Cuttings: February 2024

‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people beauty, freedom and dignity – article by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. "For architects, who generally want to do more with their skills than adding some style to an office block or a private house, designing for older people and those living with age-related diseases such as dementia gives them a chance to contribute to something of social value. ... The Village Landais Alzheimer, on the edge of the town of Dax in south-west France, is a comprehensive attempt to 'give real life back' to people with Alzheimer’s, as one staff member puts it, to 'create conditions where they don’t just stay in a room waiting to die'.... Within each cluster of buildings, or quartier, are individual 'houses', each with private bedrooms and a shared sitting and dining area, and a kitchen run by staff. These in turn look through glass walls into informal courtyards, to create the possibility of community with the other houses.... The paths around the village are designed in loops, because people with Alzheimer’s sometimes get confused by dead ends. They also return walking routes back towards the centre and away from the boundary fence, which you barely notice.... The paving is a uniform beige colour throughout, as strong contrasts can be disturbing to people with Alzheimer’s. Mirrors, also potentially unsettling, can be concealed by shutters. Light and dark are used to attract attention where it should go, and deflect it from where it should not. Pale door handles are placed against darker backgrounds, and doors to service areas are barely noticeable in boarded walls. People with Alzheimer’s are 'more curious than other people, as they are lost all the time', says Charon-Burnel, so 'if you put a "no entry" or "staff only" sign on something they will go there'. It’s better to make the off-limits zones inconspicuous. 'There is as little signage as possible,' says Morten Rask Gregersen of Nord. 'People can see where they need to go instead of being shown.'”

Hardy Women by Paula Byrne: brilliant writer of women, very bad husband – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "How is it, [Byrne] wants to know, that while a female fan could write to the creator of Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead praising him for his 'complete understanding of a woman’s soul', his first wife could only rail at the way he reserved his sympathies exclusively for those females he invented? Drawing on Hardy’s correspondence, including some letters that were, Byrne says, unknown to previous biographers, she sets out in her new book to find answers by looking closely at all the women in his life – and I do mean all of them. Not only are his wives and lovers, his sisters and his mother here. At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.... While Hardy Women is deeply researched and often well-written, it is, unfortunately, one of those books that struggles to rise above its tricksy, completist concept. Chop-chop-chop, we go, through all the women, each chapter devoted to a different one, save for those few that return, by necessity, to a creature we’ve already met. The effect, in narrative terms, is frustratingly stop-start, and (unintentionally, I think) repetitive. ... The biggest problem, however, stems from the fact that the most fascinating period by far of Hardy’s life in terms of his relationships with women is ... those months and years when he was in a complicated and deceitful menage with [his wife] Emma and [his secretary] Florence. Of course it’s sad to see how he used his cousin Tryphena Sparks and a woman called Eliza Nicholls, who arrived, Miss Havisham-like, at Max Gate after Emma’s death in 1912, still in possession of the engagement ring he’d given her 40 years before – and Byrne tells both stories beautifully. But still, the reader waits – and waits – for Florence to appear and then collide with Emma, and you have to get through an awful lot of pages before she does (Hardy Women is long)."

Spent Light by Lara Pawson: the dark side of everyday things – review by Sarah Moss in The Guardian. "At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers... The gas burning under the egg pan reminds her of Zyklon B and the crematoriums of Auschwitz.... [But] these aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. Eventually, inevitably, Pawson turns her gaze to a phone... She cannot recall 'the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock … where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one are raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt'. And then, devastatingly, 'I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused.'... Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose."

On the 60th birthday of Vision On, we celebrate a creative powerhouse that inspired a generation – article by Mark Braxton on the Radio Times website. "Vision On was always a gem in the children's TV schedules – and now it's a diamond, 60 years old on 6th March. Between 1964 and 1976 it entertained children – and let's face it, their parents – with a quickfire and visually exhilarating mixture of comedy, creative ideas, multi-format animations, mime and viewers' artworks.... Input came from far and wide. [Says Vision On cornerstone Clive Doig:] 'We had a little cottage industry of regular contributors: animation artists, film directors who made little visually interesting films, many stop-motion film contributors...' Vision On [fixtures] included comic-strip-style mini-stories involving captioned conversations between Humphrey the Tortoise and a little girl called Susanne; or between The Burbles, invisible creatures who lived in a grandfather clock; the animated unearthings of The Digger on a construction site; and a cartoon cuckoo who was always losing the numbers from its clock.... 'Pat [Keysell] was terrific as the front presenter,' says Clive. 'When I was first assigned to Vision On, she had been there for many years. I think she really enjoyed breaking away from a rather plodding, stultified programme [For the Deaf] into a madcap programme of surreal ideas and visual comedy.'... Keysell assisted with the show's mime sequences, first with Ben Benison and when he left, future Doctor Who star Sylvester McCoy – billed in those days as Sylveste McCoy.... Of course, critical to the success and longevity of Vision On and its spin-offs Take Hart and Hartbeat was the brilliant artist and educator Tony Hart.. 'His type of art was amazing in the fact that he could take any little objects and turn them into great paintings.'... Humour was a big ingredient in Vision On and keeping the gag rate high on a weekly basis was David Cleveland in the gurning, lab-coated guise of The Prof. Week after week his mini masterpieces of surreal comedy were a major highlight and employed all kinds of trick photography."

Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus? – article by Marina Hyde in The Guardian. "Did some randos calling him a 'racist' on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them 'paedophiles'... A supposed free-speech nut suing for libel (not his first rodeo), Laurence brought his counterclaim on the basis that 'I felt that one of the most important things I had in this world was my good name'. Mm-hm. I can’t help feeling that that ship had not just already sailed, but been sunk in the Solent around 300 years before the development of the electric lightbulb.... Let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda.... Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. ... Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey."

The writer's attempts to improve his novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Writer (to three engineers, tending respectively to his desk, chair and laptop): Well, if there's nothing wrong with my chair, desk or computer, then why is my novel so terrible?"

A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer: sex and sanctimony – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Ninety years before the Lady Chatterley trial, the Old Bailey was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Fruits of Philosophy was the sort of thing that would corrupt wives and servants. Written in simple, unshowy language by an American physician, Fruits set out the basics of contraception, principally by means of 'the female' self-administering a spermicidal douche post-coitus. The tone was sensible and brisk, and about as far from a turn-on as could be imagined. Still, as far as the British authorities were concerned, the suggestion that married couples might want to have sex for any purpose other than making babies was downright obscene.... Standing in the dock was Annie Besant, a pretty, intelligent, public-spirited clergyman’s wife, the sort of woman whom any gentleman of the press or, indeed, the jury bench was likely to admire. Besant was charged, along with her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh, with selling The Fruits of Philosophy at the modest cost of six pence, making it easily available to all who needed it. Besant conducted her own defence with extraordinary assurance, calling expert medical witnesses to give heart-rending testimony as to the consequences for working-class families of being unable to control their fertility.... Michael Meyer plays up to all these stereotypes and even adds a comic commentary of his own. Thus, the Victorians enjoyed 'shagging like rabbits' while Besant was 'a badass'. This effortful attempt to sound relevant is unnecessary, though. Besant’s story is quite powerful enough without all the trimmings."

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review by Joe Moshenska in The Guardian. "When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, [Arendt] fled to the US. [She] questioned whether the traditions [she] had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them. As Stonebridge shows, what distinguished Arendt was her determination to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them. ... Her deepest concerns were with the nature of human beginnings – with the innovations and surprises of which people are capable, and the futures that their acts make possible; with the fact of human plurality – the fundamental variety of our common and fragile life that makes true thought possible; and with the possibility of love, which is for Arendt, as Stonebridge elegantly puts it, 'the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place'. Arendt clung on to these key commitments with the opposite of naive idealism. They were the basis of her lifelong exploration of the ways in which nazism and totalitarianism deform and nullify these fundamental capacities, and of the beleaguered but revolutionary possibilities that nonetheless remain. Her very way of being – idiosyncratic and original, while still feeling the shared world itching at her fingertips – embodied these ideals. The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Stonebridge’s book is an interesting generic mixture that itself feels like a sign of the times: it combines biography, critical assessment of Arendt’s legacy, practical handbook for action (six of the 10 chapters begin 'How to…'), and musings on the current geopolitical situation."

Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the contradictions of colonialism – review by Nandini Das in The Guardian. "Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of [Pennsylvania plant trader John] Bartram and [the Royal Gardens at] Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it, and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling. For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds that changed the English landscape and accelerated modern plant science also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world. And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism. Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.... 'It’s all true, but the opposite is also true', as Sanghera puts it. History is not a balance sheet: sometimes it requires that we hold multiple truths in our mind simultaneously. Nations – and individuals – can do great evil at the same time as doing good. And that’s where it gets complicated: sometimes doing what’s considered evil can lead to good, and vice versa."

Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the charge sheet against rule Britannia – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "In Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel to Empireland (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to the popularity of Indian restaurants.... His new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an influence.... The book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is 'not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding', he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists. Britain’s genius for propaganda has previously been used to cast its imperial identity as heroic rather than villainous. This has been replicated in the US, where the battle over the curation of history – in particular over alleged fears of the negative impact on children exposed to any text that contains traumatic events – has seen many rightwing commentators talk up the benefits of slavery to the enslaved. Such egregious arguments have not yet found favour in Britain, but they highlight the lure of revisionism. Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. Empireworld makes it more difficult for revisionists ... to return the genie to that bottle."

Christopher Priest – obituary by John Clute in The Guardian. "The novelist Christopher Priest ...became eminent more than once over the nearly 60 years of his active working life. But while he relished success, he displayed a wry reserve about the ambiguities attending these moments in the limelight. In 1983 he was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a 20-strong cohort, most of them – such as Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and AN Wilson – significantly younger than Priest, whose career had begun almost two decades earlier, and who had at least 15 books and 50 stories in print by the early 80s. He clearly felt that it was not so much the quality of his work that delayed his 'promotion' to the literary establishment, but his reluctance to deny, when asked, that he wrote science fiction. His large body of work never fitted easily into any mould. Only in recent years has it become widely understood that the sometimes baffling ingenuity and thrust of his fiction has been of a piece, no more detachable into convenient genres than, say, Amis’s or Ishiguro’s tales of the fantastic. Like them, he wove visions of Britain drifting into a post-empire future without secure signposts. Those stories, and the characters he let loose without a paddle, sink and dodge into realities that no longer count. Lacking much in the way of science-fiction gear, even his early work seems to describe the point that we have now arrived at."

Namesake by NS Nuseibeh: the pen and the sword – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. "'Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,' writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and 'easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed'.... Searching and honest, these essays carry the reader from New York dinner parties to seventh-century battlefields to Jerusalem checkpoints and down the alleyways of a shrewd and compassionate mind. As she trails Nusayba, the academic in her recedes and you can hear a girlish heart racing, her belief in her own courage blossoming. This subtext is what makes Namesake a pleasure to read: the shy, people-pleasing scholar behind all that incisive research diving headfirst into old myths as if trying to resurrect her redoubtable foremother. Will she find belonging and a connection to her ancestors? Will she ever return to Gaza or get flagged by Prevent? Will she stop worrying, make peace with overstaying houseguests and English aubergines? Will she be allowed to introduce herself as Arab and feminist without having to reject her Muslim history? At once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, here is an illuminating and trenchant exploration of Muslim feminism (a term I understand better now, though I still have a lot of arguing left in me). An essential read in the war against lazy stereotypes, cultural annihilation and every form of apartheid."

The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe? – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: '100% AI-generated'. Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first '100% AI-generated' essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.... Policy demands that I refer essays with high AI detection scores for academic misconduct, something that can lead to steep penalties, including expulsion. But my standout student contested the referral, claiming university-approved support software they used for spelling and grammar included limited generative AI capabilities that had been mistaken for ChatGPT.... I granted the appeal. I admit to trusting the human over the machine. But the defence was also convincing, and this particular student had been consistently writing in this style long before ChatGPT came into being. Still, I was making a high-stakes call without reliable evidence. It was a distressing experience for my student, and one that is being repeated across the sector."

Can these seven tips help you become a ‘supercommunicator’? – article by Lauren Mechling in The Guardian. "My weeklong experiment in being one of the 'supercommunicators' [was guided by] bestselling author Charles Duhigg’s zippy psychology cum self-help book of the same name. Inspired by his own chagrin at being a less than sterling conversational partner – with his children, wife and employees at his former workplace – he committed himself to learning how to talk to others in a way that makes them feel heard.... Duhigg’s conversations with neurologists, psychologists and negotiation experts led him to learn that superior conversationalists have a lot in common. They tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings, laugh freely and ask 20 times more questions than the average person.... Mirror their wants and needs.... Laugh your way into their heart.... Use your influence.... Assess what kind of conversation is needed.... Prepare a list of topics to discuss.... Repeat what they're saying.... Pay attention to non-verbal cues."

Five of the best books about grief – article by Sophie Ratcliffe in The Guardian. "Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter... Sad Book by Michael Rosen... You Are Not Alone: A New Way to Grieve by Cariad Lloyd... Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley... Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross"

Rocking the boat: would your marriage survive being shipwrecked together? – article by Sophie Elmhirst in The Guardian. "Let’s play it as a game. Two-player, ideally lovers.... The set-up is simple. You’re in a boat in the middle of an ocean. You have no radio. Oh, and one of you can’t swim. That’s key. A whale collides with your boat and as it fills with water you salvage a few tins of food and containers of fresh water, a couple of books, some clothes, a small inflatable dinghy and an even smaller life raft. You climb into the raft and watch your boat sink below the waves. And then the game begins. The challenges are initially practical: how do you eat? How do you find water? How do you sleep? Then they’re psychological: what do you do all day? How do you stay hopeful? How do you not go insane? ... There are questions of power to resolve: who’s in charge? Who makes the decisions? Who chooses what you eat or how much water you’re allowed to drink? Towards the end, as in all good games, things turn nicely existential. Do you make it or do you die? How do you die? Who dies first?... The version I’ve written, Maurice and Maralyn, isn’t fictional, but tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who, in 1973, endured nearly four months adrift on a small life raft in the Pacific before they were rescued.... The only thing we know for sure, obviously, is how the game ends, and it’s not with salvation. Ending Maurice and Maralyn’s story with their rescue would be like ending a love story with a wedding. A sentimental misrepresentation: bullshit. No, the game can only end one way, which is death.... You can avoid the emptiness, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to stare at it, right in the eye. Acknowledge the emptiness and know that you have to keep doing anyway, that you have to live in the knowledge of death without it dictating the terms.... I think that’s how Maralyn played the game. Maurice uncovered the emptiness, bathed in the stuff, almost let it smother him, while she kept going, kept doing. She didn’t feel she had a choice. In fact, she was grateful for the purpose he gave her. Later, an interviewer asked Maralyn how Maurice had helped her. 'I think it was having someone else to think about, rather than think about myself all the time,' she replied. It wasn’t just the doing; it was the thinking, too. She thought, and found meaning, beyond the limits of herself – which is, if you think about it, the ultimate cheat code. Death can’t touch you once you’re no longer supremely invested in yourself. She won." See also 'Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst review – how to keep a marriage afloat' review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. 

Cuttings: January 2024

The Emotional Life of Populism – article by Eva Illouz in The Montréal Review, based on her book of the same title, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In my book I argue that populist politics blends together four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love – and makes these emotions dominant vectors of the political process. The mixture of these emotions forms the matrix of populism because they generate antagonism between social groups inside society and alienation from the institutions that safeguard democracy, and because they are, in many ways, oblivious to something we might call reality. More exactly: populism lives as much in reality (naming ills that have transformed working-class lives) as in the imagination. Fear provides compelling motivation to repeatedly name enemies as well as invent them, to view such enemies as fixed and unchanging, to shift politics from conflict resolution to a state of permanent vigilance to threats, even at the price of suspending the rule of law. ... Disgust creates and maintains the dynamic of distancing between social groups through the fear of pollution and contamination: it helps separate ethnic or religious minorities and, by the logic of contamination, it also contributes towards separating the political groups who either support or oppose the minorities. Ressentiment is a key process in self-victimization; its rhetoric has become generalized, as all groups, majority and minority, invoke it to designate the relationship of the other to them; it redefines the political self in terms of its wounds. Trumpist voters or Israeli settlers are united in their common sense of self-victimization against left-wing elites. When all groups are victims of each other, it creates antagonism and changes ordinary notions of justice. It also creates fantasies of revenge. Finally, a particular form of exclusionary patriotism promises solidarity to the in-group at the expense of the others, who become redefined as superfluous or dangerous members of the nation. We should not underestimate the deep relationship that nationalism entertains today with religion and tradition. All of these emotions, together, create large imaginary spaces impervious to the real; these spaces are filled by emotional projections and scenarios which become prone to a paranoid interpretation of social and political life. These emotional imaginary spaces energetically fuel conflict within society through unavenged wounds and enemies and aggrandize a supposedly primordial and authentic definition of the true people."

Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his homily for the Feast of the Holy Family 31.12.23. "In August, I married the boy I have loved since we were 17.... I never wanted a wedding of any extravagance, and shied away from the attention it meant. But as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate. I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy, and reject hope. And so I chose to embrace it.... August 2023 was the tail end of the hottest consecutive months on record for the planet, the energy from which was being balled up and hurled back at us in summer storms. Nature was, quite rightly, retaliating.... On the day of the wedding Storm Antoni’s plan was to be everywhere. All 70mph of her tore up the church spire where the bells rang. She threw herself down the aisle as I held my father’s arm in the dress my mother had worn on her day and whistled herself into our voices as we sang. We sang louder. ... She huddled us into a tighter group. She pulled toddlers and 85-year-olds into laughter. She lifted petals to the sky. The storm should not have been there. But, in a strange sense, I respected the audacity and hoped her ferocity might stay, like the rings around our fingers. Like the rest of the natural world, Storm Antoni gave us everything she had.... I watched strangers conspire like old friends, and fought tears as others reunited after decades of separation. I was regarding a rainbow of humans at their finest, wearing scars of love, loss and hope, as we danced into the night.... Never again will this group collide, I thought.... I snuck into the farmhouse to observe from an upstairs window. By evening, Storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy, and the joining of hands, is activism after all. Care to dance?"

Between the Algorithm and a Hard Place: The Worker's Dilemma – article by Diana Enríquez on TechPolicy, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Let’s say you decide to earn a little extra cash by picking up another job [with AmazonFlex].... Today you’re supposed to drop off a package... and the app wants you to drive on a street that you know has very hazardous road conditions. You also know that the app is always tracking your location and how closely you stick to the 'optimized route'. You’ve heard from other drivers that you might get a warning and a strike against you if you go too far off route. Too many strikes means you’ll lose your flexible job, and the supplemental income that is helping you pay your bills. You have two options: (1) Break the rules but complete the goal – ... You wait a few days to see what happens… and you get an automated ... warning saying they needed to check whether or not you delivered the final package because they saw you left the optimized route. (2) Follow the rules but at a heavy cost – you’ve heard too many stories about people being deactivated for not obeying the app’s guidance, so you stick to the route and try to figure out how to reach your final goal anyway. You take the short route but damage your car. The final bill to repair your car costs more than you made on the trip.... These are the types of decisions one has to make when your manager is automated. While AI and other algorithms that manage our routines at work can do a lot of things well, these systems do not work well in gray areas when conditions quickly change.... At present, automated management is happening primarily in lower paying jobs, but these experiences are also a preview of what we might expect as we see companies turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools with the hopes it might reduce some of their workforce costs.... What researchers consistently find is that our best work environments provide some rules for structure and quality control alongside flexibility for workers to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. Automation is designed for the “average case” and performs poorly in “edge cases” or changing conditions. Adaptation and innovation is what allows humans to thrive. There is a clear route here for a better partnership - so long as we don’t ignore the strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines. But it requires leadership to make design choices that reward BOTH rule following and adaptation, instead of strictly prioritizing process at the expense of poorer outcomes."

The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson: blood, guts and popcorn – review by John Banville in The Guardian. "Towards the end of a chapter on a ... movie set just after the first world war, David Thomson writes: 'I doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film.' In its context it seems hardly more than a passing observation, but in fact the thought is fundamental to Thomson’s project. For what the eminent British film critic is writing about, at some length and in compelling and often limpidly beautiful prose, is war itself and our ambiguous relation to it, or at least to its representation in moving images – moving in more senses than one. But are we moved to sorrow and pity, sitting in a darkened cinema with our faces lifted rapturously to the light of battle flickering across the screen? At the pictures, everyone is 11 years old, and 11-year-olds glory in the mayhem going on up there, and the more blood and mangled bodies the better. Oh dear, the appalled adult in us murmurs, as the bullets fly and the arteries sever, oh dear, oh dear, but our exulting inner child silently shouts: go on, kill ’em all!... As quickly becomes clear, Thomson’s book is as much about war and our non-combatants’ attitudes to it as it is about war movies. This is the dilemma that he returns to again and again, 'that there is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on screen and our demure safety in the dark'. When we enter a cinema, we leave our sense of responsibility behind in the popcorn-strewn foyer.... War films have been a large component of cinema in the century of warfare from 1914 to the present. Something in us, some dark and ultimately unfulfillable longing, is fed by images on a screen of soldiers slaughtering one another, and machines slaughtering soldiers, and cities toppling. In his superb and masterfully engineered book, Thomson – one of the finest living stylists in the English language – is unflinching in his contemplation of this disturbing hunger."

Nicholas Winton saved my father from the Nazis; here’s how One Life betrays him – article by Matthew Reisz in The Guardian. "In late 1938, everyone in Prague was braced for an imminent German invasion. When a friend asked Winton to come and witness the developing humanitarian crisis for himself, he set about organising a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain.... Since my father was one of Winton’s 'children', my two brothers and I, and now our five children and three grandchildren, would ... not be here without him. So I had high hopes for James Hawes’ new biopic, One Life, and was delighted to be invited to the premiere. It is a great pity that the result is so soft-centred.... It reconstructs the rescue itself touchingly enough and shatters some common myths. Contrary to the comforting idea that the Kindertransports were a shining example of British decency in welcoming persecuted refugees, we get to see how hard it was for Winton to charm or bully the immigration authorities into speedily granting visas, and to find foster families and sponsors willing to provide £50 for each child to ensure they would not be a burden on the public purse.... What the new film doesn’t explore is how Elisabeth Maxwell [as well as as bringing Winton's actions to public attention] also organised a Holocaust conference called Remembering for the Future, later in 1988. This included a semi-private event where Winton got a chance to meet Kindertransportees and their close families on a much more informal basis.... Many were still visibly traumatised, regressing from successful middle-aged professionals into frightened children in front of my eyes. Others recalled poignant episodes from the train journeys across Europe, such as the moment when they crossed the Dutch border into safe territory and were welcomed with mugs of hot chocolate. Genuine celebration was tempered by a strong sense of what had been lost when they left families behind in Czechoslovakia. It was, in other words, an event which caught the real emotional complexity of the Kindertransport, rather than the kind of cheesy uplift offered by ... the biopic. It seems strange for a film on this theme to focus so entirely on Winton and to be so incurious about the later lives of the rescued children."

Magus by Anthony Grafton: spellbound – review by Dennis Duncan in The Guardian. "In Grafton’s history of learned magic, an early fascination with the military possibilities of charmed objects gives way in the 15th century to an inward focus, a kind of astrological self-help to improve the health of the aspiring scholar. ... The balance between licit and illicit magic was in constant flux, with every magus keen to draw a line between the arts that he himself practised and those that were beyond the pale.... By [the 16th century], however, the work of the seriously inclined magus was beginning to align more closely with another kind of magic: the feats of mathematics, engineering and perspective that could conjure spectacles and astound audiences."

The Alternative by Nick Romeo: moral substitutes for the free market model – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism.... You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how employees are hired, paid and enabled to share in the value they create. There is no need for ordinary workers to be pawns in a system that makes humanity and ethics secondary to the unbending logic of the marketplace and blind, selfish capital. On the other hand, is it all worth more than a can of beans? How are a collection of disparate, often small scale, if great, initiatives going to grow into a systemic challenge to the way things are currently organised? The Mondragon co-operative movement that Romeo applauds fascinated me as a teenager for all the reasons he sets out. The hope was the virtues he cites – essentially treating workers fairly, decently and with respect – would unleash such increased engagement, productivity and purpose that the good would drive out the bad of its own accord. A more moral economy, retaining the pluralism of capitalism but less of its innate exploitativeness, was there for the having. Well, more than 50 years later Mondragon has grown into one of the top 10 companies in Spain – but has too few emulators even in its own country. This admirable, readable book tries to offer hope. But for all Romeo’s enthusiasm, the question is left hanging. Why so little progress when the case against how so much of the way work and welfare is organised is so strong – and the alternatives so viable?... Until these ideas are framed by a new economics, a viable political philosophy, a critical mass of thought leaders and of political, economic and social actors, they will remain in the foothills. Romeo has done a service in marshalling our knowledge of the varying contrarian forces abroad – but there is more heavy lifting to make any of this the new normal."

The hidden life of Camila Batmanghelidjh: why was her exoneration so widely ignored? – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. "Kids Company began in south London in 1996. Batmanghelidjh, an Iran-born charity worker who had trained as a therapist, set out her vision for the charity as protecting and supporting vulnerable youngsters by showing them unconditional love and care. Unlike other services, Kids Company would never turn away a child in need. While that might sound naive and sentimental, in practice it was resource-intensive, rigorous and exhausting.... When social work or NHS services refused to help, or gave up on or lost track of a difficult or aggressive teenager – which happened thousands of times – Kids Company would step in. Batmanghelidjh’s team would take legal action to force authorities to meet their obligations, which did not make the charity popular in town halls. ...Batmanghelidjh’s idealism and charisma were magnetic to politicians, the media and celebrities, from Coldplay to Prince Charles. Her ascent was extraordinary – and would mark the great first act of her career. ... Batmanghelidjh’s second act would be one of tragedy: a brutal fall from grace that would destroy her reputation overnight. ... [A rescue] deal [as Kid's Company struggled to help the austerity-created wave of children in need] was scuppered at the 11th hour when the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that historical abuse allegations involving Kids Company were being investigated by the Metropolitan police. With potential donors spooked, Kids Company’s trustees concluded that the charity was no longer viable. It went into receivership five days later. Scotland Yard completed its investigation six months later, in January 2016. It found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse, criminality or safeguarding failures. The 32 allegations were mostly hearsay and “vague in detail”, it concluded. Meanwhile, the House of Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs select committee (Pacac)... rushed through an inquiry that concluded that Kids Company was financially incontinent, poorly governed and unable to demonstrate that the money it spent made any difference to the young people it supported.... However, a week [later] one of the committee’s most senior members and Batmanghelidjh’s most aggressive interrogators [revealed that after the report's publication] a Kids Company trustee ... had presented them with evidence showing that, far from being negligent and badly governed, the board of Kids Company had provided rigorous oversight and scrutiny of the charity. ... Still, the report’s findings continued to be reported – mostly unchallenged. They helped to underpin what fast became an entrenched media narrative: that Kids Company had been not only a financial mess, but also a giant confidence trick.... Two years after the closure of Kids Company, the official receiver ... applied to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and all [the] trustees from holding directorships of companies or charities for up to six years.... Three and a half years, 18,000 pages of evidence and £8m of public money later, the case against Kids Company was thrown out in February 2021.... The judge, Mrs Justice Falk, concluded that there was no evidence that payments made to young people were unsupervised, unscrutinised or clinically unjustified. Kids Company was a challenging, financially high-risk operation, in common with many charities, she ruled, but it was not a failing organisation, nor was its board negligent or incompetent. The seven trustees – who did not include Batmanghelidjh, whom Falk praised separately – were 'a highly impressive group of individuals' and entirely fit to hold future senior positions. In fact, she wrote in her ruling, the cause of Kids Company’s collapse was most likely not management incompetence, but 'unfounded allegations' of sexual assault. It was a near-total exoneration of Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company – and a complete disaster for the government. But instead of her third act being one of exoneration and vindication, the ruling went largely unnoticed."

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world’: 10 things I learned when my father had dementia – article by Fanny Johnstone in The Guardian. "My dad’s prognosis was not good. He wasn’t expected to live for more than a couple of years – and he didn’t. I had 18 months with him and Mum... This is what I learned. Writing helps.... We are surrounded by carers....It can be explosively funny.... You have to learn to adapt....The tiniest details can make a difference....You have to be organised.... You can forget who you are.... Everyone needs a break....The law [on assisted dying] needs to change....It can be a profound and valuable experience. I was able to care for my dad, love him, indulge him and show affection in ways that would have been impossible for me to imagine when I was young. It gave me a sense of self-worth and respect that I think had been missing for much of my life. My suspicion that he had been disappointed with me eroded during that time. I think he saw qualities in me that he hadn’t known were there. I think I did too. And as a result I’ve had a bit more faith in myself since. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that the experience redeemed me in my own eyes. I had chased fun and freedom for much of my life at the expense of responsibility and a steady career, but here I faced up to life, and grew up, I think. A few weeks after his death, my best friend, who had known my father since childhood, invited me for a drink.... She said: 'So how was it then?' Meaning all of it – the last 18 months, and my father’s death. My exact words – which surprised us both a lot – were: 'I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.'”

We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."

From the Post Office scandal to nuclear attack: 13 TV shows that shook Britain – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "Mr Bates vs the Post Office seems set to be remembered as a show that changed society more than most politicians and lawyers could ever imagine. But what are the other contenders? Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)... The War Game (BBC, 1966)... Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory (BBC Northern Ireland, 1980)... Police: A Complaint of Rape (BBC Two, 1982)... Crimewatch UK (BBC One, 1984-2017)... That’s Life! (BBC One, 1988)... Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, 1990)... Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000)... Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC Two, 2011)... Care (BBC One, 2018)... A statement by the Prime Minister (all channels, 2020)."

Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged – article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "Ministers need to 'immediately' update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say. In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: 'It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.'... The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that “mechanical instruments” should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work. For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began."

Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr Jen Gunter: why periods are ‘a muddled burden’ – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Dr Jen Gunter’s Blood takes an unapologetically scientific approach to the menstrual cycle, written for anyone who wants to understand its often mystified ways and what medicine can do to help. Perhaps Gunter’s resolve to reduce stigma around women’s health was a reaction to her own upbringing in Canada, with a mother who thought tampons were 'evil'. Now a gynaecologist in San Francisco with three decades of experience, Gunter became famous in 2018 for ridiculing the pseudoscientific offerings on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness platform Goop, and has since continued her battle against disinformation with her Substack newsletter the Vajenda, alongside bestselling books The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. Without fear, favour or sponsor, Gunter is a cheerleader for professional expertise, informed consent and reproductive justice. Brutally put, the menstrual cycle is 'resource curation to ensure the healthiest pregnancy outcome, but at the expense of the person who menstruates', Gunter writes.... The book’s ability to make science sing and stick is impressive, but an even greater achievement of Blood is to expose the playbook of medical misinformation. Gunter helps readers sort out claims that 'sound truthy' from those that are in fact true. Menstrual blood souring milk, ruining crops and wilting flowers seem like misogynistic tales from the past, but similar myths circulate online today.... Gunter regularly faces accusations of being closed-minded to alternative practice and overconfident in her opinions. To which she would say that evidence-based medicine is not an opinion, even if you don’t like it. Consenting adults can do as they please, and she isn’t criticising consumer choices but rather the peddlers who prey on women’s discomfort and fears in the name of feminism while making money. Medics are wrongly demonised as puppets of big pharma, she says, while influencers flog untested and unregulated supplements with clear self-interest."

Work ‘wellness’ programmes don’t make employees happier, but I know what does – article by André Spicer in The Guardian. "A new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examines the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions such as stress management and mindfulness classes, and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these interventions had any statistically significant impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction. They did not improve employees’ sense of belonging at work or reduce perceived time pressures. Nor did they make employees feel supported or improve workplace relationships. In some cases, wellbeing interventions seemed to make matters worse, the study suggested. For instance, workplace resilience and mindfulness training had a slightly negative impact on employees’ self-rated mental health.... While companies seem to excel at making their employees ill, the question remains about what they can do to help them feel better. Fleming points out that it is possible to improve employee wellbeing by focusing on more structural aspects of work. These include improving pay, providing secure contracts, giving employees some flexibility and control over their work schedule, and providing opportunities for upskilling and mentoring. Birkbeck’s Kevin Teoh and Rashi Dhensa-Kahlon looked at employee wellbeing interventions in the NHS and came to a remarkably similar conclusion. The most effective way to improve wellbeing in healthcare workplaces included cutting back pointless bureaucratic procedures, reducing the length of meetings, improving staff rotas and giving employees a sense of psychological safety in their team. My colleague Amanda Goodall has found one important way that organisations can improve wellbeing: improving the quality of frontline managers. Getting rid of David Brent-style bosses and giving managers proper training can significantly improve employee wellbeing.... The good news for leaders and employees is that we know what does work; instead of investing in ineffective initiatives, leaders should focus on taking away stressors. This means getting rid of unnecessarily complicated systems, poorly trained managers, and – in some cases – ineffective wellness interventions."

How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living by Vincent Deary: the ways in which we’re undone – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. This book, part memoir of his working practice, part inquiry into the ways in which mental health is undone, is a sequel to an earlier volume, How We Are, published in 2015. The chronology is pertinent. The trajectory of those intervening nine years of austerity, and pandemic, and precarity, serve to make this volume both inevitable and urgent.... There is a rawness to Deary’s analysis that gives a compelling human edge to his theorising. Some of that comes from his allusions to a breakdown he himself suffered in recent years. Otherwise, he dwells on case studies of people he has met in his work, individuals whose 'allostatic load' of stresses – the camel’s-back-of-straws waiting for one too many – become overwhelming.... Deary punctuates his book with a series of health checks: 'How precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?' In doing so he makes a powerful argument against some of the contemporary factors that undermine security: the 'audit culture' of the world of work that seeks to constantly measure our performance against nebulous targets; the shift in focus in the welfare state away from a culture of care toward homilies about 'resilience'; the erosion of healthy perspective in the 'ambient hum' of social media; and the fact that, as a society, 'we have lost the knack of convalescence', the space and capacity for deep rest that might accelerate recovery. Deary is clearly an eclectic reader and his studies have him reaching as often for quotations from Terry Pratchett and George Eliot as from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.... At the heart of Deary’s analysis ... is the idea of our minds as storytelling machines, which go haywire in 'our periods of trembling and breaking', feeding us delusion and addiction and compulsion and paranoia. The second half of his book is devoted to the strategies that might protect us from those rogue internal narratives.... he self-help wisdom here is properly caveated and hard-won, but there is still enough for the odd inspirational Post-it note. Here’s one: 'The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.'”

How We Break by Vincent Deary: look after yourself – review by Alex Curmi in The Guardian. "In this book, the second in a planned trilogy, and a follow-up to 2015’s How We Are, health psychologist Deary delivers a much-needed message: we have a finite capacity to meet the unpredictable challenges life throws at us. The concept of allostatic load (the wear and tear of chronic stress) crops up repeatedly. ... A particular strength of the book is the way Deary weaves between different schools of thought within psychology, philosophy and religion. The result is not merely a discussion of abstract ideas, but a collection of valuable observations about what it means to be human in the modern world, taking in biological, societal and economic realities.... The various chapters work as stand-alone essays and discuss very different questions. How do stories and narratives shape us? What is the difference between useful and destructive thinking? How do dysfunctional psychological processes like anxiety or anorexia come to possess us? What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? The resulting insights apply whether we have a diagnosable mental health condition or not.... The third instalment of the trilogy will be called How We Mend. In the meantime, this book offers a cathartic meditation on just how difficult life can be. Although the concept of self-care has become an overused and sometimes unhelpful trope on social media, Deary makes a compelling argument as to the necessity of self-compassion. He leads us to a more humane understanding of our suffering and offers practical advice for navigating life’s ups and downs with greater grace and equanimity."

Seen and Heard: October to December 2023

Batman: The Enemy Within – narrative game from Telltale. (See review on Adventure Gamers.) An excellent take on the Batman mythos, supported by convincing writing and voice-acting. The two main interactive elements in the story, which otherwise proceeds largely on rails, are deployed precisely at the points where they contribute most and have most impact. When Batman gets into a fight or some other dangerous situation, there are timed-action sequences in which you have to react quickly to onscreen prompts or locate objects against a time limit. Right from the start of Episode 1, this makes The Riddler’s lethal traps, from which you have to extricate yourself and others, genuinely scary, for fear of what you’ll see if you make a mistake or move too slowly. The second interactive element is dialogue choice, which allows you to role-play your relationships with the other characters and shape how they develop. For example, when a conflict arises between Commissioner Gordon and Agency Director Waller, which of them do you support? And having made that decision, which of them do you call for help later when you need backup? The biggest branch in the story concerns Bruce Wayne’s relationship with the man called John Doe (the proto-Joker), whom he met briefly in the previous game when they were both in Arkham Asylum (Bruce being temporarily insane as the result of poisoning by a super-villain). Now discharged, John is still very disturbed and latches on to Bruce seeking some sort of stability. As Bruce, you have to exploit him to some extent to get access to his contacts and advance the story, but after that it’s up to you how genuine a friend to be. If you reject him, he will become The Joker as expected, but if you continue to believe in him, despite his clearly psychopathic behaviour in Episode 4, then he becomes a vigilante like Batman, whom he idolises, and Episode 5 takes a completely different turn, effectively a whole additional episode. The other major relationship which can go in two directions is Bruce Wayne’s relationship with Selina Kyle (Catwoman). Again these two have history from the previous game and already know each other’s secret identity. This time however, Selina starts to drop her teasing flirting Catwoman persona and open up to Bruce, and if you choose to have Bruce open up to her in return a kind of intimacy can develop. At one critical point, you as Bruce have the option to invite Selina into the Batcave – a tremendous gesture of trust. But the trust is not unproblematic because Catwoman has her own agenda, and at certain points in the plot she will betray Bruce or at least deceive him. This heightens the tension of the final episode (in one of its versions) where The Joker has Bruce and Selina in cages and effectively forces them to play Prisoner’s Dilemma, manipulating them so that they have every reason not to trust each other. If you as Bruce do choose to trust Selina, there's a wonderful emotional rush which you get when you realise that she has trusted you also, and you get the "good" ending. It’s possible to mistrust and betray Selina at every stage of the story, in which case you end up with her as an enemy; the story still makes sense, but leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Great writing and clever story-telling. The previous story (which I played subsequently) is good, but not at the same level. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)

Pillars of Eternity – enjoyable homage to classic computer RPGs, created by enthusiasts with Kickstarter backing. (See review on PC Gamer.) The writing is good, and there’s some decent voice acting, which is welcome, though I find the music disappointing. (It’s not bad, but there’s not enough of it, so it gets repetitious. It compares unfavourably with the great score to Neverwinter Nights, which I still play.) Importantly, the character and combat systems are complicated but not too complicated; I tried playing Baldur’s Gate II (now on heavy discount, given that Baldur’s Gate III has been released), but quickly gave up because I couldn’t work out how not to die. Like most such games, Pillars of Eternity has epic Lord-of-the-Rings-scale proportions, and so has taken up my evenings for many weeks and will do so for many more.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – grief memoir, written in the year following the sudden death of her husband. Having read the grief memoirs of C.S. Lewis and Julian Barnes, I decided to read this other classic also; everyone's grief is unique and different, of course, but it's still reassuring to read other people's experiences. "Magical thinking", the attitude that one can bring something about by performing certain rituals or even just wanting it very badly, is I think not quite the right description for what she went through. Certainly she was tormented by thoughts that there was something she or he could have done to prevent his death – thoughts which only subsided when she received his autopsy report (nearly a year after the event, because in her confusion she gave the pathologists, instead of her current address, the address where they lived when they were married). But much of what she describes strikes me more as denial: not disbelieving that the person has died so much as carrying on as though they are still alive; for example, she finds herself unable to give away his shoes because he would need them if he were to return. Didion writes well and honestly, though as when reading her previously I found myself constantly irritated by the highly-specific references to places, shops, celebrities etc. which are no doubt highly significant to American readers but leave me wrong-footed. What does it signify, for example, to talk about going to Honolulu?   

The Hollow Crown – reshowing of the 2012 BBC productions of Shakespeare history plays, which I missed first time around though I saw them getting rave reviews. They really are tremendous, with spectacular locations and punchy direction and (of course) top actors in all the roles, great and small, standouts from the first sequence being Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Jeremy Irons as Henry IV, Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal / Henry V, Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff and Julie Walters as Mistress Quickly. Whenever the antique language gets difficult, it doesn’t matter because the acting is so darn good you can see precisely what’s going on. The text has been ingeniously and sensitively edited so that the drama rattles along like a train, for example inter-cutting between simultaneous-action scenes to keep up the pace. My favourite modification: Richard II’s famous speech beginning “Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings” occurs not only in its proper place (Act III, when things are all going wrong for him) but is also used as a voiceover at the very opening, over the titles, to sound a note of doom and foreshadow how it's going to end. This is what I call good editing – because we are not groundlings watching a play at The Globe; we’re used to films and how films work, and these productions have made the plays work as films, brilliantly.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance – milestone exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (see Guardian review): a very carefully thought-out post-imperialist attempt to engage with the legacy of slavery. The issue could hardly be avoided; the museum itself was founded from the bequest and collection of the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, who inherited his wealth from his grandfather, who made it largely through the transatlantic slave trade. All the exhibits are connected to slavery in one way or another: as examples of pre-colonial African culture, as representations of Africans before and after the rise of transatlantic slavery, as artefacts of the merchant and investment companies which built the nation’s wealth on the profits of slave trading and slave-staffed plantations, and as products of slavery both material (most surprisingly, a Rembrandt portrait, because painted on a panel of slave-produced South American wood) and intellectual (botanical and technical knowledge derived from slaves but credited to the white authors who published it). I did find myself thinking at points “Oh, that’s going a bit far” – as when the chronometers and sextants used to solve the “longitude problem” of navigation at sea were presented as inventions driven by slavery. And then I thought: well, there’s no question that it was international trade which drove the need for better navigation, and international trade was very largely trade in slaves and the products of slavery, so actually what they'd done wasn't unfair. And then, we were shown (a total surprise for me) that the Royal Society was described in Thomas Sprat’s 1667 History as having been founded as a “twin sister” of the Royal African Society which traded in gold and ivory and people along the West coast of Africa. My own reactions reminded me of what people used to say of the way Andrew Cunningham and I tried to re-write the history of science: “couldn’t you bit a bit less extreme, and then we might agree with it;” in other words, they might agree with us if we didn't actually say it. I think this exhibition is a noble and skilful effort to shift the centre of gravity of how we think about the history and culture of this period. It’s not the final word (the curators describe it as the start of a conversation), but it’s a step along the way.

Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design – nicely-conceived exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (See trailer video and Guardian review.) We tend to think of the Victorian era as existing in black and white (early monochrome photographs, men in dark suits and women in mourning), although in fact this was the period when synthetic dyes brought colourful clothing within the financial reach of the masses. At the same time, art critics like Ruskin (surely influenced by German Romanticism, though this wasn't discussed) gave colour a priority when judging aesthetics in the visual arts; in the classical period, it had been a poor third behind composition and draughtsmanship. And then colour in art started acquiring new sets of associations: with the middle and far East, with Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement, and with decadence – the sickly colours of absinthe and The Yellow Book. All very interesting, though the exhibition does rather peter out; there’s no punchline or overall story, just a collection of exhibit-based tales about colour, albeit fascinating ones.

Lux Aeterna – concert by Voces8 supplemented by Voces8 Scholars, at King's Place, London. I was disappointed with their rendition of the title piece by Liegeti, knowing it super-well from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack album, which back in the day we all played endlessly in lieu of seeing the film in those times before home video. The performance wasn’t bad, but I was expecting it to be definitive, and sometimes I could hear, even in singers of the capability of Voces8 Scholars, that tone in the voice which can be verbalised as “Oh god, I’m not sure if I’m singing the right note here.” The rest of the concert, though, was superb, including Caroline Shaw’s beautiful ‘and the swallow’ and concluding with the Elgar ‘Lux aeterna’ (to the tune of ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma variations).

Noises Off – arch-farce by Michael Frayn, at Milton Keynes Theatre. I’d seen it twice before with my wife, and we agreed it was the funniest thing we’d ever seen in the theatre, and quite possibly anywhere, so I thought our granddaughter needed to see it, now that she's of an age, especially since she’d done drama GCSE and can appreciate all the gags to do with stage production. This is the play’s fortieth anniversary, and the content is now dated in some ways, but the comedy is timeless, and Liza Goddard, Matthew Kelly and company gave it full welly. I remember the third act as falling a bit flat after the very funny first act (a chaotic dress rehearsal) and the hilarious second act (a calamitous mid-run performance, seen from backstage, with the fictional cast struggling to keep their play going – or sabotaging it). Where can the play go from there? Apparently Frayn re-wrote the third act at least once to try to solve that problem, and though I don’t think there was any further re-writing for this production the (real) cast somehow found a way to up the power so as to end on a high (or rather, a low).

The Daleks in Colour – a reissue of Doctor Who’s original Dalek story from 1963, to coincide with the show’s 60th anniversary. The advance publicity and the new title highlighted the colourisation of the old recordings, but far more significant to my mind was the radical re-editing. I became aware of this only when I started noticing edits – a visual flashback to an earlier scene, intercutting between simultaneous scenes – which could never have been done at the time, when to economise on studio time programmes such as Doctor Who were recorded "as live", cutting between a handful of cameras while simultaneously mixing in sound and pre-shot film. I also realised that unlike most television shows from that long ago it didn’t seem slow; the action was not dragging at all, and in fact the pace seemed about right. After watching the 75 minute show and enjoying it very much (most though not all of the edits and additional background music seemed natural), I thought to look up the durations of the original version – and found that the episodes totalled 173 minutes: in other words, it had been reduced to less than half its original length. Quite astonishing to put that number on how our expectations of pace have changed. Given that the original episodes are still available, if one wishes to see them, I think this was a worthwhile transformation to make, so that (as the blurb says) a contemporary audience can find the story “as thrilling as it was in 1963”.

Doctor Who – what a relief to have David Tennant return for three special episodes between the tenures of Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa, dropping back into the role as if he’d never been away. I wanted to like Jodie Whittaker, being the first woman Doctor and all, but I just didn’t: too much shouting, which lost her the gravitas which I think the Doctor should have. But as I’ve already noted, she did make that wonderful "emergency transmission" during the early weeks of the Covid lockdown, which apparently was her own idea. Respect to her for seeing that that message (it’s okay to be frightened, and we’re going to get through this) needed to be given and that The Doctor was the best person to give it. I still miss Peter Capaldi though, who I think was not well-served by his scripts during his last season, and over Christmas I made time to re-watch his 2014 Christmas special (Doctor Who meets Santa Claus), partly for the bitter pleasure of seeing Clara getting to enjoy one last Christmas with Danny Pink, even if only in a dream.

Doctor Who: Inferno (available on iPlayer) – classic Who from 1970. This was the final story in Jon Pertwee’s first season, and the final appearance of Liz Shaw (Caroline John), who even at the time I thought was a tremendous companion, because she was a scientist and could hold scientific conversations with The Doctor and even repair his equipment when it went wrong. The character was axed by the production team, who were worried that she might be too clever for the target audience, replacing her in the next season with Jo Grant (Katy Manning) who certainly didn’t have that problem. The DVD extras also include interesting commentary on the development of the story, the kernel idea being that scientists are drilling deep into the Earth to release a new form of energy (so, quite prophetic), but The Doctor warns that the Earth’s crust will break open and the drilling is stopped. To make the story more exciting (because there’s a limit to how exciting you can be about a disaster not happening), they came up with the idea of The Doctor falling into a parallel universe where the drilling is more advanced and the Earth really does break open and is destroyed. The parallel universe plot device was then relatively new in mainstream SF; it had been done in the original Star Trek (‘Mirror, Mirror’), but this was only the second time I recall seeing it, and as in Star Trek the alternative universe was not only different but darker, with Britain under fascist rule, giving the actors a chance to play alternative versions of their characters (the Brigadier as a petty dictator, with a duelling scar and an eye patch, and a harder, militaristic Liz who nevertheless retains some of the scientific open-mindedness of her counterpart). The other element added to the story (which otherwise would have struggled to fill the required seven episodes) was that anyone who came into contact with liquid released by the drilling turned into a hairy monster – which didn't really make sense but was very exciting. Next on my list to watch: ‘The Mind of Evil’, which I remember as being truly frightening to my twelve-year old self.

Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle – three-part BBC television documentary. Lucy Worsley is always fun and informative, even if as here the main theme – that Arthur Conan Doyle resented his fictional creation Sherlock Homes so much that he tried to kill him off – is actually pretty well known. But there was lots more that I didn’t know: how Conan Doyle was an amateur body-builder and arch-enthusiast for the British Empire (to the extent of worming his way into the Boer War and robustly defending Britain’s conduct in the conflict), and that his involvement with spiritualism went back to the 1880s rather than following his son’s death in the First World War. And I do like the way Lucy Worsley feigns surprise when coming on a juicy bit in the documents she’s reading (“Mmm! Listen to this!”). Of course she's see the passage before, she knows that it's there, that’s why she’s looking at that document and that page in front of the camera, but I prefer to think of this not as fabrication but rather as reconstruction: that is, reproducing for the cameras an experience – the joy of discovery – which is real and authentic, and entirely familiar to anyone who has explored archival material for historical research.

Star Trek: Picard season 3 – final tremendous season to a previously dodgy show. When my younger step-son gave me the DVD boxset for my birthday, he made me promise that I would never, never, never try to watch seasons 1 and 2, whereas this was some of the best Star Trek ever, like a combination of The Wrath of Khan (the second film) and First Contact (the eighth film). And how right he was. The ten-episode story arc reunites the crew of The Next Generation, all plausibly developed since we last saw them twenty years ago (in the tenth film, Nemesis), plus Seven of Nine (off Star Trek: Voyager), one favoured character from the first two Picard seasons, and several great new characters, weaving together most successfully elements from across the Star Trek universe. It’s like the J.J. Abrams re-boot never happened! Patrick Stewart, now in his eighties, shows us a frail but steely Picard in his best portrayal of the character, and the other actors all raise their game to play opposite him. The most poignant episode for me was the one featuring Ro Laren (at least, it seems to be Ro Laren, but is it really?): a Next Generation secondary character who many of us feel was short-changed in the original show, here given space for a tremendous return.

Star Wars: the original trilogy – the classic films, which stand up very well even after all these years. The dramatic beats still land their punch, and Ian McDiarmid’s performance as The Emperor is superbly over-the-top : total ham, but the very best ham. The CGI additions in the “special editions” (the only versions now available) add nothing, though, and are even distracting to those who remember very well what the films used to look like.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – much-loved Christmas song. Though originally written for the film Meet Me in St. Louis, it became popular during World War 2, especially amongst US servicemen, for whom it became a song about separation and making the best of a bad situation. “Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow // Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” It’s that second line which always gets me. This isn’t a song about success, or victory, or even about true love. In defiance of the triumphalist narratives of Western civilisation, it courageously admits that things are awful and that “muddling through” may be the best we can hope for. And yet somehow – and the gorgeousness of the harmonies tells us this – that may be enough. This has been my favourite Christmas song this year.

'Emissary’ – pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. We used to have a tradition of watching this on New Year’s Eve, and I kept that tradition again this year. I think it’s one of the best ever pilot episodes for a television show, with its running theme of new beginnings and setting up so many potential storylines. However, it’s also about the past, in particular about Ben Sisko, the station commander, coming to terms with the death of his wife, who (in a link to one of the most memorable episodes of The Next Generation) was killed in the Battle of Wolf 359. When he encounters aliens who have no concept of linear time, he tries to reassure them of his friendly intentions by explaining the experience of linear existence. But to his horror, he keeps finding himself back in the room where his wife died because – as the aliens say – he exists there. And so the aliens accept him, not because he has persuaded them of the virtues of linear time and onward-going, forward-moving Americanism (baseball is his favoured example) but because they have seen that he too has a non-linear existence. And paradoxically it’s only in acknowledgement of his non-linear existence that he is at last able to move forward. A fabulous concept, and a great start to a great show; it’s just a shame it went all awry in the final season.

Cuttings: December 2023

Neglect, deflect, then scapegoat those you’ve exploited: that’s what passes for UK immigration policy – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "The headline, now increasing in pitch, capital letters and exclamation marks, is that net migration is off the charts. It is soaring. It is at an all-time high. So high that we ask, how did it come to this? The answer is, it came to this predictably and, in fact, inevitably. The way immigration numbers are reported is a sort of classification error, one forced by the overriding, unquestioned presumption that immigration is bad, that it must come down, and that politicians are in some duel with 'hordes' of immigrants who are making their way into the country, managing somehow to vanquish one of the harshest immigration systems in the world. More accurate headlines might be 'UK skilled worker shortage intensifies', 'Loss of European Union research funding renders British universities increasingly dependent on overseas students', 'Business leaders call for expansion of shortage occupations due to post-Brexit recruitment challenges', or 'Funding cuts to nurse training result in staffing crisis'. Because these apparently vexingly high numbers are, to a large extent, the outcome of economic and political decisions that mean we invite immigrants to fill labour gaps that policymakers either did not anticipate, or ignored warnings about."

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."