Sunday round-up: observations and recommendations 24 March 2024
The now-regular factoids, trawlings of television and YouTube, and words in any format that I think you should move before your eyes if you have the opportunity
Happy World Tuberculosis Day. That doesn’t really work, does it? Still, today is indeed World TB Day, inaugurated in 2012 “to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis”. (Maybe I’m an insufferable member of a metropolitan elite, but I’ve always rather assumed that tuberculosis is negative rather than positive in terms of the health, social and economics stakes.)
It’s also National Cheesesteak Day, National Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day and National Cocktail Day, though you will have guessed from the dizzying pointlessness of these commemorations which “nation” we’re talking about. More seriously, in Argentina it is the annual Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice (Día de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), held on the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état which ushered in the seveen-and-a-half-year military dictatorship or “National Reorganisation Process” (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional).
Closer to home, it is the feast of St Hildelith of Barking. We know very little about this 8th-century Christian figure, except that she was not Anglo-Saxon but brought by St Earconwald, a Saxon prince who was also bishop of London from AD 675 to AD 693 to instruct his sister St Æthelburh (high-achieving family, sanctity-wise) in her role as abbess of Barking. A migrant worker! That leads us neatly into this week’s collection of…
Factoids
The smallest church in London is St Ethelburga’s Bishopgate, built at an unknown date but before 1250 in honour of the same Æthelburh who was abbess of Barking. It was very badly damaged in the Provisional IRA’s 1993 bombing of the City of London, which killed a freelance photographer called Ed Henty and injured more than 40 people. It was very rare as a mediaeval church which had survived the Great Fire of 1666, a bell turret was added in 1775, and the minor damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz was made good by 1953. The PIRA succeeded where the fire tetrahedron and Hermann Göring had failed: an Iveco tipper truck, stolen from Newcastle-under-Lyme and carrying a one-tonne ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb hidden under a layer of tarmac, was parked just over 20 feet away outside 99 Bishopsgate, at the junction with Wormwood Street and Camomile Street. At 10:27 am on 24 April 1993, the bomb exploded with the power of 1,200 kilograms of TNT, creating a mushroom cloud visible across the capital and tearing a 15-feet-wide crater in the road. The repair bill would top £1 billion, and flattened more than half of St Ethelburga’s. So extensive was the damage that the Church of England planned to demolish it, but there was a public outcry and it was instead rebuilt to the original floor-plan. It is now the home of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.
The font in St Ethelburga’s bears an inscription of one of the longest palindromes devised, ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ (Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin, “wash the sins, not only the face”). The phrase is attributed to St Gregory of Nazianzus (d. AD 390), archbishop of Constantinople and one of the principal authors of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It was first inscribed on a font outside Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, but can also be found, among other places, in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, the oldest parish church in Nottingham; the Abbey Church of St Mary the Virgin, formerly part of the Benedictine abbey of Tewkesbury; the Church of St Vincent de Paul in Paris’s 10th arrondissement; and on the baptismal font of the Cathedral Church of St Michael and All Angels in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Since we are on the subject of monks and nuns, the core of my soon-to-be-completed-honestly-guv’nor doctoral thesis, the name of Westminster is absolutely world-famous. Yet how many of us imagined there was also an Eastminster? That, however, is how the abbey of St Mary of Graces, a Cistercian convent founded on Tower Hill in 1350, was known. Edward III had been caught on board a ship during a storm and, in his desperate prayers, “made a vow to build a Monasterie to the honour of God, and our Ladie of grace, if God would grant him grace to come safe to land”. He did, so he did. Five Cistercian monks were despatched from Beaulieu Regis abbey in Hampshire to form the nucleus of the new community, which survived almost two centuries before surrendering to the crown in September 1538 (or perhaps March 1539) and being dissolved. When the abbey closed it was home to 10 Cistercian brothers including Abbot Henry More, who was also head of Coggeshall Abbey. When the house closed, its income was £602 11s. 10½d. gross (£547 0s. 6½d. net), at a time when the crown’s total income was around £100,000.
I deliberately described St Mary of Graces as a Cistercian “convent”. Since the middle of the 19th century, we have used the word generally to mean the home of a community of nuns, but originally and accurately it is the corporate form of a community of men or women religious—that is, monks, nuns, friars or sisters living together—or the building(s) in which they live. It derives from the Latin conventus, past participle of the verb convenire, “to convene” or “to come together”, so it is a simple and descriptive term: a having-come-together. Originally “convent” was used for a group of mendicant friars who, by their very nature, spent their time travelling, but came to apply to any religious house, whether a monastery, a priory, a friary, a nunnery, a canonry.
The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1905-12), a 16-volume blockbuster intended as an “international work of reference on the constitution, doctrine, discipline, and history of the Catholic Church”, notes in the prim fashion of the time that the word “convent” as a religious community was “first used in this sense when the eremitical life began to be combined with the cenobitical”. That’s quite a sentence: in case there are any stragglers, an eremite is a religious recluse or hermit, so “the eremitical life” is withdrawing from the world to focus on the spiritual existence; a “cenobite”, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is someone living a communal existence (κοινόβιον, koinobion) for reasons of religious motivation.
As I wrote earlier in the week, the full provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 come into force soon, on 1 April. (Personally, I would never bring legislation into force on 1 April, because it just seems to invite mockery.) You can pick over the ‘free speech v hate crime’ discourse elsewhere, but what I’ll note, as we’re on a religious theme, is that it will abolish (in Scotland) the common law offence of blasphemy. This is the end of a very gentle run-down. In 1697, an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Aikenhead, had engaged in what we might now think of as “spicy banter” with friends about matters of religion. He should have chosen his friends more carefully: he was indicted for blasphemy, the charge sheet including that Christ “had learned magick in Egypt”, that “he preferred Muhammad to Christ”, “rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation” (St Gregory of Nazianzus, above, would have been hurt) and “scoffed at the incarnation of Christ”. The lord advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, prosecuted vigorously, demanding the death penalty to make an example of Aikenhead, and the jury found him guilty on 24 December 1696. On the morning of 8 January 1697, he was hanged at the Gallowlee (probably on Leith Walk today), the last person executed for blasphemy in Great Britain. He was probably 20 years old.
Aikenhead was executed under the provisions of the Act against Blasphemy 1661 and the Act against Blasphemy 1695 which reiterated its force, both acts of the pre-Union Parliament of Scotland. These laws decreed that “whosoever hereafter, not being distracted in his wits, shall rail upon or curse God or any of the persons of the Blessed Trinity” should be “punished with death”. In fact that was—I suppose obviously—the ultimate sanction. More pragmatically, first-time offenders, of which Aikenhead was one and petitioned the Privy Council to so remind them, were usually sack-clothed and imprisoned, with the death penalty being a third-strike punishment. But Stewart of Goodtrees got his way; two ministers and two counsellors argued for clemency but the Privy Council decided it would only show mercy if the Church of Scotland intervened. The General Assembly, then sitting in Edinburgh, was not in a merciful mood, and urged “vigorous execution” to curb “the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land”. Hanging it was.
The death penalty for blasphemy in Scotland was abolished in 1825 under the Leasing-Making (Scotland) Act, amended in 1837, which stipulated that blasphemy, with various other offences, “should be punished in the same Manner as such Crimes would be punished if committed in England” (I can hear SNP teeth grinding from here), that is, by a fine or imprisonment or both. The last prosecution for blasphemy, assuming the Crown Office doesn’t plan to rush one through in the next week, was in 1843, when a bookseller called Thomas Paterson was sentenced to 15 months in prison at the High Court in Edinburgh. He was found guilty of exhibiting “placards of a profane nature” in the window of his shop, “to the annoyance of the neighbourhood and the public”. Paterson was a punchy controversialist. One placard announced:
Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting—to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation—and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.
Another, pithier, sign read simply “The Bible and other obscene works not sold at this shop”.
There was, shamefully recently, an attempt by activists to have a prosecution for blasphemy brought, and amusingly it involves my alma mater, the University of St Andrews. In 2009, the Just So student club (now the Musical Theatre Society) announced that it would stage a production of Jerry Springer: The Opera at the On The Rocks arts festival that April. It was hardly cutting-edge, written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee in 2001 and having run for 609 performances in London between 2003 and 2005, but we’re not always very avant garde in north-east Fife. The director of the Just So production, John MacLean, a practising Christian, said “it’s a fantastic show: I think the score is incredible, and I went to see it in Edinburgh and I laughed out loud throughout”. If the students wanted controversy, they got it: Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, plunged off the absurdist deep end.
It is disgraceful that in the birthplace of the Scottish Reformation, St Andrews University is putting on a production that insults the Lord Jesus Christ. Ridiculing Jesus Christ will bring shame and God’s judgment on what should, with all its history, be a devout seat of learning, not a cesspit.
“Cesspit”, eh? Not in my time, sir. Alas. Michael Phillips, solicitor for the extremists, warned that the university “could be opening themselves up for protests which could lead to legal action if there is somebody with the right funding behind them”. Blasphemy had been expunged from the statute book in England and Wales the year before, so this was a last redoubt. There was no appetite for a prosecution under virtually dormant law. When the production went ahead, Christian Voice mustered “around 20” protestors. Loaves and fishes were not required.
A final monastic factoid. One of the last abbots of the Benedictine community at Westminster Abbey before it was suppressed in January 1540 was Dom John Islip, who governed the convent from 1500 to 1532. He undertook several building projects around the monastery during his tenure, and is commemorated in John Islip Street, which runs from St John’s Gardens to Vauxhall Bridge Road near the abbey. In the abbey itself, a side chapel is dedicated to his memory, and above the doorway is an hilarious visual pun, or “rebus”, of an eye and a lip carved into the lintel. Eye, lip, Islip (pronounced “Eyeslip”). Those long winter nights must have flown by.
If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight
“Jim Jefferies: High & Dry”: this won’t be to everyone’s taste, because comedy perhaps more than most art forms is extremely subjective and susceptible to mood, circumstances, outside events. But I think Jim Jefferies is very, very funny, and I like his characteristically Australian lack of inhibition. Sometimes you want to breathe in sharply at the bluntness of a joke or quip, and the subsequent release of laughter can be good for the soul. This was filmed last year in Toronto, and, according to the blurb, deals with “stoned koalas, his dad’s vasectomy confusion, choosing between his hair and his sex drive and more”, which, like all editorialising about comedy, makes it sound less funny than it is. If you like Jefferies, it’s brilliant; if you’re not sure, try it; if you don’t like it, well, we’re all different. Thank God.
“The Long Good Friday”: this week Film4 showed John Mackenzie’s 1980 gangster drama, based on a screenplay by Barrie Keeffe. It’s a taut, spare, tense thriller with brilliant performances by Bob Hoskins as upwardly mobile and aspirant Cockney mobster Harold Shand, Helen Mirren as his feisty moll Victoria and American singer/actor Eddie Constantine as the out-of-town mafioso Charlie. Because it’s a British film, however, it is also full of fleetingly glanced, later-familiar faces: Derek Thompson, Karl Howman, Gillian Taylforth, Dexter Fletcher, Kevin McNally, Daragh O’Malley and a 25-year-old bit-player from Drogheda called Pierce Brosnan… It’s full of late 1970s preoccupations like economic stagnation, shifting class boundaries and police corruption, but one of the most enduring fascinations (for me) is the setting, as it is filmed in London’s Docklands, by then a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and semi-demolished buildings. Containerisation had killed the docks absolutely dead and regeneration would not begin until the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981, the year after the film’s release, leaving The Long Good Friday as a snapshot of a period between decay and recovery. Gripping every time.
“Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle”: this Storyville two-parter tells the absorbing and horrifying story of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, the cult he led from 1954 until the fatal and ghastly denouement in the jungle of Guyana in 1978. I’m always aware that the story is more familiar to Americans than a British audience—a member on Congress, Rep. Leo Ryan (D-CA), was murdered when he visited the compound to investigate claims of hostage-taking—and so in this country the details are often hazy. We say “He drank the Kool Aid” but often don’t really know why: Flavor Aid laced with cyanide was handed out to members of the cult as the end approached, but it has transmuted into Kool Aid in the folk memory. The scale of it, if nothing else, is mind-boggling. On 18 November 1978, Rep. Ryan and four of his colleagues were gunned down just before they boarded their flight out of Jonestown; shortly afterwards, in what Jones called “revolutionary suicide”, 909 members of the Peoples Temple, 304 of the them children, killed themselves, most by drinking the Flavor Aid. Jones was found on stage in the commune’s central pavilion, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.
“The Talented Mr Ripley”: of course you’ve all seen this, as have I, many times, but the other night it popped into my head after being at the Writing Salon I attend every month, so I started it on Netflix half in the background but became, inevitably, gripped. It’s 25 years old now, incredibly and appallingly, but—as I think I’ve said before—it’s a fantastic ensemble piece with a fine case each of whom is at the top of their game. Matt Damon is peerless as the blank, charming, forgettable chameleon Tom Ripley, Jude Law oozes spoiled privilege as Dickie Greenleaf, Gwyneth Paltrow makes a good fist of what could have been a cipher playing his fiancée Marge Sherwood and Cate Blanchett is wonderfully nuanced as Meredith Logue. And of course, of course, the magnificent and bitterly missed Philip Seymour Hoffman as awful, compelling Freddie Miles. You have to hunt through a lot of celluloid to find a better entrance in a film than PSH’s here. Of course I watched all 139 minutes.
“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: The Christmas Show”: completely unseasonal and entirely subjective but this episode of Aaron Sorkin’s first television project after the all-conquering cultural behemoth which was The West Wing is incredibly close to my heart because it was close to that of The One Who Got Away and we watched it every Christmas. That aside, I think Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is very under-rated and extremely good. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry are brilliantly balanced as showrunners Danny Tripp and Matt Albie, Sarah Paulson dazzles as Harriet Hayes, one of the stars of the show-within-a-show, Timothy Busfield is effortlessly superb as director Cal Shanley and Amanda Peet is lambent as the network’s new president of entertainment programming Jordan McDeere, loosely based on the late Jamie Tarses. Is the show sometimes sentimental? Yes, of course, and the Christmas special doubles down on that. Is it too good to be true? Naturally. Does the dialogue crackle and spark, with whip-smart jokes and clever humour? It’s Sorkin, obviously it does. No, it’s not The West Wing, but, if we’re brutally honest, some of the later episodes of The West Wing weren’t really The West Wing. It’s like picking up a novel and saying warily, already putting the disappointment on the hob, “Is it The Great Gatsby?” What Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, I think, is a really good, funny, clever series about warm, engaging people that makes you feel better for watching it without feeling talked down to or sullied.
In the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word, the burning flow of molten feeling
I have recently discovered what no doubt many of you have known for a long time, which is that Amazon Prime regularly offers great swathes of books in Kindle format for 99p. I don’t have a Kindle but I sometimes use the Kindle app on my iPhone: I love the physicality of books, and a congenitally a hoarder, so most non-fiction I own is in hard copy, but novels which I will probably only read once are convenient and weightless on my phone, so I try to remind myself to do that more. It can take a while to browse what Prime is offering, but take half an hour of leisure time, decide to spend just £10 or £15, and feel free to take chances on books because at worst you’ve wasted 99p, and you’ve got a very enjoyable experience by my standards. This will account for some but not all of my recommendations over the next week.
“Stargazer”: I am a fool for well-crafted, intellectual, romantic-but-barber college novels—what do you expect? I re-read The Secret History most years—and this 2022 version by Canadian novelist and academic Laurie Petrou is simply lovely. It tells the story of two young Toronto girls, Diana Martin and Aurelle Taylor, at the fictional Rocky Barrens University in rural Ontario in the 1990s. Dense, rich, elegantly written and skeined with an ineradicable mystery. I loved it and you should read it too. It’s only 320 pages, you can do that in a couple of days, and remember what it was like to be young and full of hope and angst and confidence and fear and doom.
“If the atomic bomb had not been used”: this week I wrote an essay about the steep learning curve that President Harry Truman endured from succeeding Franklin Roosevelt and discovering the very existence of an atomic weapon to its use against the Japanese city of Hiroshima 100 days later. During my research, which was fascinating, I came across this article from The Atlantic in 1946 by physicist Karl T. Compton, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Written less than 18 months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent surrender of Japan, it tackles head-on an argument still fiercely fought over today, that the enemy was already exhausted and on the verge of defeat, making the use of atomic weapons inexcusable overkill. Compton is clear: this notion is “utterly fallacious”. Indeed, he argues that “the use of the atomic bomb saved hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese; [and] that without its use the war would have continued for many months”. Compton was in a position to have an informed view. He was one of those who advised Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the development, testing and use of the atomic bomb, spent two months in the summer of 1945 in Manila as part of the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of US Army Forces Pacific, and then was in Japan for a month after VJ Day, where he assessed “the physical and the psychological state of that country”. Powerful testimony and (I think) a persuasive case.
“Only radical reform will save our overcrowded prisons”: Ian Acheson, author of this thought-provoking and sobering piece from The Spectator this week, is a mate and a good man, but he also speaks with impeccable authority. He’s been a special constable, a prison governor, a Home Office civil servant and a government adviser on counter-terrorism and extremism, so he knows this subject from a lot of angles. Here he shines a light on a conundrum which we cannot ignore for much longer: prisons are overcrowded and understaffed, and therefore dangerous and damaging to warders and inmates, but the public wants more and more people in them and won’t—so far—listen to the argument that incarceration is appropriate for only a section of the criminally convicted population. There are few, if any, ‘quick wins’, and probably some tactical unpopularity to be swallowed, but it simply has to be done.
“The misanthropic history man”: academics are an odd breed. I was an aspirant one, once, and in some ways I think I’d have fitted in; as Sayre’s Law goes, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low”. During my brief sojourn at Oxford, my tutor, the sainted Richard Rutherford, a lovely, gentle, mild Aberdonian, was fielding a number of improbable requests from newspapers to translate the Maastricht Treaty into Latin (what can I say? It was 1994). More than once I saw him lift the phone, listen to a spiel, and say with uncharacteristic crispness, “How much?” So I read this largely hostile profile of Yuval Noah Harari in The Critic with an element of glee. But I think Andrew Orlowski makes some fair points, highlighting Harari’s extraordinary fame and the undeniable influence which has accompanied it. At the same time, some of his barbs find their mark. “Simplification allows Harari to make huge swathes of human achievement disappear,” he asserts, adding, with a jollity you can hear, “these sweeping, unsubstantiated claims were swiftly debunked by academics”. The most devastating comment is from Harari’s doctoral supervisor, Professor Steven Gunn, whose work I know because he’s primarily a Tudor historian. Gunn characterises his former student’s approach as “Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, ‘We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong’.” Ooof. If Andrew Pettegree ever said anything like that about me, I think I’d go into witness protection. This isn’t to rubbish Harari, though I confess I’m not steeped in his work, but if you climb to the top of the celebrity-academic tree, you have to be ready for incoming fire.
“Miranda’s last gift”: easily the best piece of writing I’ve encountered this week outside novels. David Frum was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, a rare non-US citizen in the White House (he was born in Toronto but became American in 2007), went through the American Enterprise Institute and The National Review and has been a senior editor at The Atlantic (where this article appears) for nearly a decade. I like his writing: he’s erudite but direct, and I often agree with him political. But this is very different. Last month his daughter Miranda, a former model and freelance writer, died from complications of a brain tumour which had been removed in 2019 but left her immune system ravaged. She was 32. I have friends who have lost children and I say freely I simply do not know how they cope with that horrible inversion of the natural order. Clearly Frum and his wife Danielle Crittenden were devastated, and my heart goes out to them both, but this tribute to Miranda is a thing of intense and heartfelt beauty. May her memory be a blessing.
Fin
No, seriously, fin.