will turn in repugnance from what I've just written and how I have mis-characterised a great scholar. However there is something interesting here in the process of Rome's movement to the principate. Our conventional accounts from Cicero or Tacitus present a aristocratic point of view: there were, Wiseman argues, more plebeian accounts but they have not survived. What we see as the development of corruption and downfall of freedom, and those whom we see as supporters of law and right against tyranny, may have been more complicated. Class conflict introduces into Roman history a dynamic that probably explains more of the popular support of the principate but also gives clues as to why the system of the Republic broke down. If Greek historians like Cassius Dio were right that the essence of Roman politics until the death of the Gracchi was compromise, then it suggests that aristocratic extremism conjured up a popular reaction which swept away the traditional republican system and replaced it with something else. If so then the rhetoric of Tiberius and Augustus focusing on a return to normality becomes explicable as a way of attempting to reconcile class as well as political warfare.

Thermopylae

2011-08-10T23:35:00.002+01:00

Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!

These lines from Byron's Don Juan are justifiably famous. They conjur up how Byron and others saw the cause of Greek independence in the 1820s, the chance to reawake the soul of European civilisation and to vindicate in its homeland the cause of freedom. The moment that they commemorate is equally famous. Thermopylae has been remembered again and again in story and in song and probably will be remembered long after everyone who reads this will be forgotten. Part of the reason for this is that the story itself is so evocative: 300 Spartans facing, according to Herodotus, several thousand Persians. The world could be seen to take a different turn on those days when the Greeks through a glorious defeat helped cement a future victory. Paul Cartledge's book about Thermopylae is an interesting guide to the battle and its importance and I think its worth reading- if like me your Persian and Greek history are rusty. Most of what Cartledge argues is based upon the ancient historian Herodotus: Herodotus wrote about 50 years after the events of the Persian war that he chronicled and wrote them by talking to people in Athens who knew about the war. Cartledge tells a conventional story: the Spartans were outnumbered, but assisted- the world forgets Thespians and others who fought with Leonides and his men. The battle was significant because it helped to inspire the Greeks to fight back against Persia.

Lets think about those points. The presence of others on the battlefield, particularly the greater proportional effort of some cities who dispatched their entire army to the field (not as in Sparta's case 300 alone) means that many popular accounts of the battle miss something important. What they miss isn't important in the sense that it should change our judgement of the Spartans, its important in that history in part functions as Herodotus tells us in the first lines of his history, we must remember great deeds because that is what is due to those deeds. We have an obligation not to forget. But this points us on to something that is very important. Herodotus on whom Cartledge bases his account is one of our only sources for events at Thermopylae, we have the odd scrap of poetry (which I'll come on to) but we must remember the fragile nature of the thread that binds us to our past.

Secondly the battle inspired the Greeks to fight against the Persians and victor at the battles of Salamis and more importantly at Plataea. Its tempting to suggest that therefore Thermopylae is a crucial moment in the history of the world: and it is probably so. But its worth also considering whether actually it did matter as much as we argue. The problem with history is that we can never replay the tape with an item altered. Greek history may have been very different- but Greek intellectual life survived Alexander's empire and it may have survived a Persian empire. Though Cartledge assumes that Thermopylae helped the Greeks later- it reinforced a Spartan theology of suicide- there is no evidence to suggest it was decisive. Nor is there neccessarily evidence to suggest the Persians were the evil freedom hating monsters of films like 300, the Bible sees Cyrus in Palestine as the refounder of Israel!

Thirdly there is Thermopylae as an idea. Here the poetry left at the monument to the dead is fascinating- 'Go tell the Spartans, passerby/ That here obedient to her laws we lie' is the wonderful epitaph composed by Simonides. Perhaps most importantly, the epitaph says all the things that we would want it to reaffirm for ourselves and Byron- it restates the Stoic suicide commited by the 300. Its worth reading again though- if one is ever tempted to consider the Spartans or Greeks fought just for freedom then that line should be an answer. Spartan law was unique and the Spartan command to fight was unique- the principle of the line though, and the principle in part of Plato's Crito are the same: Greek politics was based on obligation as well as freedom, duty to law as well as freedom from law.

Aelita Queen of Mars

2011-07-13T23:55:00.003+01:00

Aelita, Queen of Mars, is a Russian film made just on the hinge of the 1920s. It was made in 1924, the year that Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. It was made three years after the end of the Russian civil war between the Whites and the Reds had torn through the country. It was made at the height of the New Economic policy, promulgated by Lenin to restore the Scoviet economy by restoring some measure of private enterprise. It is therefore a key historical artefact: reflecting a particular moment within Russian history. It also reflects a particular aesthetic- this was an attempt to make a film which could vie with Hollywood and German cinema in the 1920s- to expand the Soviet ethos throughout the world. It therefore has all the special effects and expensive actors and costumes that money could buy: it looks amazing and its not difficult to see how this film was the epitome of Soviet glamour. Those final words of my sentence conjur up I think the real message of the film because implicit within it is a kind of guilt about its own glamour.

The film concentrates on an engineer- Los- and his wife- Natasha- who live in Moscow. They are joined by two other couples- Ehrlich and his wife (unnamed) and Comrade Gussev and his wife Masha. Los has a friend Spiridinov who is eventually seduced by Ehrlich's wife and ends up leaving Russia as he could not leave the past behind. All these units are seduced by the past in different ways. Ehrlich and his wife are the unreformed Russians who profit from the NEP and want to live exactly as they did under Tsarism. They and their circle fantasize at one point about the luxuries and the order that they enjoyed under Tsarism, they could disregard the interests of the proletariate. Gussev and Masha are good communist citizens: he is a former soldier who has fought against the Whites and comes to the local hospital after the civil war where he falls in love with Masha. Los and Natasha lie between these two extremes: they both genuninely want the Soviet world to succeed (unlike Ehrlich) but both are seduced by the detail of the old life. Ehrlich tries to seduce Natasha by offering her balls and fine food: Los notices and though Natasha never ever succumbs, he becomes jealous and devotes himself instead to dreams of going to Mars.

We see Mars through Los's dreams. He dreams of a world which is ancient and totalitarian. Its a Tsarist set up with the workers imprisoned in the lower sections of the planet and with the upper classes lolling about in the top areas of Mars. In particular an aristocratic council of Elders led by Tuskub, ruler of Mars, dominates the planet as against the sexy and impotent Queen Aelita. Los dreams that Aelita sees him through a newly discovered telescope and longs to kiss him. He also dreams of going to Mars and finding her and kissing her. These dreams, I don't think are supposed to be taken for reality. They are symbolic. Los is dreaming of escaping his good proletarian marriage, fleeing to another woman who embodies luxury and wealth. Whenever you see Aelita, its hard not to think of Calypso or Circe. But the point about Aelita is that she remains a prisoner of the old world- she remains a master and as Gussev says to Los, she remains a master. No matter what Los's dreams of romantic unity with her, he has to compromise between his relationship with Aelita and his integrity as a Communist. Ultimately Los has to realise that it is Aelita he needs to kill, she is the bourgeoise part of him, the bourgeoise part of Natasha and after killing her in his mind, he is able to return to Natasha in the flesh and throw away his dreams and start to build Russia.

Some critics see Aelita as a non-communist film: its an attitude which has some legitimacy as many critics in the 1920s viewed the film as a bourgeoise film. My reading of the film though is that it is profoundly communist. This is a film in which the only basis for a good society and a good relationship is to be a good soviet citizen. The critics are right that Aelita may be more effective propaganda because it strives to implicate the entire structure of life- the relationships between men and women in particular into this vision of soviet citizenship. Ultimately the Ehrlich's marriage is a bourgeois thing of deceit based on materialism, the marriage of Gussev and Masha can only be disturbed by his desire to serve the community and Los's marriage to Natasha is threatened by evil capitalist forces. What Aelita represents is therefore the domestication of communism within Russia- its disassociation from feminist forces for example- but possibly it works better because it isn't just a political tract: it may be a fable about space travel to Mars and the creation of a Soviet Martian republic, but odd as it may sound its also a socially realistic fable!

A Separation

2011-07-09T13:34:00.004+01:00

Often people look at divorce or break up and they see that one side or the other are to blame. They argue that somebody must accept moral culpability and I'm sure that in many cases there is a party that is to blame, there is someone who should be accountable. That is not the case in all cases. The Iranian film, A Separation, brings that home very powerfully. It concerns a couple living in Tehran. The woman wants to leave Iran, the man wants to stay to look after his senile father. Their daughter chooses to stay with the father rather than the wife. They separate- the wife lives with her parents for a while, the man in their flat. He employs someone, another woman, to come and look after his father for him. The conflicts that this creates- between the husband and wife and the woman who cleans for them- are the force which runs through the film. The conflict that arrises between the middle class couple and their cleaner is a conflict overlaid with Iranian politics and history, its about an accident which happens when the man in justifiable anger pushes the cleaner. As the crisis happens, the relationship between the husband and wife is put under hideous strain: they struggle with their different opinions, both justified, of what the best strategy is.

Some have seen in this story a political allegory. Nader the man is the Iranian reformists who try to confront the regime, his wife Simin represents Westerners fleeing the country, Nader's father stands for Iran herself- grand and helpless, the cleaner and her husband stand for the devout masses who have in their pain elevated the fanatics and thugs who currently rule. I can see the argument but find the point is too blunt. I think that actually the political point here is much more interesting and universal. This is a film that reaffirms that as humans we face moral dilemmas which are as true in Tehran and Isfahan as they are in Texas. The dilemmas in the case here exist whether you like it or not. The film investigates whether you are ever truly accountable for the acts you commit: how accountable should you be for the results of an action whose import you did not at that moment understand. If I kick a pregnant woman and she suffers a miscarriage- have I committed a murder and should I be tried for murder? The film leaves this question unanswered- but one can see the justice each way. Moral questions are not simply resolved into yes or no answers, they take thought and feeling. Equally we are confronted with the consequences of the law: what is the law- a system to punish bad behaviour or to create good social outcomes. What does punishment acheive if there was no intention and if it merely wrecks lives and leaves them destroyed without restoring anything of what was lost?

These questions run through the film but alongside them runs another one. We all face situations in our lives and have choices to make. We may call the placing of us in those situations providence or fate or fortune but it comes to the same thing: human beings cannot control the context for their actions, all they control is their response to that context. Nader and Simin therefore stand at opposite poles with respect to how they respond to their situation. He believes in right and wrong- he does not believe he pushed the pregnant woman and therefore killed her unborn child, he does not believe he should desert his father. She beleives in accomodating: even if he was not guilty, wouldn't it be easier to pay off the other family rather than accept the potential dangers of a trial. His father is ill- but then his father can barely recognise him and for the sake of their daughter wouldn't it be easier to leave Iran. These two responses are both valid responses to human events: the first set of responses needs no defence- the second set of responses are those of a pragmatist and therefore are reasonable in themselves (there is such a thing as selfish idealism- particularly when a child is involved). There is no way though of adjudicating between them- nor is there a way of arguing between them.

Ultimately this brings me to what I found most intriguing about the film. Because if we accept that the conflict running through it- between compromise and assertion- is a real conflict and an insoluble conflict then at last we can see the tragedy of Nader and Simin's marriage. They obviously love each other- obviously care for each other and they both tenderly care for their daughter. Yet in this situation these two human beings cannot share their lives- every time a strategic decision has to be made, their paths divert. The film's title is very apt- this is not a film about injustice or a response to injustice- it is a film about the pain of separation. The pain is worst for their daughter, played amazingly by a wonderful child actress, who captures the pain and courage of a precocious 12 year old facing these disasters. It is real pain though and one struggles to imagine how this relationship could not split apart. The film in that sense puts on screen something that I think is really important: it shows how sometimes relationships cannot survive, not because anyone is culpable, but just because these characters cannot find a way to compromise between their approaches to the world.

Why the Norman Conquest matters (to Blackstone)

2011-06-26T23:11:00.002+01:00

As Blackstone introduces his book, he makes a comment on the Norman Conquest:

That antient collection of unwritten maxims and customs, which is called the common law, however compounded or from whatever fountains derived, had subsisted immemorially in this kingdom; and though somewhat altered and impaired by the violence of the times, had in great measure weathered the rude shock of the Norman conquest. This had endeared it to the people in general, as well because it's decisions were universally known, as because it was found to be excellently adapted to the genius of the English nation.

What is going on here is important: because it forms the basis of a link that Blackstone will later make between English religion and English law. The crux of this paragraph is an opposition that Blackstone creates between two theories of origin for the English law. The first theory suggests that English law was the act of a leglislator at a particular point in time. The clearest such point in time was the Norman Conquest- hence Blackstone's mention of 1066 and he like every common lawyer- including Sir Edward Coke, John Selden and Sir Matthew Hale- of the previous century denied that the Norman Conquest represented an overthrow of English law. Rather Blackstone argues that there was a mysterious moment- somewhere in the immemorial past- where a set of judgements and laws came together into the common law. Essentially this is a story about the origin and meaning of law- either law is a rationally formed thing, created in a moment by a leglislator (think of Lycurgus or Solon)- or it is brought together, compounded out of fountains of thought in the deep past.

Notice Blackstone says that the Norman Conquest changed the law. He could hardly not have said that given the work done by Henry Spellman and others in the late seventeenth century which demonstrated conclusively that the law of England had been fundementally changed by the Conqueror. But what he wants to do is to deny that was a moment in which the law was created. Indeed Blackstone derives the law's utility- its legitimacy- from the fact that he believes it is both uniquely understood by the English and uniquely suited to their needs. It is constructed by usage. We will come to see in the next post why that's a crucial idea for Blackstone as a defender of the Church of England. It is also a crucial link between early modern ideas about law and conservative ideas in the English tradition. What Blackstone is arguing for is a system of legal knowledge which is established over centuries, binding together generations and which has become a language in which politics can be most appropriately described. This is the Whig conception of the constitution- and one only has to think of Burke's thinking, as Pocock has argued, to see how influential this idea of an organic language which constructs the state and its relationship to its citizens has been.

What does it mean to make the law a book

2011-06-23T23:59:00.002+01:00

During Blackstone's discussion of the character of an MP, he vents his frustration about the way that MPs who don't know the law make legislation. Whilst doing this he makes an interesting analogy- the law is a book and the MP is a commentator on that book (a bit like I am writing here about Blackstone and have written in the past about Livy and Augustine). Blackstone comments

And how unbecoming must it appear in a member of the legislature to vote for a new law, who is utterly ignorant of the old! what kind of interpretation can he be enabled to give, who is a stranger to the text upon which he comments.

Blackstone's analogy is truly radical. When I comment upon a text, I do not seek to alter it. No doubt Blackstone was thinking of the commentators or glossers upon philosophical or biblical texts who would strue the text with comments upon what it did or did not mean. In that sense Blackstone's comments were a more active comment than a modern commentator who separates the text of his comment from that which is commented upon. But even so what this implies is that the law, like the text, does not change- just people's interpretation of that law changes. We here come to a radical division between the common law mind and the modern mind: Blackstone like Coke before him believed that in some sense the law did not change, only our interpretation, our comment on the law changes.

Why lawyers make good MPs

2011-06-22T23:17:00.005+01:00

How should MPs be trained? That sounds an odd question does it not. An MP, according to Jim Hacker, is a job for which you need no qualifications, there are no hours of service etc. Modern MPs are selceted on the basis of their ideology, their adherance to their party and their experience. All of these things are relevant and they are legitimate bases to chose a modern MP upon: I do not want to question them here- just to suggest that the job of an MP has changed down the years. For evidence I want to consider something that Blackstone made clear in his lectures in Oxford in the 1750s- when you read this think to yourself about how far Blackstone's idea of an MP differs from ours. Whereas we think of our MPs as servants of their constituents and partakers in a public debate: Blackstone seems to have had something else in mind. MPs for him were partakers in public reason- that reason being defined as public law and the task of an MP, for him, was that of a superior magistrate.

He described the privilege of being an MP thus:

They are not thus honourably distinguished from the rest of their fellow-subjects, merely that they may privilege their persons, their estates or their domestics; that they may list under party banners; may grant or with hold supplies; may vote with or against a popular or unpopular administration; but upon considerations far more interesting and important. They are the guardians of the English constitution; the makers, repealers and interpreters of English laws, dedicated to watch, to check and to avert every dangerous innovation, to propose, to adapt and to cherish any solid and well weighed improvement.

Pause for a second before you assent to the wonderful prose and just think about what Blackstone means here: what he is saying is completely at odds with what almost every one of us believes today. His argument is that the central duty of an MP is not to be a loyal member of a party, not to vote on budgets (supplies is the archaic English Parliamentary word- still in use for budgetry measures) nor even to bring down governments: their job is to make or rather consider making law. Note as well that in this action of making law what they are doing is repealing or adding to an existing body of law- not creating new measures but refining old measures. The function of an MP is, for Blackstone, not as a representative (no words about the people here), nor as a creator of an executive, but as a leglislator and one that would choose to do very little.

So what did such a partaker in public law require. Blackstone had examples before him of what such a person might need. He cites Cicero to that effect. He might have cited Sir Edward Coke who famously derided the lack learning Parliament of the 14th Century for its lack of lawyers and hence of mastery of the law. Blackstone believed that to be an MP you had to have a knowledge of a public reason: he cites the rebuke of Quintus Mutius Scaevola, 'the oracle of Roman law' to Servius Sulpicius to make his point. Blackstone quotes Scaevola as saying that 'it was a shame for a patrician, a nobleman and an orator of causes, to be ignorant of that law in which he was so particularly concerned'. What we see here is a dual movement- on the one hand the assertion that the law was a subject, on the other that it was the political subject into which all others fed. Leglislators require this knowledge: Blackstone goes further and expands on the fact that he believes all bad laws in England during the eighteenth century are the product (not as we might argue of bad government or ideologically incorrect government) but of bad lawmaking:

almost all the perplexed questions, almost all the niceties, intricacies and delays... owe their origin not to the common law itself, but to innovations that have been made in it by Act of Parliament; 'overladen (as sir Edward Coke expresses) with provisoes and additions nad many times on a sudden penned or corrected by men of none or very little judgement in law.

Blackstone's case is antique- after all Parliamentary draughtsmen are supposed to deal with this problem. But it is interesting because it demonstrates quite how different his concept of an eighteenth century MP was from ours. No doubt he did believe in representation and in election and in government- but for him expertise in the law was another facet of what made a good MP. In that sense he and Coke and Cicero stand at odds with our politics. For all of them perhaps something of the aristocratic clung to the notion of an MP: they sensed the role as being an honorific one as well as a representative one- the movement between the 18th Century and the 20th may be a movement from the honorific role of election to the representative.

Sir William Blackstone

2011-06-20T22:56:00.002+01:00

William Blackstone's commentaries on the laws of England begin with a lament that the law and constitution of England is 'a species of knowledge, in which the gentlemen of England have been more remarkably deficient than those of all Europe besides'. A European gentleman, Blackstone argues, would not think 'his education is completed till he has attended a course or two of lectures upon the Institutes of Justinian and the local constitutions of his native soil'. British and English students, Blackstone argues, went to Holland or Germany to learn civil law in the eighteenth century and returned with that knowledge to illuminate the home country. Blackstone waxed nationalist about this

Far be it from me to derogate from the study of the civil law, considered... as a collection of written reason. No man is more thoroughly persuaded of the general excellence of its rules and the usual equity of its decisions; nor is better convinced of it's use as well as ornament to the scholar, the divine, the statesman and even the common lawyer. But we must not carry our veneration so far as to sacrafice our Alfred and Edward to the manes of Theodosius and Justinian; we must not prefer the edict of the praetor or the rescript of the Roman Emperor to our own immemorial customs, or the sanctions of an English Parliament; unless we can also prefer the despotic monarchy of Rome and Byzantium, for whose meridians the former were calculated to the free constitution of Britain, which the latter are adapted to perpetuate.

This eloquent passage shows Blackstone at his most nationalistic, preferring homely Alfred and Edward to the Roman Emperors, but it is also important for two reasons. Firstly it demonstrates that he believed that law was the indispensible partner of state building. England was free because it had English law. We can go further- the last sentence contrives to state that civil law has been crafted, it has been created whereas English law has been adapted by long usage. Indeed Blackstone provides here a certificate of English age versus civil reason when he discusses Parliaments. This inherited customary law is the device, he is telling us of Republics and it is precisely because Republican law is not changed that it expresses popular will.

The second important thing he states- which I think is something that distances him from us is that law and constitutions are in his words the 'ornament' of the scholar as well as useful to him. There is no profession that Blackstone excludes from this branch of knowledge: he does not erect barriers but instead argues that everyone needs, particularly his audience of Oxonian undergraduates (can anyone else detect the pomposity of a verbose don in some of those sentences?), to understand the law. In part, as he quotes Cicero, because this is what creates and informs Republican citizenship- in Rome those citizens had to learn the 12 tables, in England Blackstone is arguing they have to attend his lectures.

Geography, Luxury and Empire

2011-06-09T23:40:00.003+01:00

Reading Mark Whittow's Making of Byzantium, I was struck by Whittow's observations about the boundaries of the Near Eastern Empires in the Ancient and Medieval World. Whittow proposes a topography of the Near East that identifies agricultural areas (Egypt, the lower Mesopotamian delta, parts of Western Turkey, Thrace, the southern Caspian shore) and plateaus (the Iranian and the Anatolian) that bordered upon vast areas of arid plains. Whether to the south or the north the Arabian desert and the great Central Asian Steppe (from China in the East to the Ukraine and Hungary in the West) were conduits for nomadic tribes to invade the Empires of Persia, Byzantium and later the Arabic Caliphates from. What Whittow observes though is a fundemental issue which I suspect is at the base of any answer to Gibbon's famous question about why Western civilisation will not fall in the same way that the Western Roman Empire did (to barbarians). These areas could never become part of an empire because they were too arid, too poor to be worth conquering. The settled peoples could not conquer the vast steppe- instead they had to live with it- and often via creating negotiating partners, they created the very forces that would later undo them. This geographical, Braudelian perspective on the Empires of the ancient world is reinforced by Whittow's emphasis on the agricultural basis of their fiscal strength: as late as the 17th century between 63% and 94% of Ottoman revenues came from the land tax alone, compared to between 4 and 6% from customs.

What this emphasizes to me is the vast importance of agriculture in understanding these empires and that means the vast importance of land fertility in understanding their location and their extent. What changes in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is the rise of other sources of wealth and the rise in wealth generally within society: Karl Gunnar Persson in his essay on European Economic history gives figures for urbanisation which are interesting in this context. According to Persson roughly 20% of the population of Italy were urban city dwellers in 200 AD: that should be compared with a European figure of around 40% in 1600 and an English and Welsh figure of 50% by 1850. All those figures are approximate- particularly the Italian and the European figures (the later English figure depends on censuses) but they give an indication of what was going on inside these civilisational centres. More and more people lived inside the core towns and cities and more and more of the economy by 1800 was dominated by industrial production. What we see therefore across the 18th and 19th Centuries and into the 20th is an expansion in the resources that states can deploy to influence the arid areas of the Eurasian landmass: the settled peoples have more wealth to lever into dominating the nomadic peoples. So part of the story of industrialisation is a story about evolution to avoid these crises of nomadic invasion. That's not to say that ancient civilisations could not extend their power (see Rome and Gauls, China and numerous peoples) but there are limits to the attractiveness of arid land when your primary source of wealth is agriculture.

Whittow's argument makes sense when bound together with Persson's analysis. Lastly though it makes a mockery of one of the ancient and modern explanations for Rome's decline and critiques of modern civilisation. For it is luxury not virtue that promotes the arts of urban dwellers: luxury creates the improvements in GDP that enable the settled nations to leverage their power outside the natural confines of the agricultural hinterland and the plateaus. Bernard Mandeville would have been delighted to find not only that private vice creates public virtue but that it also extends military power. This paradox may be incorrect for certain periods of time: but as a general principle it is at least interesting to consider.

Strike

2011-05-28T09:10:00.001+01:00

What is the worth of propaganda films to a modern critic or thinker? That thought occurred to me as I watched Sergei Eisenstein's Strike at the British Film Institute last week. Strike is a pretty straightforward propaganda film. Released in 1925, the film chronicles events in an unknown factory. A worker is unjustly accused of stealing a tool from the factory. The bosses believe he has done the deed and sack him but the worker has no other place to work and so commits suicide. His suicide becomes the spark which sets off a general conflagration, as his colleagues decide that their response to the suicide is to strike. The workers walk out of the factory and submit demands to the management for satisfactory hours and rates of pay and conditions. The managers laugh at their impertinence. Assisted by shareholders they gather the local cossacks who ride back into the mass of the workers, massacring those who resist and arresting the ring leaders. Eisentein leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to think about the film, as at the end one of the ringleaders turns to the camera, in handcuffs, and exhorts us to fight for proletarian freedom and remember the sufferings of the martyrs that went before us.

Eisenstein's film is most definitely propaganda. The bosses are routinely portrayed as fat, old and ugly. They and their spies spend most of the film laughing and grimacing (displaying crooked teeth). The spies who work for them are compared to animals- an owl, a monkey, a bulldog. These animalistic references visually indicate the bestiality of the spies. They use criminals to infiltrate the crowd: at one point the titles show us that one of the spies Monkey asks for anyone without scruples to join his mission to bring down the strike. These guys are bad and they are meant to be bad. Contrast this with the workers. They can do no wrong in Eisenstien's vision of the world. They are lean and muscled. They do not seem unjust or malicious in what they do and they defend their own with a fierce determination. Eisenstein's vision includes no greys only black and white. This makes the film a poor description of a real strike- but it makes it interesting for two other reasons: the first as a historical document and the second as a document within the history of cinema.

One of the things you will notice as a western viewer when you watch Strike is that there are no characters. There are no real defined individauls on the workers' side of the dispute. What Eisenstein is portraying is a social movement rather than individuals, what he is trying to show is the force of that movement as it opens up Russia to opportunity for all. Class power not individual charisma is the engine of history within the film. Its important to note though that class power is also what keeps the proletariate down- not the individuals. The individuals whether the bosses or the spies are repugnant but its their possession of agency, their ability to shape a response using force which allows them to express that repugnancy. So the bosses are compared in a stunning sequence of montage to farmers slaughtering cows- the relationship they envisage with the worker is the same as the relationship that the farmer envisages to his livestock. Others have argued that the scene in which the bosses recruit the lumpen-proletariate is a moment at which awkward aesthetical values shatter the propaganda of the film: I disagree. What Eisenstein shows us is that the bosses and the criminals have the same interests at heart: furthermore he establishes through their alliance the fundemental respectability of the proletariate. Its important to bear these conflicts in mind when analysing the film: Eisenstein is portrying both the brotherly love of the proletariate and the hatred by the Bourgeouise of their independence. Capitalism in this view reduces the proletariate to animals being gutted and creates the exploiters who do this to them.

However Eisenstein's film is also interesting in rejecting the notion of leadership- there are no leaders here. There is a bolshevik group- in the sense that there are workers who discover that striking is good before their fellows do and there is organisation, the workers reject the stagy criminals- but there is no leadership. When compared to his later films (Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible) there is much less stress on the role of the leader in leading his people to the promised land: that is interesting, not so much for indicating where the communist revolution was (Leninism was totalitarian and unpleasant) but for indicating that you could still think in these terms in 1925. The evolution from the earlier to the later films of Eisenstein is an evolution in his own thinking but also in the official thinking of the Soviet Union from the 20s to the 40s: an evolution which perhaps indicates the way in which the revolution changed. Eisenstein could still envisage the revolution as not needing protecting or guiding (eventually) by a leader or a party in 1925: by 1940 that vision of the revolution was impossible.

These are mere thoughts about the film and I have left out the technical innovations (particularly in montage) that the film made. I'd reccomend a much superior review of Eisentein's entire works here. What I do think that Strike shows us though is how interesting a propaganda film made by a vile regime can be for understanding the ideology of that regime. Strike has fantastic images which stay in the mind but ultimately its also a serious film making a point: there is no way that any of us will agree with that point, but its worth watching just to understand how the point was made.

Unfinished articles 1

2011-05-22T21:08:00.002+01:00

Much as it may look like it- I have not gone away. The last month or so has been a rather tiresome time at work because I have been travelling a lot and that's reduced the time I've had to spend with my computer and I just haven't felt inspiration recently. One of the things I find about blogging is that I need an idea to animate a piece- it happens every so often that you read a book or see a film which sparks in you an idea- sometimes though you can feel you are stretching your material or are unsure of what you want to say. M.R. James in his ghost stories once wrote an article about unfinished stories- unfinished ideas that he had had- I'd like to borrow his concept- these are posts which are lurking in my subconscious as I write this piece. They may appear one day- they may never appear- but they are things I have started writing since April and haven't finished.

Religion and Realism: I am currently in the midst of the Brothers Karamazov. In the book at one point the narrator notes that Alyosha the religious one of the three brothers is the supreme realist. It is an interesting idea I think, particularly given that since Dosteovsky wrote the world has become more and more convinced that religion is separate from the natural world we live in. I think what he was trying to get at was that for Alyosha and for most premodern religious people, religion permeated their everyday perception of events and was not separate from it. This is true probably of many modern religious people and I think it marks out the fallacy of implying that religion is about faith or dreams or the supernatural, it is something that one perceives.

Burnt by the Sun: this film I was shown by a friend of mine over Easter- actually on the Royal Wedding weekend (which I avoided by going to Normandy). Its a very sad examination of Stalinism and I found it incredibly tragic- the kind of film that you cry over. I think its so powerful because it shows you ordinary lives effected by Stalin: the most pathetic character is a little girl who is sweet and curious and naive but over whom hangs a threat that she does not understand. It also perfectly gets who faced danger in Stalin's Russia- the Revolution really did eat its Children.

Hamlet: over Easter I went to the National Theatre's production of Hamlet. Its not a play I know well- I did Othello and Twelfth Night at School- but it was an amazing performance and really made me think both positively and negatively about life itself. I couldn't think of how to say anything new or interesting about Hamlet but I found it a very powerful experience- I'm not sure that this was an idea for an article or simply a platitude in search of a home!

Bloodlands: Tim Snyder's book is one I've been trying to review for ages but have never quite found the key to unlock it. Its about one of the most terrifying periods and places in history- Poland, Belorrussia and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Uncountable numbers of people were killed by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in that period. What Snyder gives you is both a new reference point for the killings- more from starvation and 'low tech' murder than from gassing- and a new grasp of their horror for individual Jews, Poles and Ukrainians- but also a sense of how these two barbaric tyrannies squared off against each other for being the land based rival to the sea based atlantic imperiums to their west. Its a gruesome story and Snyder brings out elements that I had never understood. It is all the more powerful because for Snyder the individaul deaths are deaths of individuals- fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. I find this one hard to write because reading it was difficult and writing about it would be worse: that Snyder and others can is something I admire. Thinking about Stalin or Hitler reduces me to depression!

These are just some of the thoughts which haven't quite made it out there over the last month- I apologise for the rambling nature of this post but I wanted to get something down on them all. Thoughts will flee and be replaced by others- what I hope is that some day all of these turn into articles: if not then I hope they can grow in the minds of others!

Review: Contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare?

2011-04-23T00:28:00.002+01:00

William Shakespeare's life was like most pre-modern lives: unrecorded. What we know about Shakespeare comes from a handful of legal deeds and reminiscences: we have no personal letters or documents, no diary, no autobiography. Shakespeare the man vanishes into history leaving us alone with his plays and his poetry. For some, since the 19th Century, this has been both frustrating and tantalising. They argue that such a great poet would have left some kind of legacy- maybe it has been obscured because the real poet was the son of Elizabeth I or a political intriguer or some other conspiracy saw fit to conceal the true authorship. Proponents for this view have ranged from great novelists and psychiatrists, right through to the inhabitants of the internet's zanier zones. James Shapiro's 'Contested Will' is an attempt to diagnose why these people think the way they do. Almost all scholars of Shakespeare accept the view that Shakespeare wrote the plays and there is very little, to my seventeenth century historian's mind that would incline me to think otherwise. So why, asks Shapiro have some very intelligent and thoughtful men and women thought otherwise?

This is an interesting topic. We often think of history as the record of what happened: actually though events only matter as people think they happened. Take the Norman Conquest: as an event it is banal, one army was defeated by another but reimagined it became an epochal moment for the conqueror and his conquered people. How people imagine the past matters. Shapiro offers us several factors- mostly personal for people to have taken on the sceptical mantle about Shakespeare. The key factor, he believes, is the idea that any poet or writer draws from his past: this idea, first documented in a footnote on Sonnet 96 by the great 18th Century critic Edward Malone, has become incredibly influential. It has led to great scholars searching in the life of Shakespeare for events which are reflected in his plays. It has led others to speculate about whether the grand subjects of the plays were generated from a grander life. Sigmund Freud argued for example that the Earl of Oxford wrote Hamlet because his father had died before the composition date and because Shakespeare's had not. There are plenty of other cases that Shapiro documents in his book: the key argument against Shakespeare's authorship is that he could not have known what the plays declared he did know, because he could not have experienced it.

This and the absense of evidence (something we will come to in a second) is the key part of the anti-Shakespeare case. It is based on the fact that as the author wrote about the pursuits of the aristocracy and about books, he must have had direct experience of them. Of course this need not be true. He could have observed this on the many trips to aristocratic homes to perform: he would have had access to literature on how to be a gentleman, he would have had access to all sorts of sources for foreign climates- the kind of access that yes might allow to him to make the mistake that Bohemia had a coastline! But that's not really the point. What Shapiro is arguing is that its a mistake to infer from anything in the plays that this was something that happened to Shakespeare himself: he buttresses this with a quote from T.S. Elliot who was bemused by the number of biographical allusions people found in his poems, a poet may not be speaking merely of himself.

So why do we make Shakespeare talk about Shakespeare or Elliot about Elliot? Why can't we leave the Wasteland or Hamlet to speak for themselves? Shapiro's history of the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare supplies us with an answer which I think is interesting and comes back to why we read and how we read. He argues that the reason that so many have wanted to read the poetry in this way is partly a tribute to the poetry itself. We read and from the romantic era on have felt that we have to sympathise with the artist who created the work: we read the work not as exempla but in some sense as a psychological history. We also take that history and examine it- turning it into our own ideas- just as I am doing in this piece. We spin off, as Freud did, from Hamlet to the Oedipus concept or from Richard III to ideas about tyranny (see Delia Bacon) and these arguments, our arguments, from the plays are reinforced by the fact that we deemed the playwright to have seen these things. How much more convincing to say that Hamlet was an effort to get over the death of the Earl of Oxford's father- rather than an imagined father of Shakespeare- how much more convincing does it sound as a proof to a psychological theory.

The case for and against Shakespeare as the author of his plays is interesting but as Shapiro argues through his book, what is almost more interesting is the history of how people have responded to the plays. We look into the past for legitimations of our own ideas- Hobbes called this practice prudence, the utilisation of experience to suggest what will happen in the future. We do this with literature as well as with history and the other arts. We have preferred since the 19th Century to base this sense of legitimation on a connection between art and reality: this actually happened, he actually saw this, that's why his account is correct. But that is precisely not what history gives us. Many artists simply imagined what happened: Homer was not present at Troy, Virgil imagined the world of Aeneas. Even worse the past is incomplete. A jobbing actor and playwright (see Shakespeare, Marlow, Johnson, Dekker, Fletcher et al) did not leave much more than invoices behind them: if they did, even that evidence is fragmentary. Reading Shapiro it struck me how much evidence there is for Shakespeare: he has a missing twenty years but then so do senior politicians during the period (Henry Ireton for example). Several figures from the seventeenth century- from the civil war fifty years after Shakespeare- appear, are prominent for a moment and vanish again. The point is that the past has left small traces of itself behind- but the evidence is always incomplete and always fragmentary.

Shapiro's book is very interesting. I would reccomend it and it touches on things I haven't touched on here yet- the lives of the sceptics are fascinating- in particular the tragic figure of Delia Bacon. But his central point is the one discussed above: Shakespeare ultimately would not do for Bacon or Freud or any of the others here listed, they had to find someone better who had the experience to write the plays. That little revelation tells us a lot about the sceptics but also about ourselves.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-04-13T22:39:00.006+01:00

Werner Herzog is one of those film makers who I think presides over our era. We may dislike or like what he has done- but he has penetrated deeply into the mysteries of modernity. His newest film- Cave of Forgotten Dreams- is one of the most powerful explorations of what time means that I have ever seen. Time is something we all confront across our lives. Humans are creatures who forget. We forget loved ones who have died, we forget instances which happen. One of my favourite scenes in film captures the ambivalence of memory: Bernstein in Citizen Kane captures a moment he remembers, a girl in a white dress with a parasol that he keeps in his memory for fifty or sixty years. Bernstein's image is so powerful because its one he remembers: but just think of everything he has forgotten. Just pause for a moment and think of everything that you have forgotten. Your first walking and talking, your first idea, the mundanity of life as you passed through it. Like Bernstein our past lives are flickers in the movie camera of our minds. But what about all the lives before yours? Living memory extends only so far back into the past: I spoke to my grandmother who was born during the first world war, I have had no contact in my life with anyone who was older than that. Before 1914 I have only history, and yet even history gives out at some point- history which Hobbes tells us is a different kind of memory- even that gives out- its with Thucydides or Herodotus or with a Chinese scholar or with the tales of the Bible- but history gives out, somewhere in the 1st Millenium BC. And then we have?

Werner Herzog takes us into that realm. He takes us to paintings made in a cave in southern France at some time 33000 years ago. Just to put that in context- the creators of Stonehenge are closer to us in time than the painters in this cave in the Ardeche river valley, in the Chauvet Cave. The paintings are amazing. Herzog uses all the powers of his camera to show us how amazing they are. You can see the hoofs of horses as they run with the camera: hoofs drawn superimposed, like a picturebook that the early pioneers of cinema spun to make motion appear. You can see bison and men and women. These works of art are incredible in themselves. But then you realise with Herzog that we have no idea why they were created: we have no idea why these things were drawn. What made a person 27000 years ago complete a drawing that had been started 6000 years before. We do not know and what's more interesting: we cannot know. All our senses of time and history are useless before the mystery of the past. As Herzog argues in the film (supported by a number of archeologists) we are left in awe: we can only appreciate, we cannot understand.

This makes this film an incredibly moving production. It is moving because Herzog understands the fact that we cannot know the past. We can speculate as to why there is a print of a boy next to the print of a wolf in the cave- but whether one chased the other, one walked with the other or they walked thousands of years apart through the cave, we will never know. Herzog fills the film with the educated speculations of archaeologists: we see ancient flutes and spears being put to use, we start to understand what we can understand of our ancient ancestors, but we can never understand what made them tick. We can only wonder at what they produced. The feeling the film produced in me was almost religious- awe and wonder at the world of these ancient peoples and at the distance from our own world. For they lived without any sense of history themselves: a point Herzog makes: these were the people before writing was invented. We move beyond our histories into the darkness of the past and yet somewhere someone in that darkness was my thirty thousandth grandfather and grandmother. This is a humanist film in that Herzog is interested in human beings- whether its someone trying to smell a new Chauvet cave or the archaeologists speculating on life in the year 33000 BC- he cares about elucidating his subjects. The film reminds us of human uniqueness thus whilst reminding us of our distance: we know that in the past people were eccentric but we have no means of discovering this eccentricity.

This film was very personal for me. Memory is something I think of a lot and think Hobbes was right about- it is the foundation of history- but then Hobbes had another point that the other foundation of history is authority. We believe because we are told by someone we trust: historians develop reasons to trust a particular authority- its confirmed by others or by other facts we know. But always you have that nagging feeling or I do that whatever we know about the past misses more than it captures: we are like Bernstein peering back into his teenage years and seeing only a girl on a ship that he glimpsed for a second. It is when we confront the mysteries that Herzog brings us that we realise how fragile that glimpse can be. We can see in the cave a painter with a crooked finger, but we have no way of knowing what part of the crooked timber of humanity that painter represented.

Why read Augustine

2011-03-30T20:25:00.002+01:00

Why should I or anyone else read Augustine- it’s the question implicit in Georg's comment below. After all I am not a fourth century Christian, I do not find Augustine's theology attractive as a method to live my life or understand the world, nor do I see the problems he addressed as key to my own life. So why therefore would or should I read the great African Bishop?

I think there are reasons to read people we disagree with fundementally. The first is a simple one and is the reason why everyone who thinks seriously about politics and history should try and read someone like Augustine. He was a genius. The City of God is a monumental achievement and though we may disagree with its argument, the logic is beautiful, the construction impressive and the execution is interesting. His thinking intrigues me. Like so many other thinkers whose ideas I disagree with, I see Augustine's thought as a roccoco structure which interests me for the intricacy of its design. By following him through these logical paths and understanding the way that his argument works, I improve my own methods of thinking and arguing. In the medieval world you would describe such a study as rhetoric: it is as useful today as it was then.

Secondly Augustine was a phenomenally important thinker. There are few that instantly I can put on the same plane as him. His influences cascade down the centuries. 10 centuries after he died the Reformation in Europe proceeded largely out of his interpretation of justification: one eminent historian has argued that the reformation was a family crisis, on the one hand those people who believed in Augustine's theory of salvation (Protestants), on the other those who believed his theory of ecclesiology (Catholics). Just like reading the Bible or Plato, reading Augustine is essential to understanding Western history and current Western politics. He shaped our language of politics: even those who disagreed with him fundementally used his language of politics and even if we may live in the slipstream of their responses, we cannot abstract ourselves from a context in which Augustine is a major player.

Thirdly the Fifth century AD is one of the most interesting moments in the history of the West. I am fascinated by Rome. Partly that is because we are its inheritors. Partly though its because whatever happened in Rome, it went through successive changes which must be important to the way that we understand our world today. Tacitus sketched the collapse of democracy into tyranny. Gibbon the collapse of empire into anarchy. We may refine those perspectives and understand those words differently today but the fourth century is still a key pivot in world history. In 410 the event which prompted Augustine to write was the sack of ROme by Alaric- the first sack of Rome since the 2nd Century BC. These are momentous events and we read in Augustine the reaction of a contemporary who was incredibly close to events and the people (a pupil of Ambrose of Milan for example) who shaped those events.

Those three reasons may not satisfy Georg (or you) and I could think of others I am sure were I to write formally about this but they are my reasons tonight for thinking about Augustine. Ultimately I may not want to take Augustine's arguments (though I may be convinced and one should never stop being open to being convinced) but I do want to understand him, for by doing so I will learn both about my own capabilities and my culture and about his time.

Rome resurgent

2011-03-27T23:19:00.000+01:00

Over the last two centuries, both Christians and Atheists have tended to argue that the latter have acquired more and more power. The Enlightenment, French and Russian Revolutions, the growth of printing, the scientific revolution and the growth of toleration have all strengthened in different ways the atheist perspective on religion. In 1714 confessional states existed right across Europe, from Britain in the West to the Russian Empire in the East and in every state prosecutions for blasphemy continued. In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was executed in Edinburgh for distributing the ideas of Spinoza, a crime described as blasphemy. The consequences of the next two centuries have meant that what Aikenhead was punished for, Dawkins and Hitchens now would regard as the softest of soft anti-theisms. But this revolution has not had unmixed consequences in the Christian world: it has changed the power relationships between churches, eroded the authority of some and enhanced that of others. One of the most curious cases of this- and something that we can see very early on after the French Revolution is the renewed strength of the Papacy.

The Pope has always been a key player within Western Christendom (I distinguish it here from Orthodox or non-Chalcedonian Christianity). His power, built upon forgeries like the donation of Constantine and theology about St Peter, extended in the medieval era through a vast panoply of churches and privileges to encircle almost every throne. In far away England the Pope's authority helped legitimate the Norman invasion in 1066: his reach extended even further in the 16th Century when he subdivided the world into Spanish and Portugeese portions- creating a Portugeese Brazil and making the rest of South America Spanish. But his power always coexisted with other powers. The Popes of the early Middle Ages could look east to see the Emperor in Constantinople and a rival who could claim the very mantle of the first Christian Emperor himself- not to mention the allegiances of the oldest Churches in the world: Jerusalem and Antioch. From 800, he might look north to the Western Roman Emperor in Germany: Charlemagne, Otto and Frederick Barbarossa all could either patronise or humiliate the Pope. Imperial power placed real limits on the Pope's authority. Furthermore the powerful Western Churches, which developed over the Middle Ages, particularly in France and Germany could always resist Papal authority. Whilst the great French bishops argued for Gallicianism, German prince bishops sheltered in their rich territories and both ignored missives from Rome.

The effect of the French Revolution was to sweep all the Pope's rivals away. The Eastern Empire had long ago fallen and the centre of orthodoxy moved north to Moscow- far far away from Italy. In the wake of the Revolution, all the Pope's other challengers were destroyed though. In the 1790s a campaign by the French state deprived the French church of its uncontested position at the centre of national life. The Napoleonic invasions of Germany swept away the Prince-Bishoprics and led to the confiscation of clerical estates. Napoleon also swept away the Holy Roman Empire. In 1816 at the Congress of Vienna these acheivements were recognised: the Bishops did not reacquire their territories and the throne of Charlemagne was declared forever vacant. The German and French Church and all other European Churches clustered around the Papacy for protection: the Pope was the only bishop to retain his land after Vienna and he became the leader of a more centralised church.

In a sense this is not so surprising. Christianity in the era when Europe was Christendom contained within itself enough space for dispute and rebellion. It is always easier to disagree from a position of dominance about how to use that dominance. As it went onto the defensive, Christianity became more unified and centralised: more dependant in the Catholic world on its centre in Rome. This phenomenon- partly explaining the rise of Ultramontanism- is one of the more paradoxical of the consequences of the Enlightenment: the rise of atheism strengthened the Pope!

Augustinian Puns

2011-03-25T00:13:00.004Z

You will notice that I stopped posting about Augustine in September last year- I got so absorbed in him that I think I lost the thread of my thought and was concerned I would write the same article too many times. I've decided to resume posting thoughts though- we left Augustine in Book V so we shall resume our account in Book VI.

Augustine used humour to undermine pagan beliefs, take this passage from Book VI of the City of God, when he addresses those who believe that the pagan gods can offer eternal life:

will these authors assure any man who supplicates the immortal gods that, when he asks the Lymphs for wine, and they reply, 'We have water, ask Liber for wine', he may then rightly say 'If you have no wine at least give me eternal life?' What absurdity could be more monstrous? If they do not try to deceive him will not these Lymphs laugh at him?... Will they not answer the supplicant: 'O man do you suppose that we have power over life [vitam] when you have heard that we do not have even power over water [vitem]. (VI 1)

Augustine uses humour in this passage for two reasons. Firstly he is pointing out the absurdity of polytheism: these are not powerful Gods, they have 'minute portions', 'little offices' within heaven. Compared to the all powerful monotheistic God of Abraham and Isaac they seem puny indeed. The temporal limits to their power suggest they cannot offer eternal life in the same way as the powerful Christian God: Juventas as he argues cannot make a man's beard grow so surely cannot give him eternal life. That is the substance of the argument of the chapter- but the humour is performing two functions, and its first alone is to support the argument.

Consider the passage above. The Lymphs, Augustine imagines, are laughing at the man concerned. Augustine believed that the pagan gods existed as demons rather than Gods: it is important to realise this because it reinforces why his humour is so powerful. In this passage as in others, what he is saying is that the belief system of paganism is absurd- but moreover it is created by demons. Part of their demonic design is to fool humans and Augustine is convinced and wants us to be convinced that they are enjoying the deception. The point here is that the deception is funny: the human is like the gulled victim in a comedy act, and that the believer in paganism as opposed to the Christian is the butt of the joke. Ultimately his Gods are vindictive and cruel. Laughter echoes through Augustine's text and its often the spiteful laughter of demons, we are invited to laugh in order to persuade us both to see the stupidity of pagans and to understand the evil of their gods.

The slip of a pen

2011-03-14T23:23:00.004Z

I'm currently in the midst of McCulloch's history of Christianity but a vignette just captured me and it demands repetition here. One of the great orders of Counter Reformation Catholicism was the Ursuline order- founded by Angela Merici- it still exists and does I'm sure important work. However the reason that it is called the Ursuline order is intriguing. Merici took inspiration for her order of only virgin women from the life of St Ursula, supposedly martyred in the 5th Century along with 11,000 virgins. There is no source for this story before the 9th Century and many historians consider with McCulloch that the source for the 11,000 virgins is a 'scribal error' in the 9th Century manuscript. None of the earlier chroniclers mention this massacre of virgins, supposedly undertaken by the Huns in 381BC.

Why does this matter? It doesn't effect the validity of the Ursuline mission at all and has no real relevance for wider Christianity. I think though it shows how important mistake and myth can be. Because a medieval scribe got something wrong in the 9th Century, an Italian nun was inspired in the 16th to create a new order. The religious can claim that as providence should they wish: for me its testament to the power of accident in history and accident is humbling because it reminds us that no matter how we think the world works, it probably won't work that way at all.

Occidentalist History

2011-03-12T12:39:00.003Z

Reading John Pocock's work on Gibbon, I came across an observation about the history of the West that I think is worth repeating. What Pocock argues is that the conquest of America represented a huge challenge to Western models of history. Smith, Robertson and the other Scots for example developed models of human progress that depended upon economic stages- from shepherd to farmer to citizen- which did not make as much sense in the Americas. The European thinkers believed that civilisation was impossible without the domestication of hoofed animals: this is a belief that makes sense in the old world- from Britain in the West to China in the East- but did not translate well into the Americas. Consequently Pocock shows that the eighteenth century thinkers developed the concept of a savage: who stood in America, outside of the procession of civilisation. Obviously this has massive unpleasant consequences: to state that someone cannot develop justifies all sorts of racism and abuse. It also had huge consequences for Western thought: it cannot be an accident that Rousseau and Diderot about this time, in different ways, enthused the concept of the savage with a new nobility. Both of the French philosophes used the concept to mount a counterfactual challenge to European hypocrisy and civilisation. It is an interesting reflection that amongst the consequences of the discovery of America is the development of socialism in Europe: but it may well be true. It does show that the history of occidentalism- the image in the Old World of the New- is as important as the history of Orientalism (Proffessor Said's creation). The former has a lot to contribute to the way that we understand how they understood the world around them.

Brother can you spare a dime

2011-03-06T23:53:00.004Z

I just thought I'd draw everyone's attention to a radio program about one of the great songs of the thirties- Brother can you spare a Dime. First heard on Rudy Vallee's radio program in 1932 (two weeks before Roosevelt was elected), or at least first heard on broadcast there, it was performed by performer after performer- Ad Colson did one version which is on youtube and Bing Crosby's is on my ipod. It gets into the context of the song- that most of the men in the Great Depression had fought in the Great War. That generation was one of those generations that seem to be afflicted by all the slings and arrows that fortune might throw at them: in their twenties they fought in the Trenches, in their forties they were sacked from their jobs and in their fifties they watched their sons go off to war. Its a fantastic program which strays into discussing the difference between Vallee's version and Crosby's version- the music of the twenties and the thirties and also the opposition between that and other songs of the Depression, particularly the fantastic 1933 song from Golddiggers, 'We're in the Money'. The latter is worth appreciating in its youtube version.

Contrast that with Brother can you spare a Dime, written a year earlier and in a version which the radio program doesn't include.

And you can see quite how shocking the latter's sentiments were.

A question of ego

2011-03-03T16:24:00.004Z

Those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of 'ego', and in the end they attacked each other with weapons. (Brother William to Adso, Umberto Eco 'The name of the rose')

One of the enlightening moments of my undergraduate degree came in a tutorial on Edward Gibbon. We were discussing why Gibbon had written 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' and myself and the other students exchanged ideas about Gibbon's intentions to reshape the enlightenment, argue with Machiavelli, discredit Christianity or explain the course of history. Our tutor leant back on his chair and asked us why we didn't just beleive Gibbon's own explanation: that sitting on the Capitol Hill he had heard the monks singing above the ruins of the empire and decided that this was the subject that should consume his lifetime's energy. That explanation did not satisfy me at the time: I left the tutorial with a friend we both agreed that there must be a better more intellectual explanation. Over the years though, I've come to reject our view and embrace the view of our tutor.

Part of the reason that people do intellectual things- whether its write a history of Rome's decline and fall or whether its a philosophical essay because they enjoy doing it. That sounds pretty simple as an account of why people do things, but it can't be neglected as a description because it ties to a vital question in intellectual history. Intellectual history increasingly focusses, following Quentin Skinner's lead, on the reasons that a book is written. If you write something- you want to contribute to some debate, your argument is to be evaluated in that light. Of course Skinner is right and his method has become very fertile as a way of reinterpreting and understanding better the thinkers of the past. I don't think we can leave out the 'enjoyment factor' from our analysis. Hobbes did not just write Leviathan to answer an authority crisis or a de facto debate during the English Civil War, he wrote it because he enjoyed that particular form of argument. In some sense, Hobbes found the experience of writing the book both enlivening and inspiring and hence he wrote it.

Lets come back to the citation at the front of this post. Imagine you are a historian and you ask why did Terentius and Gabundus argue about the word 'ego' at that point: were they responding to a grammatical crisis in Latin? William's description implies that no they were not, they did this because they sought to drive out the evil and terrible events of their own lives. They responded to their immediate situation. One might say that Leviathan was written less because of a political crisis in 1650 and more because Hobbes was bored or was particularly interested in politics at that point in time. Reintroducing a work to its immediate context is a fair thing to do, but we must be sure that we do not imagine that works are written because of their contexts. Terentius and Gabundus argued about ego because they used a language which contained the word and had a vocative tense: they argued at that particular point in their lives because they wanted to drive other thoughts away from their consciences.

Alexander Nevsky: Reflections on a Russian Classic

2011-02-27T23:39:00.004Z

Watch Alexander Nevsky and you can't stop noticing the fact that this is both a film and propaganda. Produced in 1938, it was swiftly removed from Soviet film theatres later that year when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. It returned to them in 1941 following the German invasion of Russia. The film concentrates on the story of Alexander Nevsky, a historical Prince of Vladimir, who fought the Teutonic Knights in the 1240s. The film deals with this subject by bringing together several battles into one great confrontation: on the one side is Nevsky, on the other the Knights. The first hour of the film constructs the confrontation between Nevsky and the Knights, the second half of the film reveals the battle between the two forces and the outcome of that battle- whose implications are quite clearly meant to reverbrate down the centuries to the atmosphere of 1941. This film attempts to make statements about the way that history works and the ways in which it intersects with class, nationality and religion: the way that events are shaped by those forces and by the force of the charisma of a single individual.

Writing a review of propaganda is not easy. This film is nationalistic, anti-religious, possibly anti-semitic, definitely prejudiced against the wealthy and jingoistic. It is a Stalinist production and relates to that period within the history of the Soviet Union when Communism became a nationalistic creed. One can admire the artistry. There are shots of genius in this film. There are shots of amazing beauty which still stun the eye today. Some of the photography across the icefields of Northern Russia is sublime. A shot of skulls in the snow after a great battle is stark but sums up in one image the desolation of death. All the way through the film you can see the way that it has influenced modern cinema. It is impossible to film snow or ice without thinking about Nevsky. It is impossible to film a battle sequence without (consciously or unconsciously) referring to the great battle with which this film culminates. Eisenstein made propaganda but he encased the Stalinist offal in chocolate: the film should come with a warning- dwell on the edge and taste the sweetness, bite too far in and rotten juices from the meat flow into your mouth.

The ideas of the film- the offal- is interesting because of what they tell us about Soviet communism. THe key moment in the film rhetorically is when Nevsky summons the Peasants from around Novgorod to defend Russia. When they arrive, they and the poor townsmen help defend Russia with an innate sense of Russianness and a wisdom based on proverbs about hares and foxed. Nevsky himself seems to operate best in this milieu. For Communism, an industrialising creed, this might seem strange but it testifies to the ways in which, as Orlando Figes and others have described, the Communist regime became nationalistic. Consequently although Catholicism is condemned and one of the 'traitors' is made to look Jewish, orthodoxy is not questioned. The film supports a project which says that at its core Russia is Russian and truth springs from the people of Russia, in particular the peasants of Russia. This reading of the film suggests that it is Stalinist but also that Stalinism can be seen as changing through the medium of its own propaganda.

It is difficult to review a film which does mask such dark ideas. I have not done Nevsky justice in these reflections nor have I found a real theme to hang this review upon. I think though it is a film worth seeing- mainly for its artistry and imagery. Its ideas are interesting but I found them too linked with the totalitarian regime that inspired the film to be satisfying. Ultimately they are the beast, the cinematography is the beauty.

Review: The First World War

2011-02-20T21:02:00.006Z

I can smell scholarly defensiveness from a mile off. The classic tactic of a scholar on the defensive is to write a very very long book about a very small area of history. If that's so, Norman Stone is on the attack. His short volume about the First World War covers one of the most important events of the last five hundred years: the events of the summer of 1914 ushered in a historical catastrophe that almost everyone in Europe is still reeling from. We live in a civilisation that has punched itself right on the nose and the bloodied nostrils and the cracked bone are there for all to see. Stone writes with a sense of that damage- the three pages on Passchendaele are incredibly moving as they document the decline in British singing, a deluge of blood mirrored in the narrow futility of 'we're ere because we're ere because we're ere'. A swift pace allows you to absorb the tragic figures: 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Somme for no gain at all, 400,000 British troops died in the mud to take Passchendaele, a small Belgian village of only 'local tactical significance, the Italians lost 1.5 million men making minor border adjustments against Austria. Those and the deaths at Verdun and on the Eastern Front are the large figures: but just consider this, at the Ypres salient there were 7,000 deaths a week through natural wastage!

Stone is a historian and not merely an antiquarian. He writes with a historian's verve and eye for detail. This is one of the most entertaining books about mass catastrophe I've ever read. The Battle of the Somme was held up by an 18 hour traffic jam as British troops struggled to get to Amiens. Lenin's arrival in Russia in 1917 was negotiated by Helfand, who operated the leading tobacco monopoly in the Ottoman Empire. Everyone knew in 1914 that the Germans were going to attack Belgium: all you had to do was look at the length of the railway platforms in sleepy Rhineland towns. Italian action in 1912 and in 1922 precipitated both world wars: Rome not Berlin or Paris or London was the key capital. Some of these facts are grim: the Italian monument to the unknown soldier excludes the Second Army where no search was conducted for bodies, the reason was that so many of the men of the Second Army were shot by their own officers. In 1931 one such officer who had stood behind his men, shooting those who wouldn't come out of the trenches, was murdered in mysterious circumstances. We could go on- with the invention of the four wheel drive by Porsche in order that the Germans could assault the Alps in 1917, or the fact that at the treaty of Brest Litovsk clueless Austrian aristocrats interviewed Russian peasants about how to grow onions. You get the sense through these anecdotes of the richness of Stone's understanding but also the anecdotes give the reader a sense of the war. Onions may be ridiculous but they point out the sheer abstraction of the Austrian general from the conditions of his peasant farmers.

Stone uses this vividness for his own devices. Running through the entire book is an argument, around it circle asides which dispatch for Stone some of the more persistent problems of European history. The argument though is the centre of this book and echoes forwards to our own day. Stone's argument provides an explanation for the first war and the beginnings of one for the second. The explanation briefly runs like this. Post 1871 the Germans took two decisions. They decided firstly that they wanted to dominate the centre of Europe, to create in Heisenberg's words in Copenhagen 'a new Enlightenment centered rightly upon Germany'. To do that they would have to dislodge Russian influence in the Balkans and in Poland. Their second decision was that they would challenge the British Empire globally by building up a fleet. In Stone's view this second decision was the greatest misjudgement of the 20th Century. By 1914 the first German ambition had a time limit upon it: the Generals believed that war with Russia could not be won if it was not fought swiftly. German war plans called for eliminating France within weeks and then driving on Russia before she had had a chance to mobilise: Russian railway building meant that such a plan would be impossibly by 1917. The German decision to build a fleet forced Britain's hand: faced with her old age dilemma British statesmen opted to fight Germany rather than leave her to turn on them once she had conquered Europe.

Stone's war is one that turns away from the carnage of the Western front and looks East. The consequences of the war were most impressive in the East: if the war had an immediate cause it was the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. If the war had an immediate consequence lasting down to the present day it was the creation of modern Turkey. More than that though Stone sees the war through the prism of a battle over the European and in particular the Eastern European continent. He sees that innovations in fighting- most particularly the method of rolling attack which won the war spread from East to West. Just as importantly it was in the East that the real prize was at stake. The First World War was not a battle for Atlantic supremacy- the fleets stayed at home and the submarines were only effective in bringing in the Americans but for European supremacy. A supremacy that could only be won in Poland and the Ukraine rather than in Belgium. Chillingly Stone comments that Russia without the Ukraine is Canada, with it it is America: looked at from Berlin he implies the same is true of Germany without Poland. Whatever we think of that observation, both Hitler and Stalin had it memorised and if the First World War played out the first time as tragedy, then the Second World war would play the same script with added blood and horror.

Stone's book is short and controversial. I am sure that a thousand academic pens have already been sharpened to puncture this elegant balloon. Equally though this is history from the stable of Alan Taylor, its fast, controversial and fun. Its important that Stone includes a special fiction section in his short bibliography, he writes as though a sense of the past is needed not just a dryasdust recounting. Some of the judgements may be awry: though Stone largely avoids in this book his most controversial views on the Armenian genocide. The book though never fails to be interesting: boldness means there must be mistakes within it, but there are no prizes for scholarly defensiveness. Ultimately Stone understands that history is made of two things- argument and empathy- one must analyse and understand the past. He attempts to do both in this short essay- its success is for specialists to analyse, I just sat back and enjoyed.

Laughter in the Name of the Rose

2011-02-13T12:04:00.002Z

Umberto Eco's novel the Name of the Rose is about monks. Fundementally it is about theology and the way that a theology which is taken seriously can lead to real world consequences. Eco reflects on many ideas- the role of learning, the Renaissance, science and the begginings of modern society- but one of the key themes of the book is about laughter. Is laughter ultimately justified in the sight of God, or is it a signal of the dominance of Satan in the world? One monk Jorge argues that laughter is the principle of all evil:

Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know, which has already been said once and for all. With his laughter the fool says in his heart 'Deus non est' (God is not)

Jorge's position is based on his belief that he knows what is true. Think about it for a second. In his universe, there are only two kinds of statements. The first are statements which are true. They are either descriptions of God's mercy and power or prayers to God. To laugh at these is to imagine that God's sovereignty is funny. The second set of statements are statements that attack God or condemn him or ignore him. These again should not spark laughter but rage and denounciation. Jorge's position is set out from a position of power: Christianity is, and to laugh is to say that it is not. It is to disturb the single truth and single rule of God.

In contrast to this Eco develops another character William of Baskerville who argues against Jorge. I take William's arguments to be dual: interestingly they imagine a world in which knowledge is much more unstable than in Jorge's world. Baskerville's first challenge concerns scriptural and other examples of the persecuted: they laugh at those who persecute them. He sets up the Christian not as an authority or an authoritative presence but as the subordinate: his point therefore is akin, and Eco would know this, to Christ's to the inquisition in the Brothers Karamazov. Secondly he argues that there are things which scripture does not declare upon:

God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide. And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which for that matter, we know only what we infer from our own reason by analogy and often by negation. Thus you see to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason, laughter can sometimes also be a suitable instrument.

Laughter for Baskerville serves to mark the division between propositions which are absurd and those which are plausible. Tell me that a secret cabal of aliens runs the world and I'll laugh, argue in favour of Keynesianism or Monetarism and I'll respond seriously. The key point here though is that William admits of a whole set of questions that Jorge does not admit of: questions which are ambiguous where our judgement is uncertain and God does not provide a rule. Laughter is a device within a continuous argument.

What I think is so interesting about Baskerville's position and Jorge's position is that Eco cleverly exposes one of the functions of laughter. In a world where everything was known, where the world was revealed, Jorge might well be right. Laughter would be silly: either indecorous or positively slanderous of truth. This is not the world that we live in: Baskerville's view of truth, that we do not know much and that that that we do know must be constructed painstakenly from argument and inference is much more familiar to a world of laughter. His is a reminder that we are strangers in our own land and what we understand is much less than what we do not understand. Jorge is wrong, the fool who laughs has not said in his heart Deus non est, he has said that he is a fool!

Brighton Rock (2011)

2011-02-12T10:27:00.003Z

Remakes are not easy for they are shadowed by the original. This is particularly true when the film remade is a classic- like the 1947 version of Brighton Rock. The viewer has an expectation both of difference and influence. Its something I've often wondered about. In classical music or theatre we are perfectly happy with the idea that a different performance can shape a piece or a script in a different way. The fact that McKellan did Lear a couple of years ago does not mean that Jacobi can't to it today. We are more resistant in cinema. The director and the writer have become fused, so remakes have an illegitimacy to them. Consider the word for a start. Noone says that the London Philarmonic remakes Mozart, but they do exactly what Rowan Joffe has done to Brighton Rock. They take the original piece, interpret it and play it to an audience. Would it be better if we could get a screening of the first ever performance of Mozart's orchestras, is their performance the best because its the earliest? Or is this obsession with remakes in cinema just an avatar of the genre's insecurity and its immaturity?

Brighton Rock is interesting in this regard. This story has now been told directly three times. Once in a novel by Graham Greene, secondly in a film in the 1940s and thirdly in this updated version. I have reviewed the novel and the earlier film elsewhere: this third film does add a different dimension though the story is basically the same. The basic elements of Brighton Rock are here. The anti-hero Pinkie Brown has committed a murder. A waitress at a local cafe is able to incriminate him because of what she has seen: he then attempts to woo her in order to stop her so doing. His gang gets nervous and Pinkie has to deal with the nerves. And against him is ranged a determined older woman- in the book and the 1940s film she is unconnected from the main action- in this Ida is the owner of the cafe in which Rose the girl works. The set up therefore and the denoument are the same as the book and the other film. The task for the director and actors is straightforward: they have to find something else in the material and convince you that its worth watching another version of the same story. I think they do.

The obvious difference between this film and Greene's book and the earlier dramatisation is the date. Greene's work is dated in the 1930s as Brighton emerged as a centre for race horse gangs. This film is dated in the 1960s, the era of the riots of mods and rockers. It is actually dated pretty precisely to 1964: this is significant because it is the last year in which hanging was available as a punishment for murder. The dress therefore and the style of the film are different from the older version. At one point, Andrea Riseborough, playing Rose, is able to acquire a sixties short skirt: there are echoes of sexual revolution in the air and suggestions of a different future to come. Although this film like the accounts of the sixties I have heard from my parents suggest that whatever was progressive intersected with a huge society that was conservative: radicalism, Beatlemania and Harold Wilson are all off stage in this film. They are important for they make Pinkie's idealisation of the way of the gang a conservative vision, almost a reactionary vision, but they are not central to the line of the story. Setting matters because it throws into relief the curious conservatism of the main characters: but it is not key.

The real change in this film as against the book and the previous film, is that it makes the relationship the centre of the drama. The film is laconic but it appeals to our emotions: it leaves you wondering whether Pinkie ever really did love Rose and whether Rose ever really did love Pinkie, rather than wondering about Catholicism. Catholicism is brought in: but the people I went with reacted to religion by discussing its impact on the relationship rather than the relationship's importance for religion. When Pinkie tells Rose that their marriage will produce only mortal sin, we empathise with the girl's instinctive horror that this moment of moments in her life has been ruined, rather than feeling his and her feelings of sin. Perhaps this is nowhere best symbolised than when Rose goes into a church: the camera follows her face, her features, her walk rather than following the images of Mary and Christ on the wall. This is Brighton Rock the individualistic drama about Catholicism rather than the Catholic fable about individuals. Its an important shift in tone.

So Brighton Rock 2011 achieves in producing a remake that is a version of the original rather than being a faximile of the original. The important performances here come from RIley and Riseborough. He generates an air of silent menace but also one of vulnerability. Riley's Pinkie has obviously no idea of how to seduce a girl and no idea at all of sex. Riseborough similarly has no idea of how to be seduced and captures wonderfully an air of innocence- almost of mental incapacity to recognise the world. She plays the part with an exemplary touch: making you believe in this incredibly vulnerable girl without a hint of street wiseness in her make up. Because of that they are a believable couple. What's interesting about them- as opposed to Attenborough and to the book- is that they are products of a cinema that has much less time for religion as a motivation. Constantly therefore we are looking for other motivations: is Rose a disturbed and abused child who has found a substitute father, is Pinkie really in love with Rose? They are questions that the film doesn't answer: but what it provides it problematises.

I'm not sure I have any answers surrounding those questions, but this third attempt at the story of Brighton Rock appears to me to be a more feminist text than the first two. Fundementally we are being asked to understand this relationship. How free are those that enter into this coercive and frankly terrifying ensemble: is Rose coerced by Pinkie's violence, is Pinkie by his situation. Furthermore is there a sense in which they are both escaping, Rose from her family, Pinkie from the gang. The ending of the film suggests both that human life and our answers to these questions are illusions, and that a life is leant meaning by its sequel. If Rose believes that Pinkie loved her, does it matter that he was a sadistic basterd who loved noone?

How to commit treason once you are dead

2011-02-06T12:23:00.002Z

Shane O'Neill died in 1567. In 1569, he attainted for high treason in the Parliament of Ireland by the Viceroy Sir Henry Sidney. Its long been a matter of interest to Irish historians that this happened: some speculate that Sidney and the crown wanted to get O'Neill's property in Ulster. A recent essay by Ciaran Brady argues that the trial was an arena for making a political point. Brady argues that the crown did not need to take O'Neill's property, instead what the act of attainder was was a complex act of political propaganda. Its long preamble asserted English perpetual sovereignty over Ireland and particularly over Ulster. Its importance was as an ideological statement of English power in Ireland and as a statement that both the native Irish and the English colonists were bound by that power. If O'Neill was a subject then he was a subject in the same way as the English colonists and so were all his Irish compatriots. The legal case was a political statement.

Its an interesting argument and Brady is probably right about Sidney's motivations. It does though make you think about the purposes of early modern and even of modern justice. Quite frequently you think of justice as a three party relationship: there is the offender, the judge and the audience outside. The offender is judged by the law to have committed a crime. The judge sentences to send a message to him and to the audience outside that crimes have consequences. The judge sends a message to the audience outside that crimes will meet with retribution: he satisfies bloodlust. What Brady shows is that there may be another dimension to a crime or a criminal trial: a trial establishes what is true and what is legal. So for example I may want as the state to demonstrate that Irishmen are subjects to the English Crown, thus I pass an Irish act of Parliament to assert that Irishmen can commit treason in the same way as the English.

To come to my title, the point is that O'Neill actually didn't do anything to commit treason. Rather than thinking about his punishment (the disinheritance of his heirs) as a punishment, its worth thinking about it as an argument. John Austin famously argued that all speeches or arguments were acts: Austin was right but what the case of Shane O'Neill reveals is that many acts are actually arguments.

Henry VIII's will

2011-02-02T21:27:00.002Z

In 1536, the north rose up in the largest revolt between the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War. Robert Aske, one of the leaders of that revolt, declared later under interrogation that one of his concerns was the succession: he said, under interrogation, that

he and al wise men of those partes then grodged at [28 Henry VIII c. 7] and that for diverss causes. On was that befor that estatut, sith the Conquiror, never King declared his Will of the crowne of this realme, nor never was ther known in this realme no such law

Aske was reflecting on one of the most controversial legal changes of Henry VIII's reign. In 1534, 1536 and 1544 Henry passed three succession acts. Three acts which attempted to will the crown to a particular descendent.

Eric Ives in an article in the journal Historical Research describes the acts. The 1534 act was not particularly radical as all it did was recognise that Henry had married a new wife and that his old marriage was illegitimate: it merely entrenched the reformation (the merely is partly ironical). However in 1536 and 1544 Henry went further. He not merely declared that his marriage to Aragon (and Boleyn) were invalid: he also said that after the demise of his first legitimate heir- Edward- he was able to set the succession. In 1536 he left it at that: and we are left to surmise who he meant. Ives guesses that he wished to place Richmond his son by Bessie Blount and then Elizabeth and Mary on the throne. Ives argues that the act was a nudge aimed at James V of Scotland, Henry's nephew. In 1544, after Richmond's death, the second act made the succession more explicit and this time we can see how it was aimed. Henry reasserted that he could establish the succession. Contrary to common law, he opted that after Edward the succession would not go to the first legitimate heir- James V- but would go to his basterd daughters- Elizabeth and Mary and after them would go to the heirs of his youngest sister Mary- the Grays.

This had vast consequences running through the centuries. Most immediately it set a pattern of confused successions which ran up until 1603. When Edward died in 1553, he left no heir. Edward nominated Jane Grey to succeed him- arguing that his father had made Mary illegitimate and that he might therefore will the crown to Jane. Jane and Mary for nine days battled it out and Mary eventually won becoming queen. In 1553 when she made her own birth legitimate- repealing the act declaring that Catherine of Aragon and Henry were not married, Mary was unable to repeal the act declaring Elizabeth her heir. The Lords and Commons, Sir William Paget told her, would not accept such a repeal. So Mary died too without issue and left the throne to Elizabeth. Elizabeth too disliked the act. Both her and Mary claimed they inherited the crown naturally and not by the 1544 act: and Elizabeth too sought to shut out the next in line- the Grey family. Elizabeth waited on the matter without deciding what to do and in the end James rather than the Greys succeeded. In 1553, 1558 and 1603 the absense of a straightforward succession and the availability of two methods of succession (common law and Henry's acts) caused confusion.

More especially though it led to something else. Henry's acts proceeded from the crown to Parliament and the Commons and Lords recognised what Henry had done. In 1553, if Ives is right, they prevented Mary changing the succession acts to stop Elizabeth. Just as importantly during Elizabeth's reign on two occasions Parliament decided that it faced a situation where Elizabeth might die: if she died the establishment decided that a Parliament would have to be calleed to invalidate the succession of her heir presumptive- the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. As a constitutional precedent therefore Henry's act was important to the Bond of Association of 1585, and was discussed even as late as the exclusion crisis in 1679-81. Henry's acts though were invalidated by the Stuart succession of 1603- James became King, whereas Henry would have intended Edward Seymour to succeed Elizabeth. Furthermore lawyers echoed the judgement of Robert Aske. Sir Matthew Hale concluded that the experiment of Henry's acts had never worked and so were not noteworthy in England's constitutional history.

Ives shows that Hale was wrong. The experiments are noteworthy. Without Henry's act, neither Mary (1553-8) nor Elizabeth (1558-1603) might have become Queen. Elizabeth in particular is a key monarch in British history: it is afterall her Church of England that survives and she was the first supreme governor of that Church (Henry was the supreme Head). Furthermore Henry's act, just as the Reformation acts, established that Parliament was the arena in which such matters might be discussed. Ives's article reasserts their importance in the constitutional revolutions of the 16th Century and thus is to be welcomed.

Philistines and German Students

2011-01-31T22:57:00.003Z

The Old Testament has Philistines in it: they are the people who in general the Jews don't get on with. Philistine also has another meaning in the modern world: it means the kind of person who can't understand art. But the two meanings of the word don't seem to have much to do with each other: whatever the Philistines quarrelled with the ancient Isrealites about, it wasn't Van Gogh, nor was it the finer points of aesthetics. The reason the two meanings are linked is interesting: and it shows both how scriptural, how unconsciously scriptural our culture is, and also how meanings have shifted down the centuries. The story of the word Philistine begins of course in ancient Isreal: but the story of its second meaning, to refer to an artistic ignoramus, has its origins in the 1668 in Germany. More precisely we can fix an exact place to it, Jena and an exact time, a sermon.

In Jena in 1668, a student was killed by a townsman. I take these details from Tim Blanning's study of Romanticism as a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What Blanning argues, and I see no reason to doubt him, is that the sermon preached on that occasion was from Judges 16:9: 'The Philistines be upon thee, O Samson'. The students of Jena took those words and fashioned an identity out of them: they were the Isrealites, the townsmen were the Philistines. For some reason, the division between gown and town, intellectual and bourgeois mutated during the course of the 18th century so that the word Philistine now did not distinguish the unintellectual or the boorish townsman, but instead the aesthetically challenged. What we are discussing is the migration of a word across between different forms of social contempt.

So what's interesting here? I think the first thing that this illustrates is how scriptural the pre 18th Century world was. We forget all the time how central religion was to anyone who was alive in this period. Religion was not just something that they believed, it was something that they lived in. Therefore an argument which may have had nothing to do with religion became infused with scriptural energy and citation. Secondly its worth considering how much of a change the creation of the status of artist was: it’s the subject of Blanning’s book but I think its worth drawing out here too. Creating the artist meant that he had to assume, to pinch the clothes and contempt of others: in this case the students. The point is that a new social reality grabbed language and ideas from the rest of the world, it inherited the old cloak of intellectual snobbishness and put it on with ease. I think that's interesting because it reveals how much social change can often be masked with conventional language and in the appearance of other disputes.

Parliament

2011-01-28T19:34:00.002Z

I've been rereading Maddicott's discussion of Medieval Parliamentary history. Its a very interesting book but one aspect interests me. What do you mean by the word Parliament? Arguing with a friend at work about Maddicott's overall thesis- that Parliament dates back to the 10th Century- I realised that we were arguing about very different things. He believed that Parliament was connected to representation and therefore dated its formation to the first elections (probably 1254). I connected Parliament to its function- so who cares when it was elected first- its the fact that a claimed representative starts taking decisions and becomes key to the royal governance of the Kingdom. We can date that far earlier: the Abbott of Bedford said in 1140 that no King could ammend the laws beyond his own lifetime without the consent of some council. I think that council was a Parliament because its functions, as Maddicott argues, are continuous with the functions of the Parliament that emerges in the 14th Century. Its an interesting debate and reveals how much people can agree about narratives whilst disagreeing about what they mean and are: the definition of the word Parliament might not matter much, but take that disagreement to other issues and it could easily matter a lot.

The other thing my argument this morning illustrated was how difficult a single language is at capturing an evolutionary reality. Take the French revolution: its easy to say that before 1789 you have a monarchy, post 1793 you don't- why? Because the King is dead and his heir in exile. Its not as easy to discuss when something became a Parliament. The first law making powers are very early, the selection of successors is very early. Kings are making promises to Parliament as early as 1014 with Ethelred. On the other hand the Commons only separated from the Lords in 1311. Parliamentary privilege was only constructed in 1526. Democratic elections involving women only happened in 1928. So you have an argument for suggesting that we have had a Parliament since 924 with Maddicott, or that you've have had a Parliament since 1928! You pays your money and takes your choice to some extent: but the problem is one embedded in our own historical language. We have a blunt instrument to describe the past which cannot capture its subtlety.

Anthologies and why I worry about them

2011-01-23T11:26:00.005Z

Anthologies can be wonderful. One of the ways I became interested in poetry was through Palgrave's Golden Treasury, but anthologies are also dangerous. Harvey Kaye's review of Newt and Jackie Gingrich's anthology of American speeches and proclamations identifies one danger- that an anthology could be used to spread an ideology. Professor Kaye leaves out the most important danger though. It is not that an anthologizer will use or manipulate the wrong narrative out of his or her sources (although with a particularly unscrupulous anthologizer this may happen- Gingrich et al don't appear to be too bad from Kaye's account in this regard) but that they will use a narrative at all. Let me put it like this. If you read Gingrich's anthology cover to cover, you would go from Tom Paine to Ronald Reagen: the temptation would therefore be to imagine that Paine can be evaluated in the light of Reagen, Reagen in the light of Paine. This is a basic historical mistake: Paine never read, never knew, could never imagine the society in which Reagen lived. Reagen may not have read or wanted to read Paine. The two may not be communicating across the centuries at all: even if they are, Paine will have been heard by Reagen and not the other way around.

Its a basic idea but its an important one. The danger in these anthologies is that you imagine that Reagen's concerns and Paine's concerns are the same. So they are involved in the same debates. When Paine talks about American liberty, he means what Reagen means by American liberty. It is of course nonsense: Paine was talking about American liberty from colonialism, Reagen American liberty in the era of superpowers. The debate is very very different and who knows whether Paine would have endorsed the latter liberty. When Patrick Henry says 'Give me liberty or give me death', he doesn't mean the same liberty as Barry Goldwater did when he said 'Extremism in the course of liberty is no vice'. Henry could not and did not imagine the kinds of debates about liberty that occurred in the 20th Century: Goldwater was not interested in the republican liberty that suffused the eighteenth century debates. Henry could not read his Friedman, Goldwater had not read his Harrington. When we read the same words, we are not reading the same concepts.

The best way to understand a speech or a statement in the past is to read it against its context. So you read Paine against other people at the time who used or were interested in Paine. You read Reagen against speeches by people like Helms and Goldwater. You can read a writer that interested a figure in their past: so you understand more of Thatcher if you read Hayek, but what you can't do is imagine that the past and the present have the same agendas. They do not. The story of something like liberty or democracy or love or any other concept is not that of an unending debate from the same positions (is liberty to be contrasted for example against coercion or against slavery) but its the story of a debate in which the meanings of the words shift endlessly. An anthology is therefore dangerous because it lines up the past with the present and invites us to imagine a debate which probably never existed, using terms which have a meaning in the present and another meaning in the past.

This is not to deny that anthologies are useful. They are brilliant as entrances into subjects, but that is all they are and they should come with a health warning. It does undermine the entire principle of Harvey Kaye's review though- he wants us to look at anthologies and evaluate them politically. The problem is that whether they are right, left or centre leaning, they are all bad history. Professor Kaye holds a chair in Democracy and Justice Studies at Wisconsin, at the very least he should know that democracy has a thousand meanings and justice tens of thousands of meanings. The point of an anthology is to make us read behind the texts: I have no idea of whether Mr Gingrich and his daughter's anthology does that, but if it does, I don't really care if its on the right or the left of American politics. All it is is an entrance and if people go through- they will find out that the world is more beautiful and more interesting than any single narrative of the past can make it.

La Boulangere de Monceau

2011-01-22T13:44:00.000Z

You don't need much time to say something important. A short film or a short book is often more powerful than a long one. (Sometimes this blogger needs to learn that with respect to blogposts!) Eric Rohmer's La Boulangere de Monceau fits into that pattern. The film is only 22 minutes long but it has interesting things to say about the ways that we view morality. Its a story about a lad who meets two girls, one an unnamed bakery assistant and the second Sylvie, a slim blonde on the street. The man meets Sylvie on the street. She walks through his route to university every day and he admires her from afar. Prompted by a friend, he engineers a meeting with the girl- and after a discussion, she agrees to go for a coffee with him the next time they meet. Then she vanishes. He searches for her round the district, in the markets and the streets. Eventually he ends up going regularly to a bakery where he flirts with the assistant and agrees to meet her in a cafe. However just before he does, he sees Sylvie again who broke her leg and therefore had vanished, he jilts the bakery girl and goes to dinner with Sylvie- he describes this as a moral decision.

There isn't much suspense in the film and therefore I feel no guilt about telling you the whole story. I think though what's really interesting about this is the way that our protagonist describes the whole story as a moral tale. His decision to go with Sylvie to dinner and not the bakery assistant is moral: why? There are two reasons for the decision to be moral: the first is that he is committed to Sylvie. We know however that they have only just met, there is no reason for him to be committed to her. Sure he may desire her more but that desire is not a moral judgement, its a preference. There is a second reason for the decision to be moral: the reason is retrospective. At the end of the short film, the man marries Sylvie. In retrospect, had he jilted her he would have jilted his wife. In retrospect therefore the decision is about morality when looked at from the point of view of the future. Two things are crucial in this perspective: the first being that Sylvie as opposed to the girl from the bakery is given a name by the narrator- she is an individual- the other is not. The second is that the film is narrated: the entire film is seen from the point of view of the future.

This spinning round of the moral order is important. We often see the moral moment as the moment of choice, whereas the film presents the moment which defines the morality of an action as the moment afterwards. Obviously morality is useful as a guide to how to behave. Rohmer's reminder is that morality is also a useful concept applied to the past: it is our way of understanding our history. The man here needs to rule out the alternative possibility- that he married the girl from the bakery- and he does so by creating an obligation to Sylvie. The road not taken could not be taken because it would have been immoral to have taken it. Psychologically Rohmer argues that we need to classify, to judge our pasts in order to explain and justify our presents and he only needs 22 minutes to say that.

Christians in Ethiopia

2011-01-22T01:21:00.002Z

Distance is everything in history and religion. Sounds like an odd comment? Consider the Christian Church in Ethiopia for a moment. What I'm writing is based on Diarmaird McCulloch's history of Christianity, but what McCulloch notes about Ethiopian Christianity is fascinating. It exposes the effects of distance and location on relgious thinking. There are two stories about Ethiopian conversion: Acts Chapter 8 recounts the baptism of a eunuch servant of an Ethiopian Queen in Egypt by Phillip. Our first historical account of an Ethiopian Christian regime is from the fourth century though, and here it is not from Egypt but from Syria that Ethiopian conversion was achieved. A Syrian merchant, Frumentius, is supposed to have converted Ezana, King of Aksum to the faith. Despite this its links with Egypt dominated Ethiopian religion: an Egyptian nominee was the Abun (Bishop) in the church. The Ethiopians followed the Egyptians and the Syrians into Monophysitism: the belief that the three persons of God have the same nature and substance, rather than as Chalcedonite Christians believe simply having the same substance. Ethiopia therefore was endowed with both Syriac and Egyptian roots and contacts for its Christianity and those contacts continued, however tenuous and influenced the character of its faith.

Ethiopian Christianity partook of a Red Sea and Nile world. Ethiopia was briefly connected by conquest to Yemen and definitely by trade to the rest of the Roman world. During the seventh century the conquest of Africa and the Middle East by Muhammed for Islam changed the world entirely. In Europe the Meditereanean became a frontier. In Africa the world of the red sea and Nile was no longer a link for Ethiopia to Christianity but rather a block. So much so that in the 16th Century when Jesuits from the counter reformation finally broke through the Islamic barrier, they were shocked by Ethiopian practices such as circumcission and refraining from eating Pork. The Ethiopian church developed along very different lines to the Western or Eastern Churches. In part this was natural: church designs were different to accomodate heat. But in part this was a result of the lack of cultural cross pollination: Ethiopian church music was distinct and different from that used in the Western or Eastern Church. Most significantly long after it was abandoned elsewhere by Christians, the Ethiopians were interested in the Book of Enoch- something that provoked interest in seventeenth century England of all places!

I haven't gone through everything that McCulloch says about Ethiopian Christianity and what he says, I am sure, barely scrapes the surface of what we know about that culture. What is interesting though is the way in which the Ethiopian church attests to the importance of geography in the development of Christianity. Evangelised across a trade route commonly known in antiquity and then isolated from the rest of the Christian world by Islamic conquest: Ethiopia produced its own style of Syriac/Egyptian Christianity. It produced great stories of self denial (the monk Takla Haymanot for example who stood on one leg for a considerable proportion of his lif on his cell feeding on seeds brought by birds) and great monuments but had features which we don't see elsewhere. For a start a foreign bishop meant that monks became more important. In the 15th Century the Ethiopians decided that both the Sabbath and Sunday should be days of rest. We must not overstate this- during the 15th Century Ethiopian Christians rediscovered Europe and cross pollination restarted, including the important use of a French work of devotion from the 12th Century in Ethiopian monasteries in the 15th- but the Ethiopian church's different path through the centuries suggests both the ways in which geography influences history and the ways in which there are alternative possible models of Christianity.

Of Gods and Men

2011-01-10T23:51:00.004Z

Film is a window onto the soul. It is a way of unpicking human beings, of seeing straight into their eyes. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the most famous shots is the closeup. Peering into the character's eyes we can get a sense of their anguish, of the bends of that piece of the crooked timber of humanity. Nowhere is this truer than when filming takes on religion. Great film makers from Bresson to Bergman have seen in religion- in particular in European Catholicism and Protestantism a subject which continues the define the fate of the West and the fate of each individaul living in the world. God becomes a character within the cinema: whether it is his silence echoing through Bergman's Winter Light, the greatest film of Calvinist desolation ever made, or his stern adjunction in the films of Bresson, or his unreal presence in those of Rosselini, coming like Christ before the inquisitor. When we think of religion we can think of its departure from this world, a world that Bresson's L'Argent informs us is irredeemably corrupt. Surprisingly Of Gods and Men is a film about monks: it is a film about monks that argues for engagement with the world, for sympathy with it.

Of Gods and Men is a film that concerns itself with a unique situation. We begin and stay inside the monastery for most of the film. THis is a film about the monastery itself and its community. We only go outside that community to establish some central facts. The first fact is the context in which the monastery resides. The local community love the monks. One monk, Luc, functions as the local village's doctor. The other monks are also deeply embedded in this community. Their Christianity is not seen as an impediment for the Muslims around them are committed to toleration. The second context is the threat from outside. We see the murder of some Croats working out in the desert early on in the film and we are always aware that the Islamic Fundamentalist opposition to the government will at some point come and kill these monks. The dilemma becomes the issue of what the monk's duty is. If they go to seek their own safety, are they really cowardly. Is departure an indication that they are neglecting the community that they have helped to nurture: a woman tells them that the villagers are the birds sitting on a tree, the monks are the branch they reside on. But if they stay, is that just as egoist a decision: do they seek martyrdom where they do not need to? Are they spiritually arrogant?

I am not sure I can answer those questions: I have never sat in that position and have no idea, though have a fear, of how I would react. What I think is interesting is the way in which the monks come to their decision. Christian their leader begins by discussing with them as a group and there is rancour and discord. The discussion is closed off by prayer. As the film moves forward, each member of the group struggles to a greater or lesser extent with what the decision means. One monk almost goes mad in his cell, shouting about God having abandoned him in his hour of need. There is actual spiritual anguish here. There is also contemplation. The film is happy to stay with the monks as they make the decision, tracking Christian as he walks through a forest thinking in silence, or shooting another two monks having a trivial argument about the washing up. An argument that is really about less trivial things. You see that as the process of decision happens so the activity of the monastery continues: the men treat the sick, they pray, they talk to the local villagers (there is one touching exchange between a girl on the verge of her twenties and Luc for example). Activity we see is part of this decision: it is part of the prayer that leads them to take their decision.

It is also a coping mechanism. This is a decision but its also a worry. We can see the monks are driven by their need to decide whether to go or to stay, but they are also terrified by their situation. To decide to stay is to take a very brave decision. They are able to deal with this worry through their normal activities. You can see this in two moments. Both are moments of great tension but in both the monks survive because they don a clothing of Catholicism. Firstly when the Islamic Fundamentalists arrive at the monastery in the middle of night asking for medicine: Christian's response is to tell them that guns are not allowed in the monastery. He tells them that the monks will treat any fundamentalist, but they will not move their medicine around for them. He does two other things though: he quotes the Quran to the invaders about Christianity, about the particular kindness of priests and he informs them that the day they invaded is Christmas. Later they bring a wounded comrade to the monastery and Luc treats him. These moments of intersection are moments in which the monks use their monastic principles to quiet their anxiety. Secondly there is a moment in which a helicopter comes over the monastery: the monks fear for their lives, but instead of panicking they go inside the monastery and sing prayers to God. The prayers do not drive the helicopter away- why would they- but they provide a psychological release.

The danger is real. Throughout the film the Algerian government are shown warning the monks. The army arrives to protect them and the monks dismiss it because it interrupts their work. The army commander is keen to restate the dangers. The army take Christian to identify a terrorist leader's body, he does so but shakes his head. The soldier sniffs in contempt. This is not a film which unambiguously takes the side of the monks: the Algerians say at one point, that the reason that Algeria has its problems is its history of colonialism. The view of the monks appears to be that they are as much part of the history of Algeria as anyone else: or rather that they are now part of their monastery and cannot be decoupled from it. Throughout the film you get the sense of the affection between the monks and the land. Perhaps this makes sense in the context of France in Algeria in particular. Its also powerful because it gets to something else about the film: the monks are not aggressively anti-Muslim and neither is the film. We see Algeria through the eyes of the monks, rather than through our own eyes, and it looks to them as though it is a complex society riven by hatred. A complex society which has thrown up a gang of fools but also contains its fair share of saints.

This is a film ultimately about the monks. It is a difficult task as a non-Christian living in a society that forgot monasteries at the reformation to understand the role and function of monastic living. Whether you are a Christian or not, I think what this film does is explain the process of decision making under stress in that kind of a community and open to your eyes a world which dominated Western spirituality right up until the seventeenth century. Walking out of the cinema, one thought flashed into my head: Bergman and Bresson and Rosselini all deal with the role of Christianity in the modern world, after the death of God. This film does not deal with that modernity but another. It takes us to the frontiers of Christendom and positions its deepest questions around the roles of Christians on that frontier. If Bergman and Bresson and Rosselini are in dialogue with Dosteovsky and Vico: then Of Gods and Men speaks of missionaries, martyrdom and forgiveness. Its subject is older, but no less interesting.

Enemies of the People

2011-01-09T00:44:00.002Z

We live our lives surrounded by the past. It envelops and confines us within patterns of behaviour. This functions at a personal and a political level. Thet Sambath's film, Enemies of the People, is a study of memory and the way that it has effected his life and the lives of others. Its an attempt to explain what happened in the 1970s in Cambodia, when Pol Pot seized power and millions were slaughtered. What Sambath does isn't to examine the details of Cambodian politics at that point: he does not approach the issue as a student of diplomacy or of political structures. What he does is approach the entire drama from a humanistic point of view. He looks at the individuals that performed the murders and asks them why they did what they did. Its important to realise after all that genocide cannot happen without perpetrators: within obedience is consent. Sambath's film takes the entire gamut of the perpetrators. He spent ten years making it. The ten years were well spent, he presents us with the killers themselves: the men and women in charge of the operation in the killing fields. He presents us also with Nuon Chea, Brother No 2, Pol Pot's deputy, who never sullied his hands with blood but who ordered the entire event.

Sambath's quest is given particular relevance by the fact that he himself is a victim. His father was killed by the Khmer Rouge. His brother vanished under their rule, probably killed too. His mother was forced to marry a Khmer cadre and died in child birth. Everything Sambath says about the Khmer regime is conditioned, we know from his narration, by these deaths. In that sense he represents the whole of Cambodia: roughly speaking a quarter of the population were murdered in those bloody years and therefore most Cambodians must like Sambath be directly effected through their relatives. The documentary becomes therefore not merely a medium in which the killers and the officials remember, it becomes a medium for Sambath to recover the meaning, the memory of the events which slaughtered his family. You get a hint of what this might mean when he discusses the members of his family who are now alive and remarks that his surviving sister and he can never speak: they can never speak because to speak reawakens the memories of the dead and the destroyed. The place of pain from which this documentary flows means that it is a particularly visceral act of memory: I challenge you to watch it and not to cry.

But there are two places of pain to remember these events from. The first is grief: Sambath's grief and his guilt. Guilt that the last words he spoke to his brother were those of disappointment about a fighting cock that his brother had forgotten to bring home: a reminder lest any were needed that even under totalitarianism people live normal lives and worry normal worries. The grief is more obvious. The other place of pain though is the pain of the perpetrator. At one point one of Sambath's interviewees, a devout Buddhist, speaks of the fact that in his belief system he will never come back as a human being. He tries to imagine what he might come back as but cannot imagine something bad enough as a punishment. Watching the faces of the perpetrators, you see both the impassivity of having seen too much and the pain of having done too much. They stutter, they deny what they did, their eyes flicker around the camera screen- never looking straight at us, knowing (possibly) that they never can. Sambath's impassive questions turn into a kind of torture: in a quiet tone he asks them what it felt like to kill, why they killed and how many, forcing them into the prison of the past.

The impassivity is important: although Sambath is deeply bound into these memories because he like us did not see the massacres, he like us is exiled from the direct memory of the massacre. So he can be our proxy. When the killers discuss drinking the gall bladders of their victims or when they show him how to slit a throat or where the bodies lie, he like us can feel shock. These are the kind of details that became normal for those who committed the crimes- but for us and for Sambath they are revelations of barbarism. You are not supposed to discuss whether gall bladders taste bitter or not: to discuss that isolates you from the rest of human kind. Murder like anything else can become a habit. Its crucial that Sambath is involved and yet not involved: that his business is not reawakening his own memories, but finding out what happened to those he loved. He like the audience has to relive the killings through the memories of those who committed them: he keeps an admirable objectivity in his reporting, asking for details and inspecting sites, but in his commentary following each interview, he gives us an emotional response that we can empathise with. The interviews with the perpetrators reveal the way that murder has cut them off from society: they have experiences, they have guilt that they can neither communicate nor expunge.

The perpetrators do not seek to justify what happened, save by arguing that they followed orders. They appear to be stunned by the events they have participated in. The exception here is Nuon Chea, Brother Number 2. Nuon Chea is the only participant who is certain about the justice of his memory of events. He is interviewed and sits looking into the camera, unflinchingly. His answers are measured and come without anguish. He knows what he knows and he knows that it is right. His view is that those who were murdered were Enemies of the People, Enemies who had to be slaughtered lest the party fail in its reforms of the country. Self righteously Chea remains in his certainty: seeking even to impart that to others, to excuse their sins. He feels no guilt and his words are a power of themselves, certainty is convincing. Nuon Chea is definitely a clever and thoughtful man and when he speaks you feel yourself for a moment being seduced. Sambath though mixes the interview with his interviews of the perpetrators on the ground, with his own discussion of the consequences of massacre: we are never allowed to divorce the snake from his trail of slime. For that reason Nuon Chea's rhetoric is undermined and turned against himself: we find the reason for the murders in his certainty and his charisma, but Sambath's filming means that we are not persuaded.

Memory is important. So many Cambodians in the seventies were killed and that memory will stay within that society for as long as anyone reading this blog is alive. Just as the atrocities of the twentieth century in Europe remain alive, facts within the politics of the twenty first century, so will the Khmer Rouge's work in Cambodia. Sambath's dispassionate eye and his camera allow us to navigate different memories: his own memory of his brother, mother and father and their grisly fates, the memories of those who performed the bloody work out on the killing fields and the memory of the one who ordered it. What it presents is a picture that is complicated and difficult: Sambath never says what he thinks about this and never expresses his anger. When you contrast that with the anger of Nuon Chea, willing to denounce those whose blood stains his hands, you can see a moral distinction which is as clear as can be.

Murder at Christmas

2011-01-02T01:45:00.003Z

Thomas Sydens was murdered in London on Christmas Day 1683. He was murdered by Francis Johnson. The full record of the trial is below

Francis Johnson , Indicted for Killing Thomas Sydens ; also Arthur Grayham , and Richard Grayham , as Aiders, Abetters and Comforters of Mr. Johnson in the said Fact . It appeared upon the Evidence, that Mr. Johnson, and the two Grayhams, had been late a Drinking at the Castle-Tavern, near St. Fulchers Church, London, came out from thence about One a Clock, on Christmas-day in the Morning; That Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Arthur Grayham had some difference, and drew upon one another: as soon as they came out, that the Watchman upon the next Stand cried out, Watch, Watch, that the Constable and Watch came immediately; but that Thomas Sydens having been at the Watch-house to light his Candle, went that way in the very juncture of their Fighting, and that before the Constable could get up, Sydens was wounded, of which he suddenly died; that the Watch found the said Three persons with their Swords drawn: And by circumstances it appeared, that Mr. Johnson's Sword was sweared, as if with Fat or Grease, about Three or Four Inches next the point, that a wound of that depth was made in Sydens Belly: That none else had Swords but those Three. Many Witnesses were on each side; and the Trial so long, as not to be exactly herein particularized. In conclusion, the Jury found Mr. Johnson Guilty of Manslaughter , but acquitted the Two Grayham's.

This is all we know about what happened on Christmas Day 1683. The scene is vividly described. You can imagine the darkened alley way, the sounds of fighting, the constables coming down with their torches and the three men standing round a body with drawn swords. Whoever wrote this wrote it for an audience: the vivid detail and the exclusion of legal argument give this away. The account though is confusing: the original dispute was between Arthur Grayham and Francis Johnson who had been drinking together, but it was neither of them who were killed- rather it was Thomas Sydens, who disturbed their fight.

What we don't have is any account from any of the men about what they were quarrelling about, we don't know why two men were let off and one was sentenced. We do not even know- though we can guess- what the sentence eventually was for the guilty man: it is almost certain that he was hung. We have this very vivid record but even despite that, we do not actually know key things about what happened. We can all imagine the scene but we know nothing of the characters or consequences. Take for example the murderer: Francis Johnson was not an unfamiliar name to the Old Bailey in 1693, a Francis Johnson was prosecuted in April 1683 for 'Felonies to a small value' though he seems to have been transported. We do not know even though if this is our Francis Johnson or not: and if it is, why his transportation had not taken effect.

The record is silent and frustrating. In that sense it mirrors the past. Looked at another way though it gives us valuable detail. Think about the watch: we have here a description of how an early modern watch worked. A man heard something he didn't like, shouted for reinforcement and the watch from the next street and the constable came running to find the murder. Arriving too early at the scene could be dangerous though as Sydens discovered: he arrived and was murdered on the spot. Early Modern policemen might make judgements from the weapons used: Johnson was prosecuted and convicted possibly upon the basis that his sword was greased up to the length of the cut in Sydens' belly (how did they calculate that?) Alternatively we have a familiar scene from the modern world here- a night at the pub followed by drunken violence between men unfortunately carrying swords. Violence which took place on dark London streets (without lighting- Sydens had to light his candle).

This one incident can be over laboured. We don't know how typical it was. It is interesting though- partly because of how little we can actually say about events. The priorities of the past and the present are often different when it comes to the records we want them to have kept. (No socialist historian could use this for example in a class analysis of London- unless you knew where you were definitively- but though I have been able to find a Castle Tavern, just off Cheapside near St Paul's, I have not been able to find a parish of St Fulchers (There may be readers who do know where St Fulchers was, if so could you leave a comment).) All the incidental detail about the participants is missing so it is hard to generalise. What we have is an exciting story- given the nature of the published records, attempting to get sales against Exclusion crisis tracts and any number of other things in 1684, we might expect that.

What it does tell us is that public taste has not changed, crime outranks the specifics of legal process and technical description in the public imagination.

Comments policy

2011-01-01T01:54:00.002Z

I thought I'd clarify something because of something that I came across this evening- I don't want to be mystical about it but that's all I'm going to say. Basically my comments policy on this blog is pretty straightforward: I will publish and respond (if I have time) to any comment that I think is genuinely engaging with what I have to say. I'll be a bit more curt with comments that I think are being curt with me. I won't publish comments that are obviously spam or offensive in some way.

If a comment is acceptable by my criteria and with people like Claude or Goodbanker or Edmund and numerous others that's almost always true, the only reason I won't have published it is that I've just forgotten to check comments recently! I should be better: sometimes I wonder if I should take off moderation, that is until I get attacked by the spammers again. But that's the basic rule: anyone who engages with me as a commenter, who thinks and wants to be in a conversation with me and others will be published: if you don't, you won't.

If anyone is ever worried about a comment not being published do email me on the email address which is around somewhere but is gracchii at gmail and I'll respond.

(And come and look at my website selling spanners is not a comment which is the start of a conversation about near anything this blog covers!)

Review:The Anatomy of England: A history in ten matches

2010-12-27T16:23:00.004Z

November 25 1953 is a date burnt into the memory of English football. A team including several of England's best ever players (Stanley Matthews at rightwing, Stan Mortenson at centre forward, Alf Ramsey and Billy Wright) were not merely defeated but were thrashed in the Autumn at Wembley. It was England's first ever defeat at home- a record that had stood for ninety years- and symbolised the ways in which the inventors of football had been left behind tactically and imaginatively. Harry Johnstone, the centrehalf from Blackpool, was unable to find the Hungarian centre forward who played very deep, Matthews was uninvolved until late in the game and his counter part on the left Robb, a school master whose pupils were in the crowd, was completely isolated. The Hungarian side led by Puskas simply left England in the dust, playing the game a way that had been antique twenty years before in a style that was prehistoric. Traditionally this game marked the moment at which England became an inferior side. Previous defeats in the World Cup (against America in 1950) or internationally (Spain in 1928) were ignored domestically or explained a way (dodgy food or heat) but Hungary had taken on and beaten England on a November day in London. Short of dragging the Europeans to Hull and feeding them chip butties for three days, there weren't many more English conditions and the English had been thrashed.

Jonathan Wilson's new book about the history of English football reflects on this and ten other games which have significantly influenced the way that the English have felt about their national game. Wilson's story both magnifies and diminishes games like that at Wembley in November 1953. It magnifies it because it is a story focused around separate matches. There is no denying that football is tied to specific moments: England and Hungary's battle in 1953 demonstrated something about English football. Harry Johnstone couldn't pick up his opponent because England were tactically behind the Hungarians. It also diminishes those games by illustrating how far they are part of a longer narrative, they are peaks in an overall story. England had been beaten before 1953 by foreign sides, in 1929 they were destroyed by Spain for example in the first of Wilson's games. The memory of English defeat though stretches back to the turn of the century with the Scottish sides of the 1900s who passed their way through English individualistic midfielders. Games reflect a longue duree, a history of the game which suddenly is revealed in individual instances. In that sense Wilson performs here the classic task of a historian: he takes isolated moments from the past and strings them together with a philosophical approach, he is both an antiquarian and a philosopher, a Coke and a Voltaire and hence becomes the combination an historian.

So what's the story? Wilson identifies two issues that English football has faced since the 1930s if not before. One is an addiction towards individualism. The greatest exponents of that individualism were the old fashioned wingers. The iconic moment for Matthews in Turin in 1948 was when he was remembered to have gone past a fullback, stopped the ball, taken out a comb and straightened his hair and then gone past the same fullback again. Its untrue but is a wonderful story to exemplify English individualism. Perhaps the greatest exponent of that theme was Paul Gascoigne, a player who could never be caught thinking, was as daft as a brush (and consequently put one in his sock) but for a couple of moments in 1990 and 1996 was a genius. The second aspect, tied to the first, was a reliance on effort over tactics. Ken Wolstoneholme cried out against Hungary that some good old fashioned tackling would sort out the Hungarians. He was the prototype for every football fan who ridicules Arsenal's ticcy taccy style and proclaims that Blackburn, Bolton and Stoke will sort them out by tackling hard. Again you can see the line through to the modern day, Kevin Keegan's England were the epitome of the all effort and no thought. Notice the double theme, whether the winger who stands a solitary genius or the growling centre half (think Dave Mackay holding Billy Bremner) the ideal is not to think. Jonathan Wilson casts English football as an unintellectual pursuit, occasionally wrestled into thinking about itself by a visionary (Ramsey in 66, Venables in 96) or by accident (Robson 90).

Within that macro story, Wilson does allow the celebration of individual generations. For example, he writes perceptively about the England Italy game of 1948. He argues that in that game, England played possibly her greatest ever forward line- Matthews on the right, Mortenson at inside forward, Lawton at centre forward, Mannion as the other inside forward and Finney on the left. The English beat the then world champions four nil in Turin. Wilson argues that this was in part due to the virtuosity on display. He blends through his matches the rise and fall of playing careers- by 1972 against Germany many of the players who had won the world cup especially Bobby Moore the captain were too old. During the 2000s, the golden generation both represented an amazing opportunity- Wilson identifies that players brought up at the same club have an instinctual understanding of where they need to accommodate each other and that generation included the Fergie Fledglings (Neville, Neville, Beckham, Butt, Scholes)- but were brought down by clumsy management (England lost Scholes their best player in 2004) and over expectation. This threading of the generations through the story fuses the tactical with the tale of talent. Football history is about judgement but its about the luck of producing great players at the same time and using them to win something: when a golden generation and tactical insight come together you get the Spanish success of 2008 and 2010.

This is a pretty convincing story: and Wilson makes his points well. The debate over how to fit Lampard and Gerrard into the same midfield is finely ridiculed. His discussion of the older more insular English football culture is brilliant. However one element is missing. When Matthews played, he played in a league where there were no foreign players and no foreign managers: the only foreign players you encountered were oddities (see Trautman, Bert) or Scottish or Irish. Since 1980 and probably since the World Cups of the seventies, through television and through the growth of football as a business, the entire game all over the world has become internationalised. Stephen Gerard for example has been managed for most of his career by a Frenchman and a Spaniard. Frank Lampard has worked since 2001 for an Italian (Ranieri), a Portuguese (Mourinho), an Isreali (Grant), a Brazilian (Scolari), a Dutchman (Hiddink) and another Italian (Ancellotti): it is in that period that all save one of his England caps were awarded. During his time at Chelsea Lampard's most frequent midfield partners have also been international. What you are seeing since 1990 and probably earlier too is a fusion of football cultures. Famously it took place at Arsenal in culinary terms: the new French manager Arsene Wenger refused to allow his squad to eat steak and chips, replacing them with pasta and vegetables. Wilson doesn't fit that into his story of English football nor does he speculate on how that internationalisation of football will leave national style.

The other thing that Wilson doesn't do as well is tie his story back into the story of England and football itself. Obviously the hubris of 1953 faded at almost the same time as Suez, but such a comparison is facile. The interesting questions about English football remain who goes, who plays and who pays and have the answers changed. The 1990s changed the spectators a lot: anecdote suggests more women and middle class people went (as the middle class expanded- another story- football may have been a way for the socially aspirant to retain their origins). Furthermore in terms of the wider history of football, was it necessary for England to lose its power? The magic of contemporary football glimmers with memories of different national styles- Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Uruguay, Sweden, Hungary, Austria all have their proud football histories. Without the achievement of so many nations, would football be as popular? English decline was inevitable because of the size of its population relative to the rest of the world, but one wonders had it not happened- had England dominated as America does in its sports, would football have been so popular.

Wilson's book like all good books opens up further questions, but those questions go out from his matches out into the impact of football onto a wider world- a wider world of class tensions, national rivalries and ultimately the choice of individual humans to watch and play a global and not an English game.

Languages

2010-12-18T17:43:00.003Z

I have a confession to make: I am hopeless at foreign languages. I can just about hold a conversation in French but only of the most basic sort and I could at one point read some Latin and Greek but only again basically. I can read no Russian, no Chinese, no Arabic, no German- the worlds of Tolstoy, Confucius, Khaldun and Neitsche are only available to me through transalation and I have no means of judging the quality of what is translated. I find it interesting though to think about which languages people should learn. A recent article in the New Republic, damning the teaching of French in US universities, raised this issue: the author argued that the only languages Americans should learn at university were those that would be crucial to tommorrow's world- Arabic and Chinese. (I have no idea why Arabic was placed ahead of Hindi or Urdu, but then I may not know what I'm talking about!) His argument boiled down to the suggestion that languages should only be taught when they were languages of power: so Chinese for example is an imperial language and the language of a rising power so needs to be taught, Latin's moment passed 1500 years ago so should not be taught.

There are obvious reasons to endorse this argument. An education which means you can read Cicero in the original won't assist you directly in negotiating quotas at the WTO. A deep knowledge of Proust and his language is not going to help you build bridges. Chinese will be more useful as China grows in power and like it or not, most of us are going to be dancing to the tune of Beijing more than we will to the lilt of the Elysee Palace. There are good political reasons though for pausing: America will still need its European allies, they are still pretty big countries, whether you count populations or you count economies. Their importance may be declining but they are still significant and probably will be in 2050. So will some of their colonies which speak their languages- Brazilian Portugeese and Spanish through the whole of South America not to mention Algerian French and English in India. But lets leave that argument aside- again I profess only ignorance about the trends of the next century. I'm not sure this is key either: how many of us become diplomats, how many of us need to know foreign languages because of our jobs- my guess is that there are and will be very few people for whom this is true. The real reasons to learn a language are different. Are there reasons to learn a language which aren't based solely around power?

I think there are reasons to do so. Lets think for a moment about most education. It doesn't teach things that people directly need in their jobs. When I talk to maths graduates or economics graduates, they don't use what they did at university anymore than history graduates do. Unless you do a professional degree you are very unlikely to ever use what you do in your work unless you become an academic or a teacher. That doesn't mean the education is pointless: it merely means that its effects are not direct. So teaching French might not equip you to talk to your Chinese colleague about US trade policy, but it will give you other talents that will enable you to understand his argument. Learning one language helps one learn another language. Learning one literature helps one learn about the ways that human beings work and the way that logic works. Thinking no matter what it is about is good so long as it is done seriously and with effort. Learning Latin for example is good because it encourages that kind of thinking, possibly its more useful than a flaky degree in something more directly useful to a job or a future.

My opponent may take this argument but then reply, but doesn't teaching Chinese have the same effect and doesn't isn't it also more 'useful'. He is right. But lets be careful here. A good discipline in any language is a positive. French may be a door into learning other languages as well: it has more in common with English than Chinese does- so for the pupil first starting to learn languages it is a bridge into another world, a world in which the words we use have subtly different meanings. Chinese is harder in that its structure is so different, French from a pedagogic principle is therefore an easier bridge. But the whole idea that languages deserve to be learnt merely because of their importance now is also bizarre. Learning Chinese or French opens the door to vast civilisations underneath, to ways of thinking that are now long gone. You recover the world of Dumas and you learn something that no paper editorial can tell you about the radically different nature of the past. Chinese gives you the same insight because equally Confucius takes you to a different world. For me that's the real utility of a linguistic education, not that it provides you with something immediately cashable now but because it supplies you with an insight into a world you don't know about.

Who knows whether we will all need to speak Chinese or Hindi in the future, what we do know is that the basic human insight that the world is different to different people needs to be maintained. Whether it is French, Latin, Chinese or anything else languages can mantain and help assist us developing that insight: for me it is immaterial what language someone studies, so long as they study something.

And now I'm going to search for my dictionaries!

Dumas's Revolution

2010-11-30T17:55:00.003Z

One of the reasons that I find the Count of Monte Cristo fascinating is its context. Villefort, the corrupt lawyer at the centre of the book, expresses an analysis of the French Revolution which is precise and fascinating in the light of today. He compares Robespierre and Napoleon thus:

The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men: one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a King in reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe... I do not mean to deny that both men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and 4th of April in the year 1814 were lucky days for France.

Pause there and consider what Villefort says because what he does is express a classical doctrine which has some interest. The French lawyer discusses the roles of Napoleon Bonaparte and Robespierre: he suggests to us that both were advocates of equality. Robespierre took down a King to the level of a criminal and had Louis executed by the Guillotine. That is easy enough to understand. His words about Napoleon though are more confusing, how did Napoleon elevate the people to a level with the throne. Unbundle those words and they become the signature of plebiscitory dictatorship: the reason Bonaparte did that is that his acclamation as Emperor depended upon them. They were elevated to a throne because they created his new title.

This perception on the part of Villefort of the two alternatives- Democracy and Tyranny- comes from a third perspective. Villefort is speaking here as a royalist, to other royalists. Implicit in his remarks therefore is that he likes neither alternative: both are signatures of equality and he seeks to reduce Napoleonic monarchy to Robespierran democracy. Equality though in Villefort's eyes is here opposite: I think what he means here is that Robespierre's equality is a means to execution, whereas Bonaparte's is a means to dictatorship. I think its fascinating to watch Villefort upon this dilemma both because of the interest of what he says and because it exposes how vulnerable he and we are to words. His stress on the difference between the two forms of government is lost in his stress on the same word- equality- that he uses to describe them. It reveals his argument is too clever: interestingly none of his interlocutors understand what he means. Perhaps that shows their stupidity, perhaps it demonstrates that Villefort's cleverness is really sophistry.

The Geography of the Count of Monte Cristo

2010-11-28T23:09:00.003Z

The geography of the Count of Monte Cristo is very instructive for a Northern European. This is a mediterreanean novel. The main action takes place in Marseilles, then in the Chateau d'If just off Marseilles, then in Corsica, in Monte Cristo itself, in Rome and lastly in Paris and the sea itself. This may seem a blase comment but its not. The entire book is suffused with the Meditereanean. The last fourteen hundred years have seen most people in the West think about Europe as an entity that centres around the Rhine valley, with its appendages to the West (Britain), the south (Spain), the East (Poland into Russi) and the north (Scandinavia). Our political imagination sees the capital of Europe as naturally Brussels or Strasbourg and its political centre naturally running between Paris and Bonn or Berlin. There are many political and geopolitical reasons behind that: it is a longstanding political fact as well, Charlemagne's empire still rules our imagination of what Europe is.

It is worth remembering that that does not have to be what Europe is, nor is it what Europe meant in the past. For the Greeks and Romans, Europe was the northern shore of the Meditereanean and that northern shore formed a geographical unit with its southern shore- rather than the barbaric swamps of Germany. Gaul was to the Romans a massive armed camp, Britain a massive cold and wet armed camp. For Monte Cristo France leads into Italy and Spain not into Germany and Britain. The English make an appearance as exoticisms: the Count disguises himself as the English Lord Wilmott and uses the English offices of Thompson and French to bank with. But his imagination is of the East: he has a Greek mistress, he has Greek art and Greek music, oriental custom excites him and his friends rather than anything from Berlin or Bonn. Furthermore in a book which takes its characters to the Papal States, Lombardy, France, Spain, Corsica, Algeria and the East: none ever goes north or crosses the Northern seas. One of the reasons to read the Count of Monte Cristo therefore isn't just that it is amazingly fun (though it is) but because its Europe is not the same as the Europe that we all think about.

The Postman always rings twice

2010-11-26T19:36:00.004Z

Reading a book about a story that you have seen and enjoyed on the screen is very interesting. The book brings out facets that you never realised were there. Reading 'The Postman always rings twice' several things come out of the book that are not in the film: the book was far more sexually explicit than the film, take this passage

I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned slow so that they would slip out under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls.... She looked like the Great Grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.

The thing though that is most noticable isn't the sex or the violence- both of which are more visible- but the story itself. Postman is about infidelity- Cora and Frank get together and then murder her husband and face the legal consequences of that. In the film this is represented as a blighted love story: in the novel things are different.

Two things are different. The first is the background of the characters. In the film they are a drifter and a wannabe star. In the book, the drifter has prison sentences in at least two if not three states. He is not so much a drifter- a happy go lucky hitcher- as a sinister petty criminal. The route from fights in bars and petty theft to murder isn't as shocking as the route from a good time boy to a killer. The girl in the book is idealist: in the novel, she was a waitress at a cheap resturant and spent 'two years of guys pinching your leg and leaving nickel tips and asking how about a little party tonight, I went on some of them parties'. Both of these characters live in the seedy margins of the law and exhibit attitudes to match: he never seems to want to work or understand what it is to work, their relationship is based on violence. Just as importantly their contempt for her husband is based on race. In the film this is never mentioned, in the novel it is explicit. Cora turns to Frank at one point and says about her having a kid with her husband 'I can't have no greasy Greek child'. This isn't the sole example of her prejudice, again the film shows nothing of this.

So what to conclude. The Postman always rings twice is a far nastier and grittier book than the film. What does this show? In my view it shows a couple of things: firstly of course how the Hays Code made Hollywood much more covert in its approach to sex and violence, Lana Turner's legs are no substitute for what the devil had Frank and Cora do that night. But also I think it shows how Hollywood at a particular point in time moved away from reality: Postman is not a realistic film and the choice to make it not realistic was conscious. The source material is realistic and gritty: racism, the seedy underworld, deception and anger are all present in ways that you do not find on the screen. The book is grounded in a reality, in a 1930s America, complete with slang, vocabulary and attitude: the film is a much more universal thing, it is less tied to a class or a place. One of the things that cinema with its universal aspiration has done through the blockbuster is create or try to create universal languages: when you watch Postman and read Postman you can see that process taking place.

The Ghost Rider

2010-11-07T23:23:00.004Z

Across Europe in the middle of the night, a horse carries a rider and his passenger towards Albania. They pass from Bohemia down through Austria, through province after province of the medieval empire and beyond into the territories of Venice, Hungary and Ragusa until their ultimate destination is reached: Albania. During this ride, they pass from the world of Catholicism- secure in its Germanic and Italian fastnesses- into the world of Orthodoxy. They pass from the Western Empire into the Eastern Empire. They arrive in Albania and the girl, the passenger, dismounts from the horse to tell her mother she has come back, to tell her mother that her brother brought her back. The girl married far away and does not know that her brother- that all her twelve brothers- died before her voyage took place. When her mother hears the news, she screams and both women in shock take to their deathbeds. Whatever happened now resonates through the village to which Doruntine, the girl, has returned and through the wider world, consumed as it is by theological speculation about the nature of life and death and the worship of a resurrected Christ.

We enter this story with the police inspector- Stres. Stres's job in this novel is to reconcile what is irrational and nonsensical with the official narratives of the truth. Stres has to show that whatever happened, several things did not happen. The brother did not rise from the dead and come back to carry his sister to their mother: no mere mortal could usurp the prerogative only granted to the supreme mortal. He has to demonstrate to a village seething with superstition and gossip that everything has a rational explanation: that the world has a reason to it. He has to ensure that in all of this he has regards to the far away Prince of Albania down on the plains. Lastly he is in our position. This story is written about an ancient folktale from Albania. We therefore stand like Stres before a story that we know has been told but we cannot beleive is true: we, Kadare the novelist and Stres the police officer have to understand, have to reconcile what we hear in the tale with what we know cannot be or can be true. Girls do not ride through Europe on the backs of horses with their dead brothers, do they? There must be another possibility- a lover, an imposter, an intrigue of some sort.

Kadare takes us through all of these possibilities and he through his character expresses the view that they are the most probable. They must be right. Yet all the possibilities disappear as soon as they are mentioned. If a man confesses to being an imposter, under torture he reveals the confession is false. If a lover is rumoured, then relatives from Bohemia turn up to deny that Doruntine, the girl, ever had a lover. If the journey is invented, then we learn that those same relatives have evidence that Doruntine set off from Bohemia on one night and we know, through our author's eyes, that she arrived in Albania several days later. At one point Stres goes up to interview Doruntine before her death, his questions rebound off her blank face. In her presence he and we have to believe that what she says is true, that she believed she was riding across Europe with her brother Konstandine. The facts before us, as so often in life, are blank and contradict our theses. Konstandine's grave is disturbed. Doruntine's story was the same in Bohemia as it was in Albania and even tantalising hints, a crossed off word in the note she left her husband, remain just that tantalising and unexplained.

Ultimately all our resources- intellectual and coercive- cannot extract from this story what it means or what it is. Stres with his powers of police work fails to find any rider who came in to Albania with a girl that night and yet the girl is here. Neither the local Archbishop nor the Prince seem able to assist. The puzzle cannot be solved. We cannot do it either- this is not a case in which we know more than the character. Indeed what Kadare does emphasizes how much less we actually do know: we cannot treat the myth as an investigation because we lack any of the sources that Stres has. To investigate the myth we need to create a fictional investigation. The past is blank and looks back to us with a blank face when we ask it whether these things happened or when they did or what they were. Kadare doesn't tell us to give up, he tells us to redirect our energies. This would be an unsatisfactory novel if you wanted to know what happened when the ghost rider took his carriage across Europe into Albania- but there are other subjects worth investigating, worth understanding.

Right at the end of the book, Stres gives a speech about his findings. What he finds he says is not that the girl was lying or any definitive proof of what happened. What he finds is the power of a myth: it was not neccessarily Konstandine who brought Doruntine back to her mother but the power of his promise. He promised a Besa to his mother, a sacred oath, that when Doruntine went away to marry, should she ever be required to return he would fetch her back. Whether Konstandine came back from the grave to fulfill that promise hardly matters besides the fact that the promise was fulfilled. Whoever did whatever they did believed in that promise and enacted what they did as a ritual fulfilment of that promise. We have a hint of who might have done it towards the end of the novel but Stres is clear that that is not what matters. What matters is that the promise became a fact which led to Doruntine's return. What matters is that human action was predicated upon something- something that may or may not be an illusion- but the action and the reactions are not illusions. Kadare directs us to remember the most interesting reflection about folklore and myth is not about whether it happened, but about its power once the story has been repeated.

In that context we can invert everything I have written up until that last paragraph. What the novel shows is not the weakness but the strength of the human imagination. Kadare, writing under communist tyranny, produces a story which shows that even at inception, a myth is more powerful than any intellectual or coercive power deployed against it. This is the reverse of 1984: you will remember in 1984 that Big Brother seeks to wipe out ancient rhymes and rituals (even down to 'Oranges and Lemons'): Orwell imagines that eventually Big Brother will succeed. Kadare argues that it never can and never will.

Happy Birthday Bloggingheads

2010-11-01T18:06:00.001Z

Its the fifth birthday of Bloggingheads. Its a wonderful resource even for those of us outside America- I love some of the diavlogues they have hosted and if you haven't listened, go over there and try something on language, science or American politics.

Ronnie Clayton

2010-10-31T20:08:00.006Z

Ronnie Clayton isn't a person that people seem to have remembered. He was right half for Blackburn in the late fifties. He was captain of the England football team in that period as well, between Billy Wright and Johnny Haynes. He died recently. I don't have any connection with Clayton at all and have no idea of what type of person he was (though by all accounts he was a good man). Save for the fact that I possess his autobiography. Clayton gave it to my father when my father was a teenager in Leeds in the early 60s. I'm not sure what draws me to what Clayton writes. It is definitely a product of a different era: one of the photographs has Clayton and his wife standing in the shop that was his retirement plan. He counsels any young footballer to learn a trade for the inevitable day when he hangs his boots up. Clayton played in the era of national service teams: when conscripted footballers would play for the army in Germany and talks about how tackles in those ugly games could ruin promising careers. The world of Rooney and 500 pound a night call girls seems a long way away from Clayton's footballers in the era before the maximum wage was abolished.

Clayton's autobiography is titled 'A slave to soccer'. What's interesting about that title is the way in which Clayton interpreted it. He like many football professionals believed in constant practice, constant training. Clayton's speciality at Blackburn was long throws and he tells stories about trying to hit the cross bar with a throw from the side of the pitch. His book is filled with accounts of fellow professionals- men like Tommy Taylor and Duncan Edwards of Manchester United, Stanley Matthews of Stoke and Blackpool and so on. What he does with those pen portraits is not so much to create a sense of the celebrity filled world he lived in: but to create a sense of professionalism. Clayton saw these men as colleagues. I've been reading Max Weber recently and what Weber says about a vocation is very apt as a description of how Clayton saw football. The captain of England viewed football as a craft and saw his career within it as a process of improvement. Clayton in this sense was no different from the other aspirational kids emerging out of Preston at the same time who became lawyers, doctors or foremen in factories: his factory was football.

Clayton therefore was a normal working man. He had to put up with the poison pen letters and the accidental nature of a footballing career: but he also knew he would have to rejoin his more normal generation. So in the biography he talks about buying and running a Tobacconists in Blackburn during the time he was England Captain. When he left football he firstly became a manager- a job at which he did not excell- and then a regional manager for a firm which sold tyres. Clayton the company footballer became Clayton the company man. The point of this is not to disparage him at all: he comes across in his book as a much more pleasant individual to know than a Rooney or a Gerard. It does though throw up further questions. Clayton saw his work as any other aspirational kid from the same period saw their work: he saw it as a vocation, he was a slave to soccer. What's interesting is whether and how that has changed- the work of sociologists such as Richard Sennet suggests that that kind of tie from an employer to employee may be dying: that Weber may need updating for a more flexible world. If so its fascinating to think about how say Rooney's attitude to his work differs from that of Clayton.

The changes in work and the ways that work relates to life effect us all in two ways. Obviously they effect us directly. Less obviously, we all aware that the world has changed. Clayton for me is part of that awareness. By accident, more than perhaps superior players like Edwards, Finney, Matthews, Lofthouse or Revie, Clayton through his words defines for me the footballer of the 50s. Its a world that is prior to Busby (though Busby was a contemporary), Shankly, Revie and Clough: the figures that created the game I watched at the beggining of the nineties. More importantly though Clayton is a natural comparison for me for Rooney and Gerard. He is part of a dimly known and understood past: a place against which the present is measured. In that sense, his relationship to his craft is fascinating, Clayton thought about football as a craft and saw that even for the captain of England a career would end and a new one would have to be created after it finished. Running through his book there is an ideology though- the ideology of a vocation- I think what's fascinating about it is that that idea was not only Clayton's. As Weber argued, it was fundemental to the way that people saw themselves in capitalist society.

After writing this post, I feel slightly apologetic. Stretching a life into the span of an argument feels unfair. Taking a life as an archetype creates dangers in itself: perhaps such dangers are excusable in a blogpost but they are not in the thesis that the post expresses. Its the fate of a historian to be always looking to diminish life into its constants and making an argument from them: for that I can only apologise and hope for some absolution. Clayton is a figure who I never saw play and never met: I have read his biography several times but that is the only contact with him that I have ever had. Still I felt when he died a certain sense of loss, whether appropriate or not, that's where I would like to leave this post.

Jane Austen couldn't spell

2010-10-30T12:13:00.002+01:00

So Jane Austen couldn't spell. Spelling is an odd issue. Several people today believe they have the right to regulate and to be infuriated about how others spell. For some it is testament to the march of radicalism and the end of reading itself, this is bizarre. Spelling became important in the eighteenth century when the first dictionaries were published. Grammar became important at the same time as part of an effort to latinise English, to give it a formal structure and rules. Its not true that earlier writers couldn't spell or were not interested in those rules, but many of them included varient spellings and many of them did not write in what we would consider correct grammar. Austen was apparantly one of them- Oliver Cromwell incidentally, a fine styllist, was another. The idea that this, as Heffer argues, made either of them a lesser thinker is ludicrous: Heffer himself is not that great a thinker when compared to either Austen or Cromwell. One of the worst spellers and grammarians I know is currently coming to the end of his Oxford PhD!

So what is the point of grammatical correctness? I think it has two points: one is useful, the other baleful. Curiously it is most useful in education. It is useful, for the same reasons as lists of great books, because it creates access to language. Without grammar a kid starting off her education in language and their structures has no structure to grasp. I learnt to read literature by devouring the Penguin Classics: if Penguin and Everyman are the mothers of literary autodidacts, then grammar and spelling are the fathers of linguistic autodidacts. Autodidactism is something we should encourage. The second unimpressive use for correct grammar and spelling is the use to which Heffer and Truss put it. What they are interested in is putting down others, feeling superior and generally ignoring someone else's point because of a misplaced apostrophe. Its the equivalent of school kids in a playground laughing at someone because they wear glasses, and forgetting that he or she can explain something better than they can. A reverence for form is joined here to a contempt for substance: one of the blessed things puritanism has taught me is that the latter is much more important than the former.

Who cares whether something is spelt correctly or where the commas are, so long as the ideas expressed are important or right. Simon Heffer argues that bad spelling implies someone is a bad logician and so rejects any applications he sees for a job on that basis: I'd argue that looking at someone's spelling before their logic suggests Mr Heffer needs to learn a little more about logic!

Little Caesar

2010-10-24T18:52:00.006+01:00

When you call your film Little Caesar, it means something. You make a statement about what your film is about. Its not about gangsters though that may be its ostensible subject, its not about America though that may its location, its not about the Chicago slums though that may be its environment, its about the world and all that is in it. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's says the Gospel, leaving us in no doubt that what is Caesar's is the world. When Warner Brothers made Little Caesar, they made a gangster film- the type of which with Cagney and Robinson on the books that they made throughout the thirties- but like all Warner's Gangster films the film meant something. The point of the film is to describe the rise and fall of Rico, Little Caesar, as he makes his way out of the gutter and into the bigtime. His progress through the gangster organisation- from the bottom where he holds up gas stations with his friend Joe (a wannabe dancer)- to the top where he meets the big bosses and stands in their offices, dinner suit on and cigar in hand puffing smoke and talking of millions. His desire throughout this, the thing that motivates him, isn't money or girls- that motivates Joe- but is the sensation of power, is being a big shot. Rico's vulnerability is his desire to be a big shot, to be seen, spotted and in control.

That sensation is distinct from the normal attributes of success. Joe becomes a successful dancer, with a wife, but will always be at the mercy of his directors and his wife. He may be successful but he can't order people about. Rico defines success as the ability to control others. Money is almost irrelevant to that. As this article shows in today's context, you can be rich but not in control of your life or the lives of others. The life of respectability is not a life which grants power: it grants good things but not that. This desire for power is linked to Rico's egotism: Rico wants power because he sees the world as something to be mastered, not cooperated with. He desires this because his vision of the world is as a place which men and women attempt to act on, not act in. Whenever he comes up against another gangster leader he tells them that they've lost the ability to take it, though they had it to dish it out: what he means by that is that they've lost the ability to control the world, to remain impervious to it, to resist it controlling them. The only insult that works on Rico is the insult that he too has lost this ability- lost the ability to hold the world at naught. He has no morality apart from independence!

As a film made in 1931 this survives very well. Edward G. Robinson in his prime and Douglas Fairbanks junior carry the film. Robinson's performance captures Rico in all his grandeur, he snarls and moves through each scene with abandon. There have been fewer better gangster actors in the history of cinema than Robinson. The key point about Rico though is how much he is a Robinson character. If you think of the other great gangster actor- James Cagney- he could not play this part, or if he did, he would lose something that made him Cagney. Cagney always had the ballet dancer's poise- when he skips into the car in one film you can see his charisma errupt across the screen. He is the descendent of Sikes and the Dodger, the ancestor of Benny in the City of God. Robinson's character here is much darker and more introspective- the shadows of Capone hang over the performance, the performance hangs like a shadow over the Godfather and Goodfellas, over Pacino and De Niro. Robinson captures something of the reasons that a man might want to be a boss- the film is really about the creation of a boss. Robinson portrays the boss as a stoic gesture, a gesture to become independent.

As the film ends, the gangster lies sprawled on his back like a beetle in the darkness. He cries out to the audience, 'Is this the end of Rico?'. I started with a discussion of politics. One of the famous sayings of Enoch Powell was that all political careers end in failure: all 30s Gangster films had to end in failure for the gangster. Little Caesar does and does not do so: on the one hand there is Rico lying in the dark, on the other he never needed anyone to go with him. The policeman says at the end that Rico and him went on a journey together, actually he lies: Rico went his own way, his was the unsocial sociability that led him to become supreme and alone.

What Middle Eastern migration gave us?

2010-10-17T18:56:00.002+01:00

One of the odder things about human beings is that we drink milk. Most mammals drink milk when they are babies and as they grow to adulthood they become intolerant of the stuff. That's true even now for some humans. Throughout Europe and the Americas, the Middle East and Northern Africa human beings regularly drink milk- some do it every day as a standard part of breakfast for example. We do this because of a very small alteration to a chromosones which allows us to ingest milk without suffering the consequences. As far as we know, that small alteration means that at least 95% of human beings in Northern Europe can consume milk as normally as anything else. This varies across the world with some African and Asian countries containing populations which are 90% lactose intolerant (source Wikipedia). Why and when did this revolution happen?

The development of milk as a foodstuff is related to the development of agriculture. The key development was the recognition the domestication of animals: if you have cows and bulls for rearing for beef and leather, you can also produce milk from them at the same time. You could not have milk therefore without agriculture. Most historians think that this happened in the last 10,000 years- in Europe it happened at sometime around 7500 years ago. In Der Speigel a fascinating series of discoveries is noted about what happened at that date. The archaeologists argue that a group of people came across from roughly the area of the Zagros mountains (now in Turkey and Iran) and migrated up towards the bospherous and then in stages across into Europe and Northern Europe. The migrating groups brought with them agriculture and in particular cattle- there is evidence of them eating cheese and yoghurt at this point. When they came to Northern Europe though they were able to consume much more dairy produce: the temperature meant that it survived for longer. They also forced out previous hunter gatherer societies and seem to have exterminated them.

I don't know about the credibility of this. Archaeological evidence can often be very difficult to assess, particularly when you do not know the field. It does however throw into relief two ideas which I think are true:

1. That the agricultural revolution was incredibly significant- these scholars contend the development of milk led to child mortality falling (though the article doesn't mention that it probably also led to a falling variety in diet).

2. That the pattern of living in prehistoric times as well as today included vast migration: the idea that migration is only a fact of modern life is a bit like the argument that the earth is flat, its as false. Ultimately we are all mongrels.

It also brings out- hence the title of this post- a third point. The early history of Europe is a history that develops in connection with the histories of the areas around it: with the Eurasian steppe (just think of the waves of Barbarians invading Eastward in the Roman era and realise that they could not have been the first and were not the last), with the Middle Eastern landmasses to the south East and with Africa to the south. Europe has been contested and has contested its relations with these areas ever since and much of what we call European or Middle Eastern or North African is actually an import from one of the other places. An import of course that could stem ultimately from somewhere in India or China, in Nigeria or Zimbabwe. The case of agriculture may be an example- whenever you look at your bottle of milk, remember according to some scholars that's a sign of the Middle Eastern ancestory of European civilisation.

The greatness of Roger Ebert

2010-10-11T22:15:00.004+01:00

I have a lot of time for Roger Ebert. I was just reading an article he wrote recently about his new book, Great Movies. Two passages struck me as immortal. One is about one of my favourite film makers and a man whose vision I have grown to see as one of the key ones of the twentieth century: Ingmar Bergman. He talks of coming home from his sickness, and

Soon after I returned home I turned to Bergman, who is a filmmaker for thoughtful moods. His new Criterion discs have been restored to an astonishing black and white beauty, and I fell into them. It's conventional to write of "his great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist," but my God, he is great, and I found myself trying to describe the perfection of his lighting. I responded strongly to Bergman's passion about fundamental questions of life and death, guilt, mortality, and what he regards as the silence of God. I'd seen all these films on first release, but now, at an older age, having walked through the valley, I saw them quite differently. Norman Cousins famously found during an illness that comedy helped heal him. For me, it was Bergman.

Again at the end of the essay Ebert reaches a truth about literature, film and history. He says

I believe good movies are a civilizing force. They allow us to empathize with those whose lives are different than our own. I like to say they open windows in our box of space and time.

In Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis says at one point that we read to know we are not alone. Ebert makes the point as well but its a point we all do well to remember, to have repeated again and again. Lost in the prison of our own lonely consciousness, film and books, music and history are things which can reintroduce us to a world which we lose every time we close our eyes.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

2010-10-10T19:30:00.003+01:00

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is notable for many reasons. It was the film in which Catherine Deneuve caught the cinematic camera and demanded its attention, an attention that neither the camera nor her audience have relaxed in during the succeeding fifty years. The start of a career of one of the great French film actresses- up there with Moreau- is something to witness. But the film is more important than that in its own respect. The director Jacques Demy was one half of France's great directorial couple- Agnes Varda, responsible for the restoration I saw today, was the other half and Demy knew what he was doing. The film is set in Cherbourg in the late 1950s and finishes in the early 1960s. It chronicles the life of two young people- Genevieve (played by Deneuve) a 16 year old (in 1957) girl who helps her mother manage an umbrella store in Cherbourg, and her lover Guy, a 20 year old car mechanic, who lives with his aunt and her nurse, Madelaine. The two are deeply in love as the film begins.

The first thing you notice about the film is not the direction or the story, but the colour. The film is suffused with primary colours, with blues and reds and yellows. Deneuve's dresses are amazing- her beauty is framed by wonderful patterns and tones. The town itself seems as though it has been put through a filter, every single stone has its own vibrancy, its own richness. The second thing you notice about the film is that everyone sings. They don't just sing the normal kinds of love songs and duets you would expect (though this for example became popular as one such song) but they sing everything. The first scene of the film takes place in a garage and the mechanic's sing to each other- sing single lines about changing the oil in a man's car or where they plan to go out that evening. Its the only film where I've seen an argument about whether dancing, theatre or cinema are better conducted by mechanics is expressed in perfect French song. At times lines are rhymed. The actor's voices were dubbed by proffessional singers. At first this irritated me, but its done on purpose. Demy wants you to take the colour, take the song and fuse it into something else. He wants you to imagine his world is the world of fairytale. When his characters say they love each other forever, they say it with the earnestness of sixteen year olds but the medium in which they sing, the colours behind them turn gaucherie into golden promises.

So much more impressive as all the promises are broken. Demy wants to present you with a picture you'll believe in, only to smash it. The iron laws of history grind over his lovers. War and pregnancy intervene. Parents urge and though no-one behaves badly or unfaithfully, love cannot be. In the world of the film, just as in Brief Encounter, tragedy is a product not of evil men or women but of evil choices. Deneuve's character becomes pregnant by Guy, he goes to Algeria, conscripted and whilst there she makes a pragmatic choice. She chooses to marry someone else: she knows Guy might not come back, she knows that her mother and her are almost destitute. Life is about pragmatism and survival not grand gestures in favour of principles that only look good drenched in song and colour. The film's position is avowedly cynical. Filmed in black and white, it would be a realist tale of disappointment and sadness: in colour and song it seems a celebration. Really it is a proclamation of pragmatism.

Ultimately as a proclamation of pragmatism, its incomplete. It leaves us watching the screen as it fades to black, the lovers are briefly reunited before obligation tears them apart. Just as in Brief Encounter, we know that they cannot be together but unlike in Lean's masterpiece where the characters wake from love, in this film they part with scorn. Guy resents Genevieve still. Genevieve's life after marriage is left to us as a blank: we can fill in the colours should we like. Pragmatism presents us with a world in which tragedy is inevitable, the product of neccessity but that it has costs. We know that one casualty is any chance of friendship between the lovers, another may be the marriage of Genevieve and her husband. We do not know and the film allows no commentary. As a statement it misses its final clause. We know the choices were rational: but the coda isn't present to tell us how they looked in retrospect.

Without retrospect we cannot ultimately judge.

Paul McGrath

2010-10-09T01:43:00.003+01:00

I started watching football just as a set of players finished their careers. Players like Stuart Pearce, Gary Linekar, even say Paul Gascoigne and managers like Clough and Kendall were finishing their careers as I started to watch the game. Of that generation of players some like Linekar seem to have managed their retirement well- others like Gascoigne seem to have fallen apart in public and more have faded away into obscurity. Amongst the players that I remember hearing of but never really watched was Paul McGrath, of Manchester United and then (and for me during the only period I saw him play) of Aston Villa. McGrath was a very good centre half for club and country but struggled with drink and drugs during his time in football. For whatever reason, he became addicted to the former and was unable to cope- and published a memoir a couple of years ago (which I haven't read) about the experience of being addicted. He's been interviewed by the Irish Independent about what his experiences since then have been, and he has fallen back into addiction, back into drinking.

I don't think there is anything positive about having an addiction. I'm lucky enough not to have one- lucky enough to have been through school and university without acquiring the need to get hammered or to take drugs. McGrath's situation is terrible. By any objective criteria, he achieved about as much in his chosen career as you can achieve, he played for two of the greatest clubs in the world and was capped several times by his national team, yet reading the article you cannot but sense he regards himself as a failure. To some extent he seems to believe that he will lose his battle with alcohol, that where strikers like Rush and Hughes, Linekar and Sheringham failed, the demon drink will succeed. I don't know the man at all- I pity him from afar but cannot and would not know how to help. What it reminds me of though is the utter destruction that having an addiction can wreak on someone: McGrath will have had all the help that money could buy, presumably he has a vast store of goodwill to draw on and yet even he hasn't succeeded. Perhaps as well the real signal of the fact he hasn't succeeded is the fact that he seems to believe that he can't succeed.

I don't think there is anything unique here to football or to class or anything else: there are plenty of middle class and upper class people in professional jobs who have similar addictions. The reasons people get addicted vary. The reason people lose hope and give up on life vary. I'm not sure what answers there are and I'm sure there are psychological blogs out there who do offer answers. All I'm sure of is the sense of destruction that McGrath's account brings home to me: the sense of waste. Ultimately I wonder how many lives in the UK every year are ruined by addiction, how many people die early because of it and how many die lonely because of it. Paul McGrath hopefully has more chances yet, but his story brings home to me at least how addiction can strike and destroy any life whatsoever.

Names

2010-10-02T11:43:00.002+01:00

Another wonderful article in the London Review of Books from last week caught my eye recently. It concerned Greek names. A set of classicists have since the 1970s being publishing a glossary of every single Greek name mentioned in a classical source. The undertaking is formidable as it begins with the earliest poetry of Homer and Hesiod if not before, and runs all the way forwards into Byzantium. Its a brilliant idea though as even the list of names tells us so much about the way that the Greeks thought and what they believed in. Names are an indicy of what parents want their children to be. I have my grandfather's middle name for example, reflecting the close relationship between my mother and her father. But its not only family affection that names can immortalise: the famous Praise-God or Unless-Jesus-Christ-had-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone was no atheist and nor were his parents! The LRB article has plenty of examples from Greek literature of this kind of thing.

The other wonderful insight that something like a name gives a historian or anyone else for that matter is a window into another life. History is about people who left records. So for example the most famous Roman governor of Bithynia- Pliny the younger- is so because he left his letters behind to immortalise him. I doubt that many people could name many more governors of Bithynia off the top of their heads. If you like history studies the small circle of those who left records behind them. But there is a wider circle who left fragments of their lives in other's records: so for example Pliny's letters might mention a corrupt local official, we know about him because of that and that alone. There is an even wider circle who left nothing but their name behind them: one of my tasks during my PhD was to try and work out who served in the New Model Army and how they related to each other, you could do that in part from looking at petitions sent in to the headquarters, signed by as many as a dozen or two dozen people, whose names are all that we have left of them. Names therefore are the only thing that signal the intentions of these people and their parents, they are the obscured trace of a fingerprint they left in history.

What names can tell us is always a bit of a guess. Along with all decisions in human life assigning motivation is always harder than it appears at first sight- why did x do y? The only way to assign motive is to look inside someone's head as they make their decision, and sometimes even that as Michael Frayn warns us in Copenhagen might not be enough. So when we look at those finger prints, the contours are faded, the texture is eroded, but we still have something from their lives to try and learn about the past from. The fascination of history is its incompleteness, we don't know why or often when or what things happened, we only guess in an educated fashion: we grope in the dark towards the past and occasionally our hands hit something, like a Greek name in a letter.

My son, my son what have ye done?

2010-10-01T13:21:00.004+01:00

There is a murder. A son has killed his mother. He has taken two hostages inside the family house and is holding them at gunpoint. Nobody knows who they are. Outside the police are gathered. They negotiate with him. That is the setup of the most recent Werner Herzog film. All of this is told to you in the first ten minutes of the film and from there on in, assisted by the protagonist's girlfriend and his friend, we observe the police detective in charge of the case being taken through the protagonist's psyche as he wound himself up to the murder. Herzog's film has his own touches- flamingos, ostriches and dwarfs on Shetland ponies chased by mutant giant chickens- but the storyline is not complicated, though it is suspenseful. At the centre of it is the murderer Brad and his psychology.

So what are we told about Brad? He went to Peru, came back and was according to his girlfriend never the same again. He was out cayacking with his friends and they came down a river and everyone died, save for Brad who inspired for some reason decided that he would not join them. His sense of that saving animates him throughout the rest of the film. Whatever God saved him, that God is what enthuses his every action: that voice in his head, the God of the box of Puritan Oats, instructs him in how to live and what to do. This peculiar notion is central to the film: we cannot say it definitely caused his mother's death, we can say it was this mindset that enthuses everything he does. Ultimately the instruction for his mother's death was received from this voice. We see him act bizarrely even scarily, he is unwilling to admit to any constraints imposed by society. He cannot see that the fact that a house is not for sale and that he has no money precludes him buying it. He cannot see that he sounds odd and strange, he has his belief and that belief is a truth that ultimately means more to him than anything else in the world. Wondrously Herzog manages to draw on both the sense of religion as the ultimate social impulse (what could be more social than another presence inside your brain) and also the ultimate lonely one.

Two things fit into this psychological perception. The first out of which the murder arrives is his relationship with his mother. She is overbearing and strange- a Lynchian confection (she reminded me instantly of the Eastern European woman from Inland Empire)- she is protective and irritating. She forcefeeds her son jelly, turns up without knocking inside his room whilst he is in there with his girlfriend and basically treats this thirty year old as though he were a kid. The second is that Brad, during this period, is an actor. His friend is his director. The play that he acts in is famous: its the Oresteia. This series of plays chronicles the return of Agamemnon from Troy to Mycenae. At his return, the Great King was murdered by his wife and her lover. His death is avenged by his son- Orestes- who murders his own mother and then is pursued by the furies to Athens where the case is judged by the Athenian citizens and Athena herself. The point of the Oresteia in this film is to do two things- to give Brad a text but also to suggest that violence lies behind somewhere in the shadows. The family of Orestes were known for their brutality: the House of Atreus included Tantalus who fed his own son to the Gods, Pelops who slew his father in law, Atreus who boiled his nephew and then Agamemnon. Violence lies at the heart of any comparison of a family to that of Atreus- what we wonder happened to Brad's father?

The Oresteia though is more than a parallel. It and his mother's behaviour and whatever happened prior to the film are texts which Brad then uses. He believes in these texts as surely as a fundamentalist believes in the Quran or the Bible. He takes these texts and asks them what do you tell me to do. The high rhetoric of the Greek play, the low ribaldry of his situation, the dark musing of his mind come together to a point of certainty and clarity. A point we might say of insanity. His insanity is of a peculiar kind. He sees the world in a particular way and fits his experiences, scarily, into that framework. The point about this is that it is mad but no more mad than anyone who believes in a truth which leads them to see the world askew. It is evil because of its consequences- murder- but also because of the disregard for others that Brad manifests. Brad does not check his religion with sympathy or empathy, for him God is God, truth is truth and that is all Brad wants to know. Brad's charisma draws others to him: it is why I suspect his girlfriend stays with him. More confused humans come towards his certainty. The sophisticated director sees its aesthetic possibilities but not its profound immorality, like Foucault before Khomeini, he sees that the structure is profound but not that it is murderous.

Always though in the film we come back to Brad, the murderer. He shows us that the world is infinitely plastic. That it can be shaped and deformed by a thousand new attitudes and stories. Everything we know about Brad we are told about him by unreliable narrators. Quite possibly he has no rational account of what he does, but what he does proceeds from an emotional take on the world- a take which is informed by Greek tragedy and his own emasculation. More importantly though its a take on the world which is born out of his sense of having been saved all those years ago, using that as a foundation, incorporating bits of mysticism and religious text, not to mention the text of the Oresteia and his own situation, he commits matricide. The film is less a comment on the unknown murder than on the psyche that preceded it. If Herzog dances along the line in film between sanity and insanity, then its to inform us about our own natures. We too can shape the world in wonderful and terrible ways that have nothing to do with reality, but the consequences can be dire.

Oppenheimer Brothers

2010-09-28T23:19:00.004+01:00

Brothers are in the news at the moment for some reason- I'm sure its the potential of Anton Ferdinand to play with Rio at some point that's the real reason why they are up there. But its interesting in that sense to look at potentially one of the greatest pairs of brothers in the 20th Century- Robert Oppenheimer and his brother Frank. The older brother Robert was a famous and successful theoretical physicist, he led the project to design the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos and became Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. His career was marked by tragedy and the old tale of his failure to surmount slurs he was a communist and his bureacratic checkmate by Edward Teller have been told too often for them to be rehearsed here. The key thing about Oppenheimer was that after his fall and the scandal he never really produced the great work of physics that he could have done, he was less than the sum of his talents. His brother Frank was also a physicist, Robert despised his intelligence- Frank was an experimentalist rather than a theorist- but ended up founding a great American museum.

The contrast is well developed in Steven Shapin's essay in this week's London Review of Books. Ironically Shapin notes Robert ended up in an institution without students but with Professors, Frank founded an institution that aspired to make everyone a scientist but in which noone was a Professor. I think the most interesting contrast was in their view of science. I remember a friend once telling me that you couldn't understand anything about physics unless you had been a graduate in it: strictly that is probably true and Robert Oppenheimer would have agreed. For him knowledge seems, from Shapin's review, to be something only experts could claim. He made the difference between the expert and the non-expert vast: this point of view is shared by those who believe that experts are wonderful and horrible because it assumes they are different and beyond the sight of anyone else. Frank's view was much more participative: science could be diffused and could become a way of changing society. Anyone might be a scientist so long as they adopted a scientific attitude- you might not understand Feynman diagrams, but you could still be a scientist if you agreed with experimental data.

Frank's perspective seems to me to be much healthier and is really the way I think about knowledge. Knowledge is not about exclusion: you can know more or less about a subject but all knowledge has a value. Furthermore there is a distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is not the attribute of a particular group of people, its a method. You can be further forwards or back in your understanding of the method and the amount of evidence to which you have applied it but in principle the method is the same. Therefore the separation between the kid with his chemistry set and the chemist in the field isn't that they do different things or that the kid is doing something ignorant, but that the chemist has just done more.

Danton's Death

2010-09-26T23:46:00.002+01:00

Half way through Danton's Death, some of the actors in the play mounted the back of the stage and sung out the Marseilles over the audience's head. The theatre of politics, a black fringed stage, the actors standing like tribunes of the plebs at the back and the music was awesome: you could feel in that moment the absolute power of what happened in France between 1789 and 1799. This series of events and those that came afterwards (Napoleon, the great conqueror of Europe, the afterthought) have convulsed the world ever since. From the great liberal powerhouse of California to the Shanghai shack in which the Chinese communist party started, our world has been inspired and revolted by the events of those ten years in France. There are few periods in history whose resonances are as profound: the American Revolution is perhaps the only other such episode in the eighteenth century that had such tumultuous consequences for the world. Putting all that on stage is not easy, it is not easy to imagine that the wooden O at the National can indeed hold the vasty fields of France or that within those walls monarchs fall, the guillotine splatters blood and the masses splutter for aristocratic death.

Danton's Death attempts to do that. A play written in the 1830s by a German romantic it concentrates on the figure of Danton and his rivalry with Robespierre in the early 1790s. The play represents Danton as a man worn out by revolution. He had led the crowds demanding the King's execution, he had led the crowds demanding the September massacres- but for Danton revolution had an end. He believed that at some point the revolution stopped, that perfection might not be acheivable and that at some point stability was preferable to another cycle of blood. In the play Danton is represented as believing in revolution as a process that achieves an objective and then can cease: like a factory production line that can stop when the car has rolled off the other end. He loves women and wine- we see him clutching at girls and bottles- his allies are perfumed and pumped full of the joys of life. They too share his sense that revolution cannot and should not imperil normal human lives- that it had to go so far, but that it should not go further.

We contrast that vision of revolution with Robespierre's vision. In the play Robespierre first arrives on stage to declaim about terror and virtue. For Robespierre revolution is not a means to remould the system in which men live, but to remould men themselves. Robespierre believes in virtue, disdains the fleshy vices that Danton revels in. Danton's wife contemplates towards the end of the play whether she could save her husband by offering her body to Robespierre's pleasure, but rejects this possibility. The incorruptible is incorruptible and wishes everyone else to be so. Consequently he is quite willing to use terror to create virtue: he is quite willing to execute so that everyone will execute vice. Revolution is not a process to a goal but a process that will continue to the end of time. As human beings are probably not perfect, Robespierre's revolution never ends and whatever he says, he does not mean it to. He is for himself the creator of virtue, for others he is the expression of pain- as an ally of Danton says, the poor have only their pain and a scream which slashes down upon someone's neck.

Two visions of the French Revolution are presented to us- a revolution to help mankind or a revolution to cure it. The play expresses this with dialogue- constant speaking. Almost nothing happens- there are two set pieces the one described in my opening lines and a later one at the end of the play and between them, nothing. This is a play about words and as suits something written in the Romantic era, the words are flowery and often wonderful. One character derides another for example by saying 'he thinks its cool to be a compost heap', another will comment on how death reminds him that human beings are 'Plato's leather bags'. Historical references are flung in as though everyone knows who Hebert is or why Lafayette mattered, what the Girondins were and what the difference between the Club Jacobin and the Club Cordeliers was. That isn't a problem but the play is long and to listen for so long is difficult. These words situate the play at a turning point, or what Buchner the author, thought was a turning point.

I'm not sure that you need to buy this historical analysis or that Danton represented conservatism and Robespierre radicalism in this context to use or understand the play. I think the key point here is the different revolutions; any revolution which seeks to change the condition in which people live is ultimately distinct from one which changes the nature of the people ruled. The latter is a totalitarian ambition, whether clothed in the language of rightwing virtue or leftwing charity, the former is the language of humanitarianism. The play allows us to develop another distinction: what Robespierre argues for is to diminish the value of liberty, to tell someone they should change and you will force them is to deprive them of their liberty. Naturally a modern audience recoils: but he is the more virtuous of the two main characters- Danton is a fornicating drunk who argues for liberty, Robespierre a purist who argues for virtue. There is a lesson in there.

Overall the play is more interesting than entertaining- the performances especially from Robespierre are good but it is hard to keep focussed, especially given the fact that not all of us know our Desmoullins from our St Just. Having said that, the points the play makes are interesting and important. The debate between Robespierre and Danton goes on on both the right and left and has done ever since, a consequence of the development of the modern state, it is not over and I suspect will survive both this play and this reviewer.

Fantasia!

2010-09-25T15:53:00.001+01:00

This is a wonderful setting of Gershwin. As an expression of the city, Raphsody in Blue is probably the closest music can get, to put it to a cartoon like this is pure genius.

Alamar

2010-09-20T21:58:00.003+01:00

Alamar opens with two voices, it closes with a city. What fills the time in between is the dignity of cliche. Alamar is about a situation. A young man and woman meet abroad, they fall in love, marry, have a child and then fall out of love. He wishes to stay in his rural idyll. She wishes to return to her city. The child spends time with both his urban mother and his rural father. Alamar focusses upon the father. We see young Natan the son have a shower and pull on his t shirt and swiftly he heads out from Rome, where his mother lives, to the coast of Mexico where his father lives. What he finds there is enchanting. His father lives upon a house on stilts in the middle of the coral reefs. Every day he goes out fishing, diving into the coral reef and spearing lobster and crab and fish and bringing them up to the shore. His father and grandfather dive into the water, swimming underneath it into the reefs themselves (the excuse for some amazing photography). Alternately they sit upon the side of the boat reeling out lines to bait the fish, dragging them in and occasionally clubbing them on the head. This is a world in which a crocodile lives outside the front door and birds walk into the living room.

There is a point here- and its pretty obvious. It might be about male bonding and it might be about the importance of the country and sea over the City. Actually the point is a cliche- but the sea itself isn't. It is endlessly fascinating. Neither is the relationship between father and son. This is handled sensitively. The two bond on a physical level. They playfight. The father corrects the son for winding up the fishing line. The son is allowed to hawl in a fish with adult guidance. He is taught how to take his first tiny steps towards diving. He is cautioned from being eaten by a crocodile. He brings water with which the men wash the boat. Fathers and sons can bond over fishing in a way that they can't over accountancy or law. That point is obvious but the acting, the little touches are far from obvious and much more interesting than that broader point.

Ultimately a film does not have to be about much to be worthwhile. There are all sorts of other problems here: the equation of mother equals boring, father equals exciting, the idea of a community without women. It did not matter to me in the end as I was watching it. The camera loves the open spaces of the Mexican coast. It captures the sunlight shimmering across the sea. It captures the meticulous scraping of the scales off the fish carcasses, and the creation of fish stew which looks so good you can almost taste it from the back seat of the cinema (this like the famous prison dinner scene in Goodfellas is not a scene to watch when you feel hungry). We had a major debate afterwards in the party I went to if the stew was as delicious as the fried fish and tortillas which you also see being made. But its watching the stuff being catched which is extraordinary- these human bodies twisting and turning amidst shoals of fish, lobsters retreating into the coral. Ok its romanticised but still its beautiful and impressive.

I don't claim much for Alamar: apart from this that its a great vision of a life. Its about small touches between the boy and the man and the seascape around them. Its the only film I think summed up by Douglas Adams- so long Alamar and thanks for all the fish!

Augustine's relegation of politics

2010-09-19T12:18:00.003+01:00

When I went to Oxford to study for a degree primarily about political history, we were told in our first week to read the Bible and given an exam on it at the end of Fresher's Week (while most people were making friends and getting drunk in Fresher's Week, Gracchi and his mates were sitting in the library learning Leviticus!) Christian politics is something that we all know- from Constantine to Benedict and Sarah Palin, the Church and its believers have sought to guide the state in its deliberations about what is and is not moral and what is and is not legal. Looking backwards the story of Christian interraction with politics is a fascinating one and ranges across a vast range of political possibilities, from the utopian radicalism of the Baptists in 16th Century Munster to the fierce reactionary spirit of Joseph de Maistre in 19th Century France and Russia. But there is also an equally strong tradition of Christian anti-politics: it has its roots in the Bible when Christ tells his disciples to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, unto God what is God's.

Augustine's own views of Christian imperium are laid out in the 5th Book of the City of God. He describes the generic Christian Emperor thus:

We do not say that certain Christian Emperors were happy because they ruled for a longer time or because they died in peace and left sons behind to rule as emperors or because they subdued the enemies of the Commonwealth, or becaues they were able to avoid and supress uprisings against them by hostiel citizens. For even worshippers of demons... have deserved to receive these and other gifts and consolations of this wretched life.... Rather we say they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up by the talk of those who accord them sublime honours... but remember they are only men' (V 24)

Augustine's model of Emperor is that of a saint- a man who did not have earthly gifts but who was 'slow to punish and swift to punish' (V 24), who exhibited private Christian moral qualities. This is key to the way that he views politics- politics is a place for exhibiting private virtues. As an activity it does not actually matter: Augustine says that for the security and morals of most men it matters little 'that some men should be conquered and others conquerors' (V 17)- it does not really effect who will go to heaven and hell. The whole purpose of life is eschatalogical and not political: and the purpose of rule is to demonstrate ethical values which are directed towards salvation not to ensure security or stability. God might intervene to help the Christian Emperor, as he did Augustine says help Theodosius (V 26) but Augustine also notes that 'God removed [Christian] Jovian far more quickly than he did [pagan] Julian' (V 25).

Augustine's view of politics is that it is secondary to the chief object of human life- salvation. Politics matters on a personal level to the Emperor but Augustine is unconvinced that much changes below the imperial level (perhaps this is a product of living in a pre-welfare state society). Even when eulogising Theodosius, he comments that

These deeds and similar ones which it would take too long to recall, are the good works that Theodosius bore with him from this temporal life where the greatest of human attainments and exaltation is but smoke. The reward of these works is eternal felicity which God gives only to those who are truly Godly. All the other things in this life, be they great or small, such as the world itself, light, air, earth, fruits, the soul and body of a man himself, sensation, mind, life; all these things he bestows upon good and evil men alike. And among these things is imperial sway also of whatever scope (V 26)

Augustine offers no Christian prescription to keep a throne, makes no direct policy prescriptions save for be good and advance Christianity because ultimately these things do not matter. They are merely smoke. The thing that matters is salvation, politics is strictly secondary and may even by encouraging a lust for glory be an immoral activity. Whether the Diggers, Benedict, De Maistre and Palin agree, I'm not sure: but what this definitely represents is a relegation of politics to the second division of human concerns.

Tony Manero

2010-09-12T12:52:00.002+01:00

Tony Manero opens with a queue. The queue to get into a talent show contest where Chilean TV in the 1970s will select the best Tony Manero impersonator- for those who don't know Tony Manero is the name of John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. Our 'hero' Raul is one of the characters queueing to take the floor, but he has arrived a week too early having got the date wrong. He therefore has to return back to his squalid room and his own dance troup (consisting of himself, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's daughter and her boyfriend). The film focuses in on Raul- an unpleasant man who beats to death old women in order to acquire their TVs and who casually murders as a means to achieving his own desires. His desire is to be the best Tony Manero impersonator in Chile: therefore he murders his way to a set of glass bricks to insert on a stage above flashing lights, he murders a projectionist who switches from showing Saturday Night Fever to Grease, and he defecates on the white suit of a rival impersonator. This is man as a moral abyss: his focus is purely upon becoming the best Tony Manero impersonator there is.

The film is set in the Chile of General Pinochet. I make no comment on the accuracy of the film to this period of Chilean history, I do not know enough about it. Allende is but a memory and not mentioned in the film. Opposition whilst possible invites police attention and in the end brutal torture. There is an immediacy to life: none of the characters in the troup have a long term plan. They think about escaping their situation or Chile, but none of them move and all of them anchor such dreams on the unrealistic prospect that Raul cares more for them than he does for Tony. What we have here is a casualness about life and the world. Raul exemplifies it with his murderous tendencies, incidental to a Beejees song. The other characters share this though- they might strive against the regime but fundementally they live their lives for the moment. This derives in part from the fact that none of them have much to live for: the house is dirty, the dance troup shabby, Raul is a dictator and their lives are inching towards the grave. There is something Hogarthian about shabby sex in dirty rooms and feeble impersonations. The Chile of Pinochet is represented here as murky and mundane. Perhaps this is most evident in the streets strewn with stones where the police seem able to create fear but not safety: Manero murders with impunity, only opposition activists distributing newspapers are in danger.

This is fused with the world of celebrity and capitalism. This is a world in which character is driven by commodity. Raul wants to be Tony Manero. His world is impoverished, the culture of the dance troup is vitiated by the world of Hollywood. Raul neglects the Chilean and the interesting for the American and the banal. This tale has been told before in cinema from the 40s in Europe to the 2000s in Latin America, the tale of the American empire of culture that means that we are all truly Americans, is one that's been retold and retold again and again. But the truth is that we are all Americans of a certain type and Raul is not a countryman of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe: where America's culture runs from top to bottom, from thought to entertainment, Raul creates out of entertainment a philosophy where none exists. He models his life on what was supposed to be a diversion: mumbling in the dark the words of John Travolta he treats the amusement of an idle hour as though it were holy scripture. Empty and filled only with this aspiration, Raul is in truth the most boring of men and the most boring of characters. The fascination of the film lies in the fact that everyone else seems obsessed by this idiot.

Is this what dictatorship and celebrity do? Turn a world of interesting people into a city a boring ones: confine horizons, alter moral consciousness and change the world to make it smaller, drabber and dirtier. There is more here than a purely political comment: Raul thrives in Pinochet's Chile and maybe is an avatar of the dictator himself, but he would be a psychopath in any society. The difference maybe that it is only in dictatorships that he would survive. Like a bug, Raul thrives in the wet and the dark, and dictatorships are wet with blood and dark with censorship. The poverty and poverty of aspiration aids him. At the bottom though this is not a political study, but a study of a psychopath- a man for whom ends outweigh means. A man with a cult- a cult of celebrity- in this case Travolta but it might be a footballer or a Big Brother heroine- its just the same. Raul is a monster- and you feel dirty after watching this film, contaminated by its dankness- equally it is only in the nightstreets of Babylon that monsters can thrive!

The Illusionist

2010-09-05T23:46:00.002+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

We misuse the concept of tragedy in human life. Tragedies like Macbeth are about crises- something that happens that drives everyone to disaster. One minute the world is stable and the next through a tragic flaw and a sudden set of decisions, the world careers off into a darkened path. Those tragedies tell us a lot about the world and the nature and vulnerability of human life: but they are not the tragedy that faces most of us. Most of us won't have a tragic flaw that creates war between nations- we don't have tragic flaws that are completely irredeemable either. Most of us are flawed but Othello and Macbeth act upon a greater stage. Our tragedy is not that often but its what Konnie Huq describes here, its growing old, and feeling pain and suffering slowly unto death. Age itself is no tragedy, people age well and gracefully- just see John Pocock. However the wrenches of age are something we all have to, hopefully, face. Children leave, someone cleverer comes along at work and someone who can contribute more energy, fashions change, the world moves on.

The Illusionist is about the transition from one world to another. A magician lives in Paris and moves to follow his work. His work is declining though. Who wants to go to a magician when you can go to the Beatles. So the Illusionist- M. Tatischeff- moves over to London. His show closes there and various other shows collapse. He goes up to the North of Scotland through a series of accidents and eventually ends up in an inn there. He does some tricks and the crowd is more appreciative- but in particular one little girl believes in his magic. She believes his tricks are correct. He leaves the island to return to Edinburgh. She follows him, leaving home. He therefore becomes in a sense her father and in Edinburgh we see a series of charming moments in which father and daughter bond over the city and the experience of being in it. She slowly learns how to be a city-girl. He has some success and finds in the other acrobats and show people some solidarity. So you see a relationship evolving- a concern evolving between two people and the way that Sylvain Chomet films this concern developing is beautiful.

So what happens then is the film returns to its poignancy. The magician becomes ashamed of his lack of ability to provide for the girl, for his quasi daughter. His relationship with her is complex: she is slowly discovering his limitations and he finds that process difficult and disturbing. He finds his pride affected by that. Its another symbol of the way that the world seems to be moving on. Furthermore towards the end of the film she discovers someone else- she becomes located in Edinburgh, he still remains a flitting presence for whom Edinburgh is a location rather than the location of his life. This film is therefore one of the saddest you'll see and there are moments which reflect that universal tragedy of time passing. Chomet gets the mixture right: the Illusionist is losing his world- the world of the music hall- but he also has this personal separation from his quasi daughter.

You'll notice I've not mentioned a single actor- that's because there aren't any. Furthermore there is very little in the way of voicing- there are some words but they are in French or Gaelic. They don't really matter- the words are just sounds rather than meaning anything. Chomet draws so well that his characters act, appear very credible. You feel the film is magical- there is a magic in the animation that anyone adult or child can get. The animation is good enough though that the actions, the gestures make sense as actions or gestures. Its powerful both because its animation and because you forget its animation- because these characters matter to you as well as being mythical. Each character, even the minor ones, is captured. For example at one point an American in a white suit comes on to the screen, his casual arrogance is captured to a t from every part of his spotless white suit to the flashy smile he brandishes. Chomet captures Edinburgh brilliantly as well- there is one particular scene on a street corner which gave me a moment of deja-vu. I am sure I have been on that street corner and can remember it exactly. Edinburgh is portrayed as a traditional city, there are other parts of the city to see and this is a chocolat box Edinburgh but on the other hand, it has never been as beautifully animated before. The beauty of the city aids the spirit of poignancy in the film: Chomet makes wonderful use of the lighting and shade in his filming and it adds to what he wants to tell us.

What is that? I think there is something important here about ageing, the process of the world changing and the sadness of losing a career or a world that you inhabited easily, along with losing a child to the world they have grown into. The last shots of the film are about the acceptance of that process by the lead character. Sadness and poignancy does not mean that life has ended, but that one type of life has passed on and another form starts. So the film really offers us the poignancy of ending, but towards the end it shows the new lives on offer to its characters.

Apologies and Fevers

2010-09-02T23:47:00.003+01:00

Apologies for sparce posting this week- I got some kind of bug on Tuesday and have been suffering ever since. In a grotesque way, as I've been reading nothing more intellectual than Private Eye, Prospect and the Economist, I thought I'd look at the Old Bailey website under the common cold. What's interesting is that as these two anecdotes prove, people in the seventeenth century knew that a cold was related to the cold. The two anecdotes though aren't so much about that relationship as they are about those who operated at the boundaries of society. Both concern women who were, for whatever reason, exposing their children. The court deemed in both cases, as you'll see that they were committing infanticide; however the record doesn't provide a reason for suggesting that they might not have been merely abandoning rather than killing their Babies.

The records are short, so I'll include them in their totality. First this from 1678:

But of the women, two after Judgement pleaded their Bellies in respit of Execution, and by a Jury of Matrons were found Quick with Childe. Another condemned for murdering her Bastard Infant, died in Goal the next day after Sentence; It being supposed that by going abroad immediately after her Delivery upon the unnatural designe of exposing her Childe (as she did) in the streets, she might catch Cold, which together with the dejection of her Spirits, might hasten her End, and prevent an Ignominious by an untimely death.

Secondly from 1679, this:

Another Servant was found Guilty of Murthering her Bastard-Child ; She pretended to be delivered at the House-of-office, and that it was Still-born: but it was proved that she had privately wrapt it up in her Apron, and was carrying it in an Hand-basket to bury it; but being met by one that would needs see what she got there, was discovered; and all this within an hour after she was Delivered. So lusty she was to do so Villanous a Deed, venturing abroad, and going a considerable way from where she dwelt, enough in that respect to have occasioned her own Death, (considering her condition) as she had been the means of the Death of her innocent Infant. But though she escaped catching Cold, she did not escape Justice, but is Condemned to Die.

Both stories are suspiciously alike. I think they are fascinating though because they provide a real psychological account of breakdown (in the first case) and of determination in the second. Both accounts make the infanticide sound purely irrational- we don't know whether it was or not, these are the only accounts that survive. In both cases the women did what they did straight after the birth, immediately in the first case, one hour later in the second. What's interesting is that we have different levels of detail. In the first account we are told that the woman sickened and died from a cold and from dejection: we have evidence there of some kind of depression following from the infanticide. In the second case we have less detail on the woman's reaction and more on her method, she stole the baby away without anyone else seeing it. In both cases though the writer envisages that the woman risked suffering in other ways- from cold- the equation between risk and crime is definitely there.

The most powerful thing I get from both accounts is a picture of a woman on the street abandoning her baby. The interesting thing is that like so much of history I don't know what preceded that picture: I don't know why what followed it (death from cold or hanging) followed it and I am left completely in the dark as to the motivations of those involved. All I have is a vivid trace- I think these documents are fascinating both for what they reveal and don't reveal. What do you make of them?

Review: The Burning of Bridget Cleary

2010-09-02T05:21:00.000+01:00

In 1895, in a cottage in rural Tipperary, a young woman named Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband and some of her neighbours and relatives. This shocking event became one of the cause celebres of the day. Tory newspapers used the scandal to cast aspersions on their nationalist foes: could the Irish peasantry be trusted with independence if they burnt their wives? The fact that the scandal happened at the same time as the Oscar Wilde case in London meant that, for some, the Irish elite and peasantry had been impeached at the same time. So what did the Cleary scandal mean? Angela Bourke's book about it is supposed to educate us as to the meanings of this event on Friday 15 March 1895: why did it happen, who was to blame, what did it mean?

Lets start from the facts, as Bourke establishes them following court and media inquiries at the time. Bridget Cleary was a young attractive woman who had her own business selling eggs from her hens. Her husband Michael Cleary was a Copper, literate and educated (in the context of his time). On Monday 4 March 1895, Bridget walked to nearby Kylenagranagh to sell some eggs, she caught a cold and on the Tuesday was confined to her bed at her house in Ballyvadlea. Her father set off to the local doctor, Dr. William Crean, on Saturday 9 March and asked him to visit his daughter. The doctor visited on the 13th and suggested that she take some medicine but by that point Michael Cleary was so irritated with him that Bridget did not take the medicine. The local priest Father Ryan administered the last rites on the 13th. On 14th March Michael Cleary called in the assistance of a herb doctor and forced his wife to swallow some herbs boiled in milk. On the 15th Bridget felt well enough to come downstairs and dress: she met neighbours and relatives down in the kitchen. There was an argument about whether she was a changling rather than the real Bridget and Michael knocked her down to the floor, he then poured parrafin over her and set light to her. The body was buried and Michael told the local village that she had been taken by fairies: he performed a vigil out by Kylengranagh where he said he believed his wife would ride by in a fairy procession. On 21st March he and the others in the house were arrested for murder, on 23rd a coroner's inquest confirmed a death by burning, on 5 July Cleary was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years penal servitude with other lesser sentences being handed out. That is the substance of the case.

That's the substance of the case but it doesn't really explain anything. What happened in the kitchen of Michael and Bridget Cleary's house was not an ordinary murder, but something far stranger. It drew on myths from the Irish past and discontents from the Ballyvaldea present. We need to understand, as Bourke argues, both in order to understand what happened. What Bourke is good at is bringing out the nature of the Irish beliefs about fairies at this time. She takes material from Yeats and Lady Gregory and others and demonstrates that rural Ireland sat at a crossroads in the 1890s. A pre-literate culture, for which fairies were a useful way of passing on wisdom and warning through stories about common 'dangers', confronted the 'modern' world of the nineteenth century with its roads, railways and doctors. Bridget Cleary both faced a doctor and a fairy doctor during her final illness. Secondly she makes sure that we understand the particular dimensions of the situation inside that hut: Michael Cleary was challenged, his father died during Bridget's final illness and on the Friday Bridget may have implied that his mother was away with the fairies when she was a child. There is no doubt, having read Bourke's book, that Michael Cleary was under significant stress that night and that helped cause his actions.

However, Bourke turns towards the end of her book towards the question of blame- a question that she is interested in but I am not. She concludes that noone was completely to blame: ultimately this is sophistry. Bridget Cleary ended up being burnt to death, without Michael Cleary's involvement this would not have happened. However stressed Michael was, I am sure that many Irish husbands were so stressed but few Irish wives in 1895 ended up being burnt alive! But lets leave blame: the problem with blame is that its a moral judgement which each of us are entitled to make but for which we need facts. Bourke gets preoccupied with blame and therefore neglects the more interesting questions that surround the case, the relationship between husband and wife etc. She does capture some of the more interesting facets of the world in which Bridget and Michael lived: Bridget comes across as a self confident, pretty young woman who had her own business for example. But ultimately Bourke spends too much time pontificating about how we should not blame Cleary and about how fairies are a competing explanation to modern science for phenomenon and whether they are as 'useful'.

Where Bourke's wider context is more interesting is the ramifications of the Cleary case. It may have had an effect upon the crisis of Union as it spread across the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It happened with John Morley's Land Bill and at the same time as the scandal involving Oscar Wilde. Bourke tries to draw together the three events, suggesting that the scandal at the top of Irish society (Wilde) and at the bottom (the Cleary burning) destroyed the land bill. In part the Cleary case must have contributed to a sense that the Irish could not be trusted with voting: but the idea that it stopped the Morley bill I find less convincing. The Morley bill was a contentious bill coming from a weak and dying government: it was likely to fail despite any merits. Her point though about the event as an imperial event must be correct. Just like Suti in India or the primitive behaviour of British tribes under Rome, every barbaric act formed part of the metropole's justification for continued colonisation. If Bourke gets some points wrong, that point is definitely right.

Winston Churchill: Oratory and Soundbites- a thought

2010-08-28T23:43:00.002+01:00

This is a fine article from the New Yorker about Winston Churchill. One of the most interesting points that Adam Gopnik makes is about Churchill's prose as a speaker. It is fascinating to reread his 1940 speeches and notice how short of specific content they are. Its fascinating both on the levels that Gopnik identifies, but also because the tendency towards the inspecific in oratory doesn't seem to have changed. I was watching this afternoon at one point, a video that a David Milliband fan had put on youtube: what the shadow foreign secretary was recorded as saying was inspirational but content less. I'm not questioning Milliband himself here- you could do the same with most other modern politicians- but its interesting in terms of what a political speech is supposed at its best to do. Churchill's speeches, as he himself confessed, were important less because of their policy impact- nobody remembers whether he specified a piece of the North African coast to invade- but because of their emotional impact. Its that sense you get listening to him that the country will hold out against the evils of Nazi and Fascist tyranny that was key at the time. In that sense a soundbite, which is the reduction of a speech, is not really much of a reduction: perhaps the secret with Tony Blair's 'people's princess' is that whereas Churchill spoke for hours to the Commons to capture the national mood, Blair could do it with a phrase to some journalists.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

2010-08-25T23:28:00.003+01:00

In 1860, on a farm in the West Country a boy near on four years old was murdered. He was taken from his cot, slashed and cut at with a knife and razor and then drowned in a privy. Within hours, the local police were called in, within days a London detective, Mr Whicher, was summoned down from Scotland Yard to inspect the case. In 1944, in Australia a local paper reported on a female nurse who had worked with lepers, retired and was now celebrating her hundredth birthday. Emilia Kay died soon afterwards: leaving behind documents which indicated that she was Constance Kent, who had confessed to murdering her own brother Saville Kent in 1865, and who had since emigrated to Australia. Kate Summerscale's book links these two events, more than eighty years apart and tells a story which has several interesting features. Its an absorbing read and retained the interest of this reader all the way through, sufficiently that I only stopped reading it minutes ago at half past eleven this evening. Its absorbing but its also interesting: Summerscale is not just a popular crime writer who found an interesting hook and narrative, she writes about the mentality of the times she analyses and her points deserve attention.

The late nineteenth century was the golden age of detective fiction: Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe and Henry James wrote stories which are still read. Those stories didn't come out of a vacuum, they came out of a context. English society in the mid-nineteenth century underwent massive change: the population both expanded and became more urban. A consequence of that was that in 1822 the first police force was created by Sir Robert Peel. From the 1840s that Police Force acquired a detective branch. The detective branch of the Police was at first scandalous and hidden, resented as an aspect of continental tyranny. Policemen were supposed to wear their uniform everywhere, off or on duty so that a citizen might not incriminate himself without realising. Detection was a secretive art and was hated for being so. As the 1850s drew on though, perceptions changed. Detection fitted into a Victorian mindset in which the world was a system filled with signifiers. All you had to do was read them. Sherlock Holmes later commented that detection was a science, by the stride of a man you could know his history, by the stain on a woman's shirt you could know her profession. Detection was an inspirational art in which people might discover and infer things about the world.

This was detection as art as well as science. What Summerscale establishes is the way that intuition shaped detection. Whicher for example bluffed his way into procuring convictions: once telling a horse thief both that he was not alone and that he knew the thief was guilty, neither assertion was true but Whicher got his man and his conviction. Whicher like Holmes and Dupin and Bucket made the evidence talk. He made the world tell a story. Summerscale grasps both how enticing this was and how threatening it was for the Victorian audience. It was enticing because the detective became the knight in the forests of the under world. Holmes took on Moriarty for the sake of civilisation. It was also threatening. When Constance was first charged with murder she became a victim, even in her lawyer's eyes as much of a victim as the murder victim himself. She was being persecuted by a detective, a lower class detective, who presumed to assume she was guilty. She was being cross questioned. Furthermore to be a detective might be a position of authority: but it was also a vulnerable position. You can see that from the novels, the novelists are making a point that we should admire Holmes etc. but also they presume to understand how Holmes makes his case. Whicher was bombarded by suggestions: everyone wanted to be a detective, even Charles Dickens wrote his thoughts down.

Detection was important in the case of the Road Hill murder because of another interesting facet, that Summerscale brings out. The murder occured in a house which was filled with a single family. The doors had been locked. Nobody but the servants and the family could have done the murder. She brings out two latent ideas from this. First is the confinement of Victorian life. The testimonies of Constance Kent (anonymously from Australia in 1928 and in her trial) and others suggest a confined world in which resentment might spin into madness. Secondly though there is the secrecy. Summerscale makes a plausible case that Samuel Kent, Constance and Saville's father, may have suffered from siphilis and retreated to the provinces to hide it. That kind of retreat, that kind of secret fills the book. Its the things which aren't said which are important. The things which lie hidden in the family's past. Samuel Kent blocked off access to his house from the local village and there is a sense that even now many details about what happened are still blocked off. Ultimately this is a world in which Emilia Kay could disappear, quite literally, and turn up in Australia: a secret that only she and perhaps her brother William actually knew.

I have probably told too much of the story but this isn't just an absorbing book, its an interesting one. It portrays a society undergoing massive changes: I think we too often forget how large those changes were and how much effect they had. This is the world of Thomas Hardy in which the patterns of centuries were reversed in decades. The craze for detection had its roots in sudden urbanisation and in scientific revolutions. The privacy of life in rural England was breaking up and the power of the press intruding. Men and Women might be scattered across the globe by fortune. The murder and its tale are interesting but far more interesting are the broader sociological points the book raises. Summerscale warns us upon starting to read that her story is unique: the family she studies odd because a murder occured and that every detail we read comes from the fact that someone investigating the murder found it interesting. With that qualification though, the book still tells me an immense amount about Victorian Britain.

Public Enemy

2010-08-24T20:54:00.003+01:00

Public Enemy has all the glitz and glamour that a film about John Dillinger should have. I have problems with the film but I have no problems with Johnny Depp’s performance, the intersection between cool and inarticulate bluntness, nor with that of Marion Cottillard, who has never been more charming. The direction is good- there are some nice tracking shots, as Cotillard and Depp traverse the screen, there is a wonderful use of light in general. The details, so far as I know, are broadly correct- Dillinger was a bank robber who profited from the failure of America to have a federal criminal policy in the thirties (as an aside, its interesting to see Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger dodge in and out of state lines to avoid state police, its a larger version of the problem of censorship in early modern London where a pamphlet published in one City ward and printed in another was immune from prosecution). But there is something unsettling about the movie.

The movie has two story lines- two plots. One follows Christian Bale playing an FBI Agent, the other sees Depp playing Dillinger. Bale’s story is all about the technicalities of investigating and catching this man- the question which involves suspense is will he get him in the end. Historically he did get him and as I went in with that spoiler- we all know as the film goes on that he will get him. The question is when. Actually the Bale story is not as tense as it could be: you get hints of the politics surrounding the early FBI but apart from at the beginning of the story, there is no real hint of the pressure that Bale’s character must have been under to catch Dillinger. To put it simply the FBI grounded its existence upon the argument that the Feds were the people to catch a Dillinger or a Clyde, failure to do so would mean political vulnerability. There is a very interesting story to tell here about J. Edgar Hoover (incidentally if ever a subject cried out for a biopic or a series of biopics- then Hoover is that subject), his relation to his agents and his relation to the criminals he was searching for. But this is not that film. Bale’s story is told straight, as a secondary tale to the main event- the story of Dillinger.

So what’s the story of Dillinger. Well in part it is the story of Dillinger’s career of a criminal- actually you might think that but the film isn’t really the story of Dillinger the criminal. Crimes punctuate the narratives but they aren’t the focus of the story. The focus of the story is the relationship between Dillinger and Billy, his half Indian, half French girlfriend, played by Cotillard. The actress does the role well- the fact she could both play the ‘girlfriend’ part in this film and a part in Inception a couple of years later which demands her to be the ‘wife’, a movement from the mid twenties to the mid thirties, demonstrates her versatility. But the character itself is not very interesting. Dillinger’s wooing of her is possibly the most interesting bit of the romantic storyline: he woos her by saying that I like whisky, robbing banks, baseball and you! What sounds at the time a confident and bold declaration (Dillinger doesn’t feel he has to say anymore because any girl hearing that would go with him) turns as the film goes on, subtly into a declaration that this man is not actually that clever or that interesting. He says things so bluntly and so curtly because he doesn’t actually have much to say.

But here is my problem. Lets put it like this. The last scene of the film is a scene in which Billy’s love for Depp is reinforced and exonerated. Again Cottillard plays the scene well. SPOILER ALERT. Dillinger when shot told an agent that to send a message to Billy that he loved her. The last scene of the film sees the agent coming to Billy and presenting these last words: Cotillard’s face does exactly the right thing, she seems in the moment to express several emotions, the crushing sadness of remembering her lover’s passing, anger at the police officer who shot him, regret and love. Its a wonderful piece of acting. But as a last impression of a film about a man who was a great bank robber and murderer, it feels odd. As if, on a much greater stage, a film about Hitler, left the audience with the regrets of Eva Braun. I realise I’ve broken Godwin’s law but I have used the comparison to shock: we think sometimes of Dillinger and his like as an outlaw, a rather nice creature, he was though a vicious murderer, a serial killer, and it seems odd that a biopic concludes not with the victims but with the face of the woman who loved him, grieving for his death.

This is a film from the perspective of John Dillinger. That in part might justify the last moments. For Dillinger his crimes were probably episodes, a means to an end, and the victims crumpled on the floor but didn’t really die, they just went pouf and were no longer problems. Here perhaps the film making is too objective, it attempts to be a history, a biography as well as a vision through Dillinger’s eyes. We also have to ask how interesting Dillinger’s eyes are: I found myself wondering about another great gangster film- Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde’s virtue is that it shows the destructive potential of a philosophy (I’ve written about that here) but also that it shows you the paranoia of being on the run. Michael Mann the director may not share the philosophical take on the New Wave that Arthur Penn promulgated, but the paranoia is a constant between the two films. If this was a film about Dillinger, then we don’t get the sense of the sheer terror of being chased. We don’t see how uncomfortable it is to be chased. Again a scene will suffice- Cottillard and Depp are at the side of a motorway, there isn’t anywhere to stay that the police haven’t got to and they huddle together and cuddle to keep warm- but you don’t get any sense this is uncomfortable, the mood is romantic. Cottillard’s Billy doesn’t ever seem in danger- the bullets go round her, that might be Dillinger’s illusion but it can’t be ours- Faye Dunaway got her hair mussed, Marion Cottillard’s hair is always perfect.

Back in the thirties when Dillinger was around, films about gangsters had to have a moral end. During Little Caesar, Chico is gunned down by a set of posters, Jimmy Cagney’s brutes are sent to the electric chair, even a sympathetic loner who has stumbled into crime like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past has to die to vindicate the point that murder has a price. Perhaps that was too much- there isn’t a correlation necessarily between being right and being happy. Mao Tse Tung lived to a ripe old age, while philanphropists died around him. But I’m not asking for such a ‘moral’ end- art always makes an argument about morality and I wonder whether focussing on Dillinger the lover, we give him too much credit. Its an odd film in which I want Marion Cottilard to appear less, but this is that film. We do not understand Dillinger if we do not understand something about his victims, something that makes them more than a pouf and an actor with ketchup on his neat shirt. Instead we exonerate him of his crimes. The only brutality in the film comes from the police- whatever we think of some of the more aggressive tactics of the police in the thirties in Chicago, a film about a serial killer where its the brutality of the police which shocks, misses the point about the killer himself!

The Origins of the English Parliament 1 The Witan and the Council

2010-08-22T13:13:00.002+01:00

John Maddicott's volume on the Origins of the English Parliament covers such a vast swathe of English history that any review needs to be split up between several posts. The ultimate origins of Parliament are uncertain and mysterious. It doesn't take much for an enterprising historian to suggest that they might lie deep in the Germanic forest (many Victorians did) or for his sceptical colleague to argue that they the first Parliament was the first event so called (in a court roll of 1236). Maddicott, a distinguished Oxford historian, takes neither view. The first chapters of his book cover what he views as the real antecedent to Parliament- the Great Council- which began meeting as a Witan under Athelstan in the 920s and whose importance continued through the West Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet Kings right down until the reign of Richard I (1189-99) at which point it fundementally changed its character. Over that two hundred and fifty year period, England was ruled by a succession of Kings and dynasties, first the West Saxon Kings (924-1016, 1042-1066), then Cnut and his sons (1016-42) and then the Normans (1066-1189). Throughout this entire period though the form of the council remained important to Kingship- to what it meant to be an English King and an English subject.

There are several reasons that Kings preferred to use council rather than other means to govern their state. Council swere places in which feasting, gifts, complaints, patronage and appointments were performed. They were opportunities to bind together a political nation- Maddicott's account starts with Athelstan because he increased the size of the council, it became a council of the English nobility. England's unstable political history demonstrated the worth of such councils: in 1014, the 1020s, 1042, 1086 and 1100 such councils were used by Kings to legitimate their rule, to make an offer to the political nation and to have that offer accepted by that nation. When Ethelred the Unread made his attempt to regain the throne in 1014 he did so by telling a council that he would reform abuses within the state and obtained their allegiance. In 1100, Henry I outbid his brother Robert Curthose for the crown by making a similar offer to the barons in his so called charter. Such moments allowed the King to claim that he had the support of the nation in his claim to the throne. By the 970s, under Edgar the Peaceful, Englishmen and women knew about the existance of such an institution- the Witan of the English people- and whereas under the Normans it became more of a feudal great council the fundemental point remained the same. Kings used council because it demonstrated consent. It also extended the King's reach. It isn't a surprise to see the council evolve first under Athelstan into a large body. Athelstan was the first King to penetrate the northern borders of England and one of the first councils that we see him hold was to exact homage from Constantine of Scotland. Councils were mechanisms through which power could be extended throughout the state- not merely residing with the King but spreading through the tendrils of the feudal body.

Maddicott uses two main sets of sources in his discussions of these early councils. On the one hand he uses the signatory lists of charters- what we have here are decisions that the great noblemen of the day acceded to by fixing their signature to them. On the other he uses chronicle sources- in particular the Anglo Saxon chronicle and later monastic chronicles. These sources obviously do not record the contents of the meetings but they allow us to make guesses about those contents. They record the decisions taken. The chronicles record as well the imperative upon the King to take counsel with his noblemen. Counsel taking was a moral imperative for an Anglo Saxon King. Ethelred in 1014 promised to take advice from his noblemen. One key change brought in by the Norman Conquest was the concept that counsel was a feudal duty from the nobleman to the King as well. The King might demand his noble attended council and gave him advice- thereby involving the nobleman in any decision taken there. A further key Norman development goes back to the conquest itself. As Dr Garnett has explained the conquest made a radical change in the structure of English land holding: it created a bond between Kings and tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. Knights were not merely the feudal tenants of their noblemen, but also of the King. The oath of Salisbury in 1086 seems to have included knights as well as Dukes and Counts and from the 12th Century they too were being summoned to Council.

Maddicott's first chapters sketch out a realistic scenario for why and how council developed. Curiously English instability put council on a higher footing than it might have been. Instability meant that Kings competed as rival claimants at various points and attracted nobles and others too them through using the mechanism of offers made in council. Furthermore such offers (such as the Coronation Charter of Henry I 1100) became key moments in constitutional history. The Council though by the 12th Century could have fallen into abeyance. This is not a teleological history at all: indeed Maddicott leaves us in no doubt that during the reigns of William I and William Rufus the council fell back as an instrument of government. Its function changed as well in the 12th Century with a decline in royal crown wearing in council. Furthermore by the 12th Century the structure of English society was changing fundementally: we can see that councils started granting taxes (the 'Saladin tithe' of 1188 is perhaps the best evidence for this) and that they did so in a culture that was increasingly legalistic. As the council became established, its role also became established within political culture. The Abbott of Battle in 1140 might argue that 'although the king could at will change the ancient rights of the Kingdom for his own time' he could not do so for posterity 'except with the common consent of the barons of his realm'.

What's so interesting about this early period is in part the wealth of data that does survive and in part the degree to which Maddicott is able to avoid both the Whiggish and the revisionist dangers. Something was happening in England but that something could potentially have led to other things than the Parliament of the 14th Century. Most interesting perhaps is the degree to which he shows us the challenges that Councils met for Kings. The scholarship on Elizabethan Parliaments has long moved in the same direction: an expanding power in the Commons was demanded by the crown as much as by the Commons. The initiative was not seized by Parliament but was handed to it by a crown that perceived a strong Parliament or Council as being in its own interest. In a sense what Maddicott describes is not so much a prehistory of Parliament- as a context of revolt, rebellion and size which drove forward the development of council and then of Parliament as an instrument to cope with that size and instability. I'll move on to the later sections of the book later, but I think this point about the context of conciliarism is crucial to understanding why and how royal power and conciliar power developed.

The Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl

2010-08-18T20:34:00.003+01:00

What are the eccentricities of this blonde haired girl? You'll spend 60 minutes of this fine film trying to find out what her eccentricities actually are, before you realise her real eccentricity is that she doesn't exist. This isn't some Lynchian nightmare in which a character actually doesn't exist- the blonde haired girl is there (see the picture above) but she lies behind a curtain, she gestures from a window, she does not actually exist. The film is about a man who wants to turn his life to pivot upon her existance. He is an accountant, commerce dislikes him because he is sentimental, but he seems to be able to hold down a job in his uncle's Lisbon shop. Across the road he spies the girl- we later learn she is called Luisa but her name is basically irrelevant- and he falls in love with her, her and her Chinese fan. He then proceeds to win her heart, surprisingly easily, but in order to marry he must find money. His uncle won't support him so he goes to Cape Verde to raise funds. I'll stop telling the story there- there is more to tell but you know everything you need to know until the final twist (the moment when you realise the girl until then has not existed).

The entire story is told by the main male character in a train to a woman. So we only see the girl through his eyes. She is sexy in a Bardot way, large lips, a come hither glance over a fan etc etc but we don't ever learn about what she likes or who she is. She isn't anyone and likes nothing save to be observed- that's what you'd infer from the accountant's tale. He on the other hand behaves like some medieval knight, he asks his uncle for her hand, he lives in penury and suffers for her, he idealises her favour, he can't even speak to her before proposing marriage. Its not the way that I imagine young Portugeese people behave today- and seems Quixotic (literally). This is a Quixote levelling his lance at lampposts and dancing through the night. All the way through the film his actions have a naive literalness which is charming and uncanny at the same time. He tells a prose tale in poetry to the woman on the train and there must be a suggestion, there was at the bottom of my mind, that he told her it to seduce her. The whole tale may be an invention- a game itself.

But if it is, it is not very appealing. This is the girl seen through the window, through curtains (a motif) if ever there was one for the inability of human minds to connect. If he sees nothing of her then equally he reveals nothing of himself. How is a girl to marry someone she doesn't know? He doesn't appear worried by that question. There are other baroque moments- a poem is read out about the dangers of connection at a private party, friends cause unhappiness- if they do then our hero is a survivor. The epicureanism of the poem though contrasts with the spirituality of the actor. One thinks here of spirituality as a means of inflicting suffering- Jean Louis employed it in My Night at Maud's and our accountant does so here too. When he and the girl are out together, he speaks for her, first and unabashed: given that he doesn't know what she likes he doesn't have to take it into account. She is an image in his head: this he says is love, pure and unadulterated by reality. If nothing else the film is a cutting argument for cohabitation as mature and moral before marriage.

The film is eccentric, no question about that, so is its lead character. But the girl- well she may have an eccentricity by the end, I'll leave you to judge. What is eccentric about her is that she isn't eccentric in the narrator's eyes: women who only stand in windows with fans don't exist. The fact that our Quixote cannot unravel the fact that she is strange because in his eyes that is what she does, doesn't get her and therefore doesn't understand that her anodyneness is eccentricity. The film undermines sexism but it also undermines any posture which assumes that human's aren't individuals, aren't eccentric. Upon the eccentricities of the blonde haired girl, our hero wrecks his family ambitions- that seems, far from unfinished or slight, an incredibly profound and important conclusion to an interesting film. Its a conclusion that, note to some modern film makers, only took 63 minutes to get across.