Jack the Ripper Exhibition

Jack the Ripper is a name that comes with associations- dark East End alleys filled with the lonely cries of drunks stumbling through the night air, the bodies of murdered prostitutes, the glimmers of street lamps above torn carcasses, the silent murderer like a ghost walking the ways around Whitechapel. There is at the moment a fantastic exhibition about the Ripper and his times over at the Docklands museum in London: I went there last week. The pictures of East enders bring home the poverty of the time: women and men without shoes, families living in single rooms if they were lucky, dirt and grime covering the streets and glum faces looking out of them. There are some wonderful pictures here: of match girls working from home, with the matches covering the desks or of cases that came into the London Hospital: prostitutes with their faces marked hideously by siphillis, terrible injuries from manual hard labour and there are maps of London made at the time showing the poorest areas- many of which surround the narrow streets in which the Ripper preyed.

Perhaps though the most powerful moment for me was coming round a corner in the museum and hearing people, interviewed much later, discussing how they had lived when kids in the time that the Ripper was alive and hunting. The interviews must have been done in the sixties or the fifties, but there are the peculiar flat London Eastend voices, the dropped vowels and you get that sense of intimacy with the past that is so important if you are to understand it. The thing about the Victorian era is that it is so easy for us to assume that they were like us- afterall this is the generation of our great grandparents- but it is very false. The poverty was what struck me throughout the exhibition: the prostitutes that the Ripper preyed on were known as four penny touches- four pence was the price of a room in the East End for the night and they would take that for sex and spend it on the bed where they completed the purchase. Photos of the suspects- particularly the Eastern Europeans who inhabited the East end bring home the nature of the area- it was a squabbling hive of poverty and immigration. An area not unlike the favellas of Brazil or the slums of Mumbai today- an area where visitors feared to tread.

All this makes the expert witnesses, whose videoed interviews disrupt the last hall, so disappointing. One even asserts that life as a prostitute in Whitechapel today is similar in some ways to life then: whereas one would think that though no prostitute deserves our envy, few are sleeping with men just for the cost of a bed and fewer are taking such a lottery with primitive methods of contraception. Equally facile are the observations of a criminal profiler that Jack was probably a bit weird- as though most men think 'ah today I'll go out and dismember a prostitute', it would have been more interesting to see some historians discuss the eras or even better see more interviews about the time with those who had lived in the East End in similar days. Attempting to suggest that the Ripper's society is like today's society is facile: horrible crimes happen today (of course) but the Ripper's case gives us the opportunity because of the contemporary public fascination to understand a type of life that isn't often exposed to us, to get into the slums of Victorian London- breaking that for the facile assumption that it ressembles our own lives seems to lose the point of the exhibition.

Overall though this is fascinating, criminal cases often are. They are fascinating because the criminal like a knife cuts not merely at the victim, but into his society. What you have exposed by that flesh wound is often the things that otherwise would be silent, would be kept under lock and key in some safe and never heard of again. Because of the media interest and the police files, we get to see the life of a prostitute in late Victorian London, something that we would not otherwise ever hear about. In that sense the morbid fascination contributes to our understanding of the way that the world was then: and it cannot be anything but a good thing that this exhibition has chosen to try and make this a display of the Ripper and also his times. The closer we get to understanding the differences between our times and theirs, the closer we get to understanding what Victorian London was like through Victorian eyes, the closer we get to discovering something of value.

It is, despite some annoying commentary, a good exhibition to see- the photos and reminscences in particular are worth hearing and it reveals once again how historical crime and scandal can reveal to us the patterns of the past.

Cronaca di un amore

When it was first made, Cronaca di un amore was criticised by the neo-realist critics of the day. They thought it an exaltation of the frivolous lives of the aristocracy and the bourgeoise, a cinematic surrender to the delights of the flesh promised by Capitalism to the Italian middle class. Worse still they read it correctly as a homage to Hollywood, a homage to film noir in all its facets and a homage therefore to American film making. How wrong they were in their assessment. For Cronaca is really a cutting attack: it is an icy stare upon western society and in particular upon western wealth and the marinettes dancing upon the top of the wedding cake of capitalism. The film is about a girl- played by the impossibly beautiful Lucia Bose- who is caught between her husband and her lover. Years ago she turned away from her lover because his girlfriend and her friend died when they were both standing by subliminally wishing her out of the way. Her husband's investigation of this accident brings together Guido and Paola again after seven years and leads onto a similar terrible event.

Antonioni wants us though to reflect a little deeper here than we might about the meanings of things. The love that Paola and Guido enjoy is a little thing which inspires terrible consequences: it stops them acting to save the lives of others around them. They could have saved the life of their mutual friend by telling her there was no lift in the shaft, but they didn't out of love. Their love is never shown as something that satisfies either of them though. It is no grand passion. Increasingly throughout the film Paola acts the part of the femme fatale. Increasingly both of them seem utterly bored, consumed by their lustrous surroundings and drained by them. Paola in particular seems to pass through the film listlessly, she wears stunning clothes, drives amazing cars and is amazingly beautiful (such that her husband jokes he could sell her for hundreds of thousands of lire) but she doesn't really appreciate any of it: it doesn't make her happy. That isn't to say she could ever leave it: she tells Guido quite emphatically that she cannot leave her husband because she cannot leave his wealth: but it does mean that she derives almost no pleasure from life.

He is equally aimless. He doesn't appear to have a job. He expresses no enjoyment in anything during the film bar her. All the other characters are similar. The detective who trails the lovers is also a man without much in the way of pleasure- save for seeing Milan play. The husband is not a particularly violent man. All the characters seem insipid. Rendered as such by their lives which are devoid of any real meaning. I don't beleive that Antonioni thinks that there is any meaning- just that in this incredibly bleak film he finds nothing of meaning. He finds that the world for these characters is boundless and bare: this is the truly antisceptic modern world, clean and brilliant, yet utterly pointless. It is a Chronicle of Love but a chronicle of modern love: a love in a world that is merely boring. Despite the gowns and the glory that is the message of this film- and its a deeply pessimistic one- go home, don't bother, give up, there is nothing to see, all the stories we tell about ourselves are lies, all the loves we have do not last and we are as guilty of crimes we fail to prevent as of those we commit. Ultimately love and crime are similar so long as we part, we can forget, the problems come when we remember- when we seek to reawake the past, to find our stories. All we do then is send ourselves strolling round to repeat old mistakes with old lovers, reawakening passions that don't exist. All we do is stay within our Chronicles of Love- our Cronaca di un amore- without any possibility of escape.

The Lady of Musashino

The history of the twentieth century is the history of the impact of the two World Wars. Wherever you are in the world, your family was directly impacted by those wars and their massive consequences- revolution, depression, decolonisation, post war prosperity, casualties and social change. Social change followed on from war inexorably. In the UK for example, the real decade of sexual liberation was the forties not the sixties, the fifties were an attempt to repress the anarchy of the war years. If in the allied countries life was smashed and changed forever by the experience of war, then in the defeated nations, in Japan and Germany and Italy, that was even more true. Luckily for us as historians, we have copious amounts of evidence with which to understand that process. Amongst that evidence is the reaction of film makers: the Italian neo-realist tradition for example stemmed from the condition of Italian society after the war and sought to analyse and explain what had happened. If that was true of European filmmakers then it was also true of Japanese filmmakers, who sought to explain their defeat and the reconstruction of the post war era with all the tools they could lay their hands on.

Of all the explanations of the social change happening in Japan from 1945 onwards, the Lady from Musashino, a film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, has a unique vantage point. Mizoguchi was an accomplished director by the point he made this film and you can see it in the way that he forms his frames and directs his actors. You can also observe it in the economy with which he conveys the story- he uses only 88 minutes to tell a story whose characters are complete and which spans several years. He uses voice over occasionally but more often relies upon subtle visual techniques to supplement an excellent, if minamalist, script. The story is easily told: it is a story of an unhappy marriage, between Michiko and her husband Akiyama. Michiko falls in love with her cousin returning from the war, Tsutsomo and Akiyama is secretly in love with Michiko's other cousin Ono's wife Tomiko. The love pentagon is at the beggining of the film presided over by Michiko's father and mother, but they die as Japan falls to the allies and thus the stage is set for the tragedy to come.

I do not wish to get any further into the story, but rather to explore some thematic points. Because this is a film that makes you think. Michiko's father begins the film by berrating the Meijj Restoration, and restating his own martial samurai ethic. Akiyama does not come from that background and is a university Professor from a peasant family. He is totally contaminated by Western influence- in particular by Stendhal. Michiko and him live very different kinds of lives. Michiko's love affair with Tsutsomo reminds me of nothing more than the relationship in Brief Encounter, its got the same muted restraint. Michiko though explores the reasons for staying respectable in a different way than either character manages to in Brief Encounter: she argues that there is a moral code and that we have to stick by it whether it is evil or good. Our moral code is what we will, it is created out of our volition (God is scarcely mentioned in this) but once uttered it must be performed. In that sense Michiko sees the real value in life being in oaths- she takes two oaths during the film, one to her father on his death and the second to her lover and she believes in her own terms that she has kept those oaths and consequently throughout the movie is convinced of her own rectitude.

The world of the movie is more complicated than this: for whereas Michiko represents absolute conservatism, there is a sense in which she also acknowledges the need for change. She tells Tsutsomo that believing in the persistance of the Samurai ideal (symbolised by the estate of Musashino) is believing in an illusion- the future is the industrial and Americanised city of Tokyo. She has sworn her oath of fidelity to the old tradition: but she has no problem in seeing that that tradition must change. (Interestingly it is technical and economic change that forces moral change here, not the redundancy of the ethic that had led to the Nanking massacre and other like horrors.) The artificial moral code she lives by is a constricting one which restricts her own happiness and propels her to damage others. But she holds to her oaths, because they give her life a moral framework which the lives of Akiyama and Tomiko lack. Deprived of any moral framework those two are blown hither and thither by their lusts: Michiko says at one point that morality not love is the only power, and by that she means that morality can give a life structure and meaning, whereas love can only give it excitement and content. In that sense, Tsutsomo is perhaps the most interesting character- because within him we can perceive the conflict between the two principles. Tsutsomo lives a life of abandon in Tokyo but swiftly realises that it does not satisfy him, he then comes to the countryside and finds that a woman whom he can at last love, but she denies him because of her morality which is in part what he loves, because she is embedded in marriage with a husband who hates and abuses her.

The obvious conclusion is the promotion of a new standard of morality and a new kind of Japan: the age of the samurai is over and the age of the automobile has begun. Samurai morality propelled Japan into a bloody war, there is no question that flowing through this is the resentment of the soldiers that went against those that stayed behind to sleep with girls and party all day. The resentment though is something that is a double edged sword because of course traditional Japan went to war in the first place. Michiko advises Tsutsomo that ultimately the traditional way of doing things must die and industrial Japan replace it: but her example informs him of the fact that with that new industrial Japan the norms, the principles of morality must be adopted. Morality is a matter of volition and though the content of the oaths must change, the fact of the oath must not change. Morality will still exist because without it life becomes meaningless- it becomes the life that Tomiko lives- but morality has to change with the new times. Tsutsomo walks out of the film without giving us a clue as to whether Michiko's dream of a new modern yet still moral Japan has become a success: like the impact of the French Revolution, it may be too early to discuss that question, all we can do is wait and see.

Felicia's Journey

"Memory Lane" is a constant presence in this fine novel by William Trevor. Memory governs both of his characters- Felicia, a young pregnant Irish girl come to England to find her lover, and Mr Hilditch, a catering manager who she finds instead. Felicia of course is possessed by her memories as the story begins- she searches the streets of Birmingham for a face, for a whisper of news about her lover. Mr Hilditch though is also gripped by the memories of other girls in other places who he met and had tea with, counselled and eventually who parted from him. Felicia finds in Mr Hilditch a temporary resource, she does not care for him particularly and does not really think about him, the trajectory of her mind is set by her memories into a particular form and in her story, Mr Hilditch, is nothing more than an aberration on the way to find her Johnny. Whereas for Mr Hilditch she represents another itteration of a story that he retells himself again and again, about the girls he has met and about his time with them, and the times afterwards.

There is no getting away from it, this is a sinister novel, with the shade of Fred West for instance instantly present at every moment. But it is far more interesting than a mere thriller, though those aspects are there as well. It is about the way that we think about each other- and the way that our habits of explanation collide. Felicia unwittingly stimulates Mr Hilditch through her panic: when she runs down to find out how he is doing at finding Johnny in her nightgown, her urgency is interpreted by him as sexuality. There are plenty of other moments in the story where a character's actions are misunderstood- particularly there is the obtuse missionary who meets both Felicia and Hilditch and fails to comprehend either of them, then there is Felicia's family whose instant condemnation fails to appreciate Felicia's guilt and lastly there is Felicia herself who assumes that such condemnation is perpetual and therefore runs away. Most notable and tragic is Mr Hilditch, almost everything he thinks about other characters, almost every way he classifies people is an error and a mistake. It drives him onwards towards an unpleasant ending.

The novel does not offer any satisfying resolution to these issues- what I found interesting was that in the end the resolution is almost an abandonment of hope. Trevor's characters can only find peace by neglecting to remember, by forgetting the ability to write stories but just observing life as seamless and meaningless incident they find a kind of truth. By dying, they live. In a sense that Christian motif runs right through the novel- from the first hints of an Irish mass, to the last calls of an Evangelical old woman- but in a deeper sense this is a novel whose roots are incredibly Christian. What could be more theologically apt than the power of a pregnant woman, carrying a child into a strange country, what could be more theologically accurate than the conception of the anger of conscience, the torture of wronging an innocent destroying the lives of the guilty? Trevor's portrait of individual Christians is very bleak- but his conception of the world rests upon a Christian moral sensibility- and in particular an Irish Catholic sensibility.

If this has one last meaning, it is to do with the position of Ireland and England in their never ending dance (which hopefully is entering a newer and brighter phase). Written in the early 1990s though, this book reflects that world in which the IRA ceasefire was but a myth and the Celtic tiger had only begun to roar. Felicia's lover, Johnny, is feared by her father because of his possible links to the British Army. In a deeper sense his fear of his daughter's violation by this representative of Britain is an emblem of the crossing of the two societies. Felicia's remembered Ireland is the land of conservatism and rural community, Britain in contrast is scary, urban and liberal. In Ireland, a man may easily be beaten up, his face kicked to ribbons and left to die without a word passing, in Britain Mr Hilditch with all his problems fades into the anonymity of modern life. These portraits are not nice- but Trevor balances throughout the novel between the two and between the two narrators- inevitably what he portrays is the journey of Felicia psychologically from Ireland to Britain, a journey which only begins when she arrives in the UK. And lastly a journey which is deeply ironic, for everyone she meets in Britain is attempting to help her not become the person, that she eventually, under their pressure becomes. Felicia is naive: but so are the small c conservatives she meets- for they think that it is possible to be Irish in Britain. As the story proves it isn't.

There are lots of journeys in Felicia's journey, but the essential ones are internal journeys. Styllistically Trevor manages to convey this through a peculiar narrative style- most of the book comes in third person narration, from the position of one of the two main characters' minds. The key though is that the internal journey is the real event described in the title- I hope I haven't given away its ending but suffice it to say that the journey winds and twists and its ending is not what you might expect.

Industrial Britain (1931)

Part of the recent 'Land of Promise' collection of 30s and 40s documentaries put out by the BFI and made by Robert Flaherty at the start of the British documentary movement of the 1930s and 1940s, Industrial Britain is a wonder to behold. Flaherty believed in a romantic ideal of work- an ideal that we have almost lost today- that work was the culmination of life. His craftsmen- and in this film every single worker is a craftsman- are the epitomy of what it is to be a real person. In a sense what Flaherty captures is not so much industrial Britain, as pre industrial Britain- in that he seeks to find amidst the industrial the remnants of the craftsman who can be happy with his skill, the man who is more than machine, who is an expert in his own craft. It is no surprise for example that he turns to look at men who make glass and pots as his exemplas of the way that industrial Britain is or rather the way it should be. What he captures though is important and it is a precious insight- his documentary is about the value of work, work should not be about going to an office for a day and coming back in the evening to earn a wage in what is ultimately boring, futile and soul destroying, such as the ancients or the early moderns would have described it is slavery. Provender, as Mark Anthony comments, is fitting reward for a horse but it is an insult to regard any person as a horse! Rather work in Flaherty's conception was noble, it was an endeavour that transcended its dull monotony- one might not know it but the work of a steel mill or a coal mine produced a ship, a speed record, a lighthouse, a railway track or the girder that held up a hotel roof.


Flaherty was a wonderful film maker as well as someone who had an insight into the way that what we might call the industrial aristocracy of England thought about their jobs. What I think he also conveyed was something that England as a country rather lacks today- the responsibility I hasten to add of a series of complicated social changes- which is an esteem for engineering and craftsmanship. What he manages to communicate in this film is why engineering is so wonderful: it is creation at its purest. He has a wonderful sequence in which he films the construction of a glass light for a railway- the workers puffing away- the fine tweezers which manipulate the glass and the fascinated and intent look of the craftsmen at their job. Another example is where he shows a potter moulding the clay- here the eyes of the young man are intent, his hands in sinc with each other as they caress the lines of the clay and move up and down, changing subtly its shape until it becomes something recognisable as a pot. His filming is impecable- it is hard to fault any part of it- the shots are well chosen- in a steel mill for example he captures the urgency with which the men shape the course of the steel into a mould- he focuses always inwards on the expressions of those working, on their faces, intent and concentrated staring at their product.


He does romanticise, this is not the kind of film produced later in the decade which highlighted the suffering of those that worked in industrial Britain. Flaherty's workers are undeniably physically tried, in one remarkable sequence he takes us down into a coal pit where the miners are hewing out the coal with picks. The work is hard, arduous and back breaking: far removed in a sense from the glass work of the craftsmen. But he doesn't dwell on it. Rather for Flaherty the miracle is that despite the modernity of what these industries produce, ultimately it is human agency which determines their production. Coal has to be bludgeoned out of the rock, steel supervised, glass and clay shaped in order to produce what seem to us at the other end as purely mechanical productions. What he stresses is the effort, the sweat and the attention that went into the creation of industry in the modern era- and in his context the pride that also went into it, professional pride in creation. It is a part of the story that we often lose- we forget that the industrial revolutions of this and other countries depended and still depend on people doing difficult and hard jobs, and doing them well. Sometimes the part of the story that we seem to have lost is not so much the awareness of class struggle, as the awareness of the acheivement of craftsmen, engineers and manual workers. That's what Flaherty at the end of the day gets to, it is a call for recognition and a call for people to feel proud of their acheivements- the call for the Industrial Revolution to turn all men into craftsmen- if leaves an idealised picture partly because it seeks to transform the world into an ideal.


Looking back on Flaherty's film from this point in time, we can admire the photography, admire the filming and recognise that what he does is utter a call to recognise those, whose back breaking labour formed our modern world. Alongside the great scientists, great businessmen, great politicians, we shouldn't forget the great miners, great glassworkers, steelworkers and potters- our world was shaped by their hands.

The Plague

The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus. What Camus intended to do was to dramatise the problems of the French Resistance, what he intended to do was dramatise the reasons that men decided they would die in the Resistance. Instead of taking the subject on directly, Camus presented the problem of the resistance by analogy. He took the subject of a plague hitting the small Algerian (at that point French) town of Oran. The plague is indescribable. It afflicts all with equal indiscriminate ease and seems to strike at the most random moment. Furthermore because of the plague the town of Oran is isolated, cut off from the rest of France and left alone to suffer. Its townspeople for instance are reduced to watching over and over again the same films, because no new ones arrive and Camus documents their attempts at escape, the riots which threaten to sweep away the armed encircling guard, the psychosis of a citadel in the midst of an epidemic. Perhaps most terrifyingly he dwells on the experience of those whose families have been divided by the iron law of quarentine and lovers whose love is stuck in the world outside. Camus manages to capture in his prose some wonderful ideas about the ways that humans feel: he captures something that I think no novelist has ever quite got for me, which is the feeling after you have left someone you love, of their face fading before your eyes. At another fantastic moment, he captures the way that two men planning an escape attempt, suddenly begin to trust each other as they debate the position of a centre half on the football field.

The novel is almost a documentary at points and demonstrates how a community feels under that kind of awful pressure. But it is also a deep and intense psychological drama focussing on a doctor, Dr Rieux and his friends who form part of a group committed to aiding the plague sufferers in their final death pangs. Rieux and the others become hated, despised because they bring diagnosis and the reality of isolation. They labour without quite knowing why, they labour in order to labour. Camus brings out the way that in the silence of God, God becomes irrelevant to human morality. Rieux and the others are not motivated nor moved by theological speculation but by the need to struggle to do what is decent. What he also gets about morality is that there are no costless decisions, staying in the town of Oran to care for the sick is for Rieux a moral imperative and yet it leaves him with a final personal tragedy. He cannot say, no more than we can, that those who escape to find their loved ones are evil or bad: he can only say, to borrow Michael Frayn's line, that after the fact we see what matters. Each choice, including the most altruistic one, contains the possibility of tragedy and the possibility that it is futile and that the other choice would have been better. But equally for Rieux there are real moral choices- they are just not clear and codified in some divine scripture- but revealed on earth through the dispositions of conscience- to paraphrase Kipling it is when the heart and sinew give up, when everything is against you and the only thing that keeps you on the road is the realisation that an action is right, that you act in a true moral sense. Its a Kantian emotional reaction and Camus gets it.

Perhaps the great moment of this whole book comes when Camus describes the perfect individual, the embodiment for him of what it is to be moral. For him that individual is a man called Grand- a civil servant who has never risen that far- whose life seems from the outside a failure, having lost the love of his life, Jean, for being unable to speak to her. Grand spends his whole life fining and refining a sentence to start a novel about a woman that rides down a street filled with flowers. He does not serve on the frontline but rather organises the relief of the plague and he is weak, almost collapsing with the strain and yet he is the hero. For he represents the fact that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. During the whole novel we see the traditional repositaries of moral instruction- priests, magistrates- fail: often as they see their role as being to rebuke and instruct others rather than serve their communities. The priest for example as the plague begins delivers a terrifying sermon to the townspeople about it being their fault that the plague has come down upon them: how that does anything to save people from death or how it manages to do anything save for make the priest feel better in his moral superiority. Religion gets a bad press in this novel, partly because it encourages people to resign from their moral commitments in this life to attain a future one- it produces a false ascetism.

But the novel really is not about condemning any sequence of ideas, as much as in providing an explanation for the ways that humans come to behave morally. What Camus shows is the way that the drive of conscience works: it operates as a kind of neccessity- a blind neccessity forcing people to do things that they are scarcely conscious of. Interestingly it has little to do with religion or other justifications for morality- interestingly it also makes little discrimination. One of Camus's characters is Cottard, who likes the plague because it saves him from possible arrest, Cottard though is not condemned by the book as much as he is examined. And here emerges something that I savour about Camus- the book compares Naziism to a plague, and explicitly at one point links the plague to human immorality- to capital punishment but at no point does it seek the easy condemnation. It is a moral work, infused with morality, but condemns sin without looking at the sinner. And it condemns sin for the right reasons- not because of an offence to any tabboo- but because of the ways that sin hurts and destroys human lives. Camus is a humanist in the real sense of that word- someone who places their ultimate value on the relief of human suffering.

This is a great book, and I have scarcely probed its surface- but there is something magical here in his perception of morality that gets to the bottom of a thought that I find half articulated in protestant theologians of the 17th century and German philosophers of the 19th, that morality is an inward commitment, a sense, a conscience and that understanding that impulse of duty is the first step towards understanding what it is to be moral.

Station Agent

I really like steak sandwiches, with onions, and accompanied by a nice bowl of chips, well cut potatoe chips. Strange way to begin a movie review perhaps, but its information that immediatly occured to me after watching Station Agent, not merely because there is a scene in which the three main character sit and eat steaks, just cooked, and rice and tomatoes fried with onions and garlic. Its a scene that made me feel incredibly hungry and that pang hasn't really left me yet, despite the fact that I ate dinner several hours ago and am not undernourished at all! The sight of frying steaks makes my mouth savour.

What has this to do with Station Agent, well nothing really- its a self indulgent complaint! But on the other hand, it has everything to do with a movie that at its best is about the simple pleasures of life. Station Agent is about a train spotting dwarf- the worst bit about this film is its synopsis which makes it sound like Garden State but without the subtlety. Station Agent is about the way that this dwarf, bequeathed a station hut out in New Jersey decides to go out there and live in solitude. Unfortunately for him, outside his door, is a Cuban-American coffee maker called Joe whose response to rejection is just to try and try and try again- conversation becomes inevitable. It becomes even more so when Fin, the dwarf, is run off the road twice by the same woman, called Olivia, a neurotic artist trying to cope with the loss of her son, Sam. It sounds trite and a film about personal renewal- but it isn't really, its a film in which nothing much happens- redeemed by the fact that noone has an epithany until towards the end, the director makes the mistaken decision to install some drama- but even that fits into the mellow movement of the overall film.

It wouldn't work so well unless it had good actors- and Peter Dinklage does a great job here. The character he sketches out is fascinating. Fin is a character who despite his professed normality is a all interior and no exterior. He finds it hard to cope with the rejection of ordinary people who laugh whenever they see him, 4 foot and five inches tall, he gets laughed at wherever he goes or abused. The truth is that the end of the film shows him still laughed at. But he has his fascination with trains- he walks along the railway lines because he can't drive and also because he is just interested. He spends hours reading about trains and watching them- its a great moment when he finally gets to chase a train in a car. Interests make the man interesting. There are some other fine performances- the two secondary leads do well- and Michelle Williams confirms, that despite lacking the fame of her Dawson's Creek costar Katie Holmes, she is by far the best thing to have come out of the irritating teen drama of the 90s.

This isn't a major piece of work- it reminds me a little of Karismaki but without the darkness that you get in a Karismaki piece- rather its a meandering meditation. There are some little points here- if you want happiness, you have to go out and get it rather than sitting at home waiting for it to turn up on your doorstep etc. But they aren't really the point- the point is that here is a man, not a dwarf, here are a set of characters and over the time you spend with them, you get to know them a bit and get to work out why they are friends. This is a film that is best when it isn't a normal film, without a story it functions better than with a story. It is an observation as much as a narrative: and as an observation, it is charming and very funny. The humour is very subtle but Dinklage in particular just has to raise an eyebrow to make you notice the absurdity of his situation as he gets run off the road for the second time or irritated for the umpteenth time. This is a good film- but it is definitely an acquired taste- if you like casual, funny and gentle looks at life, I'd give it a shot- if you want plot and drama then move on somewhere else.

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

An Outpost of Progress

Joseph Conrad's modern reputation largely derives from his great masterpiece- the Heart of Darkness- remade into a great modern film, Apocalypse Now, whose themes have been explored and criticised by numerous thinkers, novelists and analysts. It is a wonderful book to which I will return, but perhaps as fascinating is Conrad's earlier colonial short story- An Outpost of Progress in which he reflected on the isolation of the colonial officials dispatched to some remote frontier and their 'civilization' not to mention the 'civilization' of those that came to fetch them back from the mouth of oblivion.

An Outpost of Progress is a work about the periphery. It features two characters, 'two imbeciles' according to the director of the Company who sends them up the Congo river (it is the Belgian Congo we are in here- something that numerous clues and Conrad's own correspondence gives away) to an isolated station in the middle of nowhere. These two men, Carlier and Kayerts, are joined by a third named character, the factotum of the station, Makola, who observes the white men come and go to their destruction with impassive and grim glee. All around them is a world that neither Carlier nor Kayerts understands- the only sounds that they ever hear are the drums from the nearest African village- they cannot read the language of the chieftan and rely on Makola to survey Africa for them and interpret Africans. When he sells their entire set of servants for precious ivory, neither of the two Europeans has the wit to do anything but be asleep.

In part that is their failure to understand Africa, this renders them lonely amidst a vast uncomprehending crowd. In this crowd of strangers, they are Conrad informs us in a state of nature:

They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their characters, their capabilities and their audacities, are only an expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotions and principles: every great and every insignificant thought belongs to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of one's sensations- to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous: a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Conrad's language is brilliant and he conveys the sense that the European had of Africa, when he believed that the savage was truly savage. But more than that that passage is not so much about the encounter with the primitive savage, as with the primitive loneliness of being unable to communicate. The real focus of the tale is that the silence of the jungle enfolds the two Europeans, as it does we watch them regress to an uncivilized state (a state which is far below that of the African tribes around them!) They cannot see the Africans as their comrades, when the African servants are sold as slaves by Makola, Conrad comments that the two Europeans talked with indignation but felt nothing about the illusion of that suffering. For them it is an illusion because they experience it from a distance, the same distance they would be at were they reading about it in a club in Brussels and exclaim at 'how shocking' it was. They remain detached and isolated.

And as Conrad demonstrates they thus sink into madness. These two inadequates become criminals- they become villains- they become savages. Civilisation, Conrad leaves us in no doubt, is a fortunate condition we are born into- not something that is innate to us. In this sense, the darkness of his Africa, the heart of darkness, is that life, nasty, brutish and short, that the English Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes explored in his Leviathan. But Conrad's state of nature is a reality- the true dystopian reality of his vision is that man is regressing through colonization, blazing a trail for Orwell and others to come, Conrad argued that the terror of colonization lay as much in its effects on the colonizer as on the colonized. Carlier and Kayerts are incompetent buffoons, but being colonizers turns them into villains. Our actions ultimately affect us as much as they affect those we aim them at: of course as Chinua Achebe reminds us there is something racist about only seeing colonization through European eyes, but Conrad was a citizen of a racist age and to find him calling Africans savages is not surprising. What is stunning is his clear vision, a clear vision that sits alongside the great liberals of the 19th Century- John Bright and Richard Cobden (les plus Gladstonian que Gladstone), that colonization would destroy the European colonizer: it would brutalize the brutal and would render the greatest achievement of European civilization- the security and peace that states ensure- vulnerable to the loners on the veldt and the river.

Conrad in this sense anticipates the darkest films from the Western genre- which demonstrate the terrors of the man in a state of nature. If you want to understand this short story by seeing a film, go and see the Searchers by John Ford. For in the vision of John Wayne, willing to murder his neice because she has been captured by the Apache, irreconcilable in his hate, with death in his eyes, you see Carlier and Kayerts's shadows had they but been wise. As fools their destiny is no less dark but more comic- as one ends up on a Cross with his tongue open and his cheek purple- the perfect mockery of colonialism, violence, disrespect and death- in a very European and Christian form. Communication and lack of it is the center of the decay of life for Carlier and Kayerts- they fall because they are unable to communicate with the Africans- and that signal is the last failed sentence, because it demonstrates that now they cannot even communicate with the director who sent them- they have become grotesques, lonely on the cross of their own lack, isolated forever, fixed in disrespect and mockery- fixed in a posture that ridicules the high words they came to enforce. Colonization here ironically turns the colonizers words back on them and in his last posture, the colonist is like a sow eating its own vomit- turning his own high words into high mockery.

Where would you go?

James Higham has a rather amusing post up this evening about the battle he would love to reenact- for James its Culloden. It got me thinking though about I suppose a different question, which is if I could go back in time to see something happen, what would I go back to see- its not an easy question to answer. For a start I'd exclude seeing all battles- a battle is a disorientating and unpleasant experience- to see a battle like say Hastings or Naseby, you wouldn't see the historical events taking place, you would see a massive confusing carnage, bloody and uncertain, there would be nothing to admire or enjoy in that! To go back to the past to see something, you would want to see something that was staged for a purpose, that was presented in a sense to you. Personally that for me means two sets of events- the one is a debate, the other a play. If I could go back there are four things which I would love to actually see: the first would be the Putney Debates of 1647, debates about democracy and monarchy that stretched over three days, I studied them for my PhD, they are amazing filled with great rhetoric and stunning thought. They were heavily involved and incredibly tense- at one point a soldier present tells the rest that unless the debate is concluded by the morning, the King will come and get them and hang them all. They were important and about deep principles- the questions of religious obligation, the authority of the state and political promises, the authority of an assembly of the people, the degree to which we can justly destroy rights granted in law, the degree to which war destroys law- all of these things were discussed.

My other three things are perhaps more obvious and well known. Next in line comes the Norway debate of 1940, when every great orator of mid century British politics- Llyold George, Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Neville Chamberlaine etc- all spoke. Forever in most people's minds it is linked with three great moments- when Amery leaned over to the Labour benches as Arthur Greenwood then acting Labour leader put the motion of no confidence in Chamberlaine and shouted "Speak for England, Arthur", when George called on Churchill to avoid making himself an airraid shelter for other ministers (particularly the Prime Minister, Chamberlaine) to hide under and when Amery again rose to his feet and said (repeating Cromwell's words to the Rump), 'I say now what has only once been said in this house before, Depart I say and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!'. The upshot of those moments was that Churchill became Prime Minister, and Britain decided, in the words of Lord Keynes, to throw away an empire in order to defeat Naziism.

Thirdly, well who could ask anyone to name a moment to go back and see and not appreciate this. The opening night of my favourite Shakespeare play, which happens to be the one I studied as an A-Level student, Othello. I would love to see how Shakespeare himself made those lines on that wooden O appear, love to see the way it was set up, love to appreciate the skill of those immortal words- lines that even Milton acknowledged were as perfect as pyramids (and praise from Milton for poetry is like praise from Einstein for physics!) . Imagine being in the audience as Iago, Othello, Desdamona and the like strode into the world's consciousness for the first ever time- imagine the wealth of theatrical experience available to the Englishman of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century- seeing Macbeth, Lear, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V and all the rest for the first time ever- not to mention the works of Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher et al- not to mention the poetry of Sidney and Spencer- not to mention if one had lived long enough to see Milton's Comus and in an exceptionally long life to be there for the Restoration and the plays of Aphra Behn and others. If I could I would see them all- if you reduce me to one- its Shakespeare and its Othello.

The fourth moment I would see is a different kind of moment- a moment which in a sense gave birth to all the others. I would love to have been present when Socrates gathered around him his pupils and talked- and argued and questioned truth. I would love to have seen his trial, partly to know who out of Plato and Xenophon got it right, whose account was accurate. But more to have known the man- in many ways our modern pursuit of knowledge, our modern enterprise and consciousness is still a Greek dream and if it is the dream of any one man, is the dream of Socrates. Ancient Athens was an incredible place- this was a place where at a drinking party one could find, so Plato has us beleive, Aristophanes and Socrates might be joined by Alcibiades. The forefathers of history- Herodotus and Thucydides thrived and lived at the same time as the great playwright Euripides (imagine being in the theatre for Euripides and Aristophanes- there were Greeks who were). If one place holds my imagination and the imagination of the West, it is Athens and it is that era. If I could go back.... that's where I'd go....

but I'd be back here pretty quickly- all of those places would be pretty smelly. Nostalgia is a good thing until you remember that they all lacked anaesthetics!

and I didn't mention the sermon on the mount, or the Don Pacifico debate, or meeting Bede, or watching Feynman give a paper to Einstein, Pauli, Fermi et al or the Lincoln Douglas debates or the first performance of Pushkin's Boris Godunov or or or or or....- truth is I am a glutton for the past, I'd be always travelling back in time had I the chance, perhaps its better that I don't...

Oh and furthermore its a frivolous pipe dream!

Ok guys, I've done mine where would you go?

A small death

We all have our favourite haunts. One of mine was Unsworth's Bookshop, on the Euston Road just opposite the British Library. It was a bookshop which sold excellent academic books for cheap prices- I remember getting Kevin Sharpe's Personal Rule of Charles I for a fiver for example- and was one of my favourite places to go to in London when I felt my purse needed lightening: or rather it was one of the most dangerous places for me in London as when I visited I couldn't leave without spending at least twenty pounds that I didn't have! Well its closed or it has been replaced by a poorer bookseller whose range isn't as good.

Good second hand bookshops are not ten a penny- I am lucky enough to know another one in London (My Back Pages, just opposite Balham Tube, if you are ever in Balham it is a must visit, I know another one whose name I have forgotten in Clapham that always have interesting books on offer!) but they are being replaced by discount shops who specialise in remainders of Frank Lampard's biography for fifty pence. There are other good bookshops around- Foyles in central London is a great place- but if there is one cause I think we should all turn to its supporting our local bookshop. There is something special about a good bookshop- the experience of browsing in a shop is totally different to doing it online- and to be good a bookshop needs to have the ability to be browsable- to have a good selection. They need to provoke you to want to read something- I often spend time looking for things in bookshops that I don't know I will find, just scanning across the titles and picking out interesting ones- looking at the authors to check their credentials and the acknowledgements page and then considering whether to read it or not. I like places that are eccentric- where you can see a particular interest in the seller reflected in the books he or she sells. The kind of shop where you can do that is the kind of shop that needs protecting and preserving- unfortunately more and more bookshops are going down the best seller route (witness the Books Etc near Victoria whose selection of classic novels can only be described as looking like a flower wilting without water or attention!) but they needn't: we ought to vote with our feet. Time to support good bookshops- afterall we'd miss them if they all vanished.

Winston at work

Winston Churchill has as this essay from the New York Review of Books makes clear always divided opinion. Many in his own lifetime echoed the anecdote made by Asquith who said that a fairy had come down at Churchill's birth and showered him with all possible gifts, accept that is for judgement. Many like Asquith imagine that Churchill was an undisciplined rover, an inspired genius who did not have the ballast to achieve the highest office. What is interesting is that Churchill did have the ballast to take on the burdens of office- and an important mistake in the article above suggests exactly why he was. Geoffrey Wheatcroft suggests that

One day Churchill would win the Nobel Prize for literature (largely on the strength of The Second World War, much of which, as David Reynolds has shown in his splendid book In Command of History, was ghostwritten)

Actually Wheatcroft gives the wrong impression of what Reynolds argues that Churchill did. The book was researched and written largely by others: but Churchill altered the wording, or added the key document. Reynolds prints passages before and after Churchill with his pencil went through it: and he demonstrates that Churchill kept a real control over the text. He changed crucial words which changed the entire sense of the text. In reality what Churchill proved himself to be was a competent writer: he was of course a best selling journalist and his writing, somewhere in a no-man's land between Macaulay and Gibbon not to mention the occasional touch of sentimentality, is definitely reasonable. But even more than a competent writer, he proved himself a master of delegation. He was not a historian- so Maurice Ashley did the research, what he was was a master of drafting, and one of the most known politicians of his age. He was able to get official documents and help that noone else could have got, he managed to alter the text to make it reflect things that he thought had happened, and also to give the dry work of the researchers the lightness of touch of a journalist and political speaker. In reality, Churchill's accomplishment when writing his histories was his insight into himself and his audience: he knew what he was doing, delegated what he needed to and kept the final draft to himself- in that sense what Reynolds shows is that his history proved, not that he was a great writer, but that he was a good organiser and a good politician.

The Ideology of Gymnastics in Hungary

Ignazc Clair was the first person to introduce Gymnastics into Hungary as a sport in the early 19th Century when he founded the Gymnastics society. Gymnastics developed in Hungary to a huge extent over the 19th Century- but more interesting perhaps than the fact of its development and its popularity are the reasons why it developed at that particular point. As Miklos Hadas argues in a perceptive, but often dense, article, written for the Fall 07 issue of the Journal of Social History, the timing of the rise of Hungarian gymnastics was no accident and tells us something very interesting about the process that we call modernisation.

There are two separate processes that Hadas identifies: both of which deserve some attention from us. The first is that the rise of gymnastics represented a change in the class structure of society. As society became more urbanised and more bourgeois the kinds of physical exercise preferred by people changed radically. The old aristocratic exercises such as duelling and hunting became less relevant, as the world shifted. Hunting obviously was not as important within the city of Budapest as within a country estate outside. Duelling too harked back to an honour code and an ideal of chivalric masculinity that was passing out in Burke's 'age of oeconomists'. They were replaced by gymnastics and sport. If you turn to examine the memberships of the gymnastic and sporting societies of Hungary in the century, you find that the majority of their membership were not aristocratic but were middle class- were bourgeois. As the Hungarian middle class grew, so did the obsession with personal sporting excellence.

When the bourgeois moved to exalting sports, they moved to exalting a different model of society. A duel is very different from a fencing match- and even more different from an individual athletic exercise. If I duel, I do so in order to harm my opponent- there is at least a significant risk of doing so. Fencing and to an even greater extent, rowing, and most of all gymnastics are not really about the other, the competition, as they are about the improvement of one's own standard. A duel is an important signifier when your rivals are few and very important- in the bourgeois world of late 19th Century Budapest however, your rival on the gymnastic stage is not likely to be your rival in the boardroom. Rather you use gymnastics to develop yourself as an instrument of self advancement- you do it in order to train yourself.

It is no surprise- and Hadas adopts a fairly Marxian framework based on class analysis to argue this- a framework that has its limitations but also invites us to learn a lot- that this craze for gymnastics took place at the same time as a craze for education. Over the 18th Century, the educative works of modern Europe from the great philosophers of the age- Locke and Rousseau instantly come to mind- were translated and taken on by Hungarians in order to form a new Hungarian citizendry. Rousseau in particular had a great influence through his novel Emile on the way that Hungarians thought about education. Education in Rousseau's view was a way of forming a person to live in a corrupt society- he argued that a vigorous and natural education would lead to a true citizen, whose world would not include amour-propre, the destructive self love- but instead be filled with true feelings towards society and himself. Hungarians shared that aspiration- as did others around Europe- just think of Arnold's Rugby and its description in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Education for them was a training- and it was a mental training. You placed within the individual dispositions through their education- raised them to the higher pleasures. In the classical world of the 19th Century middle class- one of the obvious ways to do that was through training not merely the mind but the body- through gymnastics in particular, through an exercise that promoted self analysis and self criticism and attention to detail amidst monotonous activity.

I don't entirely buy Hadas's thesis- I think he overstates the structural element to this. But I do think that the core is right- we are looking at a change within society and an accompanying change in mindset- and the invention of competitive sport is a part of that. It is a useful part for us because it throws light on the way that the bourgeoise of the 19th Century beleived that education formed the perfect citizen- that it implanted beneficent dispositions within the child in order to the fulfilment of society's ideal. What we are seeing in the development of 19th Century sport is the consequences of the Emilisation of society: hence amongst the most notable offspring of Rousseau should be counted the Olympic Games and the proud history of Hungarian Gymnastics!

Septimius Severus

"The contemporaries of Severus, in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign, forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal results of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principle author of the decline of the Roman Empire"
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gibbon's perception of Septimius Severus was based on his own view of Roman history- he wrote a great longitudinal study of Rome's fall, from the age of the Antonines to the age of the Florentines and in his survey he noted the chronological passing of power. For Gibbon and for many before and after him, Rome's history took an upward turn in the second century AD. The hereditary Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties with their dynastic freaks (Tiberius, Nero, Domitian) gave way to the meritocratic series of adopted emperors- Nerva (96-8), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (117-38), Antoninus Pius (138-61) and Marcus Aurelius (161-80). After Aurelius though the Empire slipped back- Aurelius's son Commodus was awful and he was succeeded by a period of civil war (193-97), only brought to an end when Septimius Severus seized control and reigned for a period of years until 211. After Septimius there was chaos as well- as challengers for the empire rose and fell and in the end internal chaos led to external danger- with emperors dying on foreign frontiers and various parts of the empire splitting off. The only Emperor who seemed to survive for a great period of time amidst the chaos was Severus, and hence Gibbon blamed him for the later decline.

Severus's biographer Anthony Birley takes a more lateral approach than Gibbon and stresses the ways in which Severus was a creature of his times. Severus was born in Lepcis Magna to a family with strong links to Rome- as part of the Empire's evolution more and more provincial citizens were using power within Rome itself- the great Senatorial aristocracy had been wiped out in the 1st Century AD and was replaced by a new aristocracy from the provinces, particularly Africa. Severus's ancestors- his grandfather in particular- was part of this and probably knew great literary figures such as Tacitus and Pliny. Severus's reign though marked a new turning point: he was the first Emperor not to have been brought up in Rome. He felt no great affection for the city- spending only three years of his reign in Italy (possibly less) and spending most of his time out on campaign. In that sense he marked the beggining of an evolution from an Italian Roman principate- to one which resided at key points on the frontier- as with Diocletian at Nicomedia and Milan, or with Constantine's successors at Constantinople and Ravenna.

Severus himself was part of a rich civilisation. He was a contemporary of Galen, the great doctor, and Tertullian, the Christian saint. Aurelius of course was not merely an Emperor but a philosopher. Severus was lucky in his historian, Cassius Dio, who compiled a pretty extensive history of his reign upon which much of Birley's work is based. But within that civilisation there were debates about strategy- some beleived as with Hadrian in an empire which withdrew to and solidified its boundaries, some like Trajan and Aurelius believed in extending the imperial sway to conquer new territories. Severus stood in the second camp- he looked in particular to Marcus Aurelius as a model for his reign- attempting to extend the Roman empire's sway in the East, where he sought to add Mesopotamian territory to reinforce the exposed province of Syria, in the south he forced the Roman border in Africa further south towards the Garamantes and in Britain, he attempted the conquest of Scotland but died before he could accomplish it. Such advances needed reorganisation. Severus was one of the leaders of a military reorganisation- that again was going to be paralleled later. The early Roman emperors relied upon provincial armies and a small Praetorian Guard in the Capital- Severus called up three legions to become a mobile reserve and attempted to introduce more fluidity into the army. Using it as a fluid weapon of offence and response instead of a passive defensive force- that meant that he spent far more upon the military than his predecessors. The instability of 193-7 also forced him to raise the soldiers' pay at a rate which the sterner predecessors would never have done.

Returning to Gibbon's question then- because it is worth answering, why did these trends lead to a temporary collapse and did they contribute to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Lets instead of answering Gibbon, answer a different question- did Severan reforms lead in part to the problems of the third century? To that question I think we can answer an unambiguous yes- the Severan reforms led to massive inflation throughout the empire, they led to military instability with soldiers desiring increased pay and receiving it from every new contender, Severus and his predecessors contributed to smashing up the old Roman system and the replacement was painful. But equally whilst Severan reforms contributed to the mid third century collapse, they also contributed to the recovery in the late third century. It is no accident that Diocletian and his successors used Severan ideas to reanimate the Empire: the Roman Empire in these years could in part be seen as a society going through the shock of reorganisation- and going through it spectacularly because the symptoms of that shock were civil war and invasion. Severan reforms though- introducing the itinerant, provincial, non-Roman Emperor with a mobile force behind him- shaped the later Roman Empire. Those reforms went back into the reigns of Aurelius and beyond- but they formed the template of what the Empire looked like under Constantine.

Perhaps what this demonstrates is that whereas there was definitely a fall of the Roman Empire in the West- decline isn't always the best way of conveying what happened to Rome. Rome evolved from a Republic to a Principate, from a Principate to an Empire- the changes meant that the form of the state changed- at times those changes could be painful but often they were attempts to respond to actual situations. Of course there were important failures- as you would expect with any system that relied on one individual, selected at times by the random chance of their genes, and Rome seemed to specialise in competent fathers with useless sons (Severus's son Caracalla didn't survive that long after murdering his brother) but there were strategical changes as well- some of which we see in Severus's reign. Severus's change of strategic focus is interesting because it demonstrates the increasing foreignness of Rome from what it had been- and it demonstrates the way that the Empire evolved to meet new challenges- tougher enemies on the frontiers (especially in the East with the rise of Sassanid Persia) and the need to rule by consent in the provinces, and coopt local elites. Severus afterall probably spoke with a Carthaginian accent- (he might well have pronounced his own name Sheptimus Sheverus) Carthage three hundred years before his birth, had been Rome's great rival.

Severus's reign therefore is fascinating- Gibbon was right, though other reigns built towards it, it was a watershed. But 'decline' is the wrong image, rather we should think of a Severan transition- whereby under Marcus and Severus the Empire's nature changed and the old Rome slowly ebbed away to be replaced (after the shock of the mid-third century) with something very different, the empire of Diocletian and Constantine.

The Robbery of Thomas Barnard

In the next place was Try'd a Butcher , against whom it was alledged that he and his Companions rob'd one Thomas Barnard of about five or six pound in money, and afterwards desperately wounded him, with an intention, as was thought, to have kill'd him, to prevent Discovery , being, it seems, known to the said Barnard; But he by providence escaping with his life, declaring the manner of the fact, and naming one of the principal persons concern'd in it, upon a diligent serch it was not longe'r he was apprehended.This Fellony and Robbery was committed a little beyond Islington , between which place and Barnet divers others were robbed that Evening, and as was supposed, by the same gang, but no more of them were taken, neither did any of the persons so robed give Evidence against the Prisoner, but onely the said Thomas Barnard , who knowing him so well, and giving in so plain an Evidence against him, the Jury could do no less then find him Guilty , according to which evidence he now stands Condemned.

I have highlighted this from the Old Bailey records website - because I think it is intrinsically interesting. But before that the website itself is pretty extraordinary and is going straight on my blogroll- as it contains all the published records for the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey from the 17th Century to the early 20th Century when records ceased to be published. I am adding this to my blogroll because its a really wonderful resource for anyone interested in social and criminal history.


I bring up this entry though, about the robbery and attempted murder of Thomas Barnard, for a variety of reasons. One is two important signs of the way that life has changed: the first is that Islington in the 17th Century was a village not part of London as it is now, Barnet too is part of London. Highwaymen do not frequent the roads around Barnet and Islington now: that's partly because there are no highwaymen in the UK (we will move onto the reasons for that later) but those roads on which Thomas Barnard was robbed are today roads through suburban houses, filled with the bustle of city life and the area where he was robbed is now passed through by trains and tubes. That's one major change- another is the amount of money for which he was robbed- five or six pounds isn't that much money today, it will buy you some fruit, a sandwich and a coffee at some places today- in the seventeenth century five or six pounds was a hell of a lot of money. A lease in 1688 for a house with "courtledge [curtilage] orchard, garden, Hempland Meadow and close on West Cheseldon, one and a half acres" was worth roughly 2 pounds a year. So Thomas Barnard, fifteen years before that lease was brought out, was robbed of the equivalent of a two rents for a house with land- that's a hell of a lot of money in anyone's terms.

What else is interesting in this record? Well there is plenty more obviously but lets start with something I consider very interesting. There are no Highwaymen in England anymore. Why? It might seem like an odd question- afterall the levels of violence have fallen across the centuries- but think again whilst levels of violence have fallen, the types of violence have not disappeared. Violent assault by men on their wives, I would guess is less than it was in 1673, but it has not disappeared. So why did Highwaymen disappear? There is a reason that highwaymen disappeared and it has to do with the fact that their habitat disappeared. So let us look for the moment at what happened to their habitat- the rural roads around Islington and Barnet which once were prayed on and dominated by gangs like those referred to above: well one thing is that they aren't rural any more, but there are rural roads so what has changed about those rural roads?

One word comes to mind, one word that really explains the way that the English countryside has changed: that word is "Enclosure". From 1500 onwards English agriculture changed its ways completely- in your stereotypical medieval village the fields were divided into strips. Each peasant would have a strip and the field of several acres would be managed by the whole group collectively rather than individually. Property rights were subject to what E.P. Thompson called the 'moral economy'- they were not absolute. Common fields existed within people's property and were tilled by all- often for instance people would have rights to take turf for fires from a field whilst the ownership went with someone else. Significantly of course, there were common ways stretching across fields and boundaries between fields were crooked and fields were unfenced and unhedged and only locals might know where a right of passage had evolved across centuries. In this system of local byways and chaotic field organisation, highwaymen could easily evaporate into the landscape, knowing routes unavailable to less local law enforcement officials. Notice what happened within Barnard's case- he only managed to gain a conviction because he recognised his assailant.

That brings me to my last interesting point about what we can tell from this one transcript: Barnard recognised his assailant. Presumably the assailant was someone Barnard knew in his other trade as a butcher- again remember this is a local society. More often than not, people would know their assailant if they were local. Unlike most of us, whose worlds at home scarcely stretch outside our streets- these were people whose main social network were those who lived closely to them. In the Barnard case, this Butcher was unlucky enough to come across someone from the community who used his local knowledge to escape and who could identify the assailant. Of course by the end of the seventeenth century that was changing- by 1700 a tenth of the population of England lived in London- but still as a general truth it holds, this was a much less numerous and much more local society than any any of the readers of this blog lives in.

One thing though doesn't appear to have changed- if we look at the record and assess it on face value (ie assume it tells the truth about whatever happened that night in Islington) then it confirms something all of us are familiar with from the news: that robbers when frightened by the prospect of discovery will often murder rather than pursue their other crime. History is full of these moments of strangeness- when the past seems so far away that we can barely understand it (for a Londoner imagining Islington as a village!) and moments of familiarity where you can understand immediately what is happening. The task of a historian is not to forget when feeling one emotion that the other exists- history is the human past: it happened to people, but not people like us.

Medieval Lesbians

Why do you want your only one to die, who as you know, loves you with soul and body, who sighs for you every hour at every moment, like a hungry little bird... as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly... you are the only woman I have chosen according to my heart.

That text is from a 12th Century letter from a woman to another lamenting their separation. What it bears testimony to is the reality of lesbian relationships going back into the medieval period. It is hard to read that text with its references to exclusivity or indeed to the mate of the turtle dove without thinking that it is, in some sense, a love letter. But it is not alone- Lesbian literature in some form was around during the entire Middle Ages- of course as Lesbianism was prohibited and women were the silent sex during the period, there isn't that much of it but individual examples are there which illustrate what may be a greater silent trend.

The canon lawyers definitely thought that that was true. As Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe, and as its believers became more literate they developed penitentials and other legalistic codes to describe sin and administer penitence. The Penitential of Theodore reccomended that a woman who indulged in vice with another women did penance for three years- more if she were married. The Penitential of Bede stated that a woman who used an instrument in sex with another woman should do an extra four years penitence. Hildegard of Bingen argued that Lesbians usurped the male role, both in sex and in general, Etiene de Fougeres suggested that Lesbians sometimes play the cock, sometimes the hen. The fear of Lesbians was the fear of mannish women.

On the other hand, Lesbianism did not get the attention that either male homosexuality or heterosexual adultery got. Perhaps it was less common. Perhaps as well it threatened the family unit less: adultery could end in a confusion about the legitimacy of children, crucial in a society like that of medieval Europe based around lines of descent. Furthermore contemporaries couldn't quite believe in sex without penetration- women were the passive receivers of sexual attention and aggression, not the instigators of it. Indeed one medieval text argued that a mannish woman turned in either of two ways- if filled with lust she became an active seductress, if totally bereft of human feeling, she became a Lesbian.

Women though were punished for being Lesbians- and practical steps were taken to dissuade Lesbianism. In 1568, a woman was drowned in Geneva for a 'detestable and unnatural' relationship that she had with another woman. In 1405 a French woman called Laurence appealed against a conviction for Lesbianism, insisting that her partner, Jehanne, had been the instigator of the crime. A lawyer in Seville in the 16th Century witnessed the flogging of several female prisoners convicted for making artificial sexual instruments to indulge with each other. In general the courts tended to leave Lesbianism alone though- for the reasons I gave above. Yet in other parts of medieval society we find that practical measures were taken against Lesbianism- with nunneries having strict rules about communal sleeping arrangements, prohibiting nuns (particularly old and young nuns) sharing beds and maintaining a light on at all times in the dormitory.

Such a description shouldn't lead us to think that medieval Lesbianism was in any way similar to modern Lesbianism- the letter I quoted from at the beggining is phrased within the conventions of courtly love poetry. To go further, medieval individuals often thought of themselves in wildly different ways to modern individuals. Take the case of Bernadetta Carlini, an Italian nun, who claimed to have visions and to be possessed by an angelic spirit. Carlini's spirit used her body to have sexual relations with another nun in her convent- she was sentenced to imprisonment. Historians like to quarrell over whether Carlini was what we would think of as a Lesbian- she said at her trial that she had no memory of her sexual escapades- in truth its a false question. The real answer is that she like many medieval men and women thought differently about their lives than we do- instead of as historians like to do, forcing them into modern straight jackets, its worth considering what they experienced.

The difficulty in this field though is that that isn't always that easy. Carlini's case is only there because she was tried and we have the transcript, we don't have much evidence to go on here. Much of what I have written comes from an article by Jacqueline Murray (within this collection), Murray attempts to make up with theory what she lacks with evidence, a parlous proposition for history which is an empirical approach to the world. Having said that, there definitely seem to have been medieval Lesbians- and looking at the way that both the Church and courts approached them reveals the deeply sexist orientation of medieval society. Women just couldn't be evil because they were recipients, not aggressors, in the world.

What it also reveals I think is that something about the subject of human nature- lesbianism is natural to human beings- but the forms, particularly the emotional forms it takes, change with societal change. That movement is a movement between artificial constructs to express a natural reality- Carlini's experience of Lesbianism was a different expression of an underlying emotion that she shares with Jodie Foster. They might say different things and feel different things- but the underlying thing they share is an attraction to women.

Brits abroad

Roy Hodgson and Gary Johnson are not the names that fly off the tip of the tongue whenever we consider managerial jobs at the top level of English football, but they should be. Hodgson is now manager of Fulham, but has managed in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and Finland- he was also considered to be manager of Germany in the late 90s. Johnson's career is less illustrious: he has managed in England mostly and very successfully at the lower levels (Yeovil and now possibly Premiership bound Bristol City) but also had a great stint as manager of Latvia. The reason I bring these two up though doesn't lie in their exceptional careers- great though they are- but in the fact that they are so often ignored- when the lament comes up that there are no English managers, what does it say that we ignore these two and how does that structure the incentives for managers.

There are very few English managers of class in the Premiership- personally Steve Coppell, Sam Allardyce, Harry Redknapp and maybe one or two others might qualify. But overall most English managers have been left behind over the last ten years by those continental managers interested in diet and uninterested in pure motivation- the failing careers of Kevin Keegan and Peter Reid demonstrate how old methods of up and at em don't work so well any more. The English Premiership has been staffed by foreigners. You might wonder then why English managers don't go abroad?

I think there are two reasons why more don't follow in the footsteps of Hodgson and Johnson- two reasons that demonstrate an unhealthy conservatism in the attitudes of both the managers and the football bosses themselves. The first is that most English managers tend to be happy with where they are- they want to be football managers and learn the group of players that come to England and how they work. They are rigorously logical in their approach to football management- that's why they all use the same limited vocabulary, because that is the vocabulary of management. The interesting thing is that going abroad will not neccessarily teach you things that you didn't know about football but it will teach you things that you didn't know about life. And as soon as you are exposed to more, try more in life, you yourself learn more about yourself and consequently become better able to help other people. This comes in all sorts of ways- it would be interesting to think about the way someone who has never lived in a foreign country helps a 19 year old settle in a new place, it is even more interesting to consider whether knowing more in general actually enables you to think laterally- to go beyond convention and therefore to do better than convention.

The second thing is that management of football clubs is also very very conservative. If I want to employ a manager- I have a selection list normally of those who have managed Premiership clubs and perhaps of those who have managed a little abroad. That culture is so conservative because the environment around football is so conservative- the constant attacks on every foreign manager as though he might be Christian Gross, forgetting that Gross was not actually that bad. The best way to treat a new idea is to mock, the best way to treat intelligence is to imply homosexuality. Whatever your thoughts about football in general and management in particular (whether you agree with me, James and Chris Dillow that management is overrated or not) the idea that a culture could grow up which eschews thinking about problems and concentrates on mocking novelty and discouraging change is a deeply damning one. The environment means that Johnson and Hodgson are ignored, despite their acheivements, because they didn't do them in England- the Welsh manager John Toshack (successful in Spain) similarly has not been acknowledged sufficiently- whilst serial failures like Graeme Souness get reappointed constantly.

As this is an issue which is shaped out of a wider culture, I think it says something about Britain as a whole and the way that the country is still a small c conservative place and a profoundly unintellectual place. The difficulties with management that Dillow highlights so often on his blog are made worse by the fact that Britain doesn't seem to value what Denis Healey called a hinterland- a background which goes beyond the task at hand. Not something that managers think they need, or club chairmen look for...

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Spy movies have always been associated with James Bond. Bond movies are of course perfectly good- they do what they proclaim they will do and some particularly the Sean Connery ones are even very good films- but they don't epitomise the best work that a spy movie can do. That is becuase a Bond movie is about action- its about glamorous sexy women and big explosions, its about corny jokes and martial arts. Bond films are films to relax to, but they don't repay much analysis. Spies though do repay analysis and from Hitchcock thrillers and cheap noirs to the great adaptations made by the BBC in the 80s of John Le Carre's novels, they have produced some great films and television. When I think of a great spy on screen, I think of Richard Widmark fingering Jean Peters's bag in Pickup on South Street, or even more so of Alec Guinness shuffling into the London circus in order to plot the downfall of Moscow Central, with weary and sad resignation.

The Manchurian Candidate is a film that fits neatly within that genre- this is a film that explores the internal world of the spy. From the moment it begins, we are told that the problem with a normal spy is that he will collapse, he will feel guilt, remorse and pain. That when he murders, like Lady Macbeth, he will spot the blood on his hands- or like Macbeth be haunted by ghosts of Banquos that he has disposed of. The premise of the Manchurian candidate is that the most sophisticated spying operation in the world is one which dispenses with the spy, but finds a human that it can divest of his individuality- of his fear- of his memory of committing acts. The most successful spy is hypnotised, turned into a mere instrument in the hands of those who would use him and thus rendered completely without the intelligence to operate in a contrary fashion to their intentions. Of course nobody has achieved this outside of Hollywood films, though George Smilley might at this point knowingly nod his head and argue that all spies to an extent compromise their own personalities- learn to live with dark memories- the key here though is that the Manchurian agent had no volition, did not choose but lived the life his handlers chose for him.

But he symbolises something rather important- a point that Thomas Hobbes (about whom more soon) would have empathised with. The Manchurian Candidate is the most unlikely Communist agent- he is the adopted son of a Republican Senator whose wife is a senior red baiter. He is a war hero and a journalist. He is the soul of the Washington Establishment- a man who has met the President and whom generals salute. Yet he is unknowingly the spy, the assassin, sent to kill the targets of the communist plotters. The only men who see through him are those from his own platoon, who shared in the brainwashing and whose memories return as vile nightmares to stalk their dreams. The centre of this film though is an unsettling notion- that noone can know accurately who other people are- that endless fear is justifiable but ultimately corrosive and picks the wrong targets (McCarthyism is an obvious target in the film) and that the construction of trust is the basis of society. At one point in the film, a central character trusts another central character- indeed the film is built entirely on moments of trust: a girl meets a guy on a train, she trusts him enough to see that he is sick and needs help and she provides him with the stability to turn his life around. Janet Leigh's character is the female version of that stock character in film- the man who sees an attractive woman in trouble and helps her out in order to win her hand- only now the situations are reversed. But the central point is there: trust is what makes the world turn round.

Of course trust opens the way for the Manchurian candidate. But that trust is tempered by understanding, by an effort to sympathetically reach inside someone's brain and understand the logic of what they do and why they do it. The movie rests upon an act of empathy- of logical connection that sees the future in terms of unwinding the logical process that led to the creation of the spy. Essentially the film rests upon a liberal conceit- that reason can persuade anyone to back democracy and the American way and that reason is universal: that there is no such thing as the ultimately anti-rational- there is just the irrational. In that sense, the movie sits at two intersections- describing adequately the response of liberal thinkers to the problmes of the world but also describing the response of modern psychology to the problems of the psyche. Understand and confront are the watchwords here- and the rhetoric of conflict is ridiculed as both ineffective and conniving. Like Shakespeare (and significantly Edward Murrow) the film reminds us that

the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves

Its an important idea. And requires us to investigate ourselves- requires that solipsistic tendency which is the ultimate key legacy of Christian thought to liberal thinking: a concentration on understanding and addressing the inner motivations of the brain so as to understand and deal with their consequences. The point of the Manchurian candidate is about the ways that psychology enable us to analyse and also act upon the world- and there is no surprise that in this film it is in our minds, not on the ground, that the war between America and Russia is conducted. Science not scandal mongering will allow us to capture the high ground.

Its an interesting thesis- and not one that all liberals would agree with (Sir Isaiah Berlin would for example give such a position a sophisticated argumentative drubbing) but it is central to the kind of American liberalism that has prospered in Ivy League campuses and Eastern cities since the war. Within that liberal tradition, the Republicans have are represented as fake spokesmen of hatredn, as pharisees whose attention is misfocussed. Instead of looking inward on themselves, and seeking to empathise with those that oppose them, they look outward to condemn and consequently miss the biggest facts, and fail to deal with what they see. That is the position that this film endorses- I make no comment as to its accuracy. In that sense this is a fascinating historical document of the way that psychologically and politically liberalism links together.

It works because of its performances- there is plenty here to chew on because the actors themselves have got within their characters. In some senses the attitudes of the film are not easy to cope with: there are as I argued above some recognisably ungendered characters here. The men are mostly dependant, the women are mostly strong and resolute. Evil in this film is female, but so interestingly is the ultimate pole of good. Military life is shown in all its decadence: the men on bases whore and drink to cope with a fearful war. Furthermore this is a film about shell shock: its a film about the nightmares that wake you after war. A film about all the men destroyed by war who returned to Europe and America in the forties, fifties and sixties to lean on their wives. Its a film as well about the concept of patriotism, about the idea of service- which sometimes neccessitates great sacrafice. It is a great patriotic movie- its significant in my view that JFK was an important force in getting it made- he persuaded Arthur Krim (then President of United Artists) that the film should go out and contained no threat to the Presidency- for this is a film about Kennedyesque liberalism- America as a rational city on the hill. It is hard to remember now a time before the great conservative upswell of the sixties, seventies and eighties but this film comes from a moment where liberalism seemed triumphant- where reason seemed to have victored.

Its an important film- and remains an important film which embodies an outlook on the world. This is an enlightenment film- it is a film in praise of reason. Lastly it is significant that the key signal in the film comes from a pack of cards- the cards are random, but the signal is not- it is assigned by a man in Russia to be followed by a man in America and once understood, it enables one to perceive all the actions of the film to be logical and follow rationally. Language in the film means something, cards mean something, actions mean something- all that you need to do is read yourself and others accurately and the truth will be revealed. A truth that then allows you to take political actions- rhetoric and ambition cloud the issue, but reason is the key to unlock the universe.

Or at least that's how the world looked in 1962...