text:
By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN
1) Our national anthem – it's surely the worst of all: dull, dispiriting and banal. Watching the European football tournament and the teams lining up before the games I can't help feeling how lucky the Welsh are to be spared it (the Northern Ireland team are not so lucky). And of course the Welsh anthem is truly stirring.
2) Our obsession with the royal family, who, as far as I can see, don't do very much that's useful.
3) The mindlessness that takes over the nation every time the English football team – Engerland – is involved in a football tournament, in which they nearly always underperform.
4) The UK's geographical shape – it's a mess.
5) People referring to "our national poet", as the Brexiteer MEP Daniel Hannan did on the radio the other day.
6) People talking of the British parliament as the "mother of parliaments" in a meaningless way. (I also recently heard somebody, again on the radio, refer to Britain as the "birthplace of democracy".)
7) The fact that I have to think about whether I'm from the UK or Great Britain when I'm filling in a form. I don't like either appellation. It's so much simpler in other European countries.
8) Our parliamentary system, which is a mess, as we've seen in the past few days.
9) Deluded notions of the UK (GB?)'s world supremacy in all sorts of fields where we've long ago been overtaken by other countries.
10) The politics of Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.
The Walking Forest © Aline Macedo
By SAMUEL GRAYDON
I recently went to Amsterdam for the Holland Festival (which runs until June 26). It advertises itself as "showing innovation in art"; it was to my surprise, then, that all of what I saw insisted, in a variety of ways, on retrospection.
Looking back does not necessarily mean that innovation is lacking, of course, as was shown by Mark Cousins's film about atomic power, Atomic: Living in dread and promise, compiled from public-service broadcasts, stills, documentaries and interviews. An informative work that dragged you into a mindset of the past, it made you reconfigure your understanding of its subject. The film was perhaps not as strong in narrative as Cousins suggested in a discussion before the screening of the film, but it was offhandedly threatening, thanks partly to Mogwai – the Scottish post-rock band; they were commissioned to write the soundtrack to the film, and performed it live. Their ambient and droning music nicely complemented the film's explorations of the devastating and the healing potential of the atom.
Brain scan; a still from Atomic by Mark Cousins
Atomic was greater than the sum of its parts – Cousins's direction was subtle and respectful. In his interview, Cousins said that he believed that "good storytelling should take your hand and walk with you to begin, and then it should let it go". I'm sorry to say that, elsewhere in the Festival, I got a bit lost on occasion. Nowhere did I want a friendly guiding hand more than during Christine Jathay's The Walking Forest, a "video and theatre installation" inspired by Macbeth. Jathay intended to make members of the public think about their part in oppression, and what they would do if a real Macbeth came to power. We were spectators, free to wander around as we pleased, but we were actors too. About twenty of us were wired up with earpieces, and we had to do as we were instructed – at times we were given mundane tasks such as "stand by the women at the bar"; at others they had a more exotic flavour: "feel inside this dead fish filled with fake blood to find two teeth". There was a free bar, which people made understandable use of; I was given ten euros (covered in fake blood, of course), and ten of us had to (nearly all rather drunkenly) read lines from Macbeth into a microphone. Julia Bernat (the only actress involved in the installation, playing Lady Macbeth) wandered around naked, before getting dressed, pouring water over herself and crawling like a fish across the bar. She then delivered a diatribe on the crookedness and injustice of world politics, lying motionless on the floor. All the while, screens, which eventually moved across the room so as to hem the audience into a corner, informed us about forced migration, corruption, dictatorship and violence inflicted on people by their governments. I seem to remember a semi-naked man wearing a boar's head, as well.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my thoughts did not immediately turn to my role in mechanisms of power and oppression.
The problem was that, had I not had any information about Jathay's intentions before I saw The Walking Forest, it would have made no sense at all (in fact, I couldn't make much sense of it even with the information). I often run into this situation; if I find myself reading the placard next to an artwork more than I actually look at the artwork, it's usually a bad sign.
The Walking Forest © Aline Macedo
I had similar trouble with a film by Julian Rosefeldt, specially commissioned to accompany an excellent performance of Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation). This film was meant to be antithetical to the music ("if the music evokes a babbling brook, then perhaps you'll see a dried-up riverbed on screen") – a response, not an interpretation. Whereas in Haydn's piece, humankind is presented as the height of God's creation, in Rosefeldt's film the species has brought about its own destruction by striving at technological advancement.
Once again, I can only make these comments because of the festival press pack. The audience spent an hour and a half looking at aerial views of deserts, the abandoned Atlas Studios film sets and the industrial ruins of the Muir Valley, shot in slow motion with men in white overalls wandering aimlessly around. There was also footage of dogs mating. The landscapes were immense, beautifully filmed and wonderfully colorized, but even so, there is only so much slow-motion desert one can take.
Much more successful, in my opinion, was the Dutch National Opera's production of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, directed by Stefan Herheim. It was my first acquaintance with the work, and I found it rather awe-inspiring as played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and conducted by Mariss Jansons – with a powerful performance by Alexy Markov as Count Tomsky. At one point, the chandelier turned into a huge swinging thurible, pouring smoke onto the stage. With the striking black-and-white costumes, the austere but grand sets and the cold lighting, Herheim drew out the oppressive atmosphere implicit in the opera, aided by Misha Didyk's paranoid and aggressive portrayal of Hermann. Having said that, even though I did not know the opera, I could tell that Herheim was introducing a novel twist that, unfortunately, was not quite paying off. He wanted to explore how "Tchaikovsky's unspeakable homosexuality and passion rises through the music to the surface". And so during the sublime overture, the curtain rose on Tchaikovsky reclining in an armchair while a scantily clad Hermann rose from his knees, lifting his head from the composer's crotch. Tchaikovsky then proceeded to die, and remained on stage for the entire performance, "conducting" his fellow performers and playing the piano. Great pieces of art can be interpreted in different ways (indeed, as Auden had it in his essay on reading, being read in a number of different ways is one of the signs that a work actually has merit), but this was not simply interpretation; it was imposition.
Perhaps I am being facile to suggest it, but sometimes a piece does not need reinterpreting, but simply rereading.
Die Schöpfung (The-Creation) © Wonge Bergmann
By MICHAEL CAINES
Robert Graves reckoned that there were three poets of importance killed during the First World War: Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Charles Hamilton Sorley. The last of these was the youngest, yet also the first to die, by sniper's bullet at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. And he was a captain by then, at the age of twenty.
Neil McPherson tells Sorley's tale in his new play It Is Easy To Be Dead – in verse, prose and song – at the Finborough Theatre. It begins with Sorley's parents (movingly played by Jenny Lee and Tom Marshall) receiving the worst possible news, but finding a way to commemorate him: by preparing his poems for publication . . . .
Many grieving parents of literary-minded victims of war had the same sort of response. Publication meant remembrance. "Just privately . . . for friends and family", says Janet Sorley (as McPherson calls Sorley's mother Janetta) to her unconvinced husband William. "Everybody is doing it."
In reality, the Sorleys worked quickly: TLS could review their son's posthumous collection Marlborough, and other poems in February 1916. A third edition in December that year with added "illustrations in prose", that seemed to shed welcome light on the poems and the author's personality, justified a further review. And when Sorley's letters appeared in print three years later (his parents had deliberately delayed publishing them until the war was over), the TLS's anonymous reviewer could point out the most "remarkable quality" of Sorley's personality – his "exuberance" – as well as his promise at public school, his "delightfully amusing" letters from Germany (where he spent several months before and during the outbreak of war) and his astute reservations about Rupert Brooke. He also reservations about his own country. "I hate Britons with a big big B", he once wrote. Not Country in the big C sense but country in the Richard Jefferies sense was more to his taste.
All of these aspects of this attractive figure in It Is Easy To Be Dead. Alexander Knox makes a suitably exuberant, impish Sorley, pattering out the stories of his German travels. He transforms, over the evening's course, from the boy reciting "The Song of the Ungirt Runners" as he runs (and looking like an extra from Chariots of Fire while he's at it) to the charming, camp young fellow observing the Germans (and falling in love with one), to the soldier who names his school friends as their photos – and wartime death dates – flare up on the wall behind him. Even the idolized Brooke is displayed in the same way, as Sorley criticizes him: "He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice".
Nothing could be further from that spirit of self-obsession than the poem by Sorley from which McPherson takes his title, "When you see millions of the mouthless dead": "None wears the face you knew. / Great death has made all his for evermore". Neil Corcoran, writing in the TLS in 1986, saw this as "Owen-like" verse – and it does, admittedly, seem strange to be watching a play that focuses on Sorley in a Brooke-like, golden-youth manner, given his own firm rejection of the Brooke-like, golden-youth cult.
It's also perhaps worth considering Sorley's poetry in the context of the question William Boyd asked in the TLS earlier this year: "What exactly is Scottish war poetry, as opposed to war poetry in general? . . . it is surely not possible to ring-fence the artistic expression of a response to the various traumas and stresses of war by a national label." Yet there is Sorley, among others, in an nationally themed anthology, reviewed by Boyd, that presumes exactly that.
As directed by Max Key, perhaps the Finborough production's most impressive theatrical characteristic is its smooth dovetailing of song, dialogue and recitation, with the warm lighting by Rob Mills accentuating this small theatre's cosiness. (It's a space McPherson knows how to write for, incidentally, since he is the Finborough's artistic director.) The tenor Hugh Benson and pianist Elizabeth Rossiter provide a splendid recital's worth of the appropriate numbers: George Butterworth's setting of A. E. Housman's "On the Idle Hill of Summer", a jolly "Gaudeamus Igitur" for Sorley's mixing with German students. Overall, the show makes an enjoyable, smaller-scale foil to Iain Bell's recently premiered operatic adaptation of David Jones's In Parenthesis.
It Is Easy To Be Dead does feel slightly too long for the story it has to tell, proceeding as it does in leaps and excerpts. The parents come and go, working through their son's papers; they struggle with grief and, in William's case, a desire to hang on to his son through his literary remains, and not to lose him to the world. Despite such anguishing scenes, however, the play seems to lack the final stroke that would reveal some message beyond the obvious one, about the First World War's futility and the bloody waste of young lives. That much the audience can bring along for themselves.
McPherson's homage did make me wonder, though, if Sorley's letters rather than his poems constitute the more rounded achievement – in that review, Corcoran thinks the letters "excellent", the early poems "an adolescent stew of Meredith and Masefield". Either way, you can see why William Sorley remained so keen to protect his son's literary legacy. After all, he could write to the TLS, in 1930, merely to complain of the meaning-mangling misprints in an anthology edited by Laurence Housman called War Letters of Fallen Englishmen.
There are, incidentally, TLS reviews in the pipeline of some of the latest round of centennial war books; and readers interested in the war and literature should know that Patrick Miles has resumed his excellent blog about a writer and former TLS reviewer killed in the war, George Calderon, whom I have mentioned here once or twice before. I'd like to think Calderon and Sorley, killed within months of one another, on different fronts, could have had a profitable conversation about literary matters, had they ever crossed paths.
Professor James Campbell, 2009; a still from an interview conducted by Alan Macfarlane
By ALEX BURGHART
I have just returned from a funeral in St Mary's, Cogges, Oxfordshire – a tranquil corner of old England where, to paraphrase Larkin, the place names are all hazed over with flowering grasses and, under wheat's restless silence, the fields shadow Domesday lines. The bigwigs of medieval history gathered there to say their final goodbyes to Professor James Campbell, one of the finest minds ever to write about Anglo-Saxon history and, perhaps, the last of the old dons.
Many people are donnish. But there was nothing -ish about James's donnery. He smoked a pipe until he was seventy. He liked a drink before, during and after tutorials (a "swift half" before Hall was not always swift and not always a half). He could be madly disorganized – one former student reported seeing his unmarked essay on James's floor many years after he had graduated. He never learnt to drive and he never used a computer – after the typewriter he liked became obsolete all his essays were written by hand. He was intensely myopic and could use his jam-jar glasses to dramatic effect. He needed very little sleep – one friend who holidayed with him reported waking up in their Moscow hotel room in the small hours to find him reading the works of the soviet geochemist Vernadsky and puffing on cheap Russian tobacco. He was deeply loyal to his Oxford College, Worcester, which had made him a Fellow when he was twenty-two; he stayed there for forty-two years, never completing a doctorate and migrating straight from "Mr" to "Professor". He was a bachelor until his seventies, when he became a happily married man.
Most of all, he had a wholly remarkable storehouse mind which seemed to contain detailed notes of everything he had ever read – and he had read hungrily and omnivorously for a very long time. This reading fuelled a huge flotilla of interests – everything and anything from cannonballs to the herring trade to minor Irish country houses to German political thought and beyond. He once said, quite rightly, that "in terms of people teaching well and being useful to the University, people who read a lot are at least, or even more, important than people who write a lot". For his part, he adored teaching – he hated it when younger dons considered it a burden – and his students adored being taught by him. Many have talked about the experience for the rest of their lives.
In some ways he was a man from a different time. Raised by his grandparents in the rural East Anglia of the 1930s and 40s, he had a deep connection with previous generations and the England that they had inhabited. He had met his great-great uncle who had been born in 1848 and who was a successful bookmaker despite being illiterate ("the only man in my family ever to make any money and he left it, not to one barmaid, but two"), and he told stories about his grandmother's grandfather who had been a "witch-doctor for cattle" and had gone from herd to herd laying hands on sick cows with a tame bantam cock perched on his shoulder as a familiar.
It was perhaps inevitable that such a man, who seemed to know, almost at first quarters, something of the time before the industrial revolution, would develop a deep reverence for and empathy with England's most ancient institutions. A number of his essays profoundly illuminate the sophistication of the late Anglo-Saxon state – how orderly, centralized and uniform it was. But he also showed, as the great nineteenth-century constitutional historians had done, how the Anglo-Saxons' shire and hundred courts had required the participation and co-operation of ordinary people and how this participation had "maintained a kind of freedom, of non-absolutism, in the polity". Such readings make Anglo-Saxon history more than interesting; they make it important, because they involve the period in the history of liberty. Indeed, his work consistently showed that much of what is taken to be modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was actually much older (what he often called "very old indeed").
James did not shy away from the consideration of great antiquity. He noted that Domesday Book used much the same system of land assessment that had been in place 400 years earlier when the written record began. He argued that this might simply be the first glimpse of already ancient systems that had allowed for the construction of Maiden Castle hillfort in the first millennium BC and that of Stonehenge in the third. But because he could see equally antique parallels in the organization of Neolithic Ireland and early medieval Denmark, he could detect the possibility of an "Indo-European grammar of government common to the local administration of much of Europe over very long periods, but coming to light and knowledge only late".
Every time I talked with James, I always learnt something that I would not otherwise have known. It meant that I had conversations with him that I could not have with anyone else. And now those conversations cannot be had. In his Festschrift, his friend and former pupil, the late distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholar Patrick Wormald, wrote that "James Campbell's importance lies not in the vast amount that he knows, nor even in the unexampled richness of what he writes, but in how he has taught historians of early times to think". That importance lives on.
By MICHAEL CAINES (no pun intended – ed.)
There is a modest tradition of walking sticks propped in literary corners – in the writings of Leigh Hunt, Richard Steele and a few others. Steele didn't always trust them: "a cane is part of the dress of a prig", he suspected. Wounded soldiers aside, there were too many "peaceable cripples" who, "in this warlike age", "think a cane the next honour to a wooden leg". Hunt was more defensive of the innocent instrument itself. He felt the insult was misplaced when people were called names such as "a poor stick, a mere stick, a stick of a fellow". "We protest against this injustice done to those genteel, jaunty, useful, and once flourishing sons of a good old stock."
There is a self-flattering Edmund Gosse anecdote about Tennyson, as published in the TLS in 1904, in which the younger man seeks to impress the Poet Laureate with a fine line about – what else? – Rosicrucianism, likening the mysteries of that secret society to the mysteries of the art of poetry. The poet's response was gratifying: "He paused to listen, and then beat his walking-stick upon the gravel with fervent approval". Walking sticks, it seems, are not merely an aid to perambulation . . . .
For Dickens, whose own sticks survive in various museums, sticks could have personalities of their own. Jenny's crutch-stick in Our Mutual Friend, at one point, "seemed to entreat for its owner to come in and rest by the fire". In the same novel, Boffin's "seemed to be whispering in his ear". Around the same time, Punch patronisingly advised the frugal young lady who wished to adopt a cane for fashion's sake to "convert her last year's parasol stick into a new walking one, and so save Papa the cost". Although equally chappish, Hunt reckoned the stick to be an ancient and universally useful invention. Hence its diversification in modern times, with three related categories of use: "to give a general consciousness of power"; "to help the demeanour"; and "to assist a man over the gaps of speech – the little awkward intervals, called want of ideas".
The eighteenth-century stick could be a means of attack or defence – the ursine Dr Johnson's stick was meant to be a considerable deterrent – but Hunt had in mind the usefulness of a stick to "any one who has known what it is to want words, or to slice off the head of a thistle". "How his foot keeps time to the switches! How the passengers think he is going to ride, when he is or not! How he twigs the luckless pieces of lilac or other shrubs, that peep out of a garden railing! And if a sneaking-looking dog is coming by, how he longs to exercise his despotism and his moral sense at once, by giving him an invigorating twinge!"
Sticks need not be so energetic. In more recent times, when the Australian writer Donald Horne had to stop for a rest in the street, he switched from walking-stick mode ("using it as a rudder on the flat and as alpenstock on slopes . . . not to mention the swinging of the tip with every second or third step to show who is in control") to "shooting-stick mode". He would pause to take in the scene, "imagining a painting", only for strangers to ask if he knew where he was, and if he needed help getting back to his nursing home. Unfortunately, "to the uninformed eye, I can seem an old man lost". There is more telling meditation on age and its supports in Antony Thwaite's poem "In the Vicinity of the Crank-house".
This is a reminder of Coleridge's story about the "strange walking-stick, five feet in length" he bought from a countryman in in Cambridge, in 1794. This stick, he could claim, "a most faithful servant it has proved to me"; "sudden affection" swiftly "mellowed into settled friendship". When it went missing from the inn where he was staying in the Welsh town of Abergele, during a tour with a college friend, and an alarmed search revealed nothing, he resorted to giving the following lines to the town crier:
"Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergeley [sic], a curious walking-stick: on one side it displays the head of an eagle, the eyes of which represent rising suns, and the ears Turkish crescents; on the other side is the portrait of the owner in woodwork. Beneath the head of the eagle is a Welch wig, and around the neck of the stick is a Queen Elizabeth's ruff in tin. All down, it waves the line of beauty in very ugly carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in love with the above-described stick, and secretly carried off the same, he (or she) is hereby earnestly admonished to conquer a passion, the continuance of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty; and if the said stick has slipped into such gentleman's (or lady's) hand through inadvertence, he (or she) is required to rectify the mistake with all convenient speed. GOD SAVE THE KING."
This is where a Horne-like figure comes into view. Coleridge continues:
"Abergeley is a fashionable Welch watering-place, and so singular a proclamation excited no small crowd on the beach, among the rest a lame old gentleman, in whose hands was descried my dear stick. The old gentleman, who lodged at our inn, felt great confusion, and walked homewards, the solemn cryer before him, and a various cavalcade behind him. I kept the muscles of my face in tolerable subjection. He made his lameness an apology for borrowing my stick, supposed he should have returned before I had wanted it, &c . . . ."
For Coleridge, it was a fine bonus that a "very handsome young lady" in a coach asked for the copy of the bill Coleridge had given to the crier. "I acceded to the request with a compliment, that lighted up a blush on her cheek, and a smile on her lip."
By contrast: the saddest of literary sticks must be Virginia Woolf's. It accompanied her on her last walk to the River Ouse in 1941. Leonard found it on the bank, and it has now made its way to the New York Public Library.
My only excuse for taking this idle thought for a walk – swiping at shrubs, but no dogs, as I go – is an auction. You can view now (and buy tomorrow, should you wish and have a few hundred or thousand quid going spare) items from the collection of Roy Moore, a late "rabologist" (collector of walking sticks).
Over the surprisingly short span of two years, according to Chiswick Auctions, Moore acquired over 400 walking sticks from Europe and the US, many of them exquisite, rare and unusual. The Starck Barnes & sons walking stick pictured below, for example, is topped with a Royal Navy roundel and doubles as a flute:
This bamboo cane, meanwhile, of Chinese manufacture, doubles as an opium pipe:
That makes it not dissimilar in doubleness from this cheaper "folk art smokers companion" equipped with a clay pipe:
Whereas this reptilian curiosity in rosewood is perhaps only spring-loaded in order to impress, or terrify, the grandchildren:
I'd like to think that Leigh Hunt, the connoisseur of the "rhabdosophy, sceptrosophy, or wisdom of the stick", would have enjoyed all this – even if the porcelain handles weren't exactly what he meant about a stick's ability to "help the demeanour".
By REBECCA SWIRSKY
Can one taste an artwork? This was the synaesthesia-based conundrum I pondered while dining at a pop-up restaurant at Sotheby's in New Bond Street. Chef Ollie Dabbous, dubbed by the food critic Jay Rayner "the most wanted chef in Britain", served six courses to coincide with the launch of the auction's house Modern & Post-War British Art Sale (June 13 and 14).
Dabbous, whose restaurant (also called Dabbous) has received a Michelin star, said he was "drawn to the colours and textures, particularly with the more shape-driven abstract artworks that diners will be surrounded by". As the pouring of wine commenced and paper bags containing warm bread were handed to tables, my fellow immaculately dressed diners were upstaged by even better-dressed walls: there were pieces by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, Lucian Freud, L. S. Lowry and Frank Auerbach.
"Forms in Movement (Gaillard)" (1956), above, and "Quiet Form" (1973), below, by Barbara Hepworth
Dabbous's inspiration was most evident in his third course, entitled "A Homage to Hepworth". A slice of bronzed kohlrabi sat atop a tasty offering of braised salt marsh lamb and wild garlic pickle; the dish bore a close resemblance to Hepworth's "Forms in Movement (Gaillard)" (1956), one of the most valuable Hepworth lots in the two-day sale. Another lot, a white Seravezza marble sculpture entitled "Quiet Form" (1973), was a gift from the artist to her old headmistress, Miss Margaret Knott, on her retirement; Knott later re-gifted it to Hepworth's alma mater, Wakefield Girls' High. Both sculptures were being sold in an effort to release funds for bursaries for future generations. "Forms in Movement", a structure consisting of three copper swirls, represents one of Hepworth's earliest forays into sheet metal, and was acquired to celebrate the opening of the school's gymnasium in 1960. The work was sold by Hepworth for the price of 200 guineas, half its market value at the time. Pupils were reportedly thrilled at its presence, with one poetically commenting that, "it gleams like the setting sun, radiating a warm glow, and yet it has such a delicate hue". Since Hepworth herself enjoyed two scholarships, first at the Leeds College of Art, then the Royal College of Art, the sale of both works to release bursary funds represents an agreeable circularity. "I shall never forget the joy of going to school and the gorgeous smell of the paint I was allowed to use, nor the inspiration and help the Headmistress, Miss McCroben, gave me", wrote Hepworth in A Pictorial Autobiography (1970).
"Ollie got a bit carried away by the naming", acknowledged Graham Burton, general manager at Dabbous. He was referring to a green concoction of raw peas and iced mint tea, arriving with the title "England's Green and Pleasant Land". The dish's construction bore a natural resemblance to Patrick Heron's ludic painting of Sydney's botanical garden, "Sydney Garden Painting" (see pictures below), included in the auction. Heron, whose bright canvases are limned with dynamic unfurlings of colour, once said of his Antipodean experience: "I had a wonderful time [in Australia] in 1989–90 . . . . It wasn't so much the landscape as the vegetation that got into the work". Biting into the vegetable crunch of Dabbous's joyous pea-and-tea creation felt close enough to tasting a painting.
"Sydney Garden Painting",1990, by Patrick Heron
Considering that Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby", is thirty-seven years old, that one in six couples struggle to conceive, and that IVF, the "miracle" that produced Louise and so many others, is available on the NHS, it is surprising that the cultural impact of infertility has been so negligible, particularly in the theatre. We have had plays about everything from the privatization of the railways to the agonies of snooker, so the first sensation on seeing Gareth Farr's moving The Quiet House at the Park Theatre in North London (which runs until July 9) is that it is long overdue. Jess and Dylan are a happy, settled, professional couple in a sleekly decorated flat with an emptiness at its heart. They want a child, and can't have one. The decision to try IVF is not even discussed – it is just the logical progression from the medical evidence that without it, they haven't got a chance.
Without ever feeling schematic or preachy, the play takes up themes thrown up by their decision that might seem "obvious", were it not for the fact that no one ever seems to talk about them in polite society (by which I mean all society outside specifically designated support and discussion groups): envy or awkwardness arising from the ease with which others – in this case a neighbour in the upstairs flat – can conceive, and the daily reminder of that in the shape of a baby; the taboo around discussing either infertility or the decision to use IVF to address it; wounded male pride – about "being a jaffa" – and its mirror image, self-inflicted female shame – "it's always the woman's fault". When it comes to conception, we witness the substitution of a round of painful injections and medical procedures for the intimacy of sex, and how the couple compensate for that. Then there is the question of how a parent begins to relate to an unborn child, from the moment it first becomes a possibility, and the alternation of extravagant hope and overwhelming despair as the news of embryos, implantation and "viability" comes through.
Farr's achievement is to make Jess and Dylan experience all this as part of a genuine domestic drama, not a public information workshop. From the start, Dylan in particular is a compelling mixture of tortured modern partner, desperate to be supportive, and classic silent male, absolutely incapable of telling his boss why he needs time off, or even of using the company's own privacy policy to avoid doing so. For her part, Jess is both clear-eyed and practical, and racked with anxiety. The quietness of the title is not just the lack of of a baby's cries, but the silence of all concerned about what they are struggling with. Of course, as Jess points out, "everybody knows" that a couple in their mid-thirties who have been together for as long as they have, and haven't declared a decision not to have children, must be considering IVF, but no one feels able to raise it – even after the upstairs neighbour takes delivery of the enormous package from the Assisted Conception Unit when Jess doesn't answer the bell. Farr shows the enormous strain all this silence puts on those who experience it. The actors who play Jess and Dylan, Michelle Bonnard and Oliver Lansley brilliantly draw out our sympathy and sense of helplessness when confronted by their narrowing odds of success. If you haven't been through IVF, the chances are you know someone who has, but The Quiet House succeeds because it shows that these are people whose yearnings and contradictions strike a chord whatever your experiences are. It was worth the wait.
"The Bizarre Bloomsday Brunch", Dublin, 2015; © Phil Crean/Alamy
By MICHAEL CAINES
"Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:
– 16 June 1904."
On June 10, 1904, James Joyce stopped Nora Barnacle in a Dublin street. "I mistook him", she later recalled, "for a Swedish sailor." She didn't show up to meet him, however, as arranged, a few days later, on June 14. If she had, that would be the date we now know as Bloomsday, as June 16 is now called, for its association with a meandering span of Leopold Bloom and the other Dublin characters in Joyce's Ulysses – for that is when they did meet again, and their passionate, complex relationship began in earnest. . . .
Fifty years later, as the date on which Joyce set the action of Ulysses, June 14 was to be chosen by John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh et al as the moment for the inaugural Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin – at a point when Joyce was, as David Wheatley has pointed out in the TLS, "neither popular nor profitable in the land of his birth". (This is not to count the similarly convivial but less . . . posthumous affair of 1924, which Joyce was aware of.) Bloomsday is now marked, and not only in Dublin, by readings, drinkings and dressings-up, but back then a Dublin publican could assume that the revellers entering his establishment belonged to a funeral party: "Ah! the sign writer, little Jimmy Joyce from Newtown Park Avenue".
At least that's the all-too-Irish story – it's like an anecdote out of Flann O'Brien, who was one of those inaugural revellers. Many a fine story is probably to be told of Bloomsday and what it elicits from modern Dubliners. "James Joyce, is it?" The bookseller and TLS columnist Eric Korn once had this from a taxi driver as he arrived in town for Bloomsday in Joyce's centennial year. "That gobshite they threw out of the country for his dirty writings?"
The first mention of Bloomsday in the TLS that I can find in the archives is in a passing reference by the novelist Rayner Heppenstall, in 1957, to this "valuable adjunct to Eire's tourist industry", "with trips round Dublin . . . stopping at spirit stores to look at the characters". Four years later, the opening of the Martello Tower as a "shrine to the memory of James Joyce" apparently marked a new stage in appreciation, receiving considerable attention in the American press. The years have seen the tipsy ritual reach a municipally demanding scale. That centennial Bloomsday enjoyed by Eric Korn, for example, also witnessed a re-enactment of the "Wandering Rocks" chapter, "including 150 participants and a viceregal coach".
At Sandycove, meanwhile, Korn observed a "various and chilly crowd of devotees", "shaving on the gunrest, absurdly with electric razors, or toasting the day in Buck's Fizz in honour of plump Buck Mulligan". There were brave swimmers at it, too. "If I had a scrotum", one water-borne woman proclaimed, "it would surely have tightened." Another Kornish tale has Davy Byrne's Moral pub being advised to advertise a Bloomsweek special, in the form of burgundy and gorgonzola ("A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?") for £2. The advice is heeded. The sign reads: "BLOOMSDAY SPECIAL: GORGONZOLA AND BOURGANDY".
The TLS was nonchalantly late to review Ulysses itself. It had covered Dubliners ("The author . . . is not concerned with all Dubliners, but almost exclusively with those of them who would be submerged if the tide of material difficulties were to rise a little higher"), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("It is wild youth, as wild as Hamlet's, and full of wild music") and Exiles (notably reviewed by T. Sturge Moore, who had campaigned without success for the Stage Society to overcome its scruples and produce the play). It continued reviewing Joyce after that, but ignored Ulysses – bar the odd nod – until 1937, by which time there was finally an English edition to review. The novel was, by then, thoroughly notorious: "there is an appendix", noted the reviewer, "giving, among other details of controversy, the decisions of the United States District Court and of the United States Court of Appeals which allowed Ulysses to be published in that country".
(An air of scandal weirdly clung to Joyce even as his work approached the expiration of copyright. Christopher Hitchens could note in the TLS in 1987 that a New York radio station risked the wrath of the Federal Communications Commission by announcing its annual reading of Ulysses on air. "The FCC was asked to state which passages might be risky, and loftily replied that that would be telling.")
Perhaps the most significant of those early engagements with Joyce's great work came in a review by Anthony Powell of a selection called The Essential James Joyce, in 1948, seven years after Joyce's death. While marvelling at Joyce's "mastery of his medium", Powell saw in Ulysses's gleeful pastiches the evidence of a "professorial attitude towards writing and [a] temperamental unwillingness to deal with the world of action in straightforward terms". And make what you will of both authors in Powell's concluding remarks:
"By mighty effort of will – will rather than imagination – [Joyce] produced a work that carried a certain sort of writing to its logical conclusions; and if there were nothing else to be said for Ulysses it might be defended on the plea that, once given to the public, such a book need never be written again. It is a literary oddity by a gifted writer, and it is hard to see how it can ever, or could ever, be otherwise regarded. However, Tristram Shandy is also a literary oddity and it has lasted close on a couple of hundred years to date. For Finnegans Wake we feel inclined to offer no such hope."
Perhaps Bloomsday in its modern guise may be thought of as a "normalizing" response to this oddity. It has served as convenient date for both the doling-out of literary prizes and coat-tail-grabbing publications such as Picador's dubious "Reader's Edition" of 1997: "the handy, usable Ulysses that we have been waiting for . . . smuggled out of the ivory tower of the academics and put squarely into the market-place". And in 2000 Julian Rathbone could reject the pedantic notion that one needed to read the book to be able to celebrate it. Dubliners, he reckoned, could feel something beyond pride and love for this writer: "Even if they haven't read a word, they know there was a man, there is a book, that understands and knows them in all their wonderful, terrible, terrifying, pitiable and admirable loneliness and companionship". I admit that I take his point.
Gary Lineker celebrates after scoring against Poland in the World Cup, 1986; STAFF/AFP/Getty Images
By STIG ABELL
Big summer football events are often as much about the past as the present. They carry with them instant access to nostalgia, a set of sights and smells immediately comparable to the previous occasions that came along with metronomic regularity every couple of years (disastrous qualifying excepted, of course).
This year, as ever, I find myself helplessly watching games in the evening, with no stake in the outcome, and feeling my fondness for the game rekindle. Because it is not that easy to love football, in my experience. And each summer tournament is a chance to love again.
I was born in 1980, in Loughborough, which sits rather glumly between Leicester and Nottingham. My dad was a Nottingham Forest fan of good standing, and had taken my mum to games when they were dating as a childhood sweethearts. My mum is perhaps the least football-friendly person imaginable: she switches off the television if anybody spits or swears on it. It's a wonder the relationship lasted.
1980 was a glorious year for Forest. Despite being a smallish side, they retained the European Cup that year, a feat striking for the time and utterly unimaginable now. Brian Clough was the manager: Cloughie, a Midlands demi-god, adored by even non-football followers (for my gran he ranked high in the public pantheon just behind the Queen Mum and Margaret Thatcher, ahead of Charles and Diana). My first teddy bear was a giant three-foot fluffy thing called Cloughie. He came with a blanket big enough to cover me throughout my childhood whenever I lay shuddering with fever or stomach ache on the sofa. "Cloughie's cover" became synonymous with getting better, with days stolen from school and the mild rigours of normal life.
Brian Clough with the European Cup trophy, 1980; Bob Thomas/Getty Images
In the 80s, I had Forest tracksuits and kits, and followed them on the extremely rare occasions they were on TV. One was the FA Cup semi-final in 1989 against Liverpool at Hillsborough. I watched it, befuddled and overwhelmed by its enormity. But it was very distant: I was nine-years-old; I had never been to a football game, and had no frame of reference for what had happened. I dimly understood death and grief, flashes of childish empathy for those who had lost someone. Hillsborough has become clearer in my mind as I got older. When I worked at the Sun, it was an ever-present issue; an indelible stain and cause for regret for everyone working there; a terrible, unforgiveable error that you cannot ever fully escape.
The first international competition I can remember is the Mexico World Cup of 1986. It was exotic and splendid, and I prepared for it with a sort of exam-like diligence. I remember my sticker collection, swapping Gary Stevens for Karl-Heinz Rummenigge with my brother, studying the players whose names I was hearing for the first time. The greatness of Gary Lineker: his legs tanned by the searing sun, unencumbered by the gleaming cast on his arm. I recall his hat-trick against Poland: three snatched, short-range strikes before he loped off languidly raising his arm. A poacher, as the commentators said, a noble thief of goals.
The vicious injustice of Maradona's Hand of God – which knocked England out – lingers still. In some sense, it was a healthful lesson that the adult world – hitherto a world of brisk rules and order – could be deeply unfair. He cheated, and was rewarded. Perhaps healthful is not the right word, but significant nonetheless.
And, of course, heroic failure then became the keynote of English football, and of the English character more generally. In 1990, for our semi-final loss to Germany on penalties, I was ten and allowed to stay up late, carried along by adoration of the team and its potential (Lineker somehow still boyishly heroic; Gazza; the rugged imperturbability of Terry Butcher). Until that point, the pixel-sharp moment of the tournament was David Platt (a subsequent, and typically enfeebled, manager of Forest in the 90s) scoring a volley, over his shoulder, of impossible beauty against Belgium in extra time.
It is easy to embellish the memory in retrospect, and I am tempted to recall the sensations: the sticky stuffiness of the summer night, the rare lateness of the hour, the sour smell of takeaway pizza gone cold on the table, the sickly sweetness of "Nessun Dorma" through which the BBC brilliantly soundtracked that summer. But I do remember my older brother crying when Chris Waddle's muffed penalty soared skywards (it's probably rising still). And the sense of national unity in our collective despair: I was part of something big, even as it was terribly sad. In truth, I clung perversely to the failure, in the way a child clings to the heroism of a scraped knee or the bloom of a bruise. Failure was somehow braver than success, more credible.
Which is lucky, because six years later we were to taste glorious failure once more in Euro 96. I was sixteen, and it was a summer of girls, alcopops, guitar music and Chris Evans. On Friday nights, my friends and I would cluster in the beer gardens of Loughborough pubs with a relaxed policy on underage drinking (The White Hart; the Barley Mow), smoking cheap fags and getting excited about the football.
That year, we had a team of talent and possible inspiration. Gazza scored the wonder goal against Scotland; we beat Holland 4-1 (condemning Scotland to exit the tournament, thanks to that conceded goal; an added bonus), daring to be exciting rather than clinging to victory by narrow margins. And then against Spain, we achieved penalty redemption: Stuart Pearce, the Nottingham Forest electrician-turned-enforcer, epitomised the sense of national pluck and fight with his delirious, maniacal celebration after his potted penalty. Of course, defeat (via penalties again; against Germany again) followed, with its amorous sting of self-pity. And the last great national effort in major tournaments subsided, to remain dormant ever since.
In my teens, I had drifted towards rugby (Leicester being the other sporting lodestone of the area), attracted by its more honest physicality and more admirable need for bravery and strength. I went to see the Tigers with my whole family: grandparents wrapped in rugs passing to me, even as a young teenager, the hip-flask at half-time (me wincing as I pretended to enjoy the fiery splash of whisky); my brother and my mum and dad. Fights on the rugby pitch tended to be as decently ordered as eighteenth-century duels: face-to-face, equal, and forgotten afterwards once honour was satisfied. Football by then was already prima donnaish: all sculpted haircuts, and rolling theatrically on the grass.
My brother, however, maintained the family tradition of being a proper football fan. He left the genteel world of rugby to become a Forest season-ticket holder again. When he could drive, he would sometimes take me with him. The atmosphere was always exciting, verging on unpleasant. One game, the visiting manager had just been cleared of sexual assault charges. For the whole ninety minutes, our section of the crowd (some with children perched precariously on shoulders, or held with clammy hands) called him a "fucking paedophile".
Stuart Pearce had another formative role to play in my footballing experience. Every game, he would run out to the Trent End (where my brother and I stood), and grimace aggressively, his hands aloft to the crowd. We would chant in reply: "Psycho, Psycho, Psycho!" One game, the crowd surged in a sort of angry ecstasy to meet him, propelling me forward to the steel barrier. I reached out, and immediately the weight of hundreds of people pushed me against it, telescoping my arm back on itself. I fell to the floor, my right arm now somehow six inches shorter than my left, dizzy with shock.
I was rescued by a huge, barrel-bellied man, who spotted what had happened, bulldozed a path to me, then carried me out. (This was the second occasion I had been saved by a football fan: I was once lying prostrate on the floor in a Loughborough park, being repeatedly kicked in the head by a group of people who thought I had been speaking to a girl without their consent; and an unknown hero in a Klinsmann Tottenham top swatted them away). As I quivered on the steps outside, awaiting the ambulance, the stadium shook with cheers for an early goal. My brother, a little reluctantly, escorted me to hospital, and Forest won 2–1.
After that, my interest in the sport waned. Forest entered a dispiriting spiral of incompetence and financial mismanagement from which they have not recovered. The England team became a group of unlikeable, filthy rich underachievers, seemingly incapable of consistent effort or performance. I recall the Sisyphean arguments about whether Lampard or Gerrard could play alongside one another; by the time that subsided an entire footballing generation had passed with nothing to show for it.
So, I approach the latest European Championships, laden with memories and scepticism. Any aspiration is further knocked by the vivid pictures of misbehaving England fans, angry and shirtless, whether provoked or not.
From Belgium v Italy, June 13, 2016; Jimmy Bolcina/Photonews via Getty Images
But then the thrill of summer nights of football returns. Italy surprising Belgium, with their team spirit, hipsterish grace, and passion. An orchestra against a bunch of frustrated soloists. Ireland nearly shocking Sweden; their fans singing Abba together outside the stadium. Iceland drawing with the dilettante Portuguese, accompanied by the brilliantly guttural "ooom" chanting that seems to rise up from a saga (my favourite fact of the championships: around 10% of all Icelandic people are in France supporting their team). England picking a young team of hungry players, free from too much expectation.
It might be nothing, but it might be a love being reborn. After all, Leicester (the wrong Midlands team, but there you go) won the Premiership this year, so anything is possible.
By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL
Big is the defining word of this year's Serpentine Pavilion. It's designed by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group, the newest starchitects-on-the-block), and its aerial-like pointed roof soars to the sky. By taking a simple object – a fibreglass hollow "brick" – and repeatedly stacking it on a huge scale, Bjarke Ingels has made a structure that, from one angle, is a wall full of holes through which you can see the greenery of Kensington Gardens, framed multiple times over. Move around it, though, and the pavilion turns into what looks like the cross-section of a twisting iceberg.
Once inside, however, it's – strangely – not that big. A gaping-mouth entrance, which looks back at the Serpentine Gallery, perfectly framing its bell tower, becomes a narrow cave with hypnotic square walls that close in on you. Its proportions are a little uncomfortable. Sitting at its widest part, on a beautiful Douglas fir bench, I felt like I was in a compact thoroughfare. There's something reminiscent here, too, of the exteriors of high-density buildings (no surprise, since Ingels designs quite a few of these), especially in Hong Kong, where basic forms are satisfyingly repeated, yet can make you feel both uneasy and overwhelmed.
Serpentine Pavilion, 2016. Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
High-rise flats in Kowloon district, Hong Kong. Photo: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy
"Think about computer programming", Ingels said to us last week at the opening talk (the Pavilion runs until October 9). "A maximum amount of information is made from the minimum amount of coding. You condense meaning into as few moves as possible . . . to get the extraordinary out of the ordinary." Modesty, as you can hear, is not associated with BIG. But perhaps the valiant is. Their power plant in Copenhagen, expected to be completed next year, will feature an alpine ski slope – the first one in Denmark – on its roof. Ingels wants to reconfigure our perception of what such a utilitarian building might be today; with clean emissions, why not make it double up as something else the public can use and enjoy? Another project – a flood and storm barrier in Manhattan – will be disguised as a park.
Serpentine Pavilion, 2016. Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
"We take human happiness very seriously", he tells us. "Yet there's never any irony in our work . . . we say what we mean." There's something refreshing about that. And about the joyful spirit with which he approaches his projects, even if, in reality, they are not always subtle or wholly sensitive to their surroundings. This year's Pavilion might appear similar to Sou Foujimoto's in 2013 – riffing on cube shapes – but Ingels's doesn't have the same finesse. Nonetheless, he taps into the Serpentine's aim to make architecture playful and accessible, something that enables and accommodates our lives. Anyone can walk into it (free admission) or climb on it (though there is a metal line half-way up the structure marking where you can't go beyond). This is architecture as communal experience.
And the Pavilion project itself has grown bigger since last year. As well as Ingels's Pavilion, there are now, for the first time, four small "Summer Houses" on the other side of the Gallery, deeper into Kensington Gardens. One, designed by Kunlé Adeyemi (above), is a replica of the inside of the Queen Caroline Temple which sits opposite. Asif Khan's is made from horizontal curving white bars that reflect the sun and act as a sundial. They are not as impressive or as slickly finished as the main Pavilion, but there's no harm in celebrating, and pushing, the possibilities of architecture, and what it can mean to each of us.
Mervyn Peake sketches his wife Maeve Gilmore as she works at her easel, 1938; © General Photographic Agency/Getty Images
By GEORGE WASHBOURN
Some six months ago, I received an unexpected email from the Mervyn Peake Estate, offering me work. I had been referred to them by my university department. The Estate was searching for an archivist to produce a comprehensive inventory for galleries of all of Peake's work. Flattered, intrigued and, crucially, in need of money, I accepted . . . .
The walls of the Peake household in north London are proudly flanked with the artist's work. Proudest of all is a huge portrait of the man himself, which hangs at the top of the stairs, his tousled brown hair, red flannel shirt and arsenal of paintbrushes and pots compounding his bohemian image. And yet, this portrait was not, I discovered, a self-portrait – it was painted by Peake's editor, biographer and wife Maeve Gilmore, a woman about whom I knew next to nothing and whose work I was also charged with logging.
Maeve met Mervyn on her first day at Westminster School of Art, where, at the age of seventeen, she was studying to become a sculptor. Mervyn, six years her senior, was already a successful painter by this time, teaching at the school to supplement his income. Dazzled by what she described in A World Away: A memoir of Mervyn Peake (1970) , as his "native exuberance" Maeve agreed to go to tea with him. They were married a year later and stayed together until Mervyn's death from Parkinson's, thirty years later, at the age of fifty-seven.
For much of their marriage, they made a home on the Channel island of Sark, in a large white chalet, previously the headquarters for the German occupied forces; from the get go, a firm dynamic was established, with Maeve devoting herself to her dark and intriguing husband and their three children.
But as Mervyn's career burgeoned with commission after commission, Maeve quietly continued to paint; her output over the years was prolific, matched only by that of her husband. So far in my inventory I have logged more than 200 paintings, with many more to go.
An oil painting by Gilmore, 1940, depicting music and a vertibra from a beached whale found by Mervyn; © The Mervyn Peake Estate.
There are considerable riches here, ranging from portraits and scenes of pastoral Sarkese life to her later, more abstract and surrealist experiments. Earlier paintings of her children, playing in the garden and wearing fancy dress, give way to a series of anonymous portraits – featureless white figures, with unusually long frames set against starkly coloured backgrounds, seem to stare at the viewer. Another painting – perhaps the most poignant of them all – was painted soon after her husband's death and, like most of her work, has never been seen outside of the family home, let alone exhibited. A messianic figure with the unmistakable dark and sallow eyes of Mervyn Peake is strung up on a crucifix; the canvas is splattered with red.
Today would have been Maeve Gilmore's ninety-ninth birthday, and it would be good to say that her love and devotion to art continues through our own appreciation of her work. Sadly, it is not so. Type her name into a search engine and you'll struggle to find anything showcasing solely her work; she is lost among myriad links to Mervyn Peake and his own impressive work. Of course, among artists or otherwise, such an eclipse is not an uncommon hazard of marriage – how long a list might one compile? – but if, with this short blog, we can add one more link to Maeve Gilmore and her work, so much the better: she's long overdue a bit of attention.
By WILLIAM BAKER
More than a decade ago, I bid for a Tom Stoppard item online. The price went higher and higher – outrageously so for a reprint of a play not all that scarce or expensive in its first edition. In the end, I was outbid. Afterwards, I was surprised to receive an email from a Dr Gerald N. Wachs in New York City asking why I was prepared to pay so much. I explained that I was a Stoppard collector and was compiling his bibliographical history. Immediately, Wachs responded that I was most welcome to come to see his own Stoppard collection. So I landed up in his flat overlooking the Met, where I subsequently spent many happy weeks working on Stoppard, and sleeping amid signed copies of the great English romantic poets, among other treasures.
Jerry was an avid collector, but the nineteenth-century first editions of English poetry were the cream of his collection. This element he built up with his friend, the eminent bookseller and bibliographer Steve Weissman, then of Ximenes Rare Books. They began in March 1970, and continued until Jerry's death in 2013 at the age of seventy-six. They collected only the finest copies – presentation copies to other writers, friends, family members; and 155 of them will be for sale at the first session of Sotheby's "Fine Books & Manuscripts" auction in New York tomorrow.
There is, as I had expected, much to choose from. The first item is a presentation copy inscribed on its front wrapper by Matthew Arnold to a fellow pupil at Rugby, Edward Armitage. Only one other inscribed copy of Arnold's extremely rare first published work, Alaric at Rome (1840), is known to exist. The estimates range from US $45,000 to $65,000. Also for sale is Arnold's Merope: A Tragedy (1858) in the original green cloth stamped in blind and inscribed by Arnold on its half-title to his father-in-law ($2,000–$3,000).
Other items include the Brontës' Poems (1846), the rare first issue of their first book in the original cloth ($15,000–$25,000) and its second issue with the errata slip ($2,000–$3000). There is the first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's first book, The Battle of Marathon (1820). The copy has twenty-four punctuation corrections additional to those known to exist; only fifteen copies are recorded, all in private hands ($80,000–$120,000).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge items include the first edition of his first book, The Fall of Robespierre (1794) with the proposal leaf present ($8,000–$12,000). Perhaps the most interesting item from a scholarly point of view is that of Zapolya (1817). This is an extraordinary presentation copy, inscribed by Coleridge on its half-title in the form of a lengthy letter to John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854). The estimate appears to be on the low side at $12,000–$18,000.
Keats is represented by his first volume of poetry ($15,000–$25,000); a first edition first issue of Endymion ($4,000–$6,000); Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820; $6,000–$8,000); and the sixty-three issues of The Chambers: A London weekly journal that contain the poet's "The Sea" and his reviews of three dramas, the sole prose he apparently published during his lifetime ($10,000–$15,000). The Keats collector will also not wish to miss the five volumes of Annals of the Arts (1817–20), containing the initial anonymous publication of Keats's odes "To a Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn" and his two Elgin Marbles sonnets ($8,000–$12,000).
The Shelleys include a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Valperga (1823; $6,000–$9,000), followed by sixteen Percy Bysshe Shelleys. The Tennysons are extensive, too, one highlight being The lover's tale (1833; $8,000–12,000), described in the Sotheby's catalogue as "one of the great rarities of nineteenth century English literature". The other highlight is the first separate edition of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1855; $25,000–$35,000) – the copy that apparently went to an officer in charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava.
Unsurprisingly, there is a run of Wordworths and Wordsworthiana. The highlights include the first edition of his first book, An Evening Walk ($50,000–$70,000) with its errata leaf; his second book Descriptive Sketches in Verse ($40,000–$60,000) with the A2 errata leaf present; and a copy of an unrecorded Wordsworth broadside – "an address to the freeholders of the county of Westmorland" – dated January 30, 1818: the estimate is between $25,000 and $35,000.The final item in this sale of infinite riches from the Wachs collection is a first edition in the original cloth of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin (1889; $2,000–$3,000).
It baffles the mind to think that I shared a room with these greats. Did I not also turn the pages of Aubrey De Vere's The Search after Proserpine (1843), fascinated by Walter Savage Landor's extensive annotations? (This volume is not mentioned in the sale.) I spent time, too, with Landor's Heroic Idylls, a proof copy extensively annotated by Landor and dedicated to Edward Twisleton, to whom he had been introduced by Robert Browning. Landor inscribes the book, "All my old friends are dead, let their place continue to be supplied by Edward Twisleton". The copy has more than fifty new lines of verse in Landor's hand, and spelling and punctuation alterations on almost every page. It is estimated at $3,000–$4,000; like its poet, one can only dream on.
By FRÍÐA ÍSBERG
On June 2, another book by the Icelandic author Sjón was published in English: Moonstone: The boy who never was (Mánasteinn: Drengurinn sem aldrei var til), translated by Victoria Cribb. This short semi-historical novel won the Icelandic Literary Prize for Fiction in 2013. Some time ago, Sjón met a friend in Hong Kong, a Londoner who told him that if he ever did anything literary in the UK he would have to do it in Review – a lovely small independent bookshop in Peckham. So there we were, an audience of fifteen, Sjón by the counter and Katia, the bookshop manager, smiling from ear to ear behind it.
Before discussing and reading from the book, Sjón told us briefly about his working methods and where he came from as an author. Bored in suburban Reykjavík, the fifteen-year-old Sjón, along with seven other boys, formed Medúsa – a surrealist movement inflamed by André Breton's writings and manifesto. It was then that he took up his pen name, Sjón, meaning "vision" in Icelandic, and an abbreviation of his forename Sigurjón. The goal was to mount a surrealist invasion of Reykjavík, and Sjón said jokingly that in some sense they succeeded – nowadays "surreal" is such a common adjective that it even finds its way into speeches in the Icelandic Parliament.
Sjón is a hoarder who gathers information about random subjects – at the moment he is preoccupied with gorilla actors from 1930s Hollywood films, and every detail he comes across is safely filed. This is how he gradually maps the themes of his stories. Before writing the story of Máni Steinn, Moonstone's main character, he had for some time been collecting information on three topics: the Spanish influenza in 1918, Reykjavík's history of cinema, and homosexuality in Iceland and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Sjón searched for a protagonist to fit those themes, first trying out a teenage Don Juan in 1920s Reykjavík – but while reading Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart (2010), whose main character is homosexual, he realized that Máni was also gay. So there he had a dynamic to work from. "What do you not do during an epidemic?", he asked us. "Have sex with strangers." Although AIDS never comes into direct contact with the storyline, Sjón explained, the story is very much about AIDS, and dedicated to the memory of his uncle Bósi, who died of AIDS in 1993.
Sjón was clearly happy with Victoria Cribb's translation, warmly praising its precision, and when he was asked whether he felt that anything might be lost in translation, he answered: "if anything, I'm just worried that the translation is better than the original".
Moonstone will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the TLS.
By GEORGE BERRIDGE
A short stroll from Hyde Park Corner will take you past two buildings that stand as reminders of some of the darkest days in the story of Lord Byron.
At 139 Piccadilly, you'll find the Georgian mansion that for a short time served as home to his botched marriage to Annabella Milbanke.
If you walk for ten minutes down the road and take a sharp left, you'll arrive at 50 Albemarle Street (see picture above), the house where, as Corin Throsby notes in her review of The Burning of Byron's Memoirs, the "greatest crime in literary history" took place, perpetrated by the poet Thomas Moore, Byron's publisher John Murray (whose name remains outside the house and on a brass plaque on the door) and his old university friend John Cam Hobhouse.
As one looks up at the chimney from which issued forth the charred pages, it feels like a good moment to reflect on writings that suffered the same fate, and those that avoided it – for better or for worse.
While Byron never intended for his work to go up in smoke, there are a number of writers who – for various reasons and to varying degrees of success – hoped for just that.
Gogol destroyed the second part of Dead Souls (intended as homage to Dante's Purgatory) as part of a later-life obsession with Orthodoxy and Asceticism. Gerard Manley Hopkins, similarly, burned most of his poetry upon entering the priesthood.
Bulgakov torched the first copy of The Master and Margarita in 1930 for fear that he could not be a Soviet Writer. He (more or less) finished the novel in 1940, although an uncensored version didn't appear until the seventies. As the quick-witted cat Behemoth tells us: "Manuscripts don't burn". It's a good thing for this jobbing hack that he was more figurative than literal, else this blog might be cut sh
To Kafka, then! The Castle, The Man Who Disappeared and The Trial only survived, after the author's death at the age of forty, thanks to the disobedience of his dear friend and literary executor Max Brod. Kafka expressly told Brod that his work should be burned.
A sickly R. L. Stevenson – who almost killed himself writing the first version of Jekyll and Hyde – was so distressed by a questioning note from his wife and editor Fanny that he is said to have burned the pages of his manuscript in his room. Against all odds, rewriting the novella seems to have aided his convalescence (along with a few sharpeners, if some reports are to be believed) and he was bolstered in a number of weeks.
Lovers of literature owe an enormous debt not just to writers but also to their literary executors, ranging from Plotius and Lucius, saviours of the Aeneid (on which more shortly) to the indefatigable Robbie Ross, who rounded up the rights to the works of Oscar Wilde which had been sold off after he went broke.
I've been left chewing over the ethical question that faced a number of them: what duty is there to honour the dying wishes of authors? Should merit and significance be allowed to trump those wishes?
Have we been left bereft by the burning of Larkin's diaries? ("[I am] rather depressed by the remorseless scrutiny of one's private affairs that seems to be the fate of the newly dead. Really, one should burn everything.") Of Saki's? Of de Sade's final manuscripts?
Consider two cases: Virgil and Nabokov. Virgil – who hauntingly describes the vanishing world and culture of Troy in Book II of the Aeneid, wreathed in flames – wished that the unedited copy of his work be turned to ash. Yet, on the orders of Augustus, who had been read sections, the poet's final wishes were disregarded – and so we possess what was spared from the fires.
It is largely agreed that the original version isn't too far from the final manuscript. So was it really not worth publishing? Should we indulge the often neurotic self-criticism of writers, or print and be damned?
Nabokov's son, Dmitri – aware of the guilt-wracked Mr Moore? – argued prior to the publication of The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments, that "I wouldn't have wanted to go down in history as a literary arsonist".
This paper's Editor, Stig Abell, agreed in his review of the book in 2009: "Books are made to be read, not destroyed. And the work of epochal artists should be preserved and made public. The burning question is not, in the end, much of a burning question".
Not all have been so forgiving. The Guardian took the critical line that money and fame might have been more important to the son than preserving his father's legacy. This question of legacy – preserving or damaging it – brings to mind David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. While it shows signs of brilliance, there is no getting around its sombre and often frustrating incompleteness (something discussed at greater length in Robert Potts's review in April 2011).
Having concluded my walk at the big Waterstones just down the street, I sat in the shop's café, surrounded by Kindles and other e-readers, I'm also left wondering if the romantic final orders of the above would be given today. Will the tradition survive in an age of USBs? "Please, darling, have my hard-drives wiped" doesn't quite have the same impact, does it?
By MICHAEL CAINES
The Savoy Hotel hosted the 20th South Bank Sky Arts Awards on Sunday night; alongside the actors, comedians, musicians and other artists honoured this time round, Sunjeev Sahota received the literature award, for his well-regarded novel The Year of the Runaways. It's a notable choice on the (anomalously anonymous) judges' part. It's very much a novel of its moment, describing the lives of Indian illegal immigrants in Sheffield, including two posing as a married couple. Yet its prose is also the least enticing of the three short-list books – all of them novels, although the award in theory covers all genres – efficient but strangely plain, despite the colourful Hindi insults.
Nothing wrong with that, perhaps. But I prefer the work of Sahota's fellow short-listed novelists, Tessa Hadley and Sarah Hall. And not only because I had the pleasure of interviewing both of them last week. . . .
I do frankly, gushingly admit that the chatting about fiction really was a pleasure – at least for me. That's because, however, I'm already an admirer of the work – in Sarah Hall's case, since I wrote a gauche review of her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, over a decade ago.
Apart from anything else, both Hall and Hadley are writers of books that many readers seem to relish for the kinds of stories they tell – but also for the sheer cumulative power, and the distinctive textures, of their prose. Here, for example, is how Hall's nominated novel The Wolf Border conjures up a dream encounter between its protagonist Rachel and one of the beasts of its title:
"It comes between the bushes, as if bidden. It comes forward, mercilessly, towards her, paws lifting, fast, but not running. A word she will soon learn: lope. It is perfectly made: long legs, sheer chest, dressed for coldness in wraps of grey fur. It comes close to the wire and stands looking at her, eyes level, pure yellow gaze. Long nose, the black tip twitching, short mane. A dog before dogs were invented. The god of all dogs. It is a creature so fine, she can hardly comprehend it. But it recognizes her. It has seen and smelled animals like her for two million years. It stands looking. Yellow eyes, black-ringed. Its thoughts nameless. . . ."
And here is Harriet, one of the four siblings at the heart of Hadley's novel The Past, in another encounter with beautiful yet disquieting nature:
"On her way home from birdwatching Harriet crossed a tussocky field, a narrow wedge shape between two stretches of woodland, rising steeply to where it was closed in by more woods at the top. After the woods with their equivocal shade, the strong sunlight was startling when the path opened onto this gap; a red kite ambled in the sky above, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, too hot to sing, and a pigeon broke out from the trees with a wooden clatter of wing beats. A stream ran down the field, bisecting it, conversing urgently with itself, its cleft bitten disproportionately deep into the stony ground and marked against the field's rough grass by the tangle of brambles that grew luxuriantly all along it, profuse as fur, still showing a few late white flowers limp like damp tissue, and heavy with berries too sour and green to pick yet, humming with flies. . . . she wanted to taste it but thought that wasn't sensible – who knew what pesticides they used on these fields? On her solitary walks she was ambushed occasionally by this fear of accidents: what if she fell, and no one knew where she was?"
I won't bang on about these two novels' other good qualities here (I've saved most of that for the friends who happen to have my copies foisted on them). I'll just note instead that our TLS Voices interview quickly gets onto a more generally curious aspect of the writing process: those moments of inspiration that can shift a story out of its intended course.
Plans change, that is, in sudden ways – The Past benefited from one that came to Hadley, in true Archimedes style, in the bath – but tend to be preceded, as she notes, by "weeks of murkiness". Novels may be "huge, sometimes planned, often times unwieldy things", Hall agrees; but "there are these great moments that occur to you that turn the direction of the book". The writer has to "embrace and cherish" these moments. (A certain well-worn line of Thomas Edison's, about perspiration and inspiration, is coming to mind.)
"A book comes in fits and jerks", John Steinbeck once observed. George Eliot and her famous deviation from the plan in Middlemarch aside, there must be many unrecorded eureka moments scattered throughout the history of the novel, propelling it on in abrupt creative bursts. Not just originary moments of inspiration, that is, but moments that upset the scheme derived from that first moment. It must be a relief to the writer who finally has one, as Sarah Hall says, after worrying weeks of "murkiness".
The South Bank Sky Arts Awards ceremony will be broadcast tomorrow night, at 8pm, on Sky Arts.
Svetlana Alexievich at the 2015 Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm, December 10, 2015; credit: Reuters/Marcus Ericsson/TT News Agency
By RUTH SCURR
May 31 was Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich's 68th birthday. She spent the evening in conversation with novelist James Meek in Cambridge at a sold-out event organized by Cambridge Literary Festival and English PEN. Afterwards the queue for her books – Second-Hand Time, first published in English last month with extracts featured in the TLS, and Chernobyl Prayer – filled three corridors and spilled out onto the street.
It is thirty years since the Chernobyl disaster. Meek began by asking Alexievich (who spoke through the excellent translator Marsha Karp) about memory. "Memory is a creature that is alive . . . nobody has simple relations with memory", she said. Alexievich's work is like a tapestry or collage assembled from other people's memories and testimonials. "I don't do interviews", she insists when questioned about her technique. "I have conversations . . . the person must be interested in me . . . I must ask interesting questions and be prepared to answer questions myself."
"But let's be very concrete", she said, and gave the audience an example from Chernobyl Prayer. Alexievich went to talk to a woman whose husband was dying from cancer caused by Chernobyl. He was continually screaming in pain. The woman told Alexievich that the only time he stopped screaming was in the night, when he would clap his hands and she went to him to make love. She said "that is the only medicine I can give him, but don't put that in your book, or people will think I'm a pervert". Alexievich did include the story, but changed the names. Then the woman rang her up and said, "Why did you change the names? I suffered so much and he suffered so much, so let our names be there".
Alexievich never speaks about Communism with contempt. Her Belarusian father was a schoolteacher and remained a Communist in his nineties. Her mother was Ukrainian. She was born in Ukraine in 1948 and grew up in Belarus. Questioned about her relationship with the Russian language, she quotes a recent protester in Ukraine: "I want to be invaded by Pushkin, not Putin".
Reflecting on her own life and the lost promise of the Perestroika years, Alexievich is darkly humorous. "I remember it was wonderful when we were running around squares shouting, 'Freedom, freedom!' But then we went home and we didn't understand what freedom was." Looking back, she thinks the real question of that era was: "Ok, so you've been reading Hegel, but can you be a businessman?" She remembers the books of Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn – for circulating which people had been prepared to risk punishment under the old authoritarian regime – suddenly lying around for sale in the street, but no one was interested in reading them any more; there was as much pleasure to be had from a new coffee machine as from books. ("Welcome to the West", said Meek.)
"Some people think consumerism saved us from civil war", Alexievich remarked. ("Well there's at least one PhD in that", quipped Meek.) Then she summoned up a haunting image of what the future might be like. She described visiting one of the abandoned villages near Chernobyl, where wild beasts now inhabit the deserted houses, but a statue of Lenin still stands with his arm outstretched over the desolate scene. "Of course we need a new philosophy of life", she said, "but then everybody wants to have two cars in the household." And the well-heeled audience laughed nervously.
On May 30, Svetlana Alexievich gave the Elliott Lecture at St Antony's College Oxford. Her title was "The history of the Russian-Soviet soul", and the convener was the TLS Russia and East-Central Europe editor Oliver Ready. A recording of the lecture is available via TLS Voices:
By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN
Still undecided with less than three weeks to go before the referendum? This might help. They – the Europeans – want us to leave! They've had enough of us. And, frankly, who can blame them?
That – at least – is the point of view of the French daily Libération's Jean Quatremer: although he says at the outset that it's not really in our interest to leave, if we stay in we will make life sour for them like never before, and the ailing project, buffeted by nationalist winds from the East, will be done for: "David Cameron will be the only European leader to have won a referendum on Europe and will therefore have a central role in the Community game. He and his successors will then negotiate concession after concession and thereby bury entirely the federalist dream of the European fathers and complete the Old Continent's transformation into an ever slacker free-exchange zone". Therefore, for the sake of the EU, we are politely being asked to clear off.
Quatremer suggests that our sacrifice for the sake of the European common good would have an element of greatness even if, as he concedes, it could well lead to the break-up of the UK. He reminds us – and this should warm the hearts of all Brexiteers – that it would be the fourth time that Britain has come to the aid of divided European tribes, after the fight against the French empire (the unnamed Napoleon) and two German Reichs, with huge sacrifices.
He ends, resoundingly: "Come on, British friends, a bit of courage! Allow yourselves to be convinced by the brilliant leaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson who, deep down, have only Europeans' interests at heart".
And in twenty years' time, he promises, they will let us back in. What could be better I say!
For a different perspective see this week's TLS symposium, and the heartfelt plea on this week's Letters page for us to remain.
"Room of Rhythms", 2016, by Cevdet Erek. Photograph: Ben Symons
By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL
On holiday in Australia recently, one of the most bizarre places I came across was Cockatoo Island. It's a UNESCO world heritage site in the middle of Sydney Harbour and, until Sunday, the host of Sydney's twentieth art biennale. Before all this, though, it has had an extraordinary past.
Named after its sulphur-crested inhabitants, Cockatoo Island has, since 1839, been a prison for particularly bad convicts; an Industrial School for Girls, which took over the same prison buildings (you can still see crumbling-brick cells, ceramic sinks, faded tiles and childlike scribbles on the walls – imagine what it must have been like for those school children); and a ship-building yard, at its peak during the Second World War. The island then lay dormant for a decade in the 1990s, underwent restoration from 2001, and was opened to the public in 2007. There are camping areas now, too. (I'm not quite sold on that idea.)
Huge warehouses, surrounded by an array of spectacular industrial cranes, provide the main venues for the art work at this year's biennale – which is a mixed bag, not helped by the airport-style barriers (everywhere) with A4-paper signs telling you where you shouldn't stand, walk or touch. (About as annoying as the biennale's website, where brightly coloured words plummet intermittently down your screen.)
William Forsythe's installation "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no. 2", though, is a highlight. He's filled a cavernous room with hundreds of synchronized, swinging plumb bobs on strings, which you're invited to navigate through (no barriers here). Forsythe, a choreographer known for the experimental dance concepts – often using video projections, music, architecture and spoken word – that he developed with the Frankfurt Ballet and the Forsythe Company, calls this piece a "choreographic object". (The original "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time", 2005, featured a solo dancer who moved in a field of pendulums suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned building on the High Line in New York.) Here, you instinctively weave your body in and out of the plumb bobs in time to their hypnotic sway (several got tangled when I wasn't quick enough; along came an attendant to immediately clean up in my wake).
"Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no. 2", 2013, by William Forsythe. Photograph: Bob Barrett
Over in the old prison and school area, there's a sinister site-specific work by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. In "Conscious Sleep" (displayed in the former sleeping quarters), white steel bed frames are held up vertically by densely woven black thread; a powerful glimpse into the dark, nightmarish and claustrophobic minds of the inmates (and schoolgirls), perhaps. Back out into the bright daylight of the prison yard, the electricity cables stretching between the disused buildings look as though they've been just as artfully placed.
"Conscious Sleep", 2009/2016, by Chiharu Shiota. Photograph: Ben Symons
Another wonderful surprise is Miguel Ángel Rojas's tessellated floor in the former Mess Hall. Only when up close (there's a barrier to stop you treading on it) do you realize that the tiles are an illusion, instead made up of finely powdered charcoal, sand and lime. A rock sits in the centre. It's a delicate challenge to Australia's history of colonization (this kind of floor pattern is found in nineteenth-century Victorian architecture) and evokes the powerful connection to land felt by Aborigines.
Approaching the Guards House – the highest point on the Island – a thud-thud, thud-thud shakes the ground, like an eerie heartbeat that grows from a murmur to a bass-heavy boom. This is Cevdet Erek's "Room of Rhythms" (see top image), a series of large speakers scattered in and around the now-roofless building, apparently to do with – the blurb tells us – the campaigns dating back to the 1850s to reduce the working week from forty-four hours to forty; each pulsation mirrors the workers' unremitting protests that finally succeeded in 1947. But for me, even without this information, the atmosphere is affecting straight away. A reminder of all those beating hearts, mostly held captive, many of whom probably died on Cockatoo Island over the course of nearly two hundred years. Unlike them, I escaped on a city ferry a few hours later.
By DAVID COLLARD
The final poem in Julian Stannard's latest collection, What were you thinking?, is entitled "East Finchley". Here it is in full:
It's always sunny in East Finchley.
It's always funny in East Finchley.
That's enough about East Finchley.
East Finchley has a few things to snag the flâneur's interest: the Phoenix cinema, with its baroque auditorium and jazz moderne exterior; the Bauhaus-influenced Northern Line tube station with its modernist archer statue aiming an arrow straight at the heart of London; Black Gull Books, one of the very best second-hand bookshops in the capital and . . . well, that's about it. The place lacks romantic allure.
Although John Betjeman never eulogized the district as he did nearby Holloway and Highgate, in 1971 he agreed to become the first Patron of the Finchley Society, sending an equivocal message of support: "Long live Finchley and its sudden steep hills, tree-shaded gardens and memories of a civilised prosperity".
Finchley proper is a mile to the north-east and home to the Stephens Collection, displayed in a grand Victorian pile called Avenue House on East End Road. This is the former home of Dr Henry Stephens, FRCS (1796–1864), inventor of the celebrated blue-black writing fluid known as Stephens' Ink.
Stephens' ink was patented in 1837 and became a huge commercial success – free-flowing in all temperatures, indelible and unfading, it also had a low acid content, so it didn't corrode steel nibs. Inky Stephens, as he was popularly known, made a huge fortune and became the Tory member of parliament for Hornsey and Finchley, later Margaret Thatcher's constituency, He was a generous philanthropist, dubbed "the uncrowned king of Finchley".
His company branched out into manufacturing fountain pens and other office supplies. Stephens' was for more than a century a household name, the firm's distinctive enamel advertising thermometer adorning public buildings from Istanbul to Dunedin. The Stephens Collection has a fine display of the company's beautifully packaged products for schools and offices: stamp pads and endorsing ink, gum mucilage, typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, wooden rulers, blackboard chalk, crayons and sealing wax – a lost world of stationery. Children can learn to handle an ink pen and even a quill, while for grown-ups of a certain age there are potent memories of inkwells, bungies and blotch. Does any TLS reader recall playing dab cricket?
The Stephens Collection was established by the Finchley Society with the assistance of the Writing Equipment Society and the support of the London Borough of Barnet. I spent a perfectly contented afternoon there – and you may want to do the same, perhaps exploring the other delights of this unglamorous north London arrondissement. You'll find one of them in the grounds of Avenue House: a statue of a local resident and Finchley Society supporter – Spike Milligan.
Stephens' Inks exterior thermometer, 1920, Hotel Baron, Aleppo, Syria; Credit: Bernard Gagnon
Roberto Saviano; credit: George Torode
By CATHARINE MORRIS
Ten years ago, at the age of twenty-six, the Italian writer Roberto Saviano published Gomorrah, an anatomy of the Neapolitan mafia. It was inspired by his own disturbing experiences of violence in his home city, and grew out of an extended period of undercover investigation.
In an article published in the Financial Times last year, Misha Glenny described what life has been like for Saviano since then:
"He is shadowed wherever he goes by between five and seven armed members of the Carabinieri, the elite police squadron that has been responsible for his security since 2006 . . . . To begin with, he had to sleep in a different apartment every night; his family have either been forced into witness protection or compelled to renounce him; and even abroad he needs armed protection around the clock. To this day, he cannot possibly form normal relationships as anyone close to him is transformed automatically into a proxy target for the Camorra. Unlike Salman Rushdie's fatwa, which was negotiated away by the Iranian and British governments, the Camorra death sentence is for life."
It was slightly surprising to me that Saviano was in a position to give his own account of things at an event hosted by English PEN in London on Thursday. Chaired by Gaby Wood and also featuring David Hare, the discussion was held in a conference room at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster and attended by a couple of hundred people (perhaps), a fair number of them Italian. Saviano spoke (and listened) through the supremely skilful interpreter Martin Esposito; and confessed early on to certain naivety in writing Gomorrah – "I didn't decide to walk bravely into the flames . . . . I was young" – while also pinpointing why the book had the effect it did. "What scared the power I wrote about was not so much [the book as] the readers, the army of readers . . . . Even those who disagreed about the book had spoken about it."
David Hare, Roberto Saviano and Martin Esposito; credit: George Torode
Saviano and Hare were in 2011 jointly awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, which rewards writers who display, in Pinter's own phrase, "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination . . . to define the real truth of our lives and our societies". One of Wood's lines of questioning (one also pursued at a recent London Library event, incidentally) was about whether a writer should be motivated in their work by a sense of social responsibility. Hare was with Cyril Connolly on this – "If Cézanne wants to paint apples, then he's free to paint apples" – but he also observed that, in his own case, his "temperament has coincided with curiosity about the world artistically". (As Wood reminded us, Hare's plays have examined the judicial system, the banking system and MI5.)
Saviano was still a child when he was overcome by the desire to write. His style was baroque – "as far away as possible from reality" – but when a priest was murdered by the Camorra, he found that he "could not not look for moral reasons". He described to us his thought process at the time: "I've got to put my words into the factory, I've got to hone them, I've got to work with them. I've got to get them working in order to make a difference". But the feeling of responsibility can also be debilitating, he suggested – it can be very similar to guilt, and has in the past "engendered behaviours that would not really belong to me except that I'm fearful of harming others". He was reminded of the television version of Gomorrah, for which Saviano removed "everything that's good in any character", his reasoning being "I want evil to be inescapable for [the audience]. I want them to say, 'I'm not like this, and if I'm not like this, why?'" The reaction to the series was unexpected, it seems: "the world is telling me that in this way I'm inspiring evil, I'm making it fascinating". There is no duty, he concluded. "There is just one thing – the truth – and this is what we need to pursue."
Saviano's book ZeroZeroZero, published last year, describes London as the money-laundering capital of the world. When Saviano is in the UK or the US, he told us, he senses that people think him unduly obsessed with ideas about corruption. "I understand that point of view . . . . It's so hard to imagine London . . . as such a corrupt entity. By corruption I don't mean . . . the police, the politicians, the bureaucracy; I mean financial corruption". He referred to a rank order in which Switzerland is in position one in terms of corruption and lack of transparency, and the UK is at fifteen. That might not seem too bad, he said, "except that there's an asterisk" – "it only applies to the island of Great Britain, not to any offshore British territories which would immediately project Great Britain to the top". Saviano also said that, were the UK to leave the European Union, it would be "devoured by foreign capital".
Hare, meanwhile, spoke of the EU referendum as something that "in theory is meant to be about the country at large, but . . . is about a power struggle among the Conservative Party"; and told us that when he wrote about the financial crisis, he had "never met a group of people so totally self-interested as the bankers": "they knew nothing about anything except themselves". Our sense of being "excluded from everything that is significant" makes us feel helpless, he said – and one of the things he finds interesting when writing about his own times is the strength of audience response to "oppositional" material. His new short play Ayn Rand Takes a Stand is currently playing in the West End (as part of A View From Islington North directed by Max Stafford-Clark); and the reaction to it, he said, is "disproportionate to its quality".
Saviano said that we've all got homework to do: "to get to know things", to debate. He suggested that we follow the activities of Transparency, and read documents published by the Secret Intelligence Services. As Hare pointed out, we can also do something much simpler. "You come to look in your own life . . . and the lives of those near you for individual acts of goodness as being the way in which it is possible for you to express yourself". Saviano had said something along these lines himself: "I believe in goodness, the good gesture – eye to eye, hand to hand; and I hope my readers will believe in this too".


text:
The models for TimeSplitters Rewind are being remade from scratch, with the original assets being used as reference only.
Originally Posted by Sketchee
Great news for me! Some of my all time favourite playstation games
Originally Posted by Fizzban
I only ever played the first game on PS2 when it launched. Can't say I liked it much tbh. I mean I tried to get into it, and got mates to come play it with me and so forth, but I never saw the fascination. Means I didn't bother trying the other 2 games.
It is pleasing to see Crytek not minding about a fan made game though. Although calling it fan made makes me think of spotty teenagers in a bedroom somewhere, and not some of the staff from Free Radical Design who made the original game lol.
Originally Posted by true_gamer
TS2 was awesome on the N64. Many nights after school, there would be 4 player battles on several custom maps we made.
Epic game! :)
The 50 Best PC Games of All Time: Part One
1st July 2016
Games of New York: Five Games from the Big Apple
30th June 2016
Killing Floor 2 Preview
28th June 2016

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Fishermen's Memorial Statue
Stacey Blvd., Rt. 127, Gloucester, MA 01930
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Sculpture honors the city's maritime heritage.
Now's a great time to "Get into Your Sanctuary" – Stellwagen Bank
Here in Massachusetts, local residents and tourists alike have the opportunity to visit and learn...
Search All Listings Here.


text:
Writer: Chris Kitley
Date:Friday September 19 2008
Time: 4:48PM
Vicarage Road
Reading travel to Watford on the back of their 6-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday, still in search of their first away win of the season.
The Royals have won three out of three at home, but have struggled on their travels, gaining just one point from a possible nine.
Watford are struggling with injuries and will be wounded following a disappointing defeat at the hands of Plymouth.
Steve Coppell will be hoping his side can take advantage of a depleated Watford team to gain their first away win of the campaign and kick-start their title challenge.
Young protégé Jem Karacan on the prospect of winning away;
'The boys have been buzzing since the 6-0. Now we need to go and put in a good performance and get an away win.
'We prepare the same for away games as we do at home, we keep our feet on the ground and we'll be confident about getting a result.
'Watford lost in midweek but that doesn't mean anything, you can't make predictions. There are shocks every weekend in this division.'
Watford are without Tamas Priskin and Lloyd Doyley, who both picked up hamstring strains in the midweek 2-1 defeat to Plymouth.
They will be replaced by Adrian Mariappa and Will Hoskins, with Hoskins Watford's only striking option due to Grzegorz Rasiak's shoulder injury.
He may be a poor-man's Stephen Hunt, but he is a pest to play against. He will be looking to impress as he faces his idol.
Reading have no fresh injury worries ahead of the trip to Vicarage Road and Coppell will be expected to play the same side that destroyed Sheffield Wednesday in midweek.
He made his league debut against Sheffield Wednesday and was in great form, scoring two and creating one. His energy and work-rate will make him a constant thorn in Watford's side.
This fixture always finishes 0-0.
Reading have failed to score in their last four meetings with Watford.
Stuart Attwell
We all know it's going to be 0-0. My prediction: Watford 0-0 Reading
Date:Friday September 19 2008
Time: 4:48PM
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