His contemporaries, by contrast, all seem to have grown smaller. W.H. Auden has perhaps three-quarters of his reputation still. But most of the other figures who dominated English poetry in the last century look diminished in the rear-view mirror. Which makes it even more striking that Eliot seems to grow. To consider why that should be is to consider something not just about our time, or his, but something about the nature of time, and the purpose of culture.

It is often thought that great artists in some way reflect or sum-up their age. And it is true that from “Prufrock” (1915) onwards Eliot seemed to speak to the particular, fractured nature of modern life. But many of Eliot’s contemporaries, including Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, managed that too. There must be reasons why Eliot continues to be read and they are not. One is that through the course of his poetic career Eliot did not merely reflect his times, but showed a way out of them. Indeed a way out of all time.

He didn’t write like other poets. And it wasn’t just that he wrote less frequently. Where others poured the stuff out, Eliot seemed to keep everything down, erupting only when it could not be suppressed any longer. Where did “The Hollow Men” or “Choruses from the Rock” come from but that deep fundament?

It was Auden, in his 1949 review of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, who observed that Eliot was not a single figure but a household in which there were at least three permanent residents. The first was an archdeacon, prim and intellectual. He was condemned to share the abode with “a violent and passionate old peasant grandmother” who had witnessed every variety of war, rape, famine and pestilence. She had “looked into the abyss” and could “scream the house down”. The third person in the household was a young boy who enjoyed practical jokes, so that as well as coping with the old woman’s screams, the archdeacon also had to watch out for an apple-pie bed or exploding cigar.

Since the publication of Eliot’s letters by Faber, we can see how close Auden came to getting to the core of the older poet. After a 20-year hiatus between the first and second volumes, these collections of letters have been emerging regularly over the last decade, so that we are now up to volume eight and the year 1938. They are comprehensive, including all the most mundane of Eliot’s business correspondence. When it comes out, the “selected letters” should find a good audience. But they will not be able to show, as these huge, turgid volumes do, the greater truth about him. For what the letters make clear is the extent to which Eliot spent his life standing on the trapdoor of the cellar, knowing that the forces inside could blow out at any moment. His ability to keep it down, to try just to survive the elemental forces he knew were growing is at times terrifying.

There is a terrible letter from 1925 in which he describes how he has tried to hold himself together as a person over the previous ten years, during his first marriage. “I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915.” Throughout the succeeding volumes, in the midst of the thousands of polite reciprocals there are very occasional moments when similar screaming breaks out from the basement. Sometimes it is mixed in with the laughter of the schoolboy, such as in the silly, “humorous” correspondence he conducts with Bonamy Dobrée (“Buggamy”) amid everyday business matters. But when the latch rattles even slightly it can be horrifying. In a footnote to a 1926 letter to Conrad Aiken, we learn that in response to one letter praising his poems sent by Aiken (then in hospital), Eliot responded by sending a printed page ripped out of The Midwives’ Gazette with certain words underlined in ink—“Blood, mucous, shreds of mucous, purulent offensive discharge.” Just that. No signature, no comment.

The more letters emerge, the clearer we see how Eliot did more than stare into, or balance over the abyss. The extremity of his knowledge of personal and cultural breakdown meant that he learned not just how a person or culture can be shattered, but how also they might be put back together. For all the biographical criticisms that can be made of Eliot—which may be one reason why, as he said in a letter to his brother in 1930, he wanted “to leave as little biography as possible”—there is a conspicuous bravery in the process by which he achieved at least three things that none of his contemporaries did.

The first is that he didn’t just speak to his time, but found a way to reclaim time. The opening of “Burnt Norton” might be his most famous mediation on this, but the presentation of all time as eternally present was there from some of his earliest poems. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) includes a startling, bathetic poem titled “The Boston Evening Transcript”. While stuck in the flat-lining world of the poem’s title, three of the nine-line poem’s tightly-packed lines read:

I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street.

Why is La Rochefoucauld there? For the same reason that Stetson—the comrade from the ships at Mylae—can be found among the crowds flowing over London Bridge in “The Burial of the Dead”. Because he can be.

In early Eliot this already seems to be more than a quirk, or mere attempt to jolt the reader. Already it seems something that is possible, though with no attempt to explain how that might be so. A reader might take this as simply one more demonstration of the breakdown of everything, so that characters even wander in and out of time, so much have things fallen apart. It is only once Eliot meditates on the nature of time in Four Quartets that he fully finds, and expands, a Christian metaphysics that justifies this early intuition of his about the potential recoverability of time: that all time might be eternally present, and redeemable.

There is a practical consequence of this view of time, and a practical utility which follows on from it that I have often seen in readers of Eliot. First-time readers, especially of his early work, often feel battered by the number of references packed into “The Waste Land” in particular. It is possible that—like the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia—this could all be seen as a skilful waste-tip of a culture: what has been left over after everything has come apart. But Eliot does not just present the jumble, he causes the reader to dig and wish to know more. He invites—in fact shows—people how to take things from the ruins.

The clearest example I can think of is the fact that today among English-speakers it is almost certain that if they have any awareness at all of Dante Alighieri it is thanks to Eliot. The lines they are most likely to know are either the one used of the crowds flowing over London Bridge (“I had not thought death had undone so many”), or the one Valerie Eliot included in her footnote to her 1971 critical edition of “The Waste Land”. There she suggests that in the misery of the protagonist of “A Game of Chess” (who in the manuscript remembers “the hyacinth garden” from the previous movement—perhaps a little too clearly, for it was later excised) Eliot may have had in mind what Francesca says to Dante in the Inferno: “There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.” It is a route not just into Dante, but back to Dante.

While other artists showed how culture could be either shown off, strewn about or destroyed utterly, Eliot demonstrated how it could be reclaimed. He showed how the remnants could become seedlings and sprout again, in another time or place. While repeatedly proving that he had a great artist’s ability to innovate, he also performed that second function of the great artist and demonstrated how culture can be transmitted. He didn’t just show the fire; he showed his readers how things could be saved from it.

In considering this achievement you have to keep reminding yourself how stark the main body of his work is. Briefer even than Larkin, Eliot’s Collected Poems can be found on 200 pages, all told. There has always been some confusion about this, because the achievement seems too great for such brevity. It is said that some guests on Desert Island Discs had their request to take the works of T.S. Eliot as their island book turned down because the book had to be a single volume. Of course the complete poems and plays altogether (including Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats) fit comfortably into a single volume—a fact that Faber obscured slightly in 2015 by deciding to publish two useful but unwieldy huge critical editions of the poems. But how could such a comparatively short poetic journey have ended up having such an impact?

It seems to me that the final answer lies in the direction of the journey Eliot accomplished from the earliest poems to the conclusion of the Four Quartets, by then, with phrases that resonate as forcefully as the opening of St. John’s gospel. What is clear now is the extent to which Eliot not only stared into the abyss or stood over it, but how he managed to cross through it: through the howling fire that threatened to galvanise him, as it does everyone. Even after the conversion to the Anglican church it is not as though Eliot’s path was carefree or smooth. But by the time he finished the Four Quartets his achievement can be seen in its proper perspective and with a clarity that turns out to be evident, whether you started reading him yesterday or have been thinking about him all your life. He remains nearly unique among artists in the last century for having managed not just to walk through that century but, with occasional slips, extraordinary poise and a great deal of bravery, emerged at the other side of the fire-walk with a vision held aloft.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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You can easily spot the bibliomaniacs among the readers, and we tend to egg each other on. Some years ago I spotted a lovely four-volume set of Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts (Constance Garnett translation, Chatto & Windus, 1968) in the window of one of the crack-dealers on Cecil Court. I already owned a paperback of the abridged version. Fate was that later that evening I bumped into David Pryce-Jones at a drinks do and made the mistake of mentioning my dilemma. “Oh no, you need that,” he said without a pause. It was like asking a drug addict whether they thought I ought to score.

My first recall of the instinct was Agatha Christie paperbacks. As I saved up pocket money and made the trips to W.H. Smith to buy each one I would dream of the day I would have the whole set in a beautiful row on my bookshelf. The habit grew, not always healthily. I still bought paperbacks, but I began to prefer hardbacks.

Eventually I got into the terrible habit of “upgrading”. That is, if a book had made a particular impression and had been read in paperback (or in a library copy) I would acquire a hardback copy of the treasured work if I spotted it in a bookshop. Which brought further problems. For the pencil marks I habitually make on the title page of even the trashiest book would be in the first copy I had read, which I could not then dispose of. So a hardback acquired became a book owned twice.

Worse depredations follow. For ineluctably—once there is any money to spare—comes the Class A drug for bibliophiles. I refer of course to first editions. This is a morally contested area. Among much else, first edition hunting is often a search for a copy of a book which has hardly, if ever, been read. There are complex questions in here about where the value of a thing resides. Twentieth-century editions are a particular case-study, with the ideal copy having the perfect dust-jacket (generally covered in protective wrapping itself), no foxing or price clipping, and preferably looking as clean as the day it was born. For this, prices obviously rocket. But if the value of the item is not to be diminished, then the new owner ought really to leave it unread too. At which stage, what is the point? Serious sufferers will know the answer: which is that you treat yourself to occasional, carefully-handled re-readings on special occasions.

The final stage is signed editions, though here is another ethical conundrum. For the collecting of signed editions is tantalising, not always too expensive and yet uncomfortably close to the religious habit of relic-veneration. I am always slightly impressed by those puritans who have no temptation in this direction, though even they can be found genuflecting on occasion. Christopher Hitchens had little care for editions and the like, once showing me a first edition of a book which (when he saw my forehead sweat) he said he would happily re-gift if it hadn’t recently come from a mutual friend.

Christopher always professed to have little care for signatures and the like (unless they came from friends), but even he could be tempted. I once mentioned to him that I had acquired a signed first edition of Myra Breckinridge by his ex-friend Gore Vidal. The inscription, I bragged, not only referenced Ken Tynan as a model for Myra but was inscribed to Princess Margaret. There was a brief pause and then, “Oh, well I’d like that.”

In my twenties and early thirties, I arrived at the book-buying equivalent of a 60-a day habit and slowed down, not just for reasons of financial health but through a realisation that I was acquiring far faster than I was reading. But that habit which W.H. Smith’s first started in me has not gone away. What causes it? A search for completeness, obviously. But also that instinct which drives some people to acquire works of art. As you wander through the world you discover that whenever you encounter that particular artist, or writer, you feel as if you know them, or knew them, however long-dead. So much so that you sometimes have to stop yourself from claiming them as an acquaintance.

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I suppose the joke stuck in my memory because what he described wasn’t far off my juvenile attitude towards libraries. Nowadays, like so many people, I have less need of them: when almost any book can be ordered for the price of postage, the library comes to us. But in those pre-internet days libraries were life-essential, even life-creating. And so, although I don’t remember skipping around it, the local lending library was certainly where I began to discover the answers to some already-emerging life questions.

Like every other warm local authority building, the corners of that practical modern building tended to be filled with old men filling out their days by eking out the free newspapers. Students waited to use the couple of bulky computers that were already there for public use. But for that dedicated number of us who would be back each week, with a fresh pile of books to return or renew, and a new pile to get stamped and dated, this was still the place to meet all the people from history you would like to meet.

It was there that I first started to work out the story that would become my first book (Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas). At some stage—and slightly worrying about the reaction of the book stampers—I had taken out the works of Oscar Wilde and then book after book about him. One had a lurid, not to say rude, cover and I remember feeling certain as I passed it over the desk that some siren would go off and every eye in the building turn on me. But I got away with it, and after a time found out the tale of the other person in his story.

Having not been taken out for some decades, Sonnets by Lord Alfred Douglas was listed as existing in some reserved stacks in another county, only able to be delivered, with a small surcharge, in a number of weeks. For all the advantages of this age of accessibility, that is one of the things that we have lost—the thrill of postponement. In any case it turns out I have a local authority lending library in part to thank for setting me off as a writer.

But that first library was not only a source for books. It was also—slightly miraculously it now seems—a tremendous resource for musical scores. For if books were hard to buy in those days, musical scores were—still are—far beyond the realms of affordability. And here, in a suburban London council library were stacks upon stacks of them. All the great operas, symphonies, oratorios and string quartets, with separate sections of solo instrumental and vocal music. How would I have managed to get to know these works if I hadn’t been able to borrow them for free and crash my way through the easier ones in piano reductions? Only looking back now do I realise how lucky I was to have had the opportunity not just to get all the classics but to access a good selection of serious contemporary music: bulky scores of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies operas, huge works of Messiaen and Tippett. I wonder how many of these have survived the subsequent culls?

For if that is the worry of every borrower, it must be the horror of every author. Every now and then a trolley would be filled with books which were no longer needed and could be bought for 20 pence—volumes that had not been borrowed for a designated period and were thought to have been superseded or replaced. A barbaric thing in a way, for the fact that something has not been taken out for a long while should ordinarily be (as those Sonnets proved) the best reason for a library to hold it. In any case, that is how I acquired—and am still encumbered by—a full set of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard that the library I once borrowed from each week turned some time ago towards the computer-oriented model of library accessibility. Nor was I surprised to hear more recently that the library was slated for closure by a council blaming cuts. I suppose the next generation of budding bibliophiles are indeed now skipping, unrestrained, among the book stacks of the internet. Though where the people eking out the day’s papers in the warm will now congregate I have no idea.

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The conundrum is not made easier by a few remarkable people. A don I know of has such natural competency at learning languages that all he needs to pick them up is to hike through the land of the language with a vocab book in hand. And of course there is Clive James who, apart from being one of the best-read people of all has taught himself to read in a quite insultingly large number of languages, including not only Italian (from which he has translated Dante) but also Japanese, which surely tries the self-esteem of the rest of us.

Doubtless I took the easy route. But there are consolations. The best translations can be miracles in and of themselves. Archibald Colquhoun’s translation of The Leopard is so subtle and fluent that you get quite as much (so Italian friends tell me) as you can from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s original. Take the wild rabbit which Don Fabrizio and Don Ciccio simultaneously shoot while out hunting. They find it with “horrible wounds lacerated snout and chest”. We read, “Don Fabrizio found himself stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things.”

I remember making a pained noise when I first read that, and I am emitting an echo of it as I type now. “Glaucous” is obviously a magnificent word to select (where else has the word been used?). But it is this order of words that ends up winding me: “at the whole ordering of things.” We know by the precision of the phrase that this is not just what Colquhoun wanted to convey, but precisely what Lampedusa wished to reveal to us as well. That the rabbit is Don Fabrizio and his era and that his era is also us.

Of course, poetry is the place where the imperative to acquire other languages is at its most acute. Do English poets I know work well in translation? Rarely as well as the originals. And yet absorbing even 90 per cent of a range of works in different languages still seems to me (in some grimly time-efficient way) better than absorbing 100 per cent of fewer works in more languages. And there is always the option of getting as many works of poetry as possible in bilingual editions. Which is how I properly encountered Rilke, 15 years ago, when a friend gifted me the Duino Elegies in the magnificent Norton bilingual edition translated by David Young. I like to be able to check the German even when most of the checks demand a German-English dictionary.

Two phrases in the Duino Elegies hit me with that same force that winded me over Don Fabrizio’s rabbit. The first was the moment where — as Young gives it — in the “Second Elegy” Rilke asks a version of the question which all human beings ask but which none has ever put better: “Does the outer space/into which we dissolve/taste of us at all?” And then that line which always makes my eyes prick, even if I have steeled myself before remembering it, one of the simplest and truest lines anyone ever wrote: “Because to be here means so much.”

Would I have found these lines if I had spent more time with my crampons fixed onto the mountain of German? Possibly, but I feel an only slightly guilty relief at having met Rilke, like Hesse and Mann, through this short-cut. Besides, when a poet grabs you, you can still always get fractionally closer to the source by trying the range of translations. I have no Greek, though I deeply wish that among others I could read Cavafy in the original. Still my shelves have enough — perhaps all — of the translations of his work (culminating in Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations) to persuade me that although I cannot ever get the full rays, I get enough of the reflected glow that it feels like the sun.

When I think back over all the books that have rewarded me the most, over and again I thank that under-thanked union of scholars, obsessives, geniuses and freaks who have toiled in this rarely-rewarded vineyard. Without Berlin’s translation, I might not have become acquainted with Turgenev and then wolfed down everything of his. Without Michael Hoffmann and Andrea Bell, perhaps neither Roth nor Zweig would have become intimates of mine. Certainly I will have lost something in translation. But what I have gained — among much else — is an adoration for those people who ensured that all of us can sit anywhere and travel the world.

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Who knows exactly what age is right to read certain books? And what parent has worked out how to stop a child reading a book on which they want to get their hands? In any case, after almost three decades I can still recall the feeling of utter desolation. A book that started off so familiarly — wreck, desert island, no adults — should not have gone like this. In particular, it was not meant to end like this. Worse was that although I had hardly seen anything of the world, the book seemed somehow accurate, saying something I must have already feared about cruelty, evil and the possible absence of cosmic justice.

I felt numb for days. Yet along with the numbness certain emotions were almost unbearably heightened. I remember almost intolerable surges of empathy and pity for people plus a desperate desire to befriend almost everyone. It wore off, of course, but for a period I lived with the sense I would meet later in Philip Larkin when he described the aftermath of his mower meeting that hedgehog:

                 We should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

From that first Golding I was away. Prose was followed by poetry, and the sense that books could hurtle you out of the world you knew became one of their major attractions. Books, which had once been “safe”, had now revealed themselves to be almost uniquely dangerous, world-altering things. Like any precocious child I tried out works I could not possibly have understood. Soon I was in the habit of always having a paperback at the ready in my blazer pocket. And though it doubtless seemed swottish, when friends heard that these things could open up worlds they had no chance of getting near in real life they too developed a certain respect for them, even if they didn’t acquire the habit.

By my early teens I was careering along the path of books, dependant in those days on what could be found in school and public libraries. I stalled on some of Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novels, but others of his landed. The Doors of Perception — that work so revered by Sixties stoners — seemed like a portal within a portal, and with some considerable danger attached. I suppose it didn’t hurt when one aspiringly cool schoolfellow inquired about this particular book and reacted with solemn respect.

But this was the great discovery: that books could let you in to places of danger. Perhaps inevitably this included places you regretted having gone. For a while I have kept a mental list of those books that I wish I could unread or unlearn. Which is not the same list as books on which I wasted my time, but rather to do with books so flooring that even as an adult they can produce the feeling I first got as a child with Golding.

Of course, the ability to be shocked declines with experience in reading, as in life. But there are still some books which are so devastating that the results seem physical, including sometimes nauseating. I see from the date I put in the front of each book I read that I first read A Handful of Dust the year I left school. What many people remember most about Evelyn Waugh’s bitterest novel is the moment when Brenda Last confuses the news about her son as being about her lover of the same name. Which is certainly a magnificently misanthropic Waughian strike. But for me it was the ending. Perhaps it is a certain type of English fear, but that fate of Tony Last — stuck in the jungle, reading Dickens aloud for the rest of his life — was so precise that I wanted to shout with rage. I immediately wished I could unread a book which had imagined such a careful form of torture and deployed it with such sadistic precision.

One other novel, read a year afterwards, that has had precisely the same effect was a later work of English fiction. At the end of school some friends and I had raced through Ian McEwan, both enjoying and being baffled by his perversity. But I read The Comfort of Strangers later and alone. The book is a compact description of a happy young couple who go to Venice, where they meet a rich man who befriends them and then kills them. If you have not read it I have not spoiled the book — I have saved you from it. I went around almost gasping after finishing it. Why? Why would anybody write a book so cruel and bleak? Some books have the effect of a smack across the face. Which can be energising at times. But sometimes it is a smack you wish you had anticipated, and ducked.

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Though rumbustious and sociable as any other nine-year-old, this godchild is never happier than when reading a book. Indeed, she can be contentedly left alone among them for hours. Recently, with the trepidation of any adult trying not to put a child off a good thing, I asked her what it was about reading that she liked so much. After a certain amount of bashfulness and “I don’t know”-ing, she suddenly said, slightly shyly, “It makes me feel safe.”

Perhaps I should stress that there is nothing in her life that should make her feel any more fear than any other nine-year-old. But the remark caught me. The sentiment I imagined her relaying was some variant of that given to a student of C.S. Lewis’s in the film and play Shadowlands: “We read to know we’re not alone.” But people — especially children — rarely do say exactly as you’d expect, and her remark struck me all the more for that. Because I both recognised the sentiment and had forgotten it.

The remark spurred me to remember the time when that feeling was there, when to pick up a book was to disappear into a world which was escape and yet security. Enid Blyton, obviously. The Hardy Boys, of course; eventually more grown-up fare. Books you could reread with pleasure as an adult: Just William, the Victorian classics, and more. They all had a certain number of things in common. What was it? The absence of adults, obviously. The attribution — in their absence — of adult powers and responsibilities to children. How thrilling to be able to catch a thief disguised as a tramp, or find the smugglers’ cave and capture the smugglers inside. It was all another world, made real by having occasionally glimpsed it.

Growing up in London, I had nevertheless caught sight of many of the places to which I escaped in books and which I wanted to hold on to. Once, BMX-ing in the Forest of Dean with my brother and a friend, the friend — a local boy — did two things that amazed me so much that they are still with me. The first was to pick fruit and eat it right off the branches of the tree on which it was growing. The other was that when we got thirsty he led us to a spring, cupped his hands and started drinking the water from them. It was like seeing through a portal. You can actually do this? Outside books? This seemed a transgression of literature into the real world, or the other way around. And in those early years of reading the possibility that the two worlds overlapped may well have been one of the attractions.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda captivated me from the moment that our heroine actually makes the chalk levitate and start writing on the blackboard. Like every other child you wonder: perhaps I might do that, if I concentrated enough. And — as the success of the Harry Potter books has shown — almost every child is drawn to the idea that the thing they sense about themselves, that something nobody else quite gets, would be amply explained once the dormant magical powers are revealed.

A couple of years ago some fraudulent school of psychic research in London shoved a leaflet through my door. They had updated their charlatanry to be comparatively up to date. A number of the classes — advertised quite seriously — were lessons in the use of wands. When I saw this I felt the tiniest memory-flicker, caused by the recognition that if I had been a child and seen this I would have had a moment of serious puzzlement and then hopefulness: “Can it be true?”

Something in the world of the literature we start off reading and gets us hooked must be because it shows us a world which while thrilling and sometimes scary is nevertheless still safe. The adults return or come back in some other way. An order exists, and is forever restored. And that is why my goddaughter’s mention of “safety” took me time to recall. I couldn’t remember reading to feel “safe” for years. What I realised was that for more than a quarter of a century I have read not to feel safe, but to approach, and confront, danger. At some point books moved from a place of safety to a place of danger, which is why next month I hope to write about the books which were so distressing that I wish I could unread them.

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Living through history makes it far easier to understand that nobody ever has much of a clue. My own explanation for the confusion and mess of the last few years has been that there are now too many variables at play to make any meaningful predictions. Human beings, with their failings, hidden motives and personal ambitions, were always the most obvious scrambling device. Then there are the different elements in any negotiation which look solid in the abstract but in reality are like juggling mercury. And now we have to deal with the added scrambling device of the media and social media.

***

Some words of wisdom in the middle of the Brexit mess came from an Australian friend who has worked in government and recently passed through London. “There is no complex task that government cannot present as simple if it wants to do it,” she said. “And no simple task that government cannot make too complex if it does not want to do it.”

***

The message that it’s all too complex and it would be better if we just fudged the verdict of the people is clearly a seductive one to push for those opposed to Brexit. In France President Macron has been claiming that the public were lied to by the Leave campaign and given promises that were unfulfillable, a charge which could just as easily be levelled against Macron himself, not to mention every other politician who has ever put themselves before any public. What is saddening is speaking to people across Europe who have been immiserated by the EU (particularly by the euro) but who look at Britain’s Fawlty Towers attempt at leaving and think, “If even the British can’t leave this thing then what chance would we ever have?” I heard exactly those words in Italy recently and could only reflect that the blame lies equally with a Commission which doesn’t want anyone to leave well and a political class in Britain which must be the most inept this country has ever had.

Ordinarily, the public should flay this political class at the next available chance. But our options seem deeply limited. After one of the latest stumbles I told one cabinet minister that he and his party were making me wonder about voting Labour. But that minister, like all the others, knows that even the most furious voter will be reluctant to put their vote beside Jeremy Corbyn’s  party by way of protest. So I don’t know. Will people just not turn up? There must be some organised and realistic answer. But what is it? If only we knew what people in the future will know.

***

One of the few way to bear the news is to read books unconnected with any of it. Over recent weeks I have been reading Jessica Douglas-Home’s beautiful new book on the sculptor William Simmonds (William Simmonds: The Silent Heart of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Unicorn, £20). I say “over recent weeks” because I have been reading it slowly because it is such a pleasure. The book itself is like an act of resurrection, fondly and generously bringing someone back to the surface after they have been submerged by the passage of time. If I were to think of a definition not just of culture but of civilised life it would be captured in such an action and such a book.

***

Eleven years ago Daniel Johnson approached me and asked me if I would like to write a column for a new magazine he was starting. I leapt at the chance and have had the honour of being in these pages in every issue since. One of Daniel’s gifts as an editor has always been putting together people of different political slants and different generations who nevertheless have clear values and concerns in common. He has now gone on to other things but I didn’t want to let a decade of his visionary editorship pass without paying tribute to him. He always said that he wanted Standpoint to be a home for a robust defence of Western civilisation and culture. For the last decade he certainly achieved that, and everybody who cares about that culture and civilisation owes him a debt of considerable gratitude.

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The Sappho Prize is an award given annually by the Free Press Society of Denmark, and as I remarked on receiving it recently, it has sometimes seemed as though I am the only person I know who hasn’t received it. But it is a terrific honour, awarded by a very brave and stalwart group of Danes who got together to uphold the principles of free expression in their country after these came under attack in 2005. One of the upsides about free-speech wars is that you can never particularly predict where your heroes will break out. And for me a whole collection of them showed up in Scandinavia.

Apart from being friends, the list of previous recipients is also a list of some of my favourite people. Mark Steyn received it some years ago and gave a brilliant speech, the only downside of which was that he used up every available joke that a chap can make on receiving a prize named after history’s most famous lesbian. When Flemming Rose and Roger Scruton received the award they made no lesbian jokes, Melanie Phillips even fewer. But since the award was named after Sappho for her voice as a poet, I was proud to quote her own words during my acceptance speech. As it happened, I had picked up a copy of her works between visiting refugee camps during the migration crisis. Since I had inscribed my copy “Molivos, Lesbos, 2016”, and the award was in part a recognition of the book I wrote as a result of those travels, the ceremony in the Danish Parliament really did feel meant. As there was a cash component to the prize, I quoted Sappho’s fragment 120: “Wealth without virtue is / a harmful companion; / but a mixture of both, / the happiest friendship.”

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This past month also took me back to Vienna — one of my favourite cities, in part because of the mixture of emotions it provokes. The first is obviously the layer of feeling that nowhere is better than this, and that this is as good as any built city can get. Then there are the whiffs of the scene that was once there. A couple of years ago I was going with a friend around an exhibition with some Schiele, Klimt and others. Did she ever wonder, I asked, whether things couldn’t get as good as this again? I remember her almost laughing. Of course they couldn’t. A city which had Mahler, Freud and Zweig around at the same time — just for starters — seemed unlikely to be bettered in any conceivable future.

But there is the other side of Vienna too, of course. Which is that, to this outsider at least, it remains a ghost town. Walk along any but the main streets at any time of day or night and you cannot shift the feeling that there just aren’t enough people here. Where are they all? It isn’t only that it isn’t a world city like London or New York. You cannot help thinking that it is because they killed all the Jews. How does anywhere ever recover from that?

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The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh is one reminder that this evil is not as far behind us as we all wish. But on top of the unimaginable stories and the horror of what happened in that attack, there seemed something additionally needless about the way in which politics began to intrude from the moment the killings had happened. America is so divided at the moment that it is as though people are waiting in every wing trying to notch atrocities up for their or their opponent’s side.

Perhaps it was to be expected, so close to the midterm elections, but people saying that the massacre was a reason why people should vote either Republican or (more often) Democrat seemed very near sacrilegious. Of all the things that are wrong about the thinking of our time one of the worst — covered in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent new book (see this issue’s Underrated) — is that life is a straightforward fight between identifiably evil people and identifiably good ones. The idea that “pro” or “anti” Pittsburgh was on the ballot paper is a monstrous delusion.

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One thing that seems to be throwing a lot of people at the moment is trying to work out what is happening as opposed to what is being said. And then working out what is more important — the words, or the deeds. We seem to have agreed that words matter more, probably because they are easier to absorb. That was certainly one conclusion I took from the reaction to President Macron’s speech warning about the perils of nationalism. At the same time that the French president was giving that speech he was reintroducing national service in his country. What is national service for, if not the nation? And where is the line between nationalism and, say, national service? There may well be one. But they cannot be in complete opposition, can they?

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Three hours later the sun rises over the Okavango delta. In the distance elephants migrate between islands in the water. Before breakfast we find that the lion’s tracks lead through the camp and — crucially — out of it. Following by jeep, our Botswanan guide uses not just the dust tracks but the remarkable signals from the rest of nature. A baboon is sitting as high up as possible in one of the first trees we get to — another sign that a lion recently came this way.

It is hard to think of any country as rich in wildlife as Botswana. The country’s famous strictures on hunting mean that elephants, giraffes, water-buffalo and much more are here in unbelievable abundance. A few days after finding our first lion we come across a pack of nine busily finishing off a baby water buffalo. The two lead males have gorged first and too greatly. Both are so full that they are lying on their sides, visibly pained and heavily panting.

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The stay is one ceaseless gallery of unforgettable sounds and images. A solitary giraffe taking a drink from the water as the sun goes down before making its way gingerly — almost in slow motion — across the water. A baby monkey engaging me in a game of peek-a-boo over breakfast. The frogs at night, making a noise like a bag of xylophone keys being constantly dropped. And at the second camp a whole day spent in search of a leopard.

Aside from the beauty of the scenery, the abundance of wildlife and the friendliness of the locals, one of the outstanding features of Botswana is the realisation that people can pick up wildlife language with such precision. Shyly elusive though leopards are, the only means to get to them apart from tracks — which we follow on foot and by jeep — are the warning calls from the rest of nature. A tree squirrel issues alarm cries from near where the leopard tracks have been erased by a herd of water buffalos. Much later, as we think we may have lost the trail, we hear a terrifying quasi-human shout. It issues every few minutes: a deep belt-out from the diaphragm. It turns out to be a baboon’s warning about a leopard in the area. It helps this baboon’s distant relatives too.

Finally in the late evening we spot the animal stalking on the other side of the water. Racing along the dirt-tracks and beginning to cross the far-away wooden bridge we find another leopard waiting to cross over. We retreat to watch. Of all the views I have seen in nature, a leopard striding towards me across a bridge at sundown is perhaps the most unforgettable. As it arrives a few feet away, cautious and confident, this magnificent creature ignores the vehicle and turns to one side to stalk along the river bank. We follow at a distance for a considerable time until, in the last moments of dusk the animal picks a fight with a honey badger which (true to the latter’s reputation for dormancy and savagery) causes the leopard to retreat, growling.

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It is astonishing to think that until recent decades one purpose of tourists coming to this country was in order to kill the wildlife. In surrounding countries this remains an objective. The growing awareness that such actions not only desecrate the animal kingdom but shame ourselves must count as one of the finest examples of actual progress.

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George Pinto was a merchant banker by profession. He was also a generous, committed supporter of many good causes — including this magazine, of which he was a keen reader. Dryly humorous and precise, he had about him the air of one who could be surprised at hardly anything human beings might do. “Quite” and “I should think so” were his stock responses to news of almost any outrage or absurdity. He was delightfully undiplomatic about anything (food, people) of which he disapproved, but also warm, widely knowledge-able and kind. I last saw him as we were both waiting for a night bus on Piccadilly. George had just finished playing cards at one of his clubs. It is hard to think of any other well-off 89-year-old who would submit themselves to this wildest form of public transport. But it seemed perfectly sensible to George, and we spent the whole resulting journey laughing. The scenario seemed a perfect backdrop for George’s underlying sense of the absurdity of most things and people.

He died last month while driving his car . An 18-year old has been arrested and released pending police investigation, on suspicion of driving while under the influence of drugs, dangerous driving and driving without insurance. None of which encourages happy thoughts about this species of ours.

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During the 1920s and ’30s while he was a senior figure in the IRA, Sean Russell cosied up to almost anyone he could in order to gather arms and allies for the war against the British. In the ’20s he headed to the Soviet Union and America looking for support. It took till the late ’30s for him to find his truest ally. Sure enough, in 1939 the IRA declared war against the British on the side of the Nazis. In the mind of people like Russell the ultimate defeat of the British would mean an Irish Republic without partition. I suppose they imagined they were thinking big at the time.

The IRA began its campaign of bombings in English cities just before the Luftwaffe took its turn. The IRA-Nazi pact did so well that in 1940 Russell went to Germany on behalf of the IRA Army Council to be trained by the Nazis’ intelligence service.

It was Russell’s personal tragedy to die on the German U-boat returning him to Ireland, meaning he never managed to put his new bomb-making skills to use. His statue was erected in Fairview Park, Dublin, after the war, and has remained there ever since.

It has suffered intermittent bouts of vandalism. An arm was removed quite early on by a group complaining that its posture suggested Russell was a communist rather than a fascist (presumably the vandal’s own preferred side). Then during the decade before this one the statue was decapitated by an anonymous group professing opposition to the mass murder of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma and others by Sean Russell’s friends.

This should have been the perfect excuse for the Irish authorities to end the embarrassment and permanently remove the statue. Amazingly, in 2009 they commissioned a fresh one, this time cast in bronze, so as to deter further vandalism.

I am happy to report that I was the only visitor to see Sean Russell on a recent, wet Sunday morning. Some local boys were returning home in the drizzle from football practice. Otherwise the park was deserted. As I scuffed my shoes on the railings that now surround the statue and looked at his face (is it a good likeness?), I wondered about the past, and these islands and the awful complexity of our continent.***

Not to remain too mawkish, but these things are on my mind. Spain’s new left-wing government is planning to move the body of General Franco from his underground mausoleum. Not before time, you might think. The only time I visited the Valley of the Fallen I was slightly shocked to see fresh flowers on Franco’s grave and a steady stream of Spaniards still coming to pay their respects. Even more shocking were the flowers laid daily on the grave of the other person buried in that ghoulish subterranean cathedral: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, who was executed by the republicans in 1936. A  Spanish friend memorably commented, “Yes, even the people still sympathetic to Franco admit José Antonio was a bit of a fascist.”

When the recent news broke about Franco’s possible relocation some Spaniards came out to protest, and did so with the old salutes. It sent me to YouTube — as almost everything does these days — where someone has helpfully posted footage of Franco’s last speech. The near-cadaver is on the balcony in Madrid in 1975, railing about a masonic-leftist conspiracy. In the packed square before him thousands of people respond with the fascist salute and a rendition of the Falangist song “Cara al Sol” (Facing the Sun). It feels as though it must be very ancient history. Yet it isn’t.

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To some extent everything is, of course, a matter of perspective. Last month I was in Oslo to give a public speech in the evening and one in parliament the next day. Oslo is a wonderful, calm and walkable city. The sun was out and people were drinking coffee on the pavements outside the cafes. Nevertheless it gave me a certain pleasure to overhear two Norwegian friends. “It’s just impossible to get around in Oslo at this time of year,” one complained. “It’s getting crazy.” The population of Oslo is 670,000.

It reminds me of a lovely story from a general election campaign in the Isle of Lewis a few years back. A candidate for Parliament ends up not just on the island, but on an island beyond the island and a mini-island beyond that island. He breaks the ice with an old lady whose vote he is after. “Well, you’re a long way away from it all here, Mrs McCrae,” he tells her bracingly. To which she replies pleasantly, “From what?”

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