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...

Pope's Solitude

ODE ON SOLITUDE.[56]


1 Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.

2 Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

3 Blest, who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day;

4 Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mix'd; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

5 Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

That Alexander Pope, who was one of the great publicists as poets go, wrote it makes the poem a deeply ironical performance. Pope lived the opposite kind of life- far from being normal he was deformed and a Catholic in a Protestant society, far from being eager to attain rural bliss, Pope lived as close to London as he could be legally permitted to, far from being content with oblivion, the poet endlessly endeavoured to put his name before the public- becoming one of the first poets who could afford to chop and change publishers. Pope did not live a life of rural simplicity- but was rather addicted to complication- to social nuance and to luxury: he is the appropriate beggining to a century which ended with Jane Austen. But whereas Austen can at times seem priggish, looking down through the eyes of Fanny Price on the immoral gaiety of Mary Crawford, Pope looks at society with a mocking glint in his eye, revelling in its absurdity.

So what are we to make of this poem? Firstly lets put something straight- this poem puts a very conventional viewpoint across brilliantly. Most eighteenth century wits would have agreed that the city was evil, the countryside good. The sentiments of Pope's poem sit at ease with the triumph of the pastoral in the previous century, and with the nature poets of the next. Idealising the independence of the rural life, he sits neatly with those republican theorists of his own time who saw true freedom as lying in independence. More so there is a strong Christian influence in the poem- what it describes is a demi Eden, Adam without Eve, growing alone and unconcerned by reputation and by bustle, just to fructify the earth and live in praise of God- live 'blest' by the ignorance that proceeds from solitude. This is a hero who can get everything from his land- his own flocks give him clothes, his trees give him shade. Luxury, the production of capitalism, is eshewed in conventional terms.

Did Pope actually believe this or is the poem ironic? I think it isn't ironic but actually reflects something that Pope himself actually believed in part- and this brings me on to something I think we can see established in the text of the poem. In a sense Pope was the kind of deeply sociable person who should have been most at odds with this Arcadian view- in the Rape of the Lock and in his masterpieces the Dunciad and the Essay on Criticism, he showed a true verve for critiquing others and living in society. But he is drawn back in this poem and others to the vision of the world as one of independence and the beauty of natural loneliness- his disposition draws him in one direction, the conventions of his time in another. Pope was obviously an exceedingly complicated man- and I think this poem reflects that- but if I might make a trite comment, I'd suggest that in this poem what we see is the way that convention can mould even the most resistant of us. Pope ended up praising a lifestyle he wouldn't be able to bear, simply because his age praised it in such reverent terms- whatever his rational mind said, Pope was attracted by the emotional pull of the ideal which is what this poem attests to. Its interesting in that sense because it demonstrates the way that people have a complex interrelationship with their own times- often feeling a yearning to conform even if conformity would strip them of what they were.

Even Pope afterall was willing to write against sophistication!

Caroline O'Day, The Gentlewoman from New York

Caroline O'Day was one of the pioneering women of the last century- who invaded former male preserves and had a large impact. She was the first Congresswoman elected from a large state- New York and had influential ties to the White House, particularly to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her career though is interesting not merely as an exempla but also as a clue to what early 20th Century America was like, how its history interacted with the social change that was sweeping the continent and was symbolised by the growing industrial, cultural and political might of the nascent super power. O'Day was in a sense an emblem of an era- her political career allows us to abstract some characteristics of American society and get closer to the social movements that convulsed her country in her times. Based on a recent article in the New York History Journal by Paul DeForest HIcks, I think we can assess O'Day's career.

First amongst those is the degree of social change. We often forget that a single lifespan could easily bridge the America of Lincoln, the civil war, and the America of Nixon, let alone that of Roosevelt. A single lifespan did bridge those Americas- John Nance Garner 'Cactus Jack' was born when Grant was President and died when Johnson was. O'Day again was affected hugely by her upbringing- born in Georgia in the aftermath of civil war she was affected by a pacifist upbringing, stimulated by parents who had seen the horrors of the civil war, and consequently she was one of the isolationist Democrats who opposed the Second World War. She was associated with other leading Democrat women in New York, including Eleanor Roosevelt, in constructing a charitable foundation to stimulate rural manufacturing of furniture. There is something Arcadian about her description of The Cottage,

When politics is through with us we are retiring to this charming retreat that is now rearing its stone walls against the cedars of a Dutchess County hillside.

Of course that was not the America she lived in. She married the heir of a Standard Oil fortune- Daniel O'Day. His father Daniel O'Day senior was unscrupulous, even by the standards of the robber-barons- but the son was more interested in politics than oil and was a leading supporter of woman's suffrage, a cause which his wife inherited.

That brings me on to the second idea that I think Caroline O'Day's life embodies. America by the time she died was a vast place, stretching from ocean to ocean and holding within it every kind of life. But it was also a place of intimacy. In part that was cultivated intimacy- O'Day as a young woman had exhibited art in Paris and sought to add European sophistication to New World naivete. In part though that intimacy was the reality of any political world- what we constantly see through O'Day's life is that neccessarily politics is the business of intimacy. O'Day was part of a partnership with her husband, both interested in woman's suffrage- according to the New York Times it was he who stimulated her interest in the subject. But he died in 1916 and from then on the central relationship politically of O'Day's life was with the Roosevelts. Eleanor and her were colleagues in the charitable foundation I quoted above, they were also close and Eleanor campaigned for her in New York when she was first elected in 1934. O'Day's personality was a winning one- she increased her plurality in every election, save that of 1940 when she was running despite a debilitating illness. She had an important leglislative record on labour and immigration during the 1930s, through her ability to charm and persuade. In the world of intimate politics, O'Day was a supreme politician.

She is not a famous figure, though she left her mark on America. But she was notable both for her own acheivements and for the way she exemplified some of the important trends and facts about America of her time. Hicks has done a good job in describing her career- and she does not deserve the obscurity that she has found.

In Bruges

In Bruges is a very very good film. It isn't hard to see that it is a very good effort- and numerous people have seen that but it is more difficult to describe why. Basically the story goes that two Irish hitmen have been sent to the Belgian city, Bruges, after a killing that they've performed for Harry, their London boss. Skulking in Bruges, they encounter a wide variety of characters- from sexy Belgian drug dealers, to midget American actors, fat American tourists, a gun salesman who likes talking about alchoves and practising his English and a set of Dutch prostitutes. Also Harry at one point reenters the story giving one of the assassins, Ken, a mission to perform. All of this takes place against the background of church towers, canal trips and art galleries- thinking about death and man's place in the world and copious ammounts of beer.

Putting that out there might make the film seem merely a surrealist piece of work, but it isn't. The reality is provided by the humour- its outrageous and outrageously funny. The younger assassin, Ray, spends most of his time taking the mickey out of people- turning to American tourists and telling them they won't make it round the bends in a spiral staircase because they are so fat, he is offensive, irritating and obnoxious but unbeleivably accurate and funny. There are some truly wonderful moments here where phrase and situation are linked- where say Ray captures something wonderfully and puts it in a line which presents the outrageous thought in all its originality and its accuracy. Take for example his comment on Bruges,

Look, Ken. I grew up in Dublin, and I love Dublin. If I had grown up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn't, so it doesn't.

Could you encapsulate that attitude any better than with that line of dialogue- just think of it, the economy of the way that the words present the sentiment. It is not a nice sentiment- but as language it is almost perfect and perfect lines slip out of the mouths of all of the characters here. This is a movie about words- I listened to an interview with Colin Farrell who is one of the movie's stars and said that he didn't ever feel like changing a line of the film because it was so perfect and I think he was right. To add to it, Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the main leads, give fantastic performances as do a range of actors, from Ralph Fiennes to Clemence Poesy, in supporting roles.

The film sits obviously in several traditions. Fiennes's character owes a lot to Michael Caine in Get Carter. Indeed the whole persona of the gangster in the film owes a lot to Caine and earlier gangster characters. These men operate violently but seem to disregard the violence that they commit in favour of adherance to a code of honour, of morality. At one point Ken turns to Harry and tells him to do what he likes to him, he (Ken) has done his job and no ammount of torture or violence could make his choice different. In that sense noone is tortured in this film- people are maimed, killed and beaten up but torture is absent. That kind of violence has no meaning. Moral choice is independent of and over and above violence- it stands in another category. I lied slightly, the only torture in this film is the torture of guilt and in a way violence represents an escape for the characters from that torture.

The obvious tradition that this film sits with is the films of Quentin Tarrantino- but In Bruges demonstrates how poor Tarrantino's films actually are. I've expounded before on how much I dislike the philosophical outlook of Reservoir Dogs- and I have similar views about Pulp Fiction and his other movies. But I think this is what Tarrantino's fans often claims he does- this combines the gangster severity of Scorsese and a whole line of films going back to Jimmy Cagney along with the theatrical imagination of wit of a Beckett. This film obviously owes something to Waiting for Godot. But its violence is much more serious and it has a wider purpose than just making a reference- violence in this film is very serious, it ends lives and goes through lives. Humour here is not adolescent but is bitter- based on the deep sorrows. Ray almost seems to be psychologically falling apart as the film goes on- his life is slowly eroded by an act of violence, accidental violence perpetrated before the start of the movie.

Away from such paltry traditions leading onwards from Tarrantino: the film's consideration of violence is deeply embedded in Christianity. The graphic fantasy of what violence might look like- what torture is- is abandoned. What we have here is the development of two ethoses- a pagan ethos- noble warriors whose roots lie in an honour cult which comes up against the idea of forgiveness, the idea of a second chance. On the one side, we have a symbolic act of suicide- once you have failed for whatever reason you take the hemlock- as Thrasea did under Nero- and in suicide become a hero, on the other side, there is the Christian view of suicide: that there is no sin that kills you, that suicide is an abandonment of life and the opportunity of doing something to repair your sin, that redemption is possible and proceeds through forgiveness. In that sense- with those two oppositions, the film seeks to understand some of the fundamental conflicts within western civilisation (conflicts that interestingly for instance often demonstrate how little Christianity works as a label): at the end of the film some of the characters conform to their pagan stereotypes and that is where the last and perhaps most theological vista is opened up.

In the midst of the film, the two main characters go to an art gallery and look at some of those wonderful portraits of hell done by medieval artists- it strikes me that this is the twentieth century equivalent of a 14th Century depiction of the day of judgement. Two of Ray's comments expose this, working around historical Bruges is an analogy for him for dwelling in his own hellish past, towards the end of the movie he realises that Bruges itself is hell- this film is the navigation, the description of that hell- and its vital to understand how the pagan ethic of the protagonists, shorn of forgiveness, leaves them all stuck in Bruges for all eternity!

Phoning through the past

This video is incredible- because it illustrates how quickly the world has changed in the 20th Century. Dial tone phones are of course now a thing of the past. In the 1930s when this video was made, in the UK there were still single numbers- London 1 etc- telephones had just exploded to becoming a consumer product, like the internet of today. Phones have of course become a standard consumer product- about possibly to be replaced by Skype and other things like it.

But they have done so incredibly quickly- the pace of technological development means that the lives that we live today in so many aspects- including the one I'm typing on to you now and the fact you are reading this online- would have been unrecognisable to our parents, let alone our grandparents when they were growing up. Someone who was born in 1920 will have lived through the rise of the car, the rise of the washing machine, the rise of the computer and the rise of the internet. Just think about that for a moment- and one of the central differences between our century and the past becomes clear. A medieval peasant could say between 1200 and 1400 be pretty confident that though there were changes in the way he farmed, his grandparents would understand them. For us though, how would you explain to your great grandparents (who as mine did died at some point before the second world war) how the internet works. Just imagine for a second how much change, if the girl in the video is still alive (and probably in her late seventies, early eighties now) she has seen.

Its an interesting thing to think about: because coping with technological change has suddenly become so much more important. Kids do because they are born to an era with the current systems: but for the rest of us, the fact that we learn so much when we are children is no longer adequate. We have to keep learning as adults just in order to keep up with the ways that communication and life are changing- that produces the stress of adults who have to learn how to program Sky Plus (Tivo for Americans) and work out HTML.

The world is changing and that means that we have to change the way that we learn- its no longer ok just to learn as a kid, welcome to the world which changes so fast that even adults are ignorant.

Page 123

Paulie has just tagged me with this meme, the rules are

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Ok the nearest book I picked up was Sarah Barber's Regicide and Republicanism (its about the English Republicans in the seventeenth century who campaigned for the King's death). On page 123

A formal charge was issued on 20 January 1649 and sentence passed a week later.

Charles was found guilty of High Treason and executed outside the banquetting hall in Whitehall on 30 January 1649.

Kingship and the Lords were abolished on 17 and 19 March, and England was finally declared a Republic a month later.

They are pretty cool sentences, but then you find them in books about the English Civil War. I challenge Matt Sinclair, Vino Sangripillai, James Hamilton, James Higham and Welshcakes Limoncello to find some better ones.

Humphrey Lyttleton

Humphrey Lyttleton died today. For those who don't know, Lyttleton was a number of things- he was a superb comic with wonderful bumbling timing, he was a wit with an extensive repertoire of conversational gambits, he was a trumpetter who brought jazz to BBC radio and ultimately was responsible for much of the fame of the genre of music in the UK. He didn't take himself seriously but came across as a phenomenally intelligent and talented man- the 'elder statesman of British jazz', he was a cartoonist as well with a superb talent not to mention a radio presenter. The thing I always liked about him was that though his jokes belonged in some cases to an earlier era- full of double entendres, it was a gentle comedy, an absurdist comedy but one confident enough of its own intelligence not to need to flaunt it. He had many of the virtues that I described here, and in a sense his comedy lived in the spirit of Wallace and Gromit- in a thread that spreads back to classics like Dad's Army. The comedies are very different- but the one thing that they have in common are that they are gentle, they don't mock people to upset, they mock affectionately- the laughter is a tone of a shared love. Lyttleton I always thought got that- his tone was warm, he was always chortling and his trumpetting was divine. You could tell he did what he did because he loved it- not merely because he continued working till he died at the age of 86- but because his comedy for instance wasn't selfish but was merry. If there are higher ambitions, I don't know what they are.

What is a Public Intellectual?

Polls of the most important public intellectual come out all the time at the moment- the American journal Foreign Policy is doing one at the moment (no prizes for guessing the main subject of that journal) and has a list out of which you can vote the top twenty. Fair enough you might say- accept really what they seem to be talking about here is political polemecists, not intellectuals and that the idea that a vote reflects any kind of intellectual merit is a bit like the idea that a vote could determine the best scientific or mathematical theory, its stupidity is only matched by its inanity.

What do I mean by the first thing I said? Well take a look at the list. At first sight you might see names like Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, Richard Dawkins, the British Biologist and so on and think aha- this is about a spread of thinkers over a wide area. You would be wrong though. Take Chomsky, I doubt he is there for his linguistic work which has been dominant in that field- I'd suggest his presence there is actually because of his jeremaids against American power. Likewise I'm not sure Dawkins makes the list for his biology, rather than his ability to upset religious people. At least the three I quote above and others like Benedict XVI are distinguished intellectuals (whatever you think of their political thinking- and in some cases (Chomsky comes to mind) their policy ideas are inferior to their other work). But Christopher Hitchens, great polemecist and writer he may be, has contributed very little of intellectual value to the world. His recent biography of Tom Paine is an absolute joke, which would be hilarious if it weren't meant seriously. Likewise Al Gore, good politician no doubt, but I doubt he had anything to do with the intellectual foundations of political theory.

Yes there are some names on the list that I had not come across- Hu Shuli for example the Chinese journalist. But equally there are names which astonished me- as a historian I can name many more intellectually exciting people than Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson (off the top of my head, Quentin Skinner, Sir Keith Thomas and Ira Katznelson all make me think far more than Ferguson with his Telegraph pieties has ever done.) All lists will have names that you don't see- but the difference between the two sets of people is that Ferguson say is a great self-publicist (the man has an ego the size of Olympus to go by his TV appearances and lectures- only exceeded by David Starkey) whereas Skinner, Thomas and Katznelson have made some very original contributions to their periods and to their studies. In a sense this isn't so much a set of interesting people who can provoke and make you think, as a collection of great self-publicists- the list produced by Foreign Policy is about marketting not mastering a leading subject.

The same thing goes for their method of choosing the top twenty- again what does the fact that x wins a vote tell you about the ideas that the winner has expressed? It tells you nothing! To take an example, I am not qualified to tell you how good a physicist Richard Feynman was and how he compared to Enrico Fermi- I have no idea because I don't know about higher physics. I do have an idea about historians but that's because I have a PhD in the subject- and even then with history outside my own specialism, I don't know who has the best knowledge of the sources. To say that I can judge the most original and thoughtful intellectual on all these subjects is crap! And it reinforces something that I think we should be very careful about- to understand the best idea as the most popular idea is not a sensible thing. Subjects are complicated and they require a lot of patience and learning- becoming an intellectual is not writing a blog, its not writing for a newspaper, its learning facts, understanding arguments and thinking deeply. The list from Foreign Affairs includes trivial people and is based on trivial grounds- that is a pity- I want to know who are the most interesting people in other subjects because then I can go and read them- a list that contains Christopher Hitchens is unlikely to give me that.

All the way without Jose?

Chelsea this season stand on the brink of winning maybe one and possibly even two trophies- they sit in the semi finals of the Champions League and are second in the Premiership behind Manchester United. Other clubs will have something to say about that: obviously Manchester United are favourites to win the Premiership and in the Champion's League, the men from London will have to beat Liverpool over two legs (something they haven't managed so far in that competition) and then confront one of United or Barcelona in the final. But for the moment, Chelsea's season is ending well and given a disastrous start, its possible to even argue that Chelsea haven't done that badly this season at all. So what, you might be tempted to say- well the key thing about that fact is that whilst it has happened Chelsea have lost a manager, Jose Mourinho who almost everyone in football reckons is one of the great coaches of his generation and have brought in a nonentity Avram Grant. What does their continual success say about media perception of managers? What does it say about the cult of the manager?

Lets start with the first question. Its pretty obvious that Mourinho is a very good manager- he won the Champion's League with Porto, has two English Premierships and a couple of the more minor cups in the UK to his name. There is no doubt that he comes across as a very bright guy as well, swatting away the sports reporters of the BBC and Sky with the contempt that they deserve. The real point though is that the press have never taken Grant seriously- he hasn't managed in England or one of the big leagues- but he has got experience in Israel and has won championships with Israeli clubs. He might not come across as impressively as the Portugeese and scowls, but he is someone who has real acheivements and spent quite a considerable time in England as director of football in both Portsmouth and Chelsea. Not merely Roman Abramovich, who didn't get his money by being thick, nor Harry Rednapp, who hasn't got a long success in football management by tolerating fools, are idiots: and someone who both of them like has got to have a presumption of being at least competent.

But even so, Mourinho and Grant are still far apart. Journalists close to the Chelsea camp suggest that Grant hasn't had much of an effect on Chelsea players- some speculate that the backroom staff are having more of an effect. I disagree. And I wonder whether privately many chairmen would disagree- their bank balances would argue that. Cristiano Ronaldo takes home the astonishing 120,000 pounds a week from the Glazers, Alex Ferguson takes home a fraction of that. That suggests that players have more of an effect than managers on results- I wonder whether the Chelsea situation makes that point as well. Chelsea are still playing in exactly the same way as they were under Mourinho- its the same squad too with the addition of Nicolas Anelka- and largely we are seeing the same type of results, grimly grafted out by athletic players. Chelsea's totems are their central midfielders, industrious souls like Michael Essien, Frank Lampard, Obi John Mikel and others sitting in front of a terrifying back four, sternly safeguarded by John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho. The manager Mourinho had to bring them together and see how they would fit, he had to design the training routines that would make them tick- but seemingly since then they have been on automatic pilot. With a good plan they have just got on with it.

Of course that is a mischeivous point of view- but its worth thinking about. Afterall in the Victorian era, players did choose the team and make the decisions- there were reasons why that changed but it also reflected something true about any team game. I wonder whether the situation at Chelsea is more Victorian or Edwardian than we think it is, with figures like Terry and Lampard having more of an influence than their nominal superior. Without being inside the dressing room, we can't know. I wonder also about the margins that managers give teams- would Manchester United be worse off without Ferguson or Ronaldo- the directors pay the two as if that question is resolved in Ronaldo's favour but does that indicate anything real?

The Science of Paracelsus

Paracelsus was an early modern medical chemist- his writings were incredibly influential in the early history of science, in the study of the occult, in the histories of medicine and of chemistry. He wandered through central Europe- Germany and Switzerland mainly though he also went to Scandinavia, Hungary, Russia, France and Asian Turkey. Paracelsus was responsible for the fact that we call zinc, zinc. He was a wandering quack, often despised by contemporary physicians but often also in advance of many of their theories- he beleived in equal proportions things that we would now consider madness and some things which anticipate some of the discoveries of modern medicine. His medicine was not a proper science, as we would see it, based upon evidence and subject to hypothesis- rather as I hope will become clear in this article Paracelsus believed that medicine might be derived from metaphysical and theological views, in much the same way as many ancient philosophers sought to harmonise science and philosophy, testing each by their coherence with each other, rather than their correspondence with what we all see in the world.

I mention Paracelsus, largely because of Cedric Beidatsch's interesting article in Eras, an Australian history journal. Beidatsch is interested in Paracelsus's views on love- and though I don't know much about Paracelsus and therefore cannot vouch for Beidatsch's work, what he has uncovered is, if true, very interesting. He argues that basically Paracelsus's medicine and theology rests upon a pretty unique view of the way that love works. For a moment its worth going back to Plato. In the Symposium, a dialogue about love, one of the speakers argues that originally every human being was a hermaphrodite, and that they were split up by a vengeful God, and that ever since we have been striving to find our other halfs- hence the strength of the emotion of love and its fixation on one object is the fixation of a disunited human upon its other part. Its worth thinking about that, partly because I am sure Paracelsus would have been aware of the doctrine, but also because the idea provides a useful entree to Paracelsus's thought when he like Plato approached the problem of love. You see ultimately we ought to be more promiscuous than we are: this emotion of love which comes across us for one or a couple of objects out of several thousands is something that needs to be explained. Plato, at one point, explained it by reference to this idea of a split human being: Paracelsus argued that we were not split but we were created so as to have a perfect partner. He argued that God had created us and predestined us for one particular partner.

Some interesting implications flowed from this view. Paracelsus believed that we would always meet this partner eventually: providence would direct that we did, unless sin turned that providence aside. He argued that amongst such sins, we should reckon the marriage contract. The marriage contract was an attempt to bind us where no bounds were neccessary: ultimately only a sinner would break from their lover. It was also an attempt to fix us within the bounds of an artificial matrimony- marriage and inheritance could in his view distort our actual mission which was to find the love that God intended for us, in favour of finding property or power or family pride. Paracelsus believed that such love was embedded in our very natures- our chemistry was orientated to this kind of love. He found that his alchemical investigations, not to mention his theological speculations about the nature of God cemented this perspective. The construction of the human body reflected the importance of love to our health. God himself, Paracelsus held, was the product of these forces- and within the depths of the divine nature was concealed a love between God and Mary which had produced the Holy Spirit and the Son, the second and third persons of the Trinity. This structure radiating downwards provided him with some of the theses that he wanted to cure people with, but also with the ways that he understood God and the nature of our obligations to each other.

Obviously most of this is completely mad. But what is interesting about it is what it says about the way that Paracelsus and many of those who followed him, most of which probably did not understand the full ramifications of his doctrine worked. Our science and our metaphysics are actually not often related- we tend to make science empirical and metaphysics philosophical. For Paracelsus consistency between the two was much more important than it is to us- metaphysical conclusions determined things about how one would seek to cure phsyical problems. Furthermore for Paracelsus the explanation had to be complete- he sought completeness and consequently sought consistency all the way up and down the spectrum of knowledge. Every area represented an analogy of every other area- the world worked by consistent rules. Much of modern science rests on the idea that we are actually ignorant and that we have to be sceptical about what we can know. Paracelsus differed from a modern scientist because the basis of his science was not the derivation of theory from empirical matter, or from mathematics (then to be validated by empirical data) but he derived his ideas from the logical extension of metaphysical and ethical principles. He expected nature to conform to the moral world and vice versa and he expected to see a complete system.

In that sense he represents a man very much of his times and from that perspective the way his attitudes work, especially if they are as bizarre as Beidatsch suggests, reflects the different nature of science as he understood it from the way that we understand the same process.