In committing to print any tribute to Henry Chinaski - the dissipated, rather-more-than-semi-autobiographical anti-hero of Post Office and several other novels by Charles Bukowski - one is faced with two options. The first is to leave the page blank and let the editor explain that the writer was indisposed due to a hangover. The second is to follow Chinaski's example when he does turn up for work and slog it out, toiling and cursing, cheap liquor oozing from every pore.
So let's not pay tribute to Chinaski. He has his hagiographers but Bukowski isn't among them. His characterisation is marinaded in self-loathing; there's too much hurt and cynicism in him for Chinaski to be in any way laudable. Deadbeats are romanticised in American life from Big Sur to The Big Lebowski, but with Bukowski it's all too raw.
A child of German immigrants to Los Angeles between the wars he was a misfit from a young age. He had chronic acne. His father was abusive. In his early teens he discovered drinking: "This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time," he later recalled. Failing to make it as a writer as a young man, he grew disillusioned and became "a ten-year drunk", which "lost years" later provided the inspiration for most of his books.
The irony, then, is that unlike Chinaski Bukowski made rather a success of things in the end, but you would have to say it was probably because of rather than despite his love of booze. Alcohol is his muse. It fuels his puckishly dyspeptic view of the world.
Much of Post Office is about the drudgery of work. It covers the period of Bukowski's own life when he worked as a mail carrier and later a mail clerk, with an interregnum when he gambled on horses. In the novel the US Postal Service is populated entirely by jobsworths, petty bureaucrats and sadistic supervisors; the part of the American dream about bettering oneself through honest sweat gets a literary pulverising. And yet, tempting as it may be to see Bukowski as some kind of champion of the lumpen proletariat, that's not quite it. Work truly is the curse of the drinking classes in his world. Chinaski drinks when he has a job and when he doesn't. There is a new hangover roughly every four pages.
Along the way we meet the tragic Betty, a widowed alcoholic 11 years Chinaski's senior who is based on the love of Bukowski's life, Jane Cooney Baker, and Joyce, who stands in for Barbara Frye, his first wife, and who is portrayed as a nymphomaniac. Frye divorced him on grounds of "mental cruelty", which is an apt description of what Chinaski subjects himself to on a daily basis. The problem is that despite being a bum and having next to no redeeming features, he is a uniquely captivating bum. It can rarely be said of man nor woman, but Bukowski's drinking did the world a service.
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]]>Can peace ever be other than relative? Its scourge, war, enjoins us to believe so: that there exists an opposing absolute to those things which take place on battlefields. All Quiet on the Western Front, written in 1929 by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War, leaves us in some doubt, however - for to his cast of young recruits, peace is as likely to be attained via the grave as it is by armistice.
To them, we discover, peace is unimaginable, unknowable. As the author states in his short introduction, the book tells of "a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." Spurred to enlist at 18 by a blustering, jingoistic schoolmaster, Paul Bäumer (our narrator) and his friends are "suddenly old at 20". Their life experience amounts to having heeded the patriotism of their elders; now, brutalised by life at the front, their numbers winnowed down by Allied bombardments, Bäumer observes "we are a wasteland", and when his own death arrives he is "almost glad the end had come."
To read Remarque's novel almost a century after the events it describes, one is struck not only by a devouring sense of pathos - these soldiers are but boys - but also by how, well, unknowable, the entire conflict seems at this remove. How is it even possible that we can reconcile its apparent meaninglessness or grasp its insanity? The so-called "Great War" was one in which men were sent to their deaths in their millions by commanders-in-chief whose own personal safety was never in doubt, in which those who spoke for peace were silenced and which so knocked the stuffing out of the nations embroiled in it that survivors often chose never to speak of it at all.
That being the case, All Quiet on the Western Front is likely to have been anything but an easy read for many of those who made it an instant international best-seller. Its core message is that war and soldiering are not merely wrong but unnecessary, that the sacrifices demanded of combatants are always in vain. The nihilism is clawing, potent, powerful - but then that is how good writing works. Remarque's book has been held up to generations of us almost as an article of unimpeachable documentary veracity, which is rather a lot to ask of a novel. Does it explain the war to us any better than history books can? No. Does it make it any more knowable? Almost certainly not.
In the Anglophone world Rudyard Kipling's homily "lest we forget" is given breath every November. It is the dead we remember, of course, but also the horror and the mystery of wars, in the hope that remembering will forestall more of them. And this, above all, is why All Quiet on the Western Front continues to be read: Paul Baumer may not believe much in peace but Remarque makes us desire it nonetheless.
]]>Little over four years ago McIlroy was still an amateur. Nowadays he's the youngest winner of the US Open in almost a century - in June he wiped the floor with the field at Congressional Country Club in Maryland - and is currently being afforded all the fuss befitting that accomplishment, by sponsors, fans, media and tournament organisers alike.
It has been a good year for him, but it's not one that's about to fizzle out quietly. The McIlroy brand has been undergoing some serious exposure and there's plenty more of it to come before 2011 is through, with commitments in Asia - including the Hong Kong Open at the beginning of December - dominating a heavy schedule.
And so one cannot but be struck by the diminutive Northern Irishman's chirpiness as he bounds into a room overlooking a neon Macau evening to meet Tatler. He's spent the last hour or so shaking hands with various people in suits in the lobby of the Venetian and charming inquisitors at a packed media conference. How's that part of life among golf's elite working out, then?
"Things have calmed down a little bit," he insists. "The first tournament I played after winning the US Open was the British Open and I probably just wasn't quite ready for the welcome I received, the attention, the hype and everything. Winning one of the majors at 22 - not a lot of golfers have done that. I think Seve [Ballesteros] won one at 22, as did Jack [Nicklaus], so that's a nice bit of company. It does bring its own pressures and attention, but I feel as if I've adjusted to that now. For me, it's actually nice to get on a golf course because you sort of get away from everything else. It's where I feel most at home."
Not that he is afforded too many opportunities to play the links courses of his native land this weather. After the week in China, he was due to fly to Bermuda for the Grand Slam of Golf, a showcase involving only the year's four major winners - of which group this year, astonishingly, two others (Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke), also hail from Northern Ireland. This month he will play at the World Golf Championship in Shanghai, then at the strokeplay World Cup of Golf at Mission Hills Haikou in Hainan - where he will partner McDowell - and after Hong Kong he has further engagements in Dubai and Thailand.
"It's important for the development of the game in Asia that there are now so many big tournaments," he says. "In China, golf is going to become so big, partly because of its inclusion at the Olympics in 2016. The point of doing the China Golf Challenge was to help promote the game here, and for the outside world as well, to showcase what China has to offer in golf. There are some really fantastic courses."
The notion of establishing a fifth golf major, to be played in Asia, has been mooted recently. McIlory is sceptical about it happening any time soon, but says: "I think it's good that there are now so many events co-sanctioned by the European and Asian Tours. You even see the PGA Tour now moving into Asia - they have a tournament in Malaysia and are trying to branch out in this market. Personally I love playing golf in this part of the world."
In fact, he claims to reserve special affection for Hong Kong, where he was beaten in a play-off in 2008 by Lin Wen-tang. "I played a couple of events as an amateur in Hong Kong and now the Hong Kong Open is probably one of my favourite events of the year," he says. "And because I keep coming back, I get to know it better every time - restaurants that I like, places to go."
Life on tour, he acknowledges, is not always conducive to letting down his considerable head of hair or sampling local cultures, but there is a sense that for all his determination to succeed on the golf course - he talks of becoming the best player in the world in the next three years - McIlroy is out to enjoy life along the way. Currently that involves making time for his new girlfriend, the world No.1-ranked tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, with whom he plans to spend a fortnight in the Maldives this month between tournaments. You might be forgiven for suspecting the sponsors of hijacking Cupid's bow, but it's clear the pair have no wish to parade themselves as some kind of sporting power couple.
"We have very similar lifestyles, so I think we understand one another more than anything else," McIlroy says. "If I shoot a bad score, I feel as if she knows what to say. And you know what she would like to hear if she has a bad result. We're both working hard to be the best in our sport, but you have to some sort of life outside that."
If he needs a pep talk from a fellow golfer, on the other hand, McIlroy need only turn to the greatest of them all. Jack Nicklaus, who went on to win 17 more majors after his first fresh-faced triumph in 1962, has invited him to spend the beginning of next year practicing at his club in Florida. McIlroy has already proven his lack of physical stature to be no hindrance to his game, but perhaps there is still something to be said for standing on the shoulders of giants.
This article appeared in Hong Kong Tatler
]]>But alas, there is nothing daunting, nothing stern, about Perlman - no loftiness or hauteur, no hint of a tortured soul. He may revel in Beethoven and Mahler but he does not share their manic severity. On the contrary, millions around the world love him as much for the enveloping warmth of his personality as for the emotional range of his playing (though the two may be inseparable). Like the late Luciano Pavarotti, he has for decades performed an almost ambassadorial role for classical music, critical adulation combining with the force of his own irrepressible joy in music-making to catapult him into the global popular consciousness.
And so, when he tells me with boyish glee that the last thing to survive when the world ends is certain to be Mozart's violin sonatas, it is difficult to be persuaded from the notion that Perlman is the effervescent pedagogue we all wish we'd had in school. He is, whisper it, almost as much fun to listen to talking as he is to hear play.
The 66-year-old Israeli-born American, who will perform his first concerts in Macau and Hong Kong for nine years this week, has spoken at length before of how he often asks his students - or when he conducts, entire orchestras - to think about colours or types of food in order to get them to play a piece of music in a certain way. "What do you say to an orchestra that has played, let's say, Beethoven's 1st Symphony 200 times? The way I do it is to just try to think of what I would like to hear from a piece, how I hear it in my head." he tells me. "I would call it suggesting what you want the orchestra to sound like."
Having taken up the baton relatively late in his career, Perlman has, over the last decade or so, conducted many of the most prestigious orchestras in the US, Europe and beyond. He was, until recently, also Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Westchester Philharmonic in New York, where he lives with his wife, Toby. Together, they run the Perlman Music Program, a summer camp for exceptionally talented young string players, and since 1999 he has taught all year round at New York's Juillard School of Music - the institution at which he himself studied the violin, under the great Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, after relocating from Tel Aviv in the late 1950s.
"For me these things are all very much connected," he says. "Teaching and conducting have an effect on you as a performer. Instead of saying to someone they must play a certain way, I talk to myself. I learn to listen in a particular way, so that I can do what I am hearing in the music. Listening is the most important word - the difference between a good performance and an okay performance is in how well the performer listens to what he or she does when they play."
Perlman's own students are mostly between 14 and 16. "I can have a better effect on the way they play because they have not developed the habits that older students have picked up," he says. He is uncomfortable with the phrase "child prodigy", believing it to create unnecessary pressure on parents and children, but it's worth remembering he gave his own first recital aged 10 and was soon thereafter performing with the Israeli Broadcast Orchestra.
In reality, he says, he hated practicing and in his reflections on his own youth there is a surprising degree of mixed feeling. He loved the instrument and went through periods of "completely idolising" first Fritz Kreisler and later David Oistrakh. "But I wasn't sure I could do it [be like them]. You just keep hoping and practicing. If you have talent then people give you support, which I had, but you need an awful lot of negative vibes as well to do this."
Making things harder, quite probably, was the fact that, having contracted polio at the age of four, he was unable to walk without crutches - to this day he relies on them, and an electric scooter, for mobility, and plays the violin while seated. "People ask me what would I have done if I had not had polio as a young child," he says. "I really don't know. I would probably have done the same. When I wanted to play the violin I did not have polio. It was not something that came after."
In the event, two appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS in 1958 made him a household name in the US at the tender age of 13, and in 1964 he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition, paving the way for a career touring the world's concert halls.
Almost five decades later he is the most recorded violinist in history, possesses 15 Grammy Awards and has played with every major orchestra in the world - including the Israel Philharmonic, with whom he made history by going behind the Iron Curtain to perform in Warsaw and Budapest in 1987, and in the Soviet Union in 1990. He has received honorary degrees from Ivy League universities and had successive US presidents clamouring to weigh him down with medals. And in addition he has recorded jazz and klezmer albums, performed as a soloist on the soundtracks to three movies - Schindler's List, Zhang Yimou's Hero and Memoirs of a Geisha (along with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma) - and made countless television appearances in the US, including on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street.
A 1980 clip of him performing a Beethoven duet with a tuba-playing Telly Monster can, inevitably, be found on YouTube; not so the 2004 PBS special Perlman in Shanghai, but it chronicles something a little more historic - a visit of the Perlman Music Program to the mainland that culminated in a concert at the Shanghai Grand Theatre featuring one thousand young American and Chinese violinists.
"We linked up with kids from the Shanghai Conservatory," he says. "Chamber music, certainly a few years ago, did not have the importance there that we feel it should have, so it was one of the things we wanted to promote. But generally in Asia right now, there are a lot of very fine musicians coming through. The ratio of kids coming in from the Far East on our programme is rising - from Korea, China, Japan. It's really a lot. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, string players tended to come from Europe, Russia maybe, the United States and Israel. Right now the cycle has really shifted to Asia for young string players."
When I put it to him that he has form in terms of breaking down cultural barriers via music, the response comes back with almost evangelistic certainty: "Music is, simply put, an international language."
"No matter where I go to play or the culture of that country, when it comes to classical music everybody has a common reaction to it," he adds. "As an Israeli, there were occasions where I have gone to countries where Israel did not have diplomatic relations yet and you knew that relationships would improve because of those visits with the Israel Philharmonic. The music was a step to improving relations. Because everybody speaks that language.
"There is something about music that is so important to the development of humans. I am asked what I would do without music. I think society would be much worse; it's the soul of society. What would we do without it?" It doesn't bear thinking about, of course; but at least the Mozart sonatas are safe.
This article appeared in The South China Morning Post
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In a sense all books are about silence, which is perhaps one reason why it has long been considered expedient that children take at least a passing interest in them. In the 1960s and 70s, decades after its first publication in 1922, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha influenced the Beatles and fed into a hippy counterculture that gave off a lot of noise - but there is little point in blaming the water for what grows in the ground: the novel itself, though redolent enough with the German-Swiss author's own spiritual angst, has a meditative, hushful quality about it in-keeping with its eponymous hero's search for inner peace, enlightenment and all that sort of thing.
When he wrote Siddhartha, Hesse was living as a semi-recluse and had immersed himself in Hindu and Buddhist scripture in the hope of finding a cure for what he called his "sickness with life". The result is a version of the bildungsroman - a phrase coined by another German about a century before to refer to novels about difficult young men, more or less - that takes the reader on a walkabout around India in the time of the Buddha and delves rather haphazardly into eastern theology but which must also be read as echoing Hesse's own quest for self-realisation.
The Siddhartha we meet at the beginning of the novel is a Brahmin's son who can hold his own in discussion with the wise men of his village and knows "how to say Om silently". The author does not say as much but he is certainly an unusual boy. Soon he decides to leave his parents and head off in pursuit of nirvana, moshka and various other states of spiritual release the book touches on: first of all by embracing asceticism, which among other bizarre exercises involves occupying the soul of a dead jackal, then later by tasting of a more worldly existence as a trader and lover.
Ultimately, however, it is in quieter rhythms that he discovers "atman", his true self: by the river, a recurrent symbol of life's "song", he meets the ferryman Vaseduva and gains the knowledge he has been seeking from the old man's "silent love and cheerfulness".
In the years that followed the First World War - during which Hesse made life difficult for himself by daring to denounce the patriotism he saw as responsible for unleashing hell on earth across Europe - Germany fell into intellectual forment. Hesse was influenced by German romanticism and neo-romanticism, he was intrigued by expressionism, fascinated by the psychoanalytic movement and by orientalism.
And yet, in light of the hell to which -isms would soon return the country it is, in passing, moving to note that Siddhartha effectively renounces the idea of doctrine as a route to harmony. When his old boyhood friend and spiritual accomplice, Govinda, finds him by the river, he wishes to hear what wisdom Siddhartha has finally attained. But the answer is incommunicable - and Siddhartha cannot respond other than with silence.
]]>Sporadic outbreaks of inchoate public rage are now expected events in Britain. The bankers, the MPs, the Lib Dems and Ryan Giggs have all copped it. Now it's the turn of the journalists, and, er, the coppers. There's little doubting the hatred is real, and yet one wonders whether there is not a little too much anti-establishment schadenfreude about it. To bow to that sentiment and neuter the press only to find that in the blink of an eye the public pulse has been quickened by some new casus belli would be a mistake. No doubt the Guardian and to a lesser extent the BBC are to be applauded for helping to expose the scandal; but it is perhaps no coincidence that the latter, in particular, stands to gain much from News Corp's ruination, or that the former has long demonised Rupert Murdoch, both on an ideological basis and personally. After the phone-hacking business erupted a couple of weeks ago, one Guardian blogger exclaimed: "Let's hope this is our Arab Spring." In-keeping with the wider narrative if he meant the Guardian's; entirely asinine if he meant the country's.
At any rate the story is unlikely to disappear from that newspaper's front end any time soon; which will surely give its editorial staff the opportunity to flesh out a vision of Britain's post-Arab Spring media world. It is encouraging, then, to note that they do not give credence to the notion espoused by Neil Kinnock - allying himself in this instance with pronouncements on the matter from the Chinese - that newspapers should be made to toe the same line the BBC is meant to on political impartiality. After all, it is for the left an unpalatable truth that in most places where there exists a free market for news and opinion, titles either marginally or blatantly to the right sell rather better than the alternatives.
]]>"London, Hong Kong, it's the same," he says finally, pointing over at the massed divisions of demonstrators snaking along Hennessey Road in the opposite direction to us. "People don't like government, make protest. It's same."
Okay. Yeah, I nod. Protest. Government. London. But wait - London? Nobody's smashing windows or setting about police vans. In fact, it's all rather peaceable. I mean, whoever heard of an angry mob carrying parasols? Maybe the anarchists are late. No trouble, I say. No violence. Unfortunately for our conversation, no understand. Well it was fun while it lasted.
But still, I'm right. This march - they've been held every year on July 1 since the British split for home in 1997 - appears to stir up all the animus of a Hare Krishna rally. The government has been trying to do away with by-elections and so this is the biggest turnout since 2004. But still, not even the chanting's aggressive. And what do they want? Well, universal suffrage would be a start. "One person, one vote" is the shibboleth. In May, incidentally, the Brits were asked whether in future they wanted two votes in general elections, or something to that effect, and declined. Instead they've been out marching against cuts in government spending that so far don't appear to be cuts at all, the erosion of middle class entitlements and suchlike.
I'd seen groups of protestors gathering earlier on. Hawkers sold t-shirts emblazoned with pro-democracy slogans and - the very latest in radical chic - Guy Fawkes masks; volunteers handed out pamphlets and placards and John Lennon's Working Class Hero blared from a loudspeaker. And it struck me that if the self-pitying jeremiads of a dead hippy were to be the democratic movement's rallying call, then the Chinese Communist Party needn't worry all that much.
It is often claimed, indeed, that there will be no great clamour for democracy on mainland China whilst the government is delivering nine per cent growth year on year. Growth, however, may not necessarily preclude anti-government sentiment if it is accompanied by a widening of the gap between the rich and the rest. And this, probably more than the desire for greater democracy, is what explains the 218,000 turnout in Hong Kong last week. As much as they have compounded the miseries of the poor, rising rents and living costs are squeezing the middle classes. The rentier class rules. The picture is not, in fact, so very different from that of London after all.
Later on, there were also a few arrests: 228 to be exact. But one shouldn't jump to conclusions. The offending parties were, for the most part, demonstrators who refused to go home. There is so little in the way of crime in Hong Kong that its bobbies occasionally feel the need of something to do.
]]>Not being in the country I haven't seen them with my own eyes, but I can well imagine the shrill headlines on the front pages of the Scottish editions of the Mail and Express after the minister sponsoring the thing, Roseanna Cunningham, acknowledged in parliament that under its provisions singing God Save the Queen or crossing oneself might "in certain circumstances" (we're sort of, um, not sure) constitute an offence. As those organs of truth will have taken delight in pointing out, you couldn't make it up, and they'd be right: you couldn't. But you didn't have to. It may be a small few who take an interest in what goes on inside the Scottish Parliament, but the transcripts are there for all to read. And Cunningham was attempting to make the case for the bill.
Equally certain is that ponderous commentarists in the lefty, Alex Salmond-hugging broadsheets will have been at great pains to point out that only a relatively small number of prosecutions would ever be likely to arise from this Bill and that nobody would actually be arrested for banging on about the queen because that would be absurd. And furthermore give the Scottish government some credit for trying to Do Something, etcetera etcetera. And in their ponderous way they would probably be right about some of this too.
But if it is agreed that a piece of legislation is so vague that it is only ever likely to be patchily enforced, or indeed so vague that you won't know you're breaking the law until you end up in jail ("behaviour that a reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive" is the key line here), then why bother with it in the first place? The chief constable of Strathclyde police was quoted as saying that "if the legislation stops one person" from doing anything vaguely sectarian, then it will be worthwhile. Really? A wiser man once said that "a corrupt society has many laws", and it is a matter of fact that we already have numerous laws capable of banging those guilty of sectarian crimes to rights, including some fairly robust anti-terrorism laws whose passage I seem to think the SNP, rightly or wrongly, opposed. Yet quite apart from the issue of its superfluity, in extending strictures on sectarian behaviour and language within football grounds to pubs, cyberspace and anywhere else Celtic and Rangers supporters might convey themselves, this Bill strikes rather a sinister, Draconian note. It is, in fact, illiberal in the extreme to presume that the state should have any business peering into men's souls on the feeble-minded presumption that people crossing themselves in an "aggressive" manner may be to blame for the violence of others.
One final point. It is often in the make-up of nationalists to be irritated and exasperated by the nation they would wish to remould in their own image. Neither Rangers or Celtic supporters have tended to promulgate a feverishly Scottish identity. But if we're in the business of proscribing songs about bygone bloodshed, what makes Flower of Scotland exempt?
]]>The title of that early "talkie" derives from Ariel's song in The Tempest: she makes it known to the shipwrecked Ferdinand that his father has perished and lies at the bottom of the sea, which misfortune has turned him "into something rich and strange," bean curd perhaps. Fred and Emily, Hitchcock's prim young English couple, off spending a wodge of inherited wealth on a cruise to Singapore, find everything they encounter east of, well, Dover, strange and exotic. Ultimately they are fleeced for their money and go back to London, where Fred gets his missus to put on a nice steak and kidney pie. Unfortunately it escaped my humourless tutor - a Canadian, I seem to think - that the joke was never other than on the Brits themselves. It is as Noel Coward had it in the song: "Why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay back home?"
I come to recount all of this as, in the last couple of weeks, I have moved to Hong Kong. As its gleaming towers serve to declare, it is certainly rich; and insofar as everything at street level looks to my racialist and imperialist eye like a restaurant, it also feels strange. But strange, too, is a feeling of widespread confidence in its institutions. China, Francis Fukuyama has said, has the best modern bureaucratic state in the world, but having failed to sanction a commercial middle class until recently, has a weak society. Hong Kong, notwithstanding its own democratic deficit, appears to have it all: a market economy, a strong society and efficient government. Regarding this last, Hong Kong's impressive Immigration Tower has an entire level devoted to welcoming "quality immigrants". Suffice to say I collected my papers on another floor.
]]>"Oh it's you, doctor," he said. "It is I", replied Pemberton, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, a grin spread across his bearded face. It was too much for Jacobs. "I don't see what's to be smiling about," he said in that languid way favoured by morphia enthusiasts, and bade Pemberton cast his eye over an item in the Constitution which had just inflamed his headache. "This afternoon, of 7th May 1886, all individuals of moral conscience are called to march on the State House of Georgia", read Pemberton aloud.
"It's bad for business is what it is, doc," said Jacobs. "These temperance lunatics have their way and we men of science are done for. It'll be an end to Pemberton's coca wine before you can say 'and a half bottle for the missus, Mr Jacobs'."
Pemberton, however, had his Gladstone bag on the counter by now and had removed the stopper from a curious-looking decanter. "I think we have a solution, Jacobs," he said. "I have perfected a new concoction, one free of alcohol but every bit as moreish as coca wine. Even more moreish, you might say."
Jacobs peered at the new liquid, which was by now fizzing away like blazes. It was black and heady. "Looks like you could descale the lavatory with this stuff," he said. "I don't suppose..."
"The recipe's a secret," said Pemberton, pouring him a draught. "All I will reveal is that there's kola nuts, sugar and some other stuff in it. It'll bring you off the morphia, for sure, and it'll cure nervous prostration, distempers of the mind and irregularities of the kidneys. Oh, and impotence, too."
The pharmacist held his glass aloft and regarded it with a beady eye, his left one; then, gingerly, he knocked it back. He let out a great "aaah", and burped. "An extraordinary potion, Dr Pemberton," he exclaimed. "My word, most extraordinary. I must have it for sale tomorrow. But how do you call it?"
"Hmm," said Pemberton. "I hadn't thought of that. Something alliterative, I think. Coca-Cobra, maybe, or Coma-Cola, or Holy Molar. I'll get back to you on that."
]]>"Dear chums [...] Those of you who still have faculties, nay a pulse, in working order, may well have noticed things are not as they were in our time. Those Eton chaps seem to have the whole business sown up, for starters. I mean to say, I can't think of an Old Rugbeian in the Cabinet.
"You may well conceive of my surprise, then, on hearing the name 'Harry Flashman' come spitting out of the wireless on The World At One. By Jupiter, says I to myself, hasn't old Flashy had enough misadventure? But then I remembered Flashy didn't make it through the Great War - some say he died falling from the Mata Hari's bedroom window - and as I listened on I was somewhat relieved to grasp that the late Brigadier was not in fact Her Majesty's Prime Minister and had only been likened to him; or rather, vice versa.
"As I comprehend the facts, the leader of something called the Labour Party thinks it quite the barb to call the PM Flashman instead of Cameron, which is his proper name, although some people insist on calling him 'Dave'. Well, I was intrigued to find out more about this Dave fellow, and it seems that not only is he frightfully young, mutatis mutandum he's really nothing like our old tormentor at all. In fact, Flashy would have shrank from the comparison as though it were double Latin.
"Now, some of you may recall that Flashy and I had our differences, and in all honesty he made my schooldays deuced unpleasant. But as the saying goes a roasting maketh a full man, or something, and, well, Empire demanded men like Flashy. That men like Flashy lost the Empire is beside the point - old Harry never picked a fight with a tyrant unless he dashed well had to and he certainly didn't gad about the world telling people we were responsible for its problems, not unless he was about to be killed."
The email goes on to compare Cameron's ability as a "swordsman" unfavourably with Flashman's, but we're keeping that bit to ourselves for legal reasons.
This article appeared in The Herald
]]>His name was barely familiar even to his countrymen. He was 32, an age at which most players are still coming to terms with the idea that they are "experienced". And, in fact, he had never actually been a footballer. For anyone.
There have been others who've been given their chance at managing big clubs without ever having played on any grand stage - Arsene Wenger is one who springs to mind - but usually there is a requirement to work one's ticket in the lower divisions. Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, however, is a man who knows his own mind. The Porto president handed a spiky young Jose Mourinho his first major appointment and did not live to regret it; Villas Boas was, similarly, his personal choice to succeed Jesualdo Ferreira.
Once again he has been vindicated. Porto host Spartak Moscow in the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final tonight having eliminated CSKA in the last round and fresh from clinching the Liga Sagres title with a 2-1 win at Benfica on Sunday. Before they took that punt on Dalglish, Liverpool were sniffing around Villas Boas; more recently Roma were rebuffed. The Porto native - a supporter of the club as a boy - has made it clear he wants to guide them into the Champions League next season.
So far, so much a case of Mourinho Mark II. And Villas Boas' relationship to the "Special One" seems almost umbilical. Before taking over at bottom-of-the-league Academica in October 2009 - from which position he led them to a safe 11th place - he spent years working under the current Real Madrid manager, first at Porto, then at Chelsea, and then at Inter Milan.
The younger man has been keen to downplay this relationship, however. Rumours that his split from Mourinho 18 months ago was an acrimonious one may or may not be well-founded, but he has at times seemed annoyed at attempts to paint him as some kind of De Niro to his master's Brando. "I am not a clone of anyone," he has said. "I want to leave my mark on this club. We do not have the same character and personality. We communicate and work differently."
"He's very insistent that he's not the new Mourinho," the editor of the Portugoal football website, Tom Kundert, told Herald Sport. "He was in fact originally taken on at Porto by Bobby Robson and he is quoted as saying that he sees himself more as Robson's successor. He said 'I have English ancestry (his late grandmother was from Manchester), a big nose and I like drinking wine.'"
The story of Villas Boas' conscription by the late Robson might well be the stuff of a Hollywood movie. As a teenager he lived in the same building as Robson - who coached Porto from 1994-96 - and harassed him into reading some of his meticulous scouting reports on the team's next opponents. The former England manager was impressed enough to offer the precocious youngster a role within the club's observation department.
At 17, he achieved his UEFA C coaching licence in Scotland before, aged 21, becoming head coach of the British Virgin Islands. When Pinto da Costa appointed Mourinho in 2002, the latter brought Villas Boas in as an assistant, and so began his higher education in the managerial arts.
It would not be accurate to suggest the new Porto coach has simply transplanted Mourinho's template, however. Like Mourinho he is adept at motivating players and impeccably organised, but there are major tactical differences: like Pep Guardiola's Barcelona, Villas Boas' Porto play highpressure, passing football; his is a more fluid 4-3-3 than Mourinho's was at Chelsea, with the wingers frequently becoming strikers.
"Where Mourinho is resultsdriven and therefore traditionally quite defensive, Villas Boas gives his players a lot of licence," says Kundert. "At the same time they lose very few goals. Tactically he has to be given credit."
In the last four years, Porto have lost the likes of Bruno Alves and Raul Meireles, Lucho Gonzalez, Lisandro Lopez, Ricardo Quaresma, Jose Bosingwa, Pepe and Anderson. Benfica, meanwhile, looked a much stronger side than their domestic rivals this season: Luisao, Fabio Coentrao, Javi Garcia, Gaitan and Saviola would all walk into Villas Boas' team.
In such circumstances, any manager who can put out a side as ruthless and tactically superior as the current Porto will always have people taking note. He may not be able to keep him forever, but Pinto da Costa's gamble has paid off. The risks for future suitors seem negligible.
This article appeared in The Herald
]]>Phillips is not generally noted for even-handedness when it comes to writing about the Middle East. She is often polemical, some might even say tendentious, in her support of Israel. She is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, and perhaps you would include yourself in that. Perhaps you feel that she comes too close to smearing all Arabs. Perhaps you even think hers are the sort of views that should be investigated by the police. But then again, perhaps you don't read her blogs and form your views of the rights and wrongs of faraway bloodshed from other sources. Perhaps you wonder what all the fuss is about.
There are echoes here of the case of another Daily Mail journalist, Jan Moir, who in 2009 upset a lot of people by appearing to attribute the death of the singer Stephen Gately to his lifestyle. Gately was gay. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided, about a year ago, not to prosecute Moir, but the whole episode conjured up bizarre images of crown officials poring over words and phrases in a newspaper opinion column for evidence of illegality.
And then there was the case, less well-publicised, involving Douglas Murray, another journalist. He was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission and the police merely for suggesting that the prosecution of an English councillor for telling a joke about an Irishman being a bit dim was ludicrous. And last year, too, a Liberal Democrat councillor was convicted under the 2006 Public Order Act for using 'threatening, abusive or insulting words, with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress'. Shirley Brown, who is black, had called a female Asian councillor, Jay Jethwa, a 'coconut', a colloquial term used to denote a person who is 'brown on the outside and white on the inside' - someone who has, in other words, betrayed his or her cultural roots by pandering to 'white' opinion.
But it's not merely in print and in the debating chamber that solecisms can have repercussions: cyberspace also has its victims. Think of Paul Chambers, who was fined £3,000 and lost his job for tweeting, in jest, words to the effect that he would blow up an airport if its closure due to bad weather disrupted his travel plans. Or of Gareth Compton, the Tory councillor who was arrested in November when - after hearing the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue on a radio programme that the West had no moral authority to condemn the practice of stoning women in the Muslim world - he asked his Twitter followers 'Can someone please stone [her] to death?', adding 'I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.'
That some users of social media are discovering, to their detriment, that the online environment does not in fact mirror the domain of the private conversation down the pub was perhaps inevitable. But then, as the Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys - who lost their jobs for making off-colour remarks when they thought they were not being recorded - recently found out, even private conversation is no longer safe from censure.
What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal - or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism - a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all.
If UK prime minister David Cameron seemed to grasp this when he spoke of the merits of 'muscular liberalism' earlier this year, it is a pity that his government's Protection of Freedoms Bill - an Act which has been making its way through parliament since last summer and which it is intended will extend freedom of information, turn back the tide of state intrusion into our lives and repeal unnecessary criminal laws - makes no attempt to return free speech to its rightful place at the altar of democracy.
The Lib-Con coalition government may well be less authoritarian than the Labour one that preceded it, but in a way we are still suffering the hangover from New Labour and the ideals it pressed into service when it ditched socialism: diversity, equality, respect. Among the 4,300 new offences put into statute under Labour were those governing 'hate speech', or the giving and taking of offence. First came legislation on racial and religious hatred; later, protection was extended to gay, transgender and disabled people. Doubtless heightened sensitivity about Islam in the wake of 9/11 played its part: the Religious Hatred Act of 2006, for instance, extended outdated blasphemy laws to afford people of all faiths, including Jedis, recourse against things they don't like hearing said or seeing written.
One of the results has been a new culture of fastidious censoriousness in every public body, human-resource department and media organisation in the land. Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that 'incitement to hatred' is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, 'hate speech' can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.
That distinction between incitement to hatred and incitement to violence is a crucial one for Peter Tatchell, one of this country's most tireless and principled human rights campaigners. When I spoke to him last year he had recently been in the news for defending the rights of Christian preachers hounded by the law over homophobic hate-speech crimes. One American Baptist evangelist, Shawn Holes, was fined £1,000 for telling shoppers in Glasgow city centre that homosexuals were bound for hell; Tatchell, who is gay himself and renowned for his campaigning on behalf of gay rights, called it 'an attack on free speech and a heavy-handed, excessive response to homophobia'.
He had also spoken up for the five Islamists convicted of showering abuse at British soldiers at a 'homecoming' march in Luton, but had elsewhere called for sanctions on extremists who incite violence - including Abu Usamah, who was shown in a Channel 4 undercover documentary advocating the killing of gays and Muslims who leave their faith. But there was no contradiction, he insisted. 'If someone says "I want to encourage people to plant bombs in Princes Street in Edinburgh", then that's pretty clear incitement to violence', he told me. 'Saying "I sympathise with al-Qaeda" is not, on the other hand.'
While that view may not be likely to find favour with mainstream political opinion, muscular liberal or otherwise, it makes sense from a First Amendment perspective, if you're talking American. Britain doesn't have a First Amendment, of course, but it did produce John Stuart Mill, who wrote in 1859 that 'there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered'. The limits of such liberty should be defined by the 'harm principle', he said, not by social offence. In other words, dealing with offence is part of being a grown-up in a grown-up society.
Liberals nowadays seem to have lost the stomach for such principles, however. The word 'liberal' itself has come to denote a much narrower set of ideas: vaguely leftish, environmentalist, irreproachably PC, pro-European, pro-Palestine, pro-Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Technology, meanwhile, may have helped to create a more informed and engaged citizenry, but it has also given a leg up to the power of mob rule. Online forums and message boards foster a culture of outrage, indignation and recrimination; they manufacture and mobilise offence.
The Lib-Cons' Protection of Freedoms Act will flush away ID cards, biometric passports and the ContactPoint database of children in England. It includes provisions to restrict and regulate the use of surveillance powers, CCTV and the storage of internet and email records and it will restore rights to freedom of assembly, non-violent protest and trial by jury. It may prove to be a watershed moment for liberty in Britain. It could have been a much greater one. It is time to weigh again the value, as opposed to the price, of free speech.
This article was published on Spiked
]]>I myself cannot recall when I started shouting at the television. I do remember, however, taking particular exception to the children's presenter Andi Peters, whose inane chatter and lisp and daft spelling of his first name made him the most annoying man conceivable. Now, I note, most people on television are like Peters: shouty, noisome and in a permanent state of excitement.
Earlier this month a pensioner named Martin Soloman was sent down for 14 months by Gloucestershire crown court for persistently violating his neighbours' peace with noisy, foul-mouthed rants at programmes that irritated him. One has sympathy with the neighbours, of course, but we should not be too quick to pass judgment on Mr Soloman, who is, after all, an old sailor, fer chrissakes.
First of all, the programme makers must shoulder some of the blame for making such knowingly irritating programmes and manufacturing sadistic contests out of everything from selling pegs to cookery. And secondly it should be noted that the old chap reserved his worst rages for Question Time - which is understandable alone for the way its studio audiences can always be relied on to applaud the most fatuous of points.
Mr Soloman's case is an extreme one, but shouting at the box is on the whole a rewarding exercise. Like a magnet it draws out the urge to despair at one's fellow man, leaving only slight feelings of guilt and the resolve to try to be nicer to him.
This article appeared in The Herald