Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me by Nicholas Rankin: a child’s eye view of empire – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "Historians don’t write history, they curate it, and in Trapped in History Rankin challenges his own childhood absorption of propagandistic accounts of Britain’s imperial past. Nearly 70 years after his arrival in Kenya from Sheffield as an intensely curious boy, Rankin, a former BBC World Service producer, writer and consummate storyteller with a flair for drama, has composed an insightful tale of hubris in colonial east Africa, underpinned by rigorous research. When, in 1953, Rankin’s stockbroker father, James Tennant Rankin – always known as Tennant – told his pregnant wife, Peg, that he’d been offered a job as general manager of Buchanan’s Kenya Estates, at a time when the country was in a state of emergency, Peg’s immediate response was: 'When do we leave?'... The credits of relocating for nine years to this “beautiful country [but] contested land” outweighed the deficits. For the Rankins, as for so many who escaped dreary postwar Britain, Kenya provided a social upgrade, though it came with the risk, as CLR James once noted, of finding yourself 'an aristocrat without having been trained as one'.... Mining his own recollections elicits a tug of constant shame in his complicity, even though an innocent child, in a social order where any black man would be called “boy” and where a spurious allegation of “menacing a white woman” might result in being flogged with a hippopotamus-hide whip.... In the suppression of the Mau Mau, Britain defaulted to blunt collective punishment, detaining thousands of suspects behind barbed wire, under observation from watchtowers. As a boy in Kenya, even if he’d been made aware of it, such action would have been unfathomable to Rankin. 'What I could not conceive, as I sat on the floor of my father’s study in my shorts and shirt and Bata sandals, was that we, the brave British who I knew had won "The War"... were now building… concentration camps.' In attempting to interrogate his privilege and divest himself of it, Rankin enters the territory of shameful histories mapped out by contemporaries such as Alex Renton in Blood Legacy and Rian Malan in My Traitor’s Heart. Such books seem marked by the authors’ determination to, in the words of the historian Peter Fryer, 'think black', and embark on an empathic journey towards self-abrogating enlightenment. In Trapped in History, Rankin frees himself, and perhaps readers, in curating a porous narrative that serves as an unforgettable distillation of Britain and Kenya’s complex and contentious shared history."
Behind Omid Scobie-gate lies an age-old maxim: always blame the translator – article by Anna Aslanyan in The Guardian. "Last week, another language professional came under fire when a Dutch translation of Endgame, Omid Scobie’s book about the British monarchy, was released by Xander, a Haarlem-based publisher. It contained something absent from the original: the names of the royals who supposedly speculated about the skin colour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s unborn baby. When the discrepancy was flagged, Xander 'temporarily' withdrew the book from sale, citing an 'error'. One of the Dutch translators, Saskia Peeters, spoke to the Daily Mail. 'As a translator, I translate what is in front of me,' she told it. As a fellow translator, I understand very well her outrage at the insinuation that she added the names. Translation is like rubbish collection: people notice it only when something goes wrong. This oft-used metaphor has a whiff of disrespect, which in turn can lead to scapegoating, a game as old as translation itself – whatever goes wrong, blame the translator. ... Whoever was responsible for the offending passage, it’s hard to imagine the translators in that role. Yet their employers seem in no hurry to clear up the confusion.... Translation is an art, a craft, a trade; it’s also a practice that few understand but many criticise. This game involves three main players: the source, the target and the intermediary. Two of them are unable to fully grasp what’s going on, so when they start losing, their instinct is to blame the one in the middle. The latest AI advances mean that certain translation jobs can be automated. In some cases, it’s a win-win, yet there are examples demonstrating that it’s not as safe as entrusting dustbins to robots. Machine translation tools can result in your asylum application being refused or your car being illegally searched. The world will always need real translators – and not as the first people to blame for rubbish piling up on the page."
‘This is a wake-up call’: Booker winner Paul Lynch on his novel about a fascist Ireland – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "[The] opening page begins with a knock on the door on a suburban Dublin street. Two members of the newly formed Irish secret police are looking for Eilish Stack’s husband, Larry, a leader of the teaching trade union. From that first line to the devastating final pages, we are dragged into Eilish’s world as first her husband and then her eldest son are 'disappeared'. Creeping surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, curfews and censorship grow into all-out civil war. Democracies crumble gradually – then suddenly, to quote Hemingway. Lynch has called the novel an 'experiment in radical empathy' – and it is impossible to read the scenes of a city under siege, shelling and walls plastered with photographs of missing loved ones, without thinking of the conflict zones in the world right now.... Back in 2018, though, the situation in Syria was very much on Lynch’s mind – in particular the tragedy of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler found washed up on a Turkish beach. 'The question I asked myself was, "Why don’t I feel this more than I should?" I started to think about how I’m desensitised by the news. Even now, watching TV, we’re starting to switch off from the Middle East in the same way we switched off from Ukraine. It’s inevitable. If we were to truly take on the enormity of the world and its horrors, we would not be able to get out of bed in the morning.'... Lynch, now 46, writes 'state-of-the-soul novels', he says. 'Art isn’t a rational process. You don’t sit down and go, "I’m going to address this."' He wanted to make the reader feel what it must be like to be so desperate you contemplate taking your children on a small boat with strangers in the middle of the night. 'It’s about not averting your gaze,' he says. 'Locking the reader into a true sense of inevitability so they cannot turn away. So they cannot say, "I don’t want to look at this."'"
Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’ – interview by Sean O'Hagan in The Guardian. "It took Glazer almost 10 years to make The Zone of Interest (the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp)... The end result is an audacious film, formally experimental and with an almost clinically detached point of view. Mainly shot on hidden cameras, it concentrates on the domestic life of the Höss family (Rudolf, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children), whose house stood just outside the perimeter of the concentration camp, the horror within suggested in glimpses of smoking chimneys but, more disturbingly, through an almost constant ambient soundscape of industrial noise and human shouts and cries. It is an unsettling film: a study in extreme cognitive dissonance. It stayed with me for weeks after I watched it, so much so that I attended another screening to try to decipher its uneasy merging of almost clinical observation and moments of abrupt and jarring experimentalism – the screen turns blood red at one point. On both occasions, it fulfilled Glazer’s aim 'to make it a narrative that you, the viewer, complete, that you are involved in and ask questions of'."
The curious case of Captain Tom: how did the feelgood story of lockdown turn sour? – article by Time Adams in The Guardian. "There has never been much of a dividing line between effective public relations and the spread of religious fervour, and for 25 days in April 2020 the good news of Captain Tom sounded a lot like The Greatest Story Ever Told....In the early lockdown days of the pandemic, twinkly 99-year-old war veteran Tom Moore [began] walking lengths of his garden on a Zimmer frame in support of NHS Charities Together... What followed was – even by the standards of that year of magical thinking – something of a miracle. PR executives who witnessed it stood in awe and wonder. Several commissioned breathless reports, analysing the phenomenon. One ... used Captain Tom’s story as a case study of 'one of the greatest demonstrations of the effectiveness of authentic purpose, PR and communication ever achieved'.... Looking back on all this now, was a different kind of ending to Captain Tom’s story always inevitable? Was it a near certainty that sooner or later another law of PR would kick in, a version of that tabloid and social media truism that, eventually, no good deed ever goes unpunished? It is hard to pinpoint exactly when that different ending started to become a probability – the one that concludes with the current ongoing statutory inquiry from the Charity Commission into the conduct of the Captain Tom Foundation and the enforced demolition of a garden building created in his name – but that other captain who became prominent at that time, Captain Hindsight, might argue for 18 May 2020. That was the date, two weeks after the hero’s birthday, on which the Ingram-Moore family first applied to trademark Captain Tom’s name...."
Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain by Pen Vogler: a peach of a read – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "Vogler hasn’t called her book Stuffed to signal the amazing array of facts she has gathered – though on this score it is, indeed, brimful (I’m in awe of her reading). The word can mean utterly screwed as well as swollen-stomached in the post-buffet sense, and thanks to this it’s entirely apt for a study of British food in good times and in bad. One word of caution, though. While Vogler’s dogged truffling takes her from the enclosures of the 15th century (and even before) to the rise of the supermarket, her approach here is to focus on individual ingredients (bacon, turnips, herring) and a few key dishes (pumpkin pie, Christmas pudding), rather than to work up a single, chronological narrative – a method she likens to a Chinese banquet, steaming bowl after steaming bowl arriving at the table. On the downside, this means her overarching argument (if she has one) gets a bit lost. But on the upside, it liberates the reader to jump around.... Vogler’s discoveries are often relevant. With our fads and fetishes, our cheats and our changing concerns, we go in circles. Dickensian gruel and 21st-century oat milk are, for instance, basically the same thing. But she’s too much the collector of the wondrous and the arcane, the weird and the funny, to worry excessively about resonance; some things are just interesting in their own right. The Anglo-Saxons thought radishes a cure for depression and that artichokes in wine could deal with body odour. Victorian consumers expected their anchovies to be a loud 'Venetian red' (perfectly safe, unless lead was involved), while the green of their gherkins was brightened with copper. In the days when Englishmen still ate carp – only in the 20th century did this sly freshwater creature fall out of fashion as supper – their muddy taste was alleviated by anglers keeping their catch in 'moist moss', where it could survive for a while out of the water, 'to cleanse the flesh'."
The End of Enlightenment by Richard Whatmore: a warning from 18th-century Britain – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise.... Paine’s nemesis, the conservative thinker Edmund Burke, thought the Thetford-born firebrand was a traitor to his homeland, but, like every intellectual worth their salt in the late 18th century, Burke conceded that Britain was a basket case.... To understand what had gone wrong, they drew on Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations. There, the great Scottish economist so beloved of neoliberal bruisers from Thatcher onwards damned a corrupt nexus of bankers, politicians and merchants for working to maximise their own profit, rather than the good of society. Plus ça change. Across the ages, Smith’s words resonate. In a sclerotically class-ridden, increasingly inegalitarian Britain run by plutocratic public schoolboys it is hard not to see the sick man of Europe in 1776 as similar to the 2023 version. 'We too live in a time when political structures we inhabit are fluid and perhaps on the cusp of great and potentially dangerous changes,' writes Richard Whatmore at the outset of this nuanced history of the manifold discontents of 18th-century Britain."
‘I’m very aware of being public school now. All those things you loathe’: Toby Jones on class, character and the cost of fame – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "The new ITV drama [Mr Bates vs the Post Office.] tells the story of the class action suit that had Alan Bates, a former post office operator at Craig-y-Don, in Llandudno, at its centre. Bates, an unassuming crusader for justice, is a lot of things – his rock-solid moral compass has its own charisma, by the time Jones has finished playing him – but he is emphatically not chic or urbane. The scandal is one of the largest miscarriages of justice in British legal history: the Post Office, over a period spanning more than 20 years, accused post office operators across the country of fraud and theft, due to accounting errors that were in fact caused by their own software.... Bates, by Jones’s account – he spoke to him, preparing for the role – is pretty unusual. 'Effectively, he was sort of saying, "I don’t have emotions."...' Having hit the brick wall of a character who taught himself how software works yet refused point-blank to emote, Jones was in a fix: ... 'How was I going to play this guy? I don’t believe a word of what he says to me about himself. I don’t believe any human is like that. Everyone has emotions.' Then he spoke to former MP James Arbuthnot, who also fought hard to get justice for the post office operators. 'And he said, "Every moment I spent with Alan Bates improved the quality of my life. I am privileged to know a man like Alan Bates."' 'He’s like the British qualities I was told about when I was a kid,' Jones says, 'modesty and duty and don’t-get-above-yourself. All that stuff that sort of went out the window in the 80s. He was formed by those forces. I just find it so heroic, and it’s celebrated in the drama. That, more than anything, made me want to do it. Just thinking, "Wouldn’t it be great, if there were more of those stories? Rather than these shameless people we have to hear about every day."'
Everyone has an opinion, but my gut is telling me differently. Should I trust it? – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "The most helpful tool I’ve discovered for tuning into my latent beliefs and desires is 'morning pages': three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing, written freehand soon after waking. These are a cornerstone of The Artist’s Way, the best-selling creativity guide by Julia Cameron.... Next month Cameron publishes Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Creativity, about her decades of experience channelling 'the wisdom inside' for support not just with writing, but in every area of life.... Once or twice, in times of personal angst, I’ve had a sudden, unexpected understanding of exactly what I needed to do, like a wise and kindly voice cutting through my prevarication and taking charge.... But, Cameron agrees, such realisations are not easily talked about. 'We live in a society that tells us not to trust our intuition – it’s difficult for us to fly in the face of all the messages of our culture.'... We might see being true to ourselves in the face of others’ opinions and social pressures – what the authors call “autonomous functioning” – as a product of being in touch with our intuition. But what does the science say?... 'Intuition is real,' says Joel Pearson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and author of a forthcoming book on the subject.... 'To be clear, I’m not talking about a spiritual, magical thing that connects everybody in the ether … The way I see intuition can be explained with the science that we already have.' His definition is the 'learnt, productive use of unconscious information for better choices or actions', best trusted only in contexts where we already have considerable experience. Pearson gives the example of walking into an unfamiliar cafe, and disliking it for some reason you can’t specify. ... Blindly trusting intuition can embed unconscious bias, such as age-, gender- or race-based prejudice – so it’s important to use it judiciously. 'There are situations when you can use it – but there are situations when you absolutely shouldn’t,' says Pearson.... Like me, Pearson trusts his hunches most when at work. His research has found that people in many different fields, from sports to the military, do the same – though they may not say so publicly. 'A lot of CEOs and C-suite managers are really into intuition, but they won’t admit that to the board of directors,' Pearson says: they fear being written off as spiritual. But if we’re to better understand and harness intuition, he continues, 'the first step is moving away from this taboo.'"
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman: a tribute to our better nature – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature and the community, bound only by the principles of humility and solidarity. Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice. Whether or not this vision of pre-agrarian life is an accurate one – and certainly the anthropology and archaeology on which Bregman draws are open to interpretation – the Dutchman puts together a compelling argument that society has been built on a false premise. Bregman, whose previous book was the equally optimistic Utopia for Realists, has a Gladwellian gift for sifting through academic reports and finding anecdotal jewels. And, like the Canadian populariser, he’s not afraid to take his audience on a digressive journey of discovery. Here, we visit the blitz, Lord of the Flies – both the novel and a very different real-life version – a Siberian fox farm, an infamous New York murder and a host of discredited psychological studies, including Stanley Milgram’s Yale shock machine and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. Along the way, he takes potshots at the big guns: Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. Yet despite the almost bewildering array of characters and information, Bregman never loses sight of his central thesis, that at root humans are 'friendly, peaceful and healthy'.... The fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls 'veneer theory' – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. In reality, argues Bregman, when cities are subject to bombing campaigns or when a group of boys is shipwrecked on a remote island, what’s notable is the degree of cooperation and communal spirt that comes to the fore."
Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion by David Keen: Trumpism’s lifeblood – review by Charlie English in The Guardian. "Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American 'bootstrap myth', which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of 'affirmative action' – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society. This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it. Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout 'Shame!' at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too. This, more or less, is the analysis of Trumpism offered by David Keen in his fascinating, occasionally frustrating book."
How one of the world’s oldest newspapers is using AI to reinvent journalism – article by Alexandra Topping in The Guardian. "Berrow’s Worcester Journal.... first published in 1690 and now a free sheet containing content from the Worcester News, is one of several publications housed by the UK’s second biggest regional news publisher to hire 'AI-assisted' journalists to report on local news.... The AI reporters use an in-house copywriting tool based on the technology ChatGPT, a souped-up chatbot that draws on information gleaned from text on the internet. Reporters input mundane but necessary 'trusted content' – such as minutes from a local council planning committee – which the tool turns into concise news reports in the publisher’s style. With the AI-assisted reporter churning out bread and butter content, other reporters in the newsroom are freed up to go to court, meet a councillor for a coffee or attend a village fete, says the Worcester News editor, Stephanie Preece. 'AI can’t be at the scene of a crash, in court, in a council meeting, it can’t visit a grieving family or look somebody in the eye and tell that they’re lying. All it does is free up the reporters to do more of that,' she says. 'Instead of shying away from it, or being scared of it, we are saying AI is here to stay – so how can we harness it?' She adds that Newsquest’s tool does not generate content – a trained journalist puts information into the tool, which is then edited and tweaked if necessary by a news editor – and will, they hope, avoid ChatGPT’s reputation for being inaccurate."
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