kenny hodgart

Category Archives: Books & Arts


by Leave a comment

Pictures of Italy

This article appeared in The Herald

Of all the reasons to like Italian films from the early 1960s, good as any, I think, is that they are so very cool. Dapper-looking chaps are all-too-often framed through a lens of suspicion in Anglo-Saxon films of the post-war era, but the characters portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni and Alain Delon (okay, he’s French, but he was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s l’Eclisse in 1962) seem almost the pitch-perfect existential response to our own era of media saturation, civic disillusionment and cultural tedium: bored, detached, intellectual, they occasionally act disgracefully, but at least they know how to wear a suit.

Before you dismiss my analysis as entirely superficial, however, let me tell you about the women. Claudio Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau (French, again): all are visions of classical Italianate beauty. But their foibles are those of modern, bourgeois women. And this leads me to my point – Antonioni and Federico Fellini broke with the conservatism of both right and left in Italy by daring to depict female sexuality per se. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was branded immoral and the Vatican tried to have it banned, while both men were hammered by leftist critics, who thought films ought only to show women being doughty.

These filmmakers deal with the lives of an affluent middle class, whose Italy, born of the post-war economic boom, is consumerist and glamour-obsessed. If capitalism is the enemy in, say, La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), the malaise is not material but spiritual. Individuals drift, unfulfilled, in and out of the action, aimless voyeurs.

Mastroianni, in La Notte, plays a writer who attends a party thrown by a tycoon and almost cheats on his wife with the host’s daughter. In 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), he is a filmmaker with “director’s block”. Along the way there is all manner of ennui and moral ambiguity to contend with. But man’s alienation in the modern world was never so appealing.


by Leave a comment

Review: On Fire With Fergie, by Stuart Donald

This review appeared in The Herald

There are bits of this book that make me want to seek out the author and smack him about the face in the time-honoured tradition of the football casual. It is 1984 and Stuart Donald is “depressed” because his team, my team, Aberdeen, are having to make do with winning the Scottish Premier Division and the Scottish Cup after being knocked out of the European Cup Winners’ Cup at the semi-final stage. Two years later and a 16-year-old Donald is on the verge of giving up on attending matches altogether – this time the Dons have only won the two domestic Cup competitions.

The message I’m getting is that I was born too late, that my life as a fan has been a futile peregrination from nadir to nadir. I was three years old in 1983 when the impossible came to pass and Aberdeen – little Aberdeen, a “provincial” Scottish club – were confirmed as one of Europe’s top sides. I dimly remember them winning the league, for the second year running, in 1985, and that even after Alex Ferguson left to manage Manchester United in 1986 people said you could never write them off. But you can now: the trajectory over the decades has been one of steady decline.

Regrets? No, not really. Donald writes about being a football supporter almost as though it were an illness; even he, I sense, would acknowledge that winning is not the cure. No supporter of Aberdeen will ever tire of reading about the Ferguson years, 1978-86, but there is much more than a raking over of old memories about this very personal memoir.

First, Donald’s narrator, his younger self, is wide-eyed, expectant, irrational; the authentic football fan, in short. But the Aberdeen players he adores are hardly of interest at all, at least not as mortal beings – Willie Miller, lifting the Scottish Cup, “rose over Hampden, arms outstretched and solemn faced, like he was Jesus and Glasgow was Rio de Janeiro” – which means we’re spared the cod psychology of so much sports-writing. Events are filtered instead through our super-fan’s imagination in what turns out to be a coming-of-age tale in which nobody actually comes of age; Donald senior, Gordon, is almost as juvenile in his passion for football as his son. In the chapter on Ferguson’s departure, we’re told: “Little did I know it at the time but Dad was in the first few hours of a strop with Fergie that would run for the rest of his life.”

But Gordon, rather than Fergie, is the real hero of this book and the relationship between father and son, lovingly rendered, is one that will resonate with any male reader lucky enough to have had a dad cut from remotely similar cloth. Fiercely proud, he can be a comic figure at times, but there’s awe, respect and not a little fear mingled in the portrait too. The enduring image is of him refusing to be intimidated by Rangers supporters intent on running riot in Aberdeen, “defending his martyr city by refusing to hide his enormous scarf, like he thought he was a sort of Charles de Gaulle character”.

It is Gordon, indeed, who gives meaning to Aberdeen’s long struggle and sudden rise as a force to be reckoned with. Where the younger Donald sees no reason why Aberdeen can’t win everything, his dad and others of his generation have learned to be pessimistic about their team’s chances of sustained success in light of the historic might of Celtic and Rangers, who are seen as a blight on the rest of Scottish football and Scottish society. “All that matters is the intensity, the bitterness, the hatred, of their own rivalry,” says Gordon’s friend, Harry.

The perception of injustice in the way the Old Firm clubs always “steal” the best players and the best managers in Scotland has no antidote in their supporters’ conduct. Celtic supporters riot outside Pittodrie after their team is beaten, Rangers fans are observed in “an organised siege on the town and its dignity”, openly urinating on Union Street in broad daylight and frightening pensioners on buses with their sectarian songs. The young Donald quickly comes to dread all things Glaswegian and to understand his elders’ bitterness towards the Old Firm, so that he shares something “demonic” in their joy at beating the Glasgow teams and – when the Aberdeen casuals started putting the visitors forcefully in their place – admits “I was secretly proud of them”.

That was emphatically not the view of the club at the time, but fortunately they did do their bit in other ways to make supporters proud. Donald’s book brings those achievements more sharply into focus. If this review got off on an envious note, I’d also like to register my gratitude, unequivocally, for a magnificent read.


by Leave a comment

An interview with Neil Hannon

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

It’s usually deemed the height of bad manners for journalists to leave their mobile phones on during interviews, but when my Blackberry starts ringing as I’m sitting down to talk to the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, it’s something of an ice-breaker. He recognises the ring tone straight away as Ann Dudley’s theme from the early-1990s TV serialisation of Jeeves and Wooster featuring Stephen Fry as PG Wodehouses’s ingenious valet. It’s Hannon’s kind of thing – there’s something Wodehousian, indeed, about the wordplay and whimsy in some of his own vignettes about oddballs and eccentrics – and it gives me the opportunity to quote to him from a recent review in the News of the World in which he was described as “the Stephen Fry of pop.”

“That’s uncalled for,” he softly demurs. “Really, he’s one of the few people that, if he died, I’d be really upset. I mean, from the celebrity order. It would be a bloody state funeral, I would have thought.” Hannon says he was delighted when he learned that Fry had “said a nice thing” on Twitter about the Duckworth Lewis Method – an album of songs entirely about cricket, which he made last year with his friend Thomas Walsh from the band Pugwash. He also met Fry once but was lost for words. “We’re talking about a man with a monster intellect,” he says.

Bashful and modest is not entirely what I expected of Hannon. The Divine Comedy released their tenth album, Bang Goes the Knighthood, earlier this summer. But the plural possessive has always been misleading: Hannon, give or take a co-composer here or a backing band there, is the Divine Comedy. And in truth he’s one of our most erudite songwriters, the purveyor of a strain of off-beat, literate pop that’s equal parts Burt Bacharach, Noel Coward, the Electric Light Orchestra and Chopin.

It’s all too clever by half for some tastes, but ever since the 1996 release of Casanova – the album which landed “chamber pop” in the charts and coincided with his adopting the dress sense of a Regency dandy – I’ve been rather in awe of him. There can be few pop artists, after all, who think it a good idea to quote from Horace or EM Forster, or to adapt the words of Dickens (“it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”), as Hannon did on a track called In and Out of Paris and London, to describe the joys of sex.

His father a Church of Ireland bishop, Hannon was raised in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, a middle class boy in a largely working class town who dreamt of pop stardom. “I was living through the golden age of British pop music, ’78-’82”, he says. After his first attempt to get the Divine Comedy up and running as an indie band foundered, he locked himself away and wrote Liberation, which, paired with its follow-up, Promenade, established him as an artist whose baroque pretensions won the praise of critics but failed to register much in terms of sales. That all changed with Casanova – all of a sudden he was selling out the Albert Hall, touring with REM and, unwittingly or otherwise, riding a post-Britpop wave. The album’s title, and the single Becoming More Like Alfie (another song about fornication), saw him cast in the role of suave womaniser by the scene’s media cheerleaders, and for a time he seemed happy to play up to a certain foppish persona.

“If you subscribe to the Adam Ant pop handbook, you can’t just do the music,” he confides. “I was down with that. I agree. I think it’s nice to have an overall kind of image; it makes everything more palatable. But I wasn’t very good at it. Basically the height of my image was to wear some nice suits and shades [lately on stage he’s been wearing a bowler hat and carrying a pipe] and kind of pretend I’d read a lot of books. In reality, I was not some kind of crazed dandy.”

More hits followed: wry, three-minute numbers like Generation Sex, a song about tabloid prurience and the death of Princess Diana, and National Express, the use of the word “arse” on which the BBC saw fit to censor on a Top of the Pops performance. By 2001, however, Hannon had tired of being arch and jaunty. He ditched the Savile Row wardrobe, lowered his eyebrow a notch and hired Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich to make his most introspective album to date, Regeneration. When it flopped commercially, he declared the Divine Comedy were finished, but has since delivered three more records under the name besides involving himself in collaborations with Ute Lemper and Air and writing songs for Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In the aftermath of Regeneration, he also moved from London to Dublin, where he still lives. He has a daughter, Willow, with his ex-wife Orla, and is happy in a new relationship with the singer Cathy Davey. Lyrically, he seems to have relaxed a bit, too: Bang Goes the Knighthood is his least “conceptual” album. There’s the odd moment of anxiety or self-examination, but on the whole there is a feeling of contentment running through it, allied to a resounding rejection of the bohemian life.

Has he become a Young Fogey? “Well, I’m not young anymore. I’ll be 40 later this year. But I’m certainly no thrillseeker. In fact, I actively avoid thrills. There’s a song on the album (Down on the Street Below), the basic thrust of which is about getting to a certain age and trying to work out what you’re really after. In the second verse I’m at one of those rarefied parties (‘the clientele straight out of this month’s Vanity Fair’), and it’s about how I sort of realised a few years ago that I’d rather be at home with a cup of tea watching the football. It’s just not me at all.”

Which is not to say that he has somehow beaten a retreat from the world. The response of most songwriters to the economic upheavals of the last couple of years has been silence. Hannon, on the other hand, sat down and wrote The Complete Banker, a chirpy, music-hall composition, the very chirpiness of which belies a rather biting set of lyrics – “I’m a conscience-free, malignant cancer on society”, declares Hannon’s assumed character, a generic City high-flyer laid low by the crash. “That song is in the grand old tradition of satire, working from the inside out and inhabiting a character you’re trying to vilify,” he says. “Political songs per se are not good, I don’t think, but I wrote that one because I felt angry.”

With uncertainty gripping the markets again this summer, Hannon will be performing at the Days Off Festival at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on July 8, followed by an outdoor gig at Somerset House in London nine days later. The former will be his first show in Paris since September 2008, when he played half a set of French cover versions – including Joe le Taxi, je changerai d’avis by Francoise Hardy, and Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam – live recordings of which were released on CD2 of the limited version of Bang.

It is a gesture that might seem a little arbitrary, but in fact Hannon has been infatuated with France for years. “Definitely France, yes, but also with Belgium,” he says. “Jacques Brel always really inspired me and the look of the new album [Hannon is pictured on the cover of Bang sitting in the bath, bowler on his head] was influenced in part by Magritte.

“After the first incarnation of The Divine Comedy fell apart I retreated to my parents’ house for a while. I watched a lot of French art house films on late night television, listened to Serge Gainsbourg and generally soaked up French culture. I think those influences really informed Liberation and Promenade and when I started playing in France the press picked up on that and supported me. No one was paying much attention in the UK at the time, so without France I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep making records.”

Success came later, he insists, as an added bonus. Now, having sampled a degree of pop stardom, it is almost as though the experience taught him to renounce such reckless folly, to “plough my own furrow” as he puts it in a song on the 2006 album Victory for the Comic Muse.

“People who go on X Factor and its ilk have this total belief that if they win their lives will be transformed,” he says. “And it’s just bollocks, because for the vast majority life could effectively be worse than before. It’s sad because they want to be famous, but they haven’t worked out why or what for. They don’t care. For me, fame was just an interesting by-product, and now that the pop star thing has all but disappeared I’m just slightly notorious. I much prefer it that way.”


by Leave a comment

Review: The Celtic Revolution, by Simon Young

The Celtic Revolution: In Search of 2000 Forgotten Years that Changed Our World

MANY in Scotland like to think of themselves as being “Celtic” without necessarily having a coherent idea of what that means. Cambridge historian Simon Young’s the Celtic Revolution has little or nothing to tell us about the Scottish Gaels, nor indeed anything about “the Celts” into modern times other than that from the Middle Ages they retreated into insignificance in the pan-European story. In short, Young is not interested in mysticism, revivalism or the elevation of history’s losers.

The result is a clear-sighted view, supported by burgeoning linguistic scholarship and archeological evidence, of who the ancient Celts and their Dark Age successors were. They may not have been empire-builders but they inhabited much of Europe and, the author asserts emphatically, they matter, “as the Greeks or Romans, the Etruscans or Carthaginians matter”.

To the novice Celticist there are plenty of juicy surprises along the way: the Iron Age Celts wore trousers but had a less refined penchant for human sacrifice and would often flay and boil the heads of captured enemies before turning them into candle-holders; in the early centuries BC, Celtic tribes sacked Rome, had successful military campaigns in Macedonia and Greece, and for a time terrorised modern-day Turkey, where they established a kingdom, Galatia; and the Dark Age Christian Celts of Ireland, into all sorts of self-harm and abnegation, originated the practice of lying out on beds with naked girls in order to “test themselves”.

The ancient Celts are often lumped in with the other “barbarians” in antiquity and it is true that they do not conform to the traditional yardsticks of civilisation: they were illiterate, they were nomadic, and they glorified invasions and conflict where southern European writers of the time agonised over whether their wars were “just”. Yet what is clear is that, in the Iron Ages, tribes who spoke Celtic tongues, shared the same style of possessions and art and had broadly similar spiritual traditions, covered enormous swathes of Europe, from Britain and Ireland to Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Germany and the Lowlands.

In 500BC they appear in Italy; in 390BC we have the first recorded military campaign involving the Senone tribe, who sacked the Etruscan city of Chiusi before going on to humble Rome. Celtic warbands then spread eastward along the Danube corridor into the Balkans, Bulgaria, Transylvania, even reaching Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In 280BC, mere decades after the death of Alexander the Great, they routed the Macedonians, then sacked Thermopylae in Greece before being stopped at Delphi.

A century or so later the Romans arrived in Asia Minor to crush the Galatians and so began the Celtic retreat. Harried out of southern Europe they were pushed towards extinction until, by 500AD, they existed only in Britain, Ireland and Brittany. What Young cogently argues, however, is that the Celts’ military successes paved the way for Rome’s ultimate domination by weakening other states and kingdoms in the region; and having shown that they changed the course of European history once, he turns to the Dark Age Celts of Ireland to prove that they did so again by helping to preserve “the universal faith” after the fall of the Christian Empire.

This episode is well-rehearsed, but it is worth reminding ourselves the extent to which Christianity teetered on the brink in Europe as the Goths, Franks and Vandals overran it and other parts of Christendom fell to Islam. To the early Irish monks, exile was another form of self-flagellation, and when they left their homeland it was to set up monasteries and exist in Godly solitude. Within a generation of arriving in Iona in 563AD, however, Collum Cille (Columba) was the most feted holy man in the British Isles. In France, Columbanus – before he angered the local king Theuderich by refusing to bless his royal bastards and had to leave – was similiarly revered, and, slightly later, Aidan Christianised much of Anglo-Saxon England. Young shows that these men did not so much alter Christianity – Celtic Christianity was later subsumed within Roman Christianity – but preserved it, injecting the faith with a zealous intellectual energy at a crucial moment.

The third part of Young’s book is given over to an explanation of how the Celts – posthumously – begat the secular, modern western mindset. Once Arthurian legend -which for the Dark Age British-Celts told of a messiah-like figure who would, some day, restore their lands – was altered out of all recognition by the courts of Europe, giving rise to the cults of chivalry and Courtly Love, the feudal aristocracies emerged with a code and a non-Christian language of their own, which in turn, Young hypothesizes, enshrined the early modern idea of separating Church and State. It’s speculative, perhaps fanciful, stuff, but in the context of a book that so painstakingly sifts fact from fiction, reality from myth, Young earns the right to so indulge.

This review appeared in the Sunday Herald


by Leave a comment

The journalism of Neil Munro

This article appeared in the Scottish Review of Books

In the eight or so decades since his death, few have hastened to call Neil Munro a “fashionable” writer. Besides his misfortune to be bundled in with his “kailyard” contemporaries by too many wrong-headed critics, he specialised in a kind of genre fiction – serious, involved historical novels about the Scottish Highlands and Scottish Highlanders – that made no pretence at getting to grips with the urban condition. His pen can seem redolent of the Victorian age, an implicitly patriotic age, and he lacks the self-importance of the so-called Scottish Renaissance writers whose fame eclipsed his in the 1920s and 30s. He anticipates modernism in certain regards but his worldview is not easily grasped and he lacks the vehemence of authors whose attitudes of mind were cast – as opposed to being numbed in middle age – by the Great War.

One possible reason for the lack of a fuller understanding of Munro is that during his life he seemed at pains to distance himself from a significant part of his own output. It was under the pseudonym Hugh Foulis that he created such Glaswegian figures of fun as “Erchie” and Jimmy Swann, and, in the fictional Clyde puffer the Vital Spark – captained by the wily Para Handy – a parallel comic universe to rival those of Wodehouse.

Meantime as a journalist – Munro’s “day job” for much of his life – he often chose to write under such guises as ‘The Looker-On’ and ‘Mr Incognito’, albeit regular readers knew exactly who they were getting. And it was the greatest paradox of his life as a writer that while he professed to deem journalism a low, dishonest profession and made no secret of his desire to be done with it altogether, he was exceptionally good at it. For the earnest writer of fiction to have to resort to hackwork is not unheard of; what is unusual is for such writing to retain its vitality and its powers of regalement a century later.

Munro does not concern himself as a journalist with heavyweight political subjects – again, his worldview remains elusive – but from it we get an intimate sense of the kind of man he was. In his introductions to The Brave Days and The Looker-On, the two volumes of Munro’s journalism published shortly after his death and now re-printed for the first time by Kennedy & Boyd, George Blake, a friend and colleague of the deceased and a novelist in his own right, explains that while the author of John Splendid and The New Road frequently toiled over his most serious work (falling prey to the novelist’s “despairs and self-mistrusts”) his less exalted prose came easy, read always crisp, alive and whimsical and was “hammered out”.

That these collections account for only a fragment of all his journalism supports such a thesis. And significantly they confirm that this writer of “romantic” novels had also that most under-valued of literary gifts: he was a humourist of the finest order. By all accounts Munro generally went about life “gay” in the old sense, kept a mischievously sardonic tongue in his cheek and deplored pomposity; and the sketches, features, essays and reminiscences culled from the Glasgow Evening News and from the Daily Record and Mail reflect this. His wit is for the most part subtle, often self-effacing and rarely savage. Often the humour comes from what is left unsaid, as when he describes the rural quiet of a sleepy village being disturbed by the arrival of sailors visiting: “The blacksmith’s shop – which may be called the parish club – disgorged a surprising number of farmhands and idlers, who had been watching a man getting his hair cut.” He delights in picaresque descriptions of various aspects of Glasgow and West Highland life, revels fulsomely in the popular song and theatre of the day and gently savages the fin-de-siecle spiritualist craze. A certain Rabelasian drollery is put to work on various “odd fellows”, cranks and chancers but rarely without an accompanying ration of fellow-feeling, and he even feels sorry for the poet William McGonagall, in whose honour he attends a dinner, the Dundonian bard unaware that he is the subject of cruel mockery.

It was during Munro’s journalistic career that the so-called “new journalism” emerged in Britain, and there would be no greater practitioner of it in his lifetime in Scotland. In his early years in the trade, he recalls, “it seemed to be assumed that politics, commerce and the law courts exhausted almost the entire field of human interest”. At some point in the 1880s he edited St Mungo, a short-lived “satirical-humorous” weekly journal in Glasgow that was “meant to be a playground for all the bright young journalists who had not sufficient opportunity to let themselves go with joyous abandon ‘on their lawful occasions’.” Over time, however, at the Glasgow Evening News – the newspaper in which he wrote for almost forty years, full-time for long spells, and which he edited from 1919-24 – he was given increasing license to let loose his brio on features and causeries relating to almost any matter of his choosing. According to Blake this was largely thanks to the good sense of the proprietor, James Murray Smith, whose enlightened attitude meant that “a writer of unusual gifts had an opportunity of self-expression quite unique in the history of newspapers.” “It is no exaggeration”, Blake adds, “to say that Neil Munro made that paper.”

That his articles were so prized must have been due in large part to the way they reflect and interpret Glasgow. Though born and bred in Argyll (he was the illegitimate son of a kitchen maid at Inverary Castle) and for much of his career seemingly desperate to return there, he has a special feeling for “the city” per se, its dynamism and its mystery.

One crepuscular scene, actually in Greenock, contains echoes of Conrad’s London in The Secret Agent: “When [the lamplighter] lights the lamps, the night, which is a giant bird, comes swooping down like a moth attracted by the candle, and men walk for a space of hours in the shadow of its wings. And in this shadow, slimey and leperous walls, and squalid entrances, windows foul and broken; make-shift expediences of poverty or slovenliness; the dirty, patched, degraded and ramshackle – all that affronts the day is half-transfigured, half-concealed.”

The sense of dread we find in Conrad, whom Munro knew as a friend and admired, is not altogether absent, but neither is Munro’s Glasgow the same as the Glasgow that filled Edwin Muir, his not quite contemporary, with abject fear and loathing. Munro’s Glasgow is rather the city of the Clyde in its tumultuous pomp, a city of “lascars and Chinese” and “boys just off the heather”; it is the city of the Glasgow Boys and the International Exhibitions of 1888 and 1901, a city of both art and commerce and the city of which the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia is reputed to have said in 1880: “Glasgow is the centre of the intelligence of England.”

There is much to delight the social historian within Munro’s accounts of Glasgow. He describes an exodus of 30,000 people on trains from Queen Street in order to skate on the frozen surface of Loch Lomond in February of 1885, and recalls that Miss Cranston’s tea-rooms (the lady herself “always with something of the fete-champetre in her costume”) were among the first businesses specifically tailored to female predilections. He remembers that in his youth Trongate was a “Saturnalia” on Saturday nights and makes certain long-vanished city centre taverns and restaurants sound reasonably appealing, others less so. Fine dining existed, but even the well-to-do tended to lunch on a mutton pie; the Glaswegian diet, it would seem, has always been gelatinous.

He also relates that in 1899 a group of “wealthy and influential Glasgow men”, when shown a cinematograph, convinced themselves that “moving pictures could never successfully compete with the waxwork, the menagerie and the diorama.” Munro himself is fascinated by technological innovation and new inventions and in one delicious episode he and Conrad end an evening X-Raying one another with a machine belonging to their host, a doctor on Bath Street.

Munro’s acquaintance was wide and varied. Besides Conrad he knew Arnold Bennett and, at the behest of Andrew Carnegie, entertained the American novelist George W Cable on a visit to Scotland. He was on friendly terms with Sir Thomas Lipton and with Kennedy Jones, the Gorbals boy who became editor of the London Evening News and secured its purchase, cut-price, for the future Lord Northcliffe. He was a director of the short-lived Scottish Repertory Theatre Company and a member of the Glasgow Art Club, and knew well a number of the Glasgow Boys and other significant figures in the art world, including Muirhead Bone and Whistler’s trusted Glasgow-based dealer, Alexander Reid.

Given that the record he left of himself in his journalism is the closest Munro came to any autobiographical endeavour, it invites us to scour his essays in criticism and his verdicts on others for clues as to his own weltanschauung. As regards literary figures he revered Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott – both enormous influences on his work – but hated the cult of Scott-worship. He admired Carlyle and Kipling, despite branding the latter a “recruiting officer” for the British Army in a rare moment of political asperity. (His reticence on such matters as war and Empire is marked. He lost a son, Hugh, at Loos in 1915, but cannot be dissuaded from exploiting the war on the western front for gallows humour: the French, he says, are “a romantic people, whatever you may think of the claims they made to compensation for damages to middens in Picardy”.)

Elsewhere, he is scathing of “kailyard” literature and of the Celtic Twilight but demonstrates a keen appreciation of Burns’ earthiness and use of the vernacular. Like Burns he is unswayable in the view that majesty and profundity are to be found in the common man and common herd. But his equability and willingness to view his fellow Scots in the best possible light is such that he seems incapable of entertaining dissenting views of them. Commenting on some scathing remarks about the oppressive nature of Scottish religion – made by Cunninghame Graham, another towering figure he knew well – Munro simply states “Scotsmen are not made like that now.” And the conclusions he draws from meeting George Douglas Brown are, at best, breathtakingly counter-intuitive: “In what could only have been the impulse of a reckless mood, he had written a prose Song of Hate [The House with the Green Shutters] about his native village, every feature of which – town or landward – he actually loved as a crony of old years”.

Disdainful of “intoxicating” literature, mysticism and, with regard to the Highlands, myth-making, at other times Munro seems not immune from such tendencies, writing in flights of fancy about ghosts and superstitions and old Highland traditions. In his novels he often allows the “romantic voice” to speak through him, ironically, as he satirises various aspects of the clan inheritance or martial Gaeldom, in particular the notion of a noble, warrior race. Underpinning this, however – and it comes though in his journalistic musings – is a lapsarian view of an essential goodness lost, an exaltation of a “true” Highland culture corrupted and deformed successively by tribal warfare, feudalism and, later, clearance. It is a weird sort of myth and one in which there is always room for pathetic fallacy: things are never allowed simply to be, landscape must always yield up a sorrowful human narrative.

If he anticipates Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon in this regard, he anticipates Hugh McDiarmid in another. In praise of Cunninghame Graham’s prose style, infused as Munro perceives it to be with the influence of his mother’s tongue, Spanish, he could easily have been referring to his own use of Gaelic vocabulary and prosody; substitute Lallans for Spanish and you get Scots modernism: “It is not enough to know it as the teacher instils it – by looks or on the Berlitz system; it must be a language you can think in, a language whose every idiom gives access to the inner life of the generations of the people who have used it. Any language will do that has passion and poetry in it, but preferable is a language that has not known the blight of ‘progress’ as English has done, and best of all is the language that – like Spanish – retains its ancient spirit and enshrines a little – not too much – noble literature.”

His own linguistic dexterity, the preponderance of contradictions in his work and a certain intellectual elusivity are all decent enough reasons for renewed study of Munro. The sheer enjoyment to be had from his journalism is another.


by Leave a comment

Review: Eclipse, by Nicholas Clee

Geneticists these days are coming round to the Judaeo-Christian idea that we are all descended from the same common female ancestor. In horseracing it’s the male-line that counts – and it is a matter of historical fact that every contemporary thoroughbred on the planet descends from one of three horses imported to England from the east in the early 18th Century and then crossed with English mares.

The legacy of Eclipse – great grandson of one of those horses, the Darley Arabian – is even more astonishing. Born in 1764, he was unbeaten in a brief but glorious turf career, before being put to stud in 1771. Over the next seven years he sired roughly 930 colts and fillies, 344 of which were winners on the racecourse. St Simon, born a century later, had 81 instances of Eclipse in his pedigree, a figure that would increase exponentially in succeeding generations thanks, in part, to St Simon’s own success as a sire. Ninety-five per cent of horses racing today are Eclipse’s male-line descendants.

Nicholas Clee’s book is a good primer for anyone with a passing interest in the breeding of race horses and the genesis of racing as we know it, but it’s also a fascinating study of Georgian society in all its pomp and carnality. Eclipse was feted by royalty and painted by the great George Stubbs, yet more perhaps than any other sphere of life, racing in the 18th Century was cross-fertilised by all social strata, a truth demonstrated by the fact that Eclipse was acquired from a middle class meat salesman by Dennis O’Kelly, the uneducated son of an Irish smallholder.

On arriving in London in 1725, the young O’Kelly, an inveterate gambler and womaniser, found work as a “chairman” – carrying the front end of a sedan chair. Later, in a debtors’ jail, he met Charlotte Hayes, whom he subsequently helped rise to become the aristocracy’s most celebrated brothel-keeper. She a madam, he a racing magnate, Clee observes they were “at the summits of two of the most important leisure industries in Britain.”

The author sifts through myth and half-truth surrounding these two larger-than-life characters and indeed the horse itself. The detail of their era and milieu is at times grotesque – one Lord, it is recorded, once successfully bet that he could find a man who would eat a whole cat live – but the narrative itself is never less than compelling.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald


by Leave a comment

Review: Stranger to History, by Aatish Taseer

This article appeared in The Herald

Aatish Taseer, raised by his Sikh mother and grandparents in Delhi and educated at a Christian boarding school in southern India and in the US, knew when he set out on his travels through Islam’s heartlands that he had a limited grasp of what it means to be a Muslim. Not being extensively versed in Koranic tradition, his own faith was threadbare; rather, indeed, like that of his Pakistani father, Salman, who shortly after Aatish’s birth in 1980, abandoned his new Indian family to return to his wife in Lahore.

In adulthood the younger man has sought to mend that broken relationship, but the pair’s disestrangement, complicated from the first by Salman’s attitudes towards India and the West, was set back in 2005 when Aatish wrote an article about British Pakistanis and Islamic extremism to which abba took vehement umbrage.

Taseer fils, puzzled that his forebear – politician, businessman and avowed disbeliever – should put such store in calling himself a Muslim, wanted to better understand the ‘civilisation of faith’ of which he had heard spoken both in Pakistan and Britain. And so, armed with his own lightly-worn Sufism, he decided to travel once more to Pakistan, this time from Turkey via the Arab world, in search of what this supra-national Islamic identity means. If the fact of his being a Muslim at all is his passport on the road, however, it should also be recorded that it gives him licence to be honest about the religion he encounters to a degree western writers tend to shrink from. For this is a book that asks awkward questions of Islam and comes up with unsettling answers.

Part travelogue, part essay, part personal odyssey, Taseer’s narrative is probing, exhilarating and shot through with pinpoint observations of people, places and situations, from the menace of Tehran to the ecstasy of religious experience and the commercialism of Mecca. His is an attempt to understand those societies from which Islam takes nourishment.

In Leeds just after 7/7, Taseer had observed a generational divide between older British Muslims, who remembered with some pride their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan, and their offspring, who lacked their parents’ instinctive humour and openness and hated the West. To younger Muslims, whose religion seemed the more rigid and forbidding, faith came with an amorphous sense of grievance. Bored and rootless, they found in political Islam a grand narrative not readily proffered by the secular West.

In Istanbul and Damascus he meets many others who feel the same way, who see the West as stopping Muslims from thinking “as the early Muslims thought.” The notion of the great Islamic past is everywhere sounded, historical fact skewered to support a narrative of aggression and attack from the Christian West. The message, that the Islamic world is now divided because of the West and the influence of its ideas, is one in which ‘cultural Muslims’ like Taseer’s father can believe, as it has “more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction.”

To his dismay, the solution the author finds gaining ground is a sort of retreat from the world, the re-emergence of Wahhabism and its insistence on adherence to letter of the Book, effecting new levels of intellectual incuriosity and cultural homogeneity. All of this is anathema to Taseer, who has a special feeling for the religious plurality of India but, ironically, it is in Iran that he finds reason to believe the ‘civilisation of faith’ will, not before time, come up against its own illogicality and absurdity. In a country where women are beaten for the merest transgression and young people are criminalised “by a tyranny of trifles”, he finds a growing culture of private and public dissent and widespread hatred of the Revolution.

In Tehran he also finds people who make the distinction between the enforced religion of the Islamic Republic, and ‘the real faith’; yet shocked perhaps that people like his father can be so unperturbed by fundamentalism, he asks: “Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the ‘real Islam’ or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?” Indeed, among his Pakistani family – supposedly moderate – he encounters hatred of America, Israel and Hindus, as well as a tendency to doubt the Holocaust. “It was too little moderation and in the wrong areas,” as he puts it.

In Pakistan itself, he finds feudalism unchecked, corruption king and bitter division amid relative homogeneity, “where once great diversity had been absorbed.” His warning that extremists “know the country has to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker” is all too sage in the light of last week’s terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Stranger to History is a beautifully-written book, but the ugliness of what it reveals is what lives on after reading.


by Leave a comment

A day in Grantchester

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine

If all you knew of England was gleaned from BBC news or the tabloids you’d probably think it an over-developed, pissed-up dump full of people like Karen Matthews and Russell Brand. It’s almost as though its traditions, its neighbourliness and tolerance, and above all its natural beauty, were things to be bashful and apologetic about. Perhaps John Major’s speech about warm beer and old maids really did do for pride in English heritage, but great pockets of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land” remain still undivested of their come-hither fecundity.

Nowhere is this ineffable sorcery more alluring than in Grantchester, a village some two miles south-west of Cambridge that is as old as the Domesday Book. It is often said that the south remoulds and anglicises the mindset and manners of people not from there, but so long as you realise that on entering you are enjoined to scarper on a sliding scale of eccentricity, Cambridge seems to take no interest in redress. And Grantchester – idyllic, Arcadian, a place where time stands still and whose pubs do not sell lager – is where they go, tourists and chattering eccentrics alike, to escape the droves on the college backs and the world of cars, gymnasiums and Wagamama restaurants.

In doing so they follow in the footsteps of many of the country’s finest minds. Jeffrey Archer, “probably the best storyteller in the world” according to the Daily Mail, lives there now with his wife Mary Archer, the scientist; while past denizens include the poets Rupert Brooke and Sylvia Plath and the mathematician Bertrand Russell. And the list of others to have taken tea or fallen off punts there includes Newton, Darwin, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Stephens Fry and Hawking.

It was out walking on Grantchester Meadows – the pasture land along the River Cam that separates the village from Cambridge -that Alan Turing first came up with the idea of artificial intelligence. Turing, you may remember, cracked the German Enigma code during World War II. He later lived in Manchester, where, in the 50s he was prosecuted for being homosexual and subsequently killed himself. I was glad when John – my host – corrected my misapprehension that we were about to cycle to Manchester. Grantchester, he informed me, would be a less taxing journey. And so, he on his own bike, I on a borrowed girl’s one, we set off across the Granchester Grind, the path that crosses the meadows.

It would be difficult to prove, but I am convinced there are more bicycles in Cambridge than people. They’re like free newspapers: if someone nicks yours you can always find a spare one lying around. It’s all very well pedalling your library books and your corduroy around the city, though; a different story negotiating the Grind. No sooner had we set wheel on gravel than briar thorns gave notice of their views on two-wheeled gender-bending. Mindful of admonitions regarding health and safety in old films about the Countryside Code, I wheeled my punctured steed along by hand towards our destination, where I managed to get it patched up and we ourselves repaired to The Orchard Tea Garden.

To sit out in the sun drinking tea under the ripening apples there is to feel the ghosts around you, here Lord Byron expostulating grandiloquently, there Keats, half-demented, agonising over his verse in some shady bower. Just a little further upstream is Byron’s Pool, a former mill pond, where the poet used to swim. The mill itself receives mention in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale. No swimming for us – instead we admire the enormous cows grazing on the river’s banks. It’s a scene that could have been painted by Constable and one that managed to charm even that grim poetess of death, Sylvia Plath. She indeed wrote from Grantchester to her mother of an occasion on which she recited Chaucer to a captive bovine audience, and the episode is recalled in verse by her husband Ted Hughes: “Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester. It must have sounded lost. But the cows Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.”

Having had enough of jam and clotted cream, John explains to me how the Romantic poets, contrary to what you will hear said of them, were bothered deeply by the cruel degradations of the industrial revolution. They feared “the dark Satanic mills” of places like Manchester but it was because they distrusted the new capitalism, and their fight was for the soul of England and its people. John is learned, so I don’t argue, but there is no doubting the poet most associated with Grantchester, Brooke, is unreservedly and unapologetically nostalgic.

Homesick in Berlin in 1912, Brooke, who lodged at Grantchester between 1909 and 1911, first at the Orchard House and later at the Old Vicarage – now the Archers’ gaff – wrote: “I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester.” He ends the poem with the famous line: “Stands the church clock at ten-to-three And is there honey still for tea?” During much of 1911, the hands of the clock on the tower of the church were stuck not at 2.50 but 3.30; to this day, however, it is always ten-to-three in the dining room of the Rupert Brooke Inn, formerly the Rose and Crown.

Brooke moved to the village hoping to escape a hectic Cambridge social life, but instead he became the lodestar of the Grantchester Group, a circle of friends that included Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Keynes and the painter Augustus John. Woolf dubbed them the ‘neo-pagans’: contemptuous of the religious stuffiness of the mid-Victorians and later held to be symbolic of a doomed novocento optimism and innocence, they would go barefoot in the village, hike for miles around and travel to Cambridge by canoe. On one occasion Brooke and Woolf skinny-dipped together by moonlight, although it is not believed that they were lovers.

Russell lived for ten years at the Mill House writing his Principia Mathematica, the manuscripts of which were so heavy that he had to transport them to Cambridge in a four-wheeled barrow, while John, the outright bohemian, lived for a time in a gypsy caravan on the meadows with his two wives and seven children, all male, whose game it was to run around the place naked.

Yet for all he embodied the spirit of his time and place, and the timelessness of that place, posterity has not been kind to Brooke’s reputation, mainly because the sonnets he wrote shortly before his death in 1915 celebrate the dream of dying for a noble cause. They are the poems of a man who never saw battle: he died of septicemia on the Greek island of Skyros while waiting to land in Gallipoli. Locally, though, he’s still a hero – along with Brooke’s and 16 other names, the war memorial in the churchyard bears the inscription “Men With Splendid Hearts”, a line from his Grantchester poem.

The church itself is a magnificent old edifice, its nave dating back to the early 12th Century. We were happy sitting Betjeman-like in its cool stillness thinking ourselves the proper aesthetes; though happier still drinking pints of real ale (Adnams) in The Blue Ball Inn, one of four pubs in the village, all of which date back centuries. The Blue Ball is where the locals drink now; The Green Man – which Brooke tended to frequent and where John (Augustus, not my companion) once laid a man clean out after a quarrel – has fallen on hard times, its Scottish owner having gone bankrupt and then been arrested while breaking into his former property to find out what the bailiffs had left.

The Rupert Brooke, which has a fifty-cover restaurant, and where if you’re lucky you might hear Pink Floyd’s wonderfully bucolic Grantchester Meadows playing on the stereo, is also worth a visit. Or so I’m told: dinner was with friends at Wagamama that night and neither of us could remember what the Countryside Code had to say about cycling drunk. So we opted to play the peaceable Scots, scrapped the idea of paying a call on the Archers and rode back out across the Grind convinced eccentrics these days aren’t quite up to the old mark.


by Leave a comment

Political books of 2008

This article appeared in The Herald

Many of the books on the politics shelves this year have been overtaken by events. As crisis became crash, the realisation that political economy is to politics what money is to banks was a little late in dawning, but there were at least one or two lonely voices who claimed to have seen the whole thing coming in time to dash off guides to where it had all gone wrong.

Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about it (Princeton, £9.95), a short expose of the lax borrowing that led to America becoming the world’s first subprime superpower, falls into that category. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money (Allen Lane, £25) does too but isn’t just a paean to capitalism’s convulsions: it’s also a thorough-going history of the rise of capital (the foundation, Ferguson believes, of human progress).

For anyone who takes fright at mention of stocks and bonds, securities, bears, bulls and hedge funds, it is essential reading. Ferguson’s lessons are that sooner or later every bubble bursts and that human greed and ignorance, rather than the financial system itself, created the current crisis.

There’s something atavistic about AN Wilson’s Our Times (Hutchinson, £25), an indictment of Britain’s national collapse. Wilson is a cultural conservative, yet there’s nothing rigid or canonical about him: neither the old establishment nor the new, the Britain of aristocratic humbug nor of health and safety tutorials, is spared his vituperation.

Britain’s shared sense of identity and purpose has been undone since the war, he believes, by political elites, mass migration, yoof culture, the demise of organised Christianity and the replacement of trains by cars. He can be contradictory, factually wayward, even scurrilous, but he is always entertaining and always illuminating.

China’s story over the last two decades – thanks to its economic reforms – has been one of rise rather than demise. Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), challenges utterly, however, the notion that democracy will be the inevitable corollary. In a sobering, saddening study he narrates the stories of men and women, dead or imprisoned, who dared to break rank. Their heroism, obscured and written out of history by the Party, a de facto “mafia”, deserves to be honoured everywhere.

Left-wing commentators lobbed so much mud at Martin Amis this year that even his virtuoso prose style was filed as a charge against him. Too clever, not self-effacing enough, crowed one reviewer, a marginally more coherent remonstrance than the view, expressed by the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, that one should no more listen to a novelist talking about Islamism than a window cleaner.

The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, £12.99), a collection of essays and short fiction written in response to 9/11 and all its consequences and bifurcations on the world stage, is a brilliant riposte to that view. Literature, for Amis, is “reason at play”; religions are repositories of “ignorance, reaction and sentimentality.” Islamism (“an ideology superimposed upon a religion – illusion upon illusion”) is a death cult every bit as pernicious as Nazism or Stalinism and the novelist – for whom morality and reason are, in the end, all – has in fact a duty to say something about it.

When confronted by Islamist terror, Amis believes, too many on the liberal left evade the truth: they see not a desolate and implacable ideology but misguided liberators whose cause is fundamentally righteous.

Where Amis’s eloquence is trained on anti-Americanism as an ideology, Simon Schama proffers instead its antidote. His The American Future (Bodley Head, £20) is both a history and a treatise on that most nebulous of constructs, hope. Our television don assumes a triangular perspective – daydreaming about the future as the past looms like a gently stirring branch at the window of the here and now. America’s history of violence is explored in considerable detail: from the obliteration of the Cherokee, to Gettysburg, to Vietnam. The liberty so prized by the early settlers, then, came at a cost to others; on the other hand, the country’s enduring racism and paranoia should be understood as inevitable by-products of being the world’s melting pot.

Convinced of America’s ability to reinvent itself once more in the 21st Century, Schama hoped for an Obama victory, and he got it. In the president-elect he sees a Jeffersonian figure salving the wounds of the bedraggled republic and renewing a sense of “common purpose.” Others tend, similarly, to see what they want to in Obama. One hopes he can be something more than that: his own man.


by Leave a comment

Review: The Thin Blue Line, by Conor Foley

The article appeared in The Herald

There is little denying that most armed conflicts and humanitarian emergencies are messy affairs in which rights and wrongs are often inseparable. There are books on the such topics which avoid becoming equally messy but this is not one of them.

The problem with Conor Foley’s The Thin Blue Line, How Humanitarianism Went to War is that he can’t decide whether to make it a memoir, an essay or a polemic. He dwells for large chunks on the niceties of international law without explaining much more than the fact that it is ambigious, while the huge cast of humanitarian colleagues and UN officials to whom he introduces us seem incidental to his overarching argument. He is at his best when describing specific crises or relating first-hand the difficulties faced by humanitarians in Kosovo or in lawless Afghanistan. Like an Antipodean backpacker determined to see the world in his gap year, however, he hops around far too much to sustain the narrative.

The effect is disorienting, but does not disguise the fact that his basic thesis is neither sustained nor convincing. The book describes the journey over the last 20 years towards ‘humanitarian intervention’ – as a way of holding states accountable for they way treat their own populations – becoming the new norm in international law. Human rights and humanitarian aid organisations have drawn closer together and Foley shows how their neutrality has been compromised as they allow themselves to be manipulated to promote explicitly political objectives.

Perhaps this could have been avoided but Foley does not venture to explain how. In the early 90s the weakness of the international community’s response to genocide and human rights violations in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina was such that there was a clamour for the doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of autonomous states to be set aside. As Foley acknowledges, UN soldiers were mere bystanders in the Balkans. Elsewhere he supports the argument that most humanitarian activity in Africa is ineffective in terms of reducing poverty, and even damaging.

Aid agencies, wise to this new appetite for intervention, have become adept at influencing public opinion in their parent countries. They know that the best way to raise money and get things done is to stir consciences. Human rights and humanitarian NGOs are often the first to report atrocities and suffering, but this creates a dilemma for them: by calling on governments to protect people, they know that force may be required. Foley sees this as an abandonment of the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality, yet is unable to counter the argument that these are not worthy sacrifices in the interests of preventing bloodshed.

NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, Foley says, made a bad situation worse. He neglects to offer an opinion on whether the west was right to take the fight to the Taliban after 9/11, but much of his discussion of the perceived abuses of humanitarian ideals focuses on operations in Afghanistan. He bemoans the fact aid agencies there have become part of the wider counter-insurgency effort and dismisses political objectives such as rebuilding governance and judicial structures and the “promotion of philosophical convictions associated with western liberal values”, as neo-colonial.

The west, indeed, comes in for no end of criticism – westerners in general for their idealistic partisanship, their short attention spans and “out of sight, out of mind” attitude to many of the most serious crises; America in particular for not supporting UN missions enough in the 1990s then seeing itself as above the law in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foley reserves particular contempt for the Bush administration but, it would seem, more for having ridden roughshod over the international body politic and declared the UN to be ineffectual than anything else.

In his section on the war in Iraq, Foley is incisive in cataloguing Blair’s dishonesties. He doesn’t tell us anything new but the PM’s repackaging of the invasion as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ after the WMD claims were blown sky high, resonates in the context of a book about betrayals.

Foley does draw some fairly sensible conclusions, albeit tangential to his main gripes. In particular he believes Britain should abandon its slavishness to the US, that so-called liberal interventions this decade have shown democracy is unlikely to be imposed from the outside, and that we need to realise the international community cannot conjure peace and prosperity out of total chaos.

One more inconsistency: humanitarian organisations, writes Foley, should not be mobilised in support of particular political agendas or philosophical convictions; yet they have an important role to play in the arguments for “global economic justice”. What could be more political?