In his previous book Other Minds, he gave us a glimpse of the world of octopuses—short-lived, highly intelligent, soft creatures, that can shapeshift and colour change in an instant, and which display evidence of a very different way of being from ours. Godfrey-Smith believes they have minds, perhaps more than one per animal, perhaps a mind per tentacle, plus a central one. In Metazoa, his aim is far more ambitious, though octupuses get a long chapter here too. He wants to provide a philosophical analysis of the evolution of consciousness, one firmly grounded in close observation of the biology and behaviour of a wide range of different sorts of animals, primarily marine animals, explained through an examination of key phases in the evolution of subjective experience. His is a special and rare kind of attention: informed by scientific research, yet sensitive to what he is seeing, the particularity of the creature in front of him, and what it might imply, always to the fore.

What makes this book so absorbing, apart from this attention and his superb descriptive skills and clarity, is Godfrey-Smith’s enthusiasm for what he observes. We accompany him on many dives down to reefs where banded shrimp wave their claws, octopuses build dens from discarded scallop shells,  and fish try to pull their prey from crevices. Whether he is describing a sponge, a worm, or a whale, his fascination and curiosity are contagious. He wants to do more than simply enjoy this underwater show—he is constantly reflecting on the physiology and behaviour of every animal he observes. He wants to know if these animals have something that we could fairly describe as a point of view, a way of experiencing the world, or whether they are more like little robots reacting to stimuli. In the book we explore hypotheses with him, witness his speculative and yet sceptical mind at work. As he points out, sentience comes by degrees in different species, and is intimately connected with the development of nervous systems. But he wants to attribute it to a far wider range of animals than has typically been done. Insects and crabs have sentience of a kind, he believes, and he wants to convince you this is so.

For some years, philosophers have used analogies with computers to try and make sense of consciousness. Some think of the mind as a very complex programme that could in principle be instantiated in something other than a human brain and body. It could, some think, be uploaded into a very powerful computer. The computer’s hardware would take the place of the body, and the thinking part would be this programme. If done well enough the upload would result in a mind within the computer, a mind with memories and patterns of thought, a continuation of the consciousness of the person whose mind had been uploaded. This is such a popular trope in movies, that there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to it, with Transcendence, CHAPPIE, and Self/less amongst the examples. Godfrey-Smith rejects this model of the experiencing mind as far-fetched and not adequately grounded in reality. The whole book is his argument. The
evolution of subjectivity is, he believes, intimately linked with particular sorts of physiology, developed over millions of years as these creatures sensed and acted within environments of threat and opportunity, and of patterns of chemical and electrical process in the resulting nervous systems and bodies of these animals. These include dynamic patterns of electrical activity across large parts of brains. He is convinced that our subjectivity is based in specific biological processes, and not something that could be transferred into any sort of existing computer. To understand subjectivity, and its degrees (it’s not all or nothing but a matter of more or less), we should be looking at animals and how they have evolved. That means scrutinising how a range of non-conscious chemical processes combined to produce creatures with increasing awareness of the world.

Some philosophers may feel that Godfrey-Smith’s detailed descriptions of invertebrate behaviour, and asides about, for example, how to sex an octopus, have left relatively little room for discussion of key philosophical ideas, that philosophy of mind has had to make room for extended passages about his encounters with marine life on the reef. But I see these careful descriptions as essential to his argument. Without them, attributing some degree of sentience to animals traditionally seen as without a point of view, would have seemed far-fetched. We need to get a sense of what each animal does, how its physiology allows it to sense and act within its environment, if we are to make the imaginative leap required to think of it as sentient. These descriptions are also a delight to read.   

Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness
By Peter Godfrey-Smith
William Collins, 288pp, £20

The post Minds of their own appeared first on Standpoint.

David Edmonds’s lively and engaging book traces the development of Schlick’s circle, later the Vienna Circle, from its formation after the First World War to the 1930s, when the rise of the Third Reich forced most of its members into exile. This group of “scientifically literate scholars” included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, logician Kurt Gödel, mathematician Hans Hahn, and charismatic sociologist Otto Neurath, a proselytising leftist of such outsized stature that he signed his letters with a drawing of an elephant. Though much divided these thinkers, they were bound by a common enemy: metaphysics. Drawing on the work of Bertrand Russell and the physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach (who gave his name to the speed of sound), and with (non-Circle member) Wittgenstein as their unwilling guiding star, they argued that science was a logical structure built through the accretion of experience. Only statements that were empirically verifiable had meaning. By definition, therefore, any assertion that relied instead on reason or intuition, assertions about ethics, say, or God, was meaningless: it asserted nothing at all. For a time, mid-century, the Circle’s logical positivism was, in Edmonds’s words, the “most ambitious and fashionable movement in philosophy”.

The Murder of Professor Schlick provides a clear, accessible introduction to the complexities of logical positivism and its many proponents (Edmonds includes a helpful dramatis personae). It also brilliantly illuminates why and how the philosophy burned so brightly. For scientists, the first decades of the 20th century were a time of seismic change. Alongside Einstein, physicists such as Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg were overturning the common sense laws of Newtonian mechanics and in doing so posing previously unthinkable philosophical difficulties. Since Kant, philosophers had upheld the notion of synthetic a priori truths, truths that could be deduced without any knowledge of the world and which created the basis for understanding it: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, say, or all events have a cause. Einstein’s theories defied the validity of these truths. Crucially, too, they were testable.

Relativity had no politics but, as fascism burgeoned, so too did the recasting of Einstein’s work as “alien” physics, a euphemism for Jewish. The same hostility attached itself to logical positivism. Cosmopolitan “Red Vienna”, a crucible of modernism, was home to the largest Jewish population in the German-speaking world: most of the Vienna Circle (though not, ironically, Schlick himself) were Jewish or half-Jewish or married to Jews. More importantly, in its determination to upend the old order, their thinking was deemed to be “Jewish”: as the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger wrote, “the spirit of modernity is Jewish, no matter how one looks at it”. Not everyone in the Circle shared Neurath’s view that logical positivism was integral to the struggle against fascism but, in its quest precisely to distinguish sense from nonsense, truth from fiction, there is no doubt it represented a threat to the Nazi authorities. In 1935 the Circle was accused of propagating a new logic “that distinguishes itself from Aryan logic”. By 1938, when the Anschluss brought Austria under Nazi rule, most of its members had fled Vienna for good.

These academic refugees brought logical positivism to the UK and the USA where it briefly flourished. It did not endure. The British philosopher, A.J. Ayer, a one-time evangelist, asserted in the 1970s that the greatest defect of logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false”. What is less well remembered is that he qualified this statement by adding that it was “true in spirit”. Edmonds acknowledges that the Vienna Circle is now generally regarded as a “long philosophical cul-de-sac” but, in this post-truth era of fake news and populist nationalism, he stresses the enduring importance of that spirit, its legacy of intellectual rigour, the interrogation of meaning and “the calling out of nonsense”.

At his trial for Schlick’s murder, Nelböck was found guilty: in place of the death penalty, a sympathetic judge sentenced him to ten years in prison. A year later, in 1938, the Nazis granted him a conditional release. By then the Jews in Vienna could no longer rely on logic or the truth to save them.

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
By David Edmonds
Princeton University Press, 336pp, £22.00

The post Testing positivism appeared first on Standpoint.

In western Europe it is Hitler who generally wins the prize. The killing factories that were set up in his name at Auschwitz and Treblinka are today seen as the apogee of evil in the 20th century. In much of eastern Europe, by contrast, Stalin is sometimes considered the greater monster. The Poles and Ukrainians in particular point out that Stalinist repression, unlike Nazi repression, lasted not years but decades; and that Russia, unlike Germany, has never tried to atone for its sins.

Meanwhile, in the European Union, there is a tendency to try and pour oil on troubled waters by fudging the issue. In an attempt to balance the memories of the east with those of the west, Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes are now routinely lumped together under the single label of “totalitarianism”—the implication being that they were essentially the same as each other.

These are the issues that Laurence Rees grapples with in his excellent new book about the relationship between these two tyrants. In Rees’s narrative, each of the above positions is misleading in its own way. Hitler’s crimes were certainly unique, but that cannot absolve Stalin of his sins. The crimes of the Communists, meanwhile, may have scarred eastern Europe more deeply, but the viciousness and intensity of their killing never matched that of Hitler’s. And as for the view that they were two sides of the same coin, that is given short shrift. Any similarities between the two dictators are vastly outweighed by the differences between their personalities, their ideologies and methods, and also the challenges that they faced.

Rees concentrates his book on the war years, because this was when Nazism and Stalinism were thrown into direct confrontation. He begins with the pact that Hitler and Stalin made with one another on August 23, 1939. This was perhaps the moment when their interests were most aligned. And yet, even as they carved up the map of Europe, there were important differences between them. At this point Stalin merely wanted to hold Germany at bay, and to retake territory that had once been part of the Russian empire. Hitler, by contrast, saw the pact as the first step on his path towards conquering the whole of Europe—including the Soviet Union.

Over the next 18 months, both tyrants embarked on military campaigns in their respective “spheres of influence”. Hitler worked within a long-established system, and was rewarded with some astonishing early successes. Stalin, however, had only recently subjected his own army to a violent internal purge. The inexperienced and demoralised generals who were left produced only a string of embarrassing failures, forcing Stalin to release thousands of more talented officers from the gulag.

Both tyrants presided over a series of atrocities in the territories they conquered, but the nature of those atrocities was very different. While Hitler was obsessed with race, and thought nothing of murdering millions of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, Stalin was obsessed with class, and singled out aristocrats, kulaks, army officers and priests.

This does not mean that they did not occasionally stray onto each other’s ideological territory. The Nazis also executed members of the ruling classes, simply because these were the people who posed the greatest threat. Stalin, meanwhile, was quite happy to embark on his own campaign of ethnical cleansing, particularly towards the end of the war, when whole populations of Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars were deported to Siberia.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two men was in the scope of their ambition. Hitler was committed to a war of annihilation, and would have kept on killing until he had conquered all of Europe. The world really had no choice but to fight him. Stalin, by contrast, was much more cautious. He directed most of his murderous activities not towards the outside world, but towards his own people. Unlike Hitler, therefore, he could at least be contained. During the Cold War this was a boon to world peace—but it was also a curse for the people of eastern Europe who were consequently forced to endure more than 40 more years of repression.

In this nuanced and disturbing book, Rees tries his best to cut through much of the mythology that infuses our collective memory of Hitler and Stalin. He presents them as a pair of flawed, ugly human beings who lacked the imagination to escape from their own paranoid fantasies, and whose only way of dealing with complex problems was through violence and terror.

Unfortunately, Rees never quite manages to shake off the aura of supernatural evil that has gathered around them, and which continues to haunt Europe to this day. If he had, perhaps we would no longer feel compelled to compare Hitler and Stalin as if they were indeed comic book supervillains.

Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War
By Laurence Rees
Viking, 528pp, £25

The post Twin terrors appeared first on Standpoint.

As soon as I’d finished it, I rewatched Dr. Strangelove and The Shining pretty much back to back, both for the first time in a decade or more, and was reminded anew that those who call Kubrick the greatest director in the history of cinema really do have a point.

He made only 13 features in well over 40 years but consider his astounding range: between his first great film, the 1957 anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, and the erotic psycho-drama Eyes Wide Shut, posthumously released in 1999, he gave us Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. For versatility, maybe only his good friend and self-confessed disciple, Steven Spielberg, bears comparison.

Mind you, even though the abundance of quality compensates for the dearth of quantity, it’s still hard not to regret all the films he didn’t make, such as a life of Napoleon, for which he completed a screenplay in the late 1960s, envisaging Jack Nicholson as the lead with Audrey Hepburn as Josephine. The mind boggles, but he’d surely have made it work. Likewise the Holocaust movie he long dreamt of directing, which was shelved in the early 1990s when he found out that Spielberg was working on Schindler’s List. Kubrick decided they should not compete.

Had he ploughed on, one thumping family irony was not lost on him. Though he left New York for good when his children were young, playing the English squire on a sprawling Hertfordshire estate, Kubrick remained a Bronx Jew to his fingertips. Yet his German third wife Christiane, who was really the love of his life, was also the niece of Veit Harlan, the German director who made Jud Süss (1940), one of the most powerfully grotesque of all the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda films.

David Mikics, an American academic, has gathered much of his material from interviews with Christiane, Kubrick’s widow since March 1999, and with others who were close to the great man. The result, unlike most other books about Kubrick, is neither a comprehensive life nor a detailed deconstruction of his work but a beguiling blend of the two, exploring the myriad ways in which his experiences and personality shaped his films.

At times, Mikics is a little fanciful: for instance by contriving a weird parallel between the way the pubescent Lolita escaped her predatory lover Humbert Humbert, and Kubrick’s own later abandonment, as he saw it, by his beloved younger daughter Vivian—who left England for Los Angeles and became a Scientologist. The two situations were hardly analogous, as the author himself acknowledges by emphasising the gulf between Kubrick’s entirely proper paternal love and the infatuated Humbert’s paedophilia. So why bother connecting them?

Mikics is on much stronger ground when examining the significance of Kubrick’s cultural Jewishness, and also detailing how his precocious skill as a photographer went on to influence the way he made films. One Friday in April 1945, while still a schoolboy, he cajoled a newspaper vendor into looking dejected next to the headline announcing the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He took the photo to the offices of Look magazine, and soon he was on the staff, snapping the likes of Frank Sinatra and Leonard Bernstein, though what he really loved were visual parables, such as a crowd of people mindlessly gazing into a monkey house at the zoo, with the monkeys off camera.

Kubrick also adored chess, because it appealed to his passion for problem solving. As a filmmaker, he felt that chess had taught him not to get carried away when a situation looked good, and also to stay calm and logical when confronted with a challenge. For 2001, he engaged Harry Lange, a German scientist at Nasa who had been an acolyte of Wernher von Braun and kept a model of a V-2 rocket in his office. When the British crew saw it they threatened to walk out. That would have enraged some directors. But Kubrick the chess player just asked Lange to remove it. Problem solved.

A maddening perfectionist who engendered not just loyalty, but love, among those who worked for him; the perceived recluse who was a gregarious host; the space-travel nut who refused to fly; the eloquent genius who wouldn’t give interviews; the Jew related by marriage to a Goebbels protege, Kubrick was nothing if not a man of contradictions. They all emerge in this excellent book, which helps us to understand how the man was indivisible from his art.

Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker
By David Mikics
Yale University Press, 248pp, £16.99

The post Quality not quantity appeared first on Standpoint.

They remind me of watching Obama up close over the course of several transatlantic visits. He was clearly a political superstar who had overcome astronomical odds to become not only the most powerful person on the planet but the first black President. He married an A-list star’s charisma with an unfazed dignity and—crucially—a willingness to delve deep on policy.

I also learned that the fairytale of his rise missed out the reality that he was also the product of a ruthlessly professional operation that knew how to manipulate things.

When I exchanged notes with his team about potential photo opportunities with David Cameron, questions like, “Where are the RPs?” came back. When I asked what that meant, I was told “Real People”. It made them sound like props.

I also saw that he wasn’t without flaws. There was a tendency to lean on soaring rhetoric, wearing out its power describing the day-to-day, or, worse, glossing over inconvenient truths.

He could also be alarmingly long-winded. I sat in several press conferences watching my boss shift from foot to foot as Obama eased into the tenth minute of an answer to a question, providing an exhaustive tour of the horizon with no sign of stopping—more professor than President.

So, I wondered which Obama would turn up in his memoir. The early impressions weren’t great. First there’s that title, A Promised Land, which may be intended as ambiguous but in reality, feels hubristic. That view is compounded by the quote from Robert Frost’s “Kitty Hawk”:

Don’t discount our powers;
We have made a pass
At the infinite.
Really?

The accompanying publicity materials come with a playlist of songs that supposedly provided the soundtrack to his Presidency. Then there’s the realisation that the 700 closely typed pages are merely the first half of his story, with another volume to come (this one takes us up to the killing of Osama bin Laden).

My fears were soon allayed. Obama is a warm narrator, treating the reader like an old friend invited to a fireside chat. He’s also a gifted writer, striking the perfect balance between colour, detail, self-deprecation and the self-justification which is the necessary evil of most political memoirs.

The preface acknowledges the fear and loathing that characterises so much of current US politics, a mile away from Obama’s hope and change, making clear the promised land may be a pipe dream, asking key questions about America: “Do we care to match the reality to its ideals? If so, do we really believe that our notions of . . . equality of opportunity . . . apply to everybody? Or are we instead committed to reserving those things for a privileged few?”

He admits that at times he sees merit in the argument of sceptics who believe America has never been about equality and the real story has too often been “conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism”. Despite that, he asserts he isn’t ready to abandon “the possibility of America”. The book isn’t always convincing in explaining why. It’s far better capturing the hoopla surrounding a candidate and President and also when at its most personal.

Obama never misses an opportunity to praise his wife’s beauty, parenting skills and wisdom but he also reveals a brutal critic. When he tells Michelle he is running for office again, she angrily accuses him of basing his plan on having “magic beans in his pocket”, before telling him he can’t count on her, in fact, “You shouldn’t even count on my vote”. Ouch. Politics can chew up and spit out those who make it their lives but there can be a heavier price for those who love them. It’s hard not to feel deep sympathy for Michelle during the late-night rows in the early years of their marriage as she sacrificed her dreams in pursuit of his. Later, Obama acknowledges the loneliness she felt, isolated in the White House, while the world fawned over him.

He isn’t always so self-aware. More than once he writes of Ted Kennedy as a giant among men, apparently not seeing that this grates with his lectures about how the rich and powerful can abuse their positions and escape justice. But I was struck more often than not by his thoughtfulness and empathy. His stories of going to visit soldiers who have been wounded horrifically in Afghanistan show he understands how an individual’s life can be upended or destroyed by a President’s whim. His anger at bankers who refused to take responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis and continued to justify spectacular bonuses is real. Each night he insisted on having ten letters placed in his papers—a cross-section of the mountain of post received daily at the White House. That helped keep him in touch and it’s to his credit that he spent time penning hand-written replies.

I had the privilege of sitting in on an intimate dinner at the White House with Obama. The staff were all black or Hispanic and it was clear, as he mentions in the book, until his presidency this had been yet another signal of the racial divide in America. As the evening wore on and he relaxed he spoke of images on the news that had angered him. In a case that foreshadowed the killing of George Floyd earlier this year, a man was shown being held in a chokehold by police after being caught selling cigarettes second hand. Obama rightly saw this as a disgusting over-reaction, and yet it also later became clear that he felt he had to contain this anger when talking to the American people about the case.

There are frequent mentions of how his campaign team constantly urged him to avoid the issue of race because it would play badly with the coalition of voters he needed to deliver and maintain power. Part of him understands, that’s politics—and the first rule is you can’t do anything unless you win; the second is you will probably lose part of your soul in the process.

For the most part, the tone is optimistic, so it’s a shock when Obama reveals a deeper, darker side. Michelle asks him at one stage, “God, Barack . . . When is it ever going to be enough?” It seems the answer is, never, even for a man who came so far, so fast. On a visit to Egypt when he spies an ancient portrait daubed on a wall he writes:

The Pharoah, the slave and the vandal, long turned to dust, just as every speech I delivered, every law I passed and decision I made would soon be forgotten. Just as I and all those I loved would someday turn to dust.

Of course, he will be long remembered.

A Promised Land makes a more than decent fist of showing Barack Hussein Obama was a good President, but more than that, it reveals repeatedly he was an exceptional human being and the greatest communicator of his time, fully deserving of his special place in history.

George W. Bush told David Cameron not to struggle too hard to burnish his legacy, because he’d either succeed or fail in comparison to whoever came after. By that mark, Obama excelled. In often sparkling prose describing everything from the killing of bin Laden to the “real gangster shit”, as his aide puts it, required to deliver a deal on climate change, he helps us see a moderate yet driven man who we could do with now more than ever. Closing the book and comparing him to today’s batch of politicians, I was left with one question: will we ever see his like again?

A Promised Land
By Barack Obama
Viking, 768pp, £35

The post The great communicator appeared first on Standpoint.

Yet another RUC man murdered by the IRA. By the dire standards of Northern Ireland in the 1970s it was a very ordinary killing, scarcely reported in most British newspapers. The only unusual aspect was that it took place in Lisburn, a Loyalist stronghold and a garrison town where ordinarily the IRA would not have dared venture.

The author, Ian Cobain, has used the incident to paint a vivid portrait of Northern Ireland’s so-called “Troubles”. He sets the scene with a meticulous account of time, place and political context. The rioting and general mayhem, the burning out of Catholic families, the retreat to the ghettoes, the rebirth of the IRA, the heavy-handed response of British security forces, the normalisation of torture, assassination and atrocity. At one particularly low point a Unionist MP even demanded in the Commons that the RAF bomb the republican ghettoes on the grounds that “there were no innocent  people in them”.

“How was our situation different from that of black people in Alabama?” asked one inhabitant of the ghettoes. “If you were black you couldn’t get a job. You could register to vote, but you couldn’t vote. We were the blacks of our time and place.”

As Cobain says:

Both communities appeared to believe they had an almost mystical right to this small piece of ground on which they lived and chafed. The roots of their animosity bored deeper over the years; as each generation came and went, they could readily recall the hurts suffered, but not always the injuries inflicted. Each complaint from one community about an injustice endured could be met with a retort of “Yes, but what about . . . ?”

By and large, however, the wider British public didn’t want to know, except when the “Troubles” spilled over into the British mainland.

Having thus graphically set the scene the author then tracks down and interviews those involved in the killing and shows the impact on their lives, as the ripples spread outwards. The killer, Harry Murray, and his accomplices were rounded up within days—there was a spy in their midst—and four of the five were convicted and imprisoned. Murray received a life sentence with a recommendation that he serve 30 years. Remarkably, his background was Protestant. In recent years he has been helping to run a sports club. Although a supporter of the peace agreement he remains unrepentant. “I did what I thought was right . . . He was the enemy. It had to be done.” One of his accomplices is now a university lecturer.

The author’s tone is factual. He reconstructs the killing and its aftermath using previously classified sources. He does not take sides or seek to glorify violence. If you are seeking a concise account of what happened in Northern Ireland, you will not do better than this. The only blind spot is that, for understandable reasons, the family of the dead man have not co-operated. Millar McAllister’s wife has remarried and his children are now, of course, grown up. It is not hard, however, to imagine the impact on small boys of having seen their father murdered.

Eventually it dawned on all sides that there were no winners from Ireland’s long war of attrition. The long, tortuous peace process began with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Despite the occasional glitch the overall impact on life in Northern Ireland has been remarkable and, with a handful of exceptions, no one wants to go back to where they came from. As Tony Blair, one of the architects of the peace, later observed, “Just occasionally, politics actually works”. 

Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death  on a Divided Island
By Ian Cobain
Granta, 304pp, £18.99

The post An ordinary killing appeared first on Standpoint.

For nearly 50 years the key critical work on Dickens has been John Carey’s 1973 study The Violent Effigy. Mullan gives it a respectful nod, perhaps confident that his own book may supplant it for a new generation of readers. “Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics” was the resonant first line of Carey’s book. That may still be true, but Mullan’s close readings and imaginative interpretations argue that Dickens isn’t necessarily wiser. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the fearful treatment of sex. As Mullan writes, “His novels cannot face up to the truth of sexual desire and are distorted by the author’s Victorian propriety”. Dickens’s suppression was hypocritical, given that he kept the actress Nelly Ternan as his mistress for 13 years, almost certainly visited prostitutes and tried to have his estranged wife Catherine confined to a lunatic asylum. It is also ironic: the funniest novelist in the English language denied to himself a vital comic subject.

Fatal flaw aside, Mullan is more interested in his greatness, in the way his art was a form of sophisticated trickery. Dickens was an accomplished magician who thrilled in bamboozling audiences. One of his best tricks was to put the raw ingredients of a plum pudding into a hat and then pull a steaming-hot pudding out of it. Such ingenuity drove his writing. A whole chapter is devoted to “Smelling” and its effect on memory. When Scrooge in A Christmas Carol returns to his childhood it is vivified by a sense of smell—of a pastry cook’s, a laundress’s, a steam pudding “out of the copper”. Less agreeable is the frowsy odour Pecksniff detects from a corridor in Martin Chuzzlewit, a mixture of brandy, tobacco-smoke, beer and “several damp umbrellas”—this last the inimitable Dickensian ingredient.

He also loved mimicry, and in his youth was inspired by the “monopolylogues” of impersonator Charles Mathews—a prototype of “the man of many voices”—to try a dramatic career for himself, but the accident of a heavy cold thwarted his audition. The stage’s loss was the novel’s gain. His mimetic gift enabled him to invent individual voices, the earliest of them Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers whose transposition of “v” and “w” would have been instantly recognisable to the working-class Cockney: “Vy, that’s just the wery point”. Mullan is astute on speech in Dickens as an unwitting revelation of the self. He traces the author’s delight in pompous circumlocution to his father, John Dickens, whom he later magicked into the more benign Mr. Micawber. Verbosity may indicate pretension, or a concealment of moral failing, or simply a helpless social incontinence, as in Flora Finching from Little Dorrit: “. . . there was a time dear Arthur that is to say decidedly not dear nor Arthur neither but you understand me when one bright idea gilded the what’s-his-name horizon of et cetera . . . ” Do we not all know a Flora Finching?

Mullan considers the architecture of the novels through Dickens’s change of tenses, and his daring use of prolepsis—a jumping forward of the narrative to warn the reader. This is good and useful, though it’s not as absorbing as his investigation of dread (Dickens was “an epicure of fear”) and the way he married horror and comedy tightly together. Perhaps the best chapter in the book is on Dickens’s obsession with drowning. Given the number of drownings in his work it is notable how few biographers have asked whether Dickens could swim. Mullan thinks he learned to in his early thirties, but in his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend the Thames is still a vortex of doom. It’s not surprising to learn that when in Paris he always visited the morgue to inspect the drowned corpses there. “Drowndead”, as Peggotty says in David Copperfield. Mullan does a fantastic riff on the moment when Mr Dombey, hearing that his intended’s child from a previous marriage drowned—and will thus be no trouble to him—raises his head. A silent reflex, with a chilling implication.

The Artful Dickens teems with these fine squiggles of observation and insight. Like the best critics, Mullan not only elucidates the genius of his subject, he invites us to see it anew. Along with Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography it is the most enlivening book about Dickens in the last 30 years, and wery varmly recommended.

The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist
By John Mullan
Bloomsbury, pp448, £16.99

The post Greater—not wiser appeared first on Standpoint.

Marr is, of course, a journalist rather than a professional historian, and his approach involves using the life stories of key individuals to illuminate the intimate textures of the past. So, rather than sketch an account of the growing liberalisation of attitudes towards homosexuality in the 1960s, he focuses on Roy Jenkins, the robustly heterosexual Home Secretary who had an affair with the future Foreign Secretary Tony
Crosland while the two were at Oxford in the late 1930s. Likewise, the anti-nuclear weapons movement is told through the story of Helen John, a shy Welsh midwife who started the women’s camp at Greenham Common in 1981 and lost her marriage and family in the process.

That doesn’t mean that Marr is satisfied with simply stringing together a series of second-hand biographical anecdotes. There’s evidence everywhere of original angles and fresh thinking. In the chapter on Mary Whitehouse he avoids falling into cheap condescension about the Nuneaton primary school teacher with the cats-eye glasses who insisted on seeing “filth” everywhere in the permissive 1970s. Not only does Marr remind us just what an effective tactician and public speaker Whitehouse was, he points out that she identified certain social blights long before the liberal metropolitan elite scented danger. In 1978 she delivered a petition to Downing Street with 1.5 million signatures protesting about systemic child sexual abuse. It was a full three decades before the Jimmy Savile scandal broke at the BBC.

Marr also highlights the questionable behaviour of Whitehouse’s liberal opponents. Hugh Carleton Greene, the brother of the novelist Graham Greene, who was Director-General of the BBC throughout the 1960s, loathed the provincial housewife with the lacquered hair-do and refused ever to meet her. Instead he had a satirical portrait painted of her naked, with five breasts, at which he would throw darts. Behaviour that probably seemed sophisticated and witty 50 years ago would strike us today as hateful and sick.

Marr repeatedly shows himself to be nimble at spotting the mid-Elizabethan parallels with our current crises. Going to press in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, he tells the story of the Mangrove Nine. In 1970 nine black British activists were charged with rioting against the Notting Hill police for targeting a local black-owned restaurant, the Mangrove. The trial was scrappy and bad-tempered, ending with the defendants being acquitted of the major charges. By then, the judge had horrified both the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office by declaring that the case had “regrettably shown evidence of racial hatred on both sides”. The Met tried to have this part of his summing up withdrawn and the judge refused. Nearly 30 years later, the report into the Stephen Lawrence case would find the police force guilty of “institutional racism” and everyone declared themselves shocked.

As Marr’s narrative gets closer to the current moment it loses some of its momentum. Perhaps that’s because memories of the Brexit wars, the Grenfell Tower fire and Covid lockdown feel too close, detailed and messy to be woven into larger patterns and general conclusions. Indeed, in many ways they are not memories at all, but simply the present continuing to unspool crazily into our current lives. For this reason Marr sensibly resists finishing his account of post-war Britain with a grand flourish and anodyne words about looking forward to the future. Instead, he closes by urging us to return to the beginning of his story, to those days in the 1950s when, having just come through a global war, early Elizabethans had a firmer grasp on what really mattered. Marr refers, without blushing, to “that more consciously moral, frugal, hard-working and optimistic Britain that is part of our common history” and wonders whether something of that spirit might be what we need now.

Elizabethans: How Modern Britain Was Forged
By Andrew Marr
William Collins, 512pp, £20

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He starts by looking at whether the Holocaust was inspired by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Then he considers whether the German army really was “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Socialists in 1918. Next he spools forward to examine who burned down the Reichstag, after which he scrutinises the thorny old question of the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in 1941. Finally, he tackles the theory that Hitler hotfooted it out of his bunker at the end of the war to live out his twilight years in the vast Nazi retirement home that was Patagonia.

It is the latter topic that has attracted the most attention over the past few years, with numerous books, articles, websites, and even a popular multi-season documentary series called Hunting Hitler, which, it should be declared, this reviewer was approached to appear in. Because of the popularity of this conspiracy theory, there have even been a few books published that rebut the notion of the fleeing Führer, most notably Hitler’s Death by Luke Daly-Groves, who managed to write that book while in the middle of completing his doctorate.

It is tempting to suppose that Evans’s book was born out of this vogue. However, by looking at other conspiracy theories concerning Nazi Germany, instead of focusing purely on Hitler’s supposed escape, the former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, has produced a somewhat disjointed work. Although Evans links his essays by claiming they are all products of the “paranoid imagination” concerning the Third Reich—a phrase deliberately redolent of Richard Hofstadter’s famous piece “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in Harper’s magazine in 1964—the problem is that these topics are not connected as closely as they may appear. Besides, some are conspiracy theories that were propagated by Nazis, while others are about the Nazis.

No matter because all five essays are engaging and well-researched. It would perhaps be a plot spoiler to repeat here what Evans concludes, although nobody sensible will be in for any surprises. However, it is that lack of surprise that reveals a flaw with the premise of the book—who is it for? Sensible people, and especially those who have read properly into the history of the Third Reich thanks to giants such as Michael Burleigh and Ian Kershaw—and indeed Evans himself—will surely already have more than a good idea of what to expect. And it would be optimistic to hope that this book will be read by conspiracy theorists, because as Evans and all decent historians know, there is no point in arguing with a conspiracist. The fundamental essence of the paranoid imagination is that it is indeed paranoid, and paranoia does not respond well to scholarship. It almost seems naive to claim, as does the publisher, that it can be “countered by painstaking research and evidence-based argument”.

The other problem is a vast lacuna. Where is the chapter on Holocaust denial? At the risk of being flippant, this is surely the daddy of the application of the paranoid imagination to the Third Reich. It is, of course, possible that Evans has had more than his fill of the topic after appearing as an expert witness in Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt two decades ago, about which he wrote a book. Or maybe, as Holocaust denial is a massive topic, it is simply not possible to address it in a book of little more than 200 pages. Such reasons are understandable, but it does seem a shame. Smaller lacunae include the exciting fantasy world of Nazi secret weapons, the existence of a Fourth Reich, a supposed escape network called the Odessa, and the Nazi relationship with the occult and the supernatural—perhaps these could all form a second volume.

Ironically, and despite his loftiness, Evans himself is not above peddling the odd conspiracy. Back in 2012, in a review he wrote for the Guardian, he heavily implied that the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) murdered one of its own officers in 1946 because of suspicions that he was sending to Moscow information about the CIC’s “ratline” operation. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this tale, which is essentially a conspiracy theory which sits well with those who like being anti-American. What this shows is that the boundaries between presupposition, prejudice and paranoia are very fine indeed, and we would all do well to guard ourselves from crossing those lines.

The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination
By Richard Evans
Allen Lane, 288pp, £20

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Stoppard persistently frames his achievements as luck. He was fond of citing (without irony) Cecil Rhodes’ claim that to have been born an Englishman was to have “won first prize in the lottery of life”. Writing of his second wife, Miriam Stoppard, to a friend the same word crops up: “she really should have been a lottery prize”, he writes. “Perhaps she was.” And to his mother—in one of the letters he wrote to her weekly or more until her death: “I’ve been lucky all my life. . . and the way I can live. . . really begins with that fate making me an ‘English’ writer instead of a Czech one.” This is partly English self-deprecation, one senses, but it is also what lies behind the repeated coin toss at the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a sense of potential losses defied against the odds.

He was precociously good with words and his letters home from boarding school fizz with a delight in linguistic pastiche. When Stoppard chose not to go to university, but to launch into life as a journalist in Bristol, the same quality was evident in his journalism—“indefatigably facetious” is the phrase Stoppard uses in disapproving retrospect. And it appears to have been a sense that it was all becoming too easy that prompted him to resolve, on his 23rd birthday, to give up journalism and write a play. He’d been lucky in choosing Bristol, a relatively small pond in which he could easily make a noticeable splash but his move to London still felt to him like an escape. “I am drowning with the panache of someone walking on water,” he wrote in a short story at the time.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern follows soon after, the famous turning point—dismissed by most critics on its first performance at the Edinburgh Festival but rescued for a London transfer by praise from the Observer’s reviewer. Its success there transformed his fortunes. It’s a mark of Lee’s attention to detail that she can put a precise monetary figure on this change. On July 11, 1967, his bank balance was £36 19s 6d (roughly £651 in modern terms); by May 28 the following year it was £2,857 10s 10d (£50,344).

If it made life easier for Stoppard, it doesn’t particularly for his biographer. The life before this moment will be less familiar for most readers; the life after is that of a celebrated writer, much in demand, and largely lived at a desk. Lee is excellent on the plays, their intellectual context and their production history. But Stoppard’s reticence about his private life make it close to impossible to break the texture of the working life, of meetings and redraftings and rehearsals, with the textures of a private one that was not always straightforward. “Somewhere in that time, he would say, he ‘got upset about something’. But that something was not anything he would tell his biographer,” she writes of the period when his marriage to Miriam Stoppard was coming to an end. She quotes too a journal entry at the time, “I am in terrible trouble”, but either could not discover from her subject what the trouble was or chooses not to share it.

The book is longer than it needs to be, listing far too many distracting details from his appointments diaries. And even theatrical scholars may feel that her accounts of what went into the programme notes for various productions is a little too much of a good thing. It’s a pity because the slightly exhausting thoroughness of the research blurs the art of Lee’s own narrative and the care with which she weaves its most important themes through the book. One of these is Stoppard’s politics—always suspect to those who valued persuasion over dramatic exploration and even more so after it became clear that he admired Mrs Thatcher rather than detested her.

Lee is good too on the question of Stoppard’s supposed superficiality, a criticism the playwright all but invited. “The iceberg is all tip”, he once said of himself, a judgement Lee rightly declines to accept. She makes a convincing argument that the emotional depth critics announce as having finally arrived in later work was there from the beginning, even if the dazzle of the surface sometimes made it hard to see.

The final chapters—coloured by Stoppard’s belated understanding of his Jewish heritage and the writing of his most personal play, Leopoldstadt, are very fine—almost elegiac in tone (Stoppard is now 83). And Lee ends with a beautifully chosen anecdote about a production of The Tempest that Stoppard saw in an Oxford college garden, in which the stage direction “Exit Ariel” was transformed by the director into a heart-stopping moment of theatrical magic, as the actor apparently ran across a lake and disappeared into a burst of fireworks. It is presented as a story about Stoppard’s humility as a theatre practitioner—his recognition that a playtext is the start of a process, not the last word on what is to happen. It is also a fine final image of the subject as Ariel, supernaturally light on his feet, and, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgement that there are things beneath the surface that we have not been allowed to see.

Tom Stoppard: A Life
By Hermione Lee
Faber, 992pp, £30

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