Being stuck at home can be claustrophobic. In the First World War, the Defence of the Realm Acts made international private travel almost impossible. And the result was to stimulate a ravenous appetite for what Auden later called a “sunburnt otherwhere”. E.M. Forster found himself thinking “There are times when one longs to sprawl over continents, as before.”

As soon as they were able, writers began to sprawl. Gerald Brenan went to Andalucia, Robert Graves to Mallorca, Norman Douglas to Capri, Laurence Durrell to Corfu, Julian Bell to Wuhan and W.H. Auden to New York. People wondered if there were any writers actually left in this country after 1918.

Of course, in the last century, the new mechanics of travel facilitated means of escape. One of the defining books of the modern era was 1957’s On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s hymn to transience and mobility experienced with the help of an automobile (in this case, a Hudson). “Climb that goddam mountain!” was Kerouac’s advice. You can’t mountaineer while working from home.

The longing for elsewhere, the need to return somewhere, is surely so profound that it’s tempting to describe it as instinctive. In this sense, homesickness is actually related to the Wanderlust. The Babylonian Captivity, when the people of Judah were exiled, is the locus classicus of homesickness: an intense yearning to be elsewhere.

We have recently had our own dreams of Zion. In 2020, by the River Thames, we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Mediterranean weather and going out to restaurants. Has the appetite for “abroad” ever been keener than it is today? Have we ever wanted to escape with more energy and commitment?

But “abroad” is a concept of real meaning only to islanders. Depending on which departement he lives in, a Frenchie can walk into Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy or Spain. But the islander’s borders exist in the mind as much as on the map: to an islander, everything is abroad.

Arriving in Calais and rolling off the car ferry, there was always a sense of infinite possibilities not available at home. Vistas were limitless, destinations unbounded. In a few hours, you could be anywhere. In my case, as a young adult travelling alone, when French air was perfumed by disques bleues and the petrol smelt different, my wheezing and rattling Citroen took me often to Burgundy.

I can recall now the profound sense of freedom found in a little auberge in, say, Savigny-les-Beaune. A corner table, a book, a mid-range bottle and a dream of being somewhere else tomorrow. And if that freedom was tinged with a little sadness about people left behind, then that simply made it more intense.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt knew a great deal about displacement: “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no-one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” Quite so. Isn’t this exactly what “abroad” offers?

But there are economic arguments too. Never mind the psychological freedom, abroad has often been cheaper than home. When Alec Waugh made his first round-the-world tour in 1926 he discovered that living on an ocean liner for an entire year was cheaper than living in his London flat. There really is nothing new under the sun: in 2020, the more adventurous WFH generation, frustrated by the privations of home, found they could live in Fuertaventura not Earl’s Court. The home office can be a beach. Where you can sprawl.

But in any case, the concept of “home”, in design terms, is changing. The autonomous car we are promised will replace my creaking Citroen. Here is a place you can eat and sleep. And work. Restless and intelligent, the autonomous car will always be on the move. And when it acquires a WC and a shower, your need for a static home with bedrooms and kitchen and bathroom will be diminished. The term “digital nomads” will acquire new meanings. And suddenly a three-bedroom semi seems a very quaint version of “home”.

Thinking of a dire upbringing in the Gothic South, the novelist Carson McCullers wrote: “I go home often to refresh my sense of outrage”. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a sense of outrage that’s refreshed. If you were more fortunate in your upbringing than McCullers, going home often might refresh your sense of history and charm. That’s the perspective being away offers.

But be it ever so humble, there’s no place like abroad.

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There is a tendency to disparage instinctive behaviour as feral rather than learned, but that’s not true. Instinctive responses are acquired only after a process of trial and error. Once bitten, twice shy. Intuitions do not arrive ex nihilo.

Instinctive Man trusts his own responses. He does not want to footnote his feelings nor peer-review his preferences. He is free because he thinks for himself. Great minds do not think alike. Great minds are always singular. As Flaubert advised, when you hear conventional thinking: “Thunder against it!”

It’s this singularity that make instinctive behaviour so much more interesting than intellectual conformism. If I say Instinctive Man is an idiot, I only mean to chase the term back to its original sense: to the Greeks, “idiocy” meant uniqueness, someone who stood apart. This sense is preserved in our own word “idiosyncrasy”.

Instinctive Man has opinions which, the Thesaurus says, are beliefs, convictions, ideas, persuasions, views, feelings, inclinations, sentiments, biases, speculations, suppositions, estimations and judgements. Thus, all that is required to be a fully-functioning human-being, as opposed to paid-up foot-soldier of the intelligentsia.

Intellectuals are not allowed to be imaginative, but Instinctive Man is bound to be. And has more fun the while. Victor Hugo thought “imagination is intelligence with an erection”. And who would not want such a thing? Whereas Picasso (left) believed that if you could imagine something, it was already real.

Instinctive Man will give you an answer promptly. He has opinions. But Intellectuals are cautious about jumping to conclusions, but jumping is very good exercise for the mind. As Henry Kissinger knew, only fools expect ever to have perfect knowledge. And waiting for perfect knowledge to be acquired licenses every form of procrastination. In Flaubert’s posthumously published novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, the two dim heroes try to assemble all the world’s knowledge. Of course, they fail.

People tend to say dismissively “but that’s just your opinion” as if an individual opinion were of less value than received collective wisdom. By definition, an instinctive pattern of thought avoids the perils of groupthink. The mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “It is never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.” In this reading, the first-class man is an idiot.

And Instinctive Man enjoys risk and accident. Indeed, actively flirts with the former while enjoying the spectacle of the latter. He is always prepared to challenge the lazy orthodoxy whether it be sourced in the Guardian, the Sierra Club, the Politburo or the National Trust.

If you are instinctive, you find chance beautiful. Raymond Aron might well have been a pur sang Sorbonne intello, but he nonetheless conceded: “Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible, they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.”

Talk of absolutes and comprehensive schemes to my ear sounds like totalitarianism. So it is appropriate that Eric Hobsbawm, an intellectual who never abandoned his support for Marx’s “comprehensive scheme” while blithely ignoring Stalin’s gulags, the Katyn Massacre, the Harvest of Sorrow and Holodomor (where perhaps four million people died), wrote: “The intellectual responsibility (is) to help create an intelligent citizenry”. Speaking on behalf of the citizenry, I say: what arrogant, insulting tosh.

Anarchic instinct is so much more interesting than the rigours of the intellect. Put it this way: how excited would you be when told by a host or hostess at dinner: “You’re really going to enjoy X, (s)he’s a real intellectual”? This would mean looking forward to a ball-breaking, patronising, smug, conceited table-mate probably completely lacking in either empathy or humour. Very likely badly dressed as well, since intellectuals with their great superiority rise above the frivolity of superficial things.

How much more fun to hear: “You’re really going to enjoy X, (s)he stole a painting from the National Gallery then cartwheeled naked down The Mall.”

None of this is to disdain the life-of-the-mind. But it is to say that the clique of self-elected, self-defined intellectuals offers only a very limited idea of how wide and deep the mind is or can be. It’s poets who are the true legislators of the world, not the intellectuals. Not for nothing is the value of “intellectual property” almost impossible to determine.

Really, in the contest between intellect and instinct, it’s a matter of whether you prefer the literati or the dilettanti. I’m certain only of one thing: it’s the instinctive, impulsive, whimsical and careless dilettanti who enjoy themselves more.

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Apollo had his tiresome lyre, which he plucked to make epicene music for his blameless followers. But Dionysus surely inspired Beethoven’s raucous Seventh Symphony which Nietzsche described as the “apotheosis of the dance”. Yes, I know it’s a Greek word, but I don’t think we have anything like as many apotheoses as we need.

If you are going to have a classical god, Dionysus is much more amusing than Apollo. Who could not be impressed by someone whose cult was of such persuasive power that the women of Athens went every year to Parnassus to hold orgies in his honour?

With Dionysus we are in the colourful territory of ecstatic libations.  There really is, one imagines, nothing quite like a good orgy. The more so when a part of the Dionysiac theory is that drinking, dancing and sex are evidence of theolepsy, of being “possessed” by the gods. (Greek words really are rather useful.)

And the Dionysus brand was influential: a franchise even. The Etruscans took up his cult and enjoyed lounging on luxurious flower-embroidered couches, drinking powerful wine from heavy silver cups while being attended by naked slave-girls. Additionally, Dionysus was often followed by satyrs which, if Attic Red Figure vases are anything to go by, had permanent erections. You would not say that about Apollo’s lot.

What began as a “harmless vineyard cult”, according to Burgo Partridge in his rackety study A History of Orgies (1958), developed into the spectacular Roman Bacchanal, as Dionysus merged into the person of Bacchus, an even more worldly entity. Most happily, in later European art, any depiction of a Bacchanal licensed nudity . . . and all that tends to go with it.

As evidence of how emotionally impoverished we have become, I am very short of real-time orgy experience. Still, I suspect the orgy has been downgraded since Bacchus’s day. So far from tanned, toned and fit nymphs and lusty satyrs, I suspect orgies, if they exist at all, are rather as if the check-in line at Ryanair has been involuntarily stripped bare. Sometimes at Stansted, I feel Dionysus is not tending to his legacy as assiduously as we might wish.

But, because I have read the great Jean Seznec, I am cautious about bad-mouthing gods. His La Survivance des Dieux Antiques (1940) says they are still around and did not die when Christianity became established. I am sure they are.

I know this because there is a family house on Skopelos with a view of Olympus from the kitchen; and there’s really not much doubt about Apollo’s presence there. I can wave to him as I chop basil. And the house is quite near Mount Othrys, mountain of the Titans and the Kingdom of Achilles. (And also the source of the best oregano.) You can sense their presence in Thessaly, if not in STN.

“But where is Dionysus?” you ask. He was the last of the twelve gods to ascend Olympus, his arrival delayed because of wandering the world teaching winemaking. So the essential distinction is this: you have Apollo, a Mr Tidy Paws. And Dionysus, an itinerant wine merchant, immoderate outlaw, enthusiastic and exhilarating. At his worst he was mad and destructive. Yet for all his licentiousness, Dionysus was not a vengeful god.

Apollo has his temples and statues. Dionysus, on the other hand, is better remembered for his rites, although we can admit that drunken frenzies rarely stimulate great building design.

But drunken frenzies do bring some benefits. Euripides believed: “The blood of the grape lightens the burden of our mortal misery”.  I think we all accept that. And I like the old lines from an anonymous poetaster:

Better than the Scriptures can
Wine reveals God’s plan to Man

For “Wine”, read Dionysus. As Nietzsche knew, he is the promise of life itself: sometimes violent, often flawed, reliably unpredictable and endlessly compelling.

And the rest of the legacy of Apollo and Dionysus? Abe Silberstein’s NASA branding, of course. By contrast, if only in matters of style, Gucci has a range of “Dionysus” handbags. Of course, Dionysus also lent his name to a legion of wine bars, facilitating, for example, the introduction of hummus to Tyneside.

What do you want?  Law and order, familiar forms and manners? Or the delirium of an unchecked creativity that continuously reinvents itself? Predictability or excitement?  Impossible, if you think about it, to imagine a wine bar called Apollo.

Jackson Pollock was a Dionysiac painter: a brawling drunk, abusive of booze, a man who died in a car crash of his own careless making. But Jack the Dripper’s pictures are joyful and exuberant. He might have had a death-wish, but his paintings are The Life Force.  Another example: Porsche is Apollonian since it is an argument about pure technical supremacy. Meanwhile, Ferrari betrays a Dionysiac commitment to massimo edonismo.

Always wise to let a feminist have the (second to) last word. Camille Paglia said: “Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal”.

For once, I’m going for vandalism.

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Tom Wolfe lampooned modernism masterfully and mischievously in his 1981 squib From Bauhaus to Our House. Because of the modernist imperatie to spurn decoration and gain inspiration from engineering: “Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse.”

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

It was the poet Arthur Rimbaud who said: “Il faut être absolument moderne.” For the first time in history, from about 1870 there was a compulsion to make poetry, art and architecture which owed nothing to tradition, but were, instead, uniquely expressive of contemporary sensibility. But concrete poetry made a less lasting impression than concrete architecture.

Modernist architects were infatuated by industrial materials and processes. This led to some craziness. Le Corbusier insisted a house should be a machine-for-living-in, but his trophy designs were, in fact, all hand-made. It is elegiac to see photographs of work-in-progress on Le Corbusier designs with labourers painstakingly using medieval tools to ape factory effects. The absurdities continued. The architect Denys Lasdun explained that the super-fine finish achieved on the hated concrete of London’s National Theatre was actually more expensive than Carrara marble.

When the critic Reyner Banham coined the influential term “brutalism”, the reference here was not to feral aggression, but to “béton brut” which is French for raw concrete. In the modernist playbook, rawness was considered evidence of honesty. And since for modernists, architecture had a moral character, honesty was a good thing. But a house inspired by an aeroplane was as much a poetic fantasy as columnar flutes in masonry inspired by woodworking.

Of course, certain daft inconsistencies in the modernist homilies were overlooked by its apologists. Truth to materials? What does that mean? What truth does PVC beg to express? Form follows function? It was Ruskin who pointed out that the most beautiful things in the world—lilies and peacocks were his examples—were also useless. Meanwhile, some very unlovely things, North Sea oil rigs, for example, are very useful indeed.

But modernism represented a thrilling return to order after the aesthetic chaos of the 19th century when competing styles from architectural history brawled for attention. The ur-modernist Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus, in fact based many of his designs on the neo-classical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The Seagram Building on Park Avenue is, in every respect save its want of volutes, a classical building.

Modernist boosters, Nikolaus Pevsner for example, liked to present the new architecture with its insistence on functionalism as a Hegelian progress towards the inevitable. But this was soon exposed as a fiction. There is nothing inherently functional about right-angled metal. In some cases an overstuffed sofa is more ”functional” than a galvanised stool.

But the white box and angle-iron chair were a passing phase. Le Corbusier, the machine romantic, soon devised a proportional system he called Modulor and this was based on the human body. He also very soon passed out of formal austerity to the complex romantic designs of Ronchamp and La Tourette. And he wrote, unforgettably, the best ever definition of building design: “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in light.”

And Frank Lloyd Wright agreed. Modernism is a state of mind, not a style. It is, Wright said, making the most of contemporary possibilities. Rather than imitating what has happened in the past.

In fact, modernism is the most complete expression of the will to design, a definition of what it is to be human, of making buildings which are appropriate, efficient, comfortable and, if at all possible, beautiful too. To be a modernist is to believe that tomorrow just might, possibly, be better than today. And that today is certainly better than yesterday. Looking always to the past is no more sensible than driving a car using the rear-view mirror alone.

The glory of the modernist mentality is that it is optimistic. It revels in the beauty and the opportunity of the here and now and the tomorrow. The Prince of Wales might want to live in a neo-classical house, but he would not want to fly in a neo-classical helicopter. Nor, I imagine, would he much enjoy Palladian-era healthcare. Someone once said what is the one word that neutralises nostalgia, that defeatist yearning to live in the past? Anaesthetics.

Modernism certainly got itself a bad name. But terrible buildings—Grenfell, the French banlieues, American housing projects—are terrible not because they are modern but because they are terrible. Stupid too. It’s a savage category error to condemn a civilised sensibility because of the errors at the margins. It is like condemning football because there are football thugs.

And here is survival bias again. The foetid stews and slums of classical Georgian England do not exist to impair a vision of a dreamworld of fine proportions and enchanting vistas. Only edited versions of the past remain. And not so much merely edited as exposed to Darwinian principles of survival. We only have evidence of the best, not the worst.

So. Modernism underrated? It is not so much underrated as misunderstood. Those pioneer modernists were a peculiar lot: Bolsheviks, sun-worshippers, vegetarians and free-lovers. One of them believed in the “hygiene of the optical”. But actually, it was hygiene of the soul. Modernism simply acknowledges that the compulsion to make new and better is a defining characteristic of civilisation.

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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Bolzano’s enduring obscurity is due firstly to politics. A professor of religion in Prague from his early twenties, he had the misfortune to be a prominent political and religious liberal during the Napoleonic era and its reactionary aftermath, when the Austrian establishment under Metternich was deeply averse to such dangerous ideas. Bolzano was dismissed in 1820 and forbidden to teach, publish, or practise his vocation as a priest. The major works produced during his enforced leave were published obscurely in Bavaria. After his death, his manuscripts languished untouched for a generation. A critical edition, which will eventually run to over 130 volumes, was not begun until 1969.

Another reason for Bolzano’s obscurity is the extent and style of his work. Freed from university and ecclesiastical duties and cared for by a wealthy admirer, he had the leisure to write. The resulting somewhat dry treatises, on the philosophy of religion and on logic, run to four volumes apiece. Even Bolzano saw the need to abridge them, but never got around to it, not least because he suffered from poor health throughout his life.

What was in those works that merit a revision of reputation? Firstly, Bolzano was not just a philosopher. He was also a talented mathematician, remembered in the names of some theorems. Listed for the chair of mathematics at Prague, he was offered and accepted the chair of religion, considering he could thereby do more good. In his early works on geometry and analysis he was one of the first to stress the need to liberate the foundations of mathematics from extraneous ideas such as motion and time. His posthumously published Paradoxes of the Infinite, dealing with the infinite in mathematics and physics, influenced Georg Cantor, the inventor of set theory and transfinite arithmetic.

Bolzano brought mathematical rigour to his philosophy. He argued the assumptions and inferences justifying particular views should be set out logically and expressed clearly. Realising that traditional logic was not up to this, Bolzano set about single-handedly refashioning and extending logic, defining the concepts required. His principal tool was a conception of abstract propositions and ideas as existing in themselves, independently of thought. Using these, Bolzano created, in his Theory of Science, the first modern semantic treatment of logic: that is, one based on the truth of propositions. Along the way, he formulated astonishingly modern conceptions of logical truth, valid inference, probability and more.

In his ethics and philosophy of religion, Bolzano was a utilitarian, though his grand name for the principle of utility is The Supreme Moral Law. He expressed the utilitarian principle with a clarity unsurpassed until the 20th century: “Always choose from all the actions that are possible for you the one which, all consequences considered, most advances the welfare of the whole, in whatever parts.” Thus his argument for Catholicism is that believing it is the best way to improve the world. While critical of most arguments for the existence of God, he does offer a cosmological argument of his own to the effect that if there is anything, there must be an unconditioned thing—God. The argument fails, but very subtly. Even the point of logic for Bolzano is ethical. Knowledge that is clearly and logically argued for in books is conducive to the general good.

In his practical ethics, Bolzano was egalitarian, ecumenical and anti-racist. His Edifying Sermons, delivered weekly to the students of Prague University, were hugely popular, contributing to his official downfall. In the year of his death, Bolzano welcomed the liberal revolution, but cautioned against the use of violence. His utopia Of the Best State recommends a republic with democratically elected representatives, subject however to potential veto by a council of enlightened elders, not, perhaps, unlike himself. In the interest of equality, Bolzano advocates drastic limitations on private property and inheritance, which lend his vision a disturbingly authoritarian communistic note.

Bolzano’s chief philosophical adversary—his “rubbing post”, as he called him—was Kant. While Bolzano admired and respected the German giant, he considered him terribly wrong in many ways. By contrast, Bolzano thought Hegel so absurdly wrong as to be not worth discussing.

Bolzano was the most accomplished logician between Leibniz and Frege. Where Bolzano scores is in his breadth: few areas of philosophy are left untouched by his clarity. While unlikely ever to be a widely popular thinker, and far from infallible, Bolzano deserves to be much better known and appreciated.

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Think of adjectives to describe an accountant’s job and, chances are, words like “monotonous” and “mind-numbing” spring to mind. A 2017 PwC study reported that 40 per cent of the accounts payable process can and will be automated; these include timely and costly tasks like billing and reporting. But accounting isn’t the only profession that is gradually being rendered obsolete. 

Back in 2004, MIT and Harvard economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that, because of the enormous complexity of information involved, a computer would never drive a car without human assistance.

Today, that prediction looks rather inane. Self-driving cars already exist; some of them have racked up thousands of miles on roads across the US and China. It’s only a matter of time before fleets of autonomous vehicles owned by behemoths like Uber leave human cabbies by the wayside; autonomous trucks will mean the same thing for long-distance lorry drivers.

Professions that otherwise have little in common, accounting and driving, share a couple of commonalities: they lack the need for genuine creativity; and they are monotonous and predictable in nature. Numerous other jobs—secretary, store clerk, cleaner—also require very little in the way of creativity. These are the kind of jobs that automation will simply swallow up.

However, perspective is needed. Talks of an automated apocalypse are overblown and unhelpful. Nevertheless, one important question needs to be answered. How can broader society survive the automated revolution?

One could be forgiven for thinking that machines are creative. After all, artificial intelligence has already created works of art and defeated world champions at chess. More recently,  IBM Watson created a movie trailer for the horror film Morgan.

Though impressive, they all benefited from carefully constrained algorithms. Essentially, these algorithms, which were produced by humans, helped the machines achieve a very specific goal. As John Searle persuasively argued in Minds, Brains, and Programs, such feats do not represent innate understanding. These algorithms are simply manipulating symbols.

True creativity involves turning original and imaginative ideas into reality. It is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

This creativity is possessed in abundance by the likes of sculptors and carpenters. Such professions require fine motor skills and lateral thinking, or the ability to solve problems in an indirect or unusual manner.

Creative jobs often require a high degree of dexterity, hand-eye coordination and flexibility. These are the very things robots struggle with. Skilled trade jobs like plumbing or joinery are safe bets for careers. So is nursing, a profession that requires high amounts of human caring and empathy. After all, we are comfortable with the idea of a robot cleaning our house, but what about caring for our elderly mother or monitoring our children?

Other vocations, like that of the humble hairdresser, are safer from automation than, say, data entry work. There have been attempts to create hair-cutting machines but the results have been disastrous. This should not be surprising. Hairdressing is a profession that requires considerable dexterity, and dexterity is almost impossible to automate.

What sort of future do we want for our children? A one-size-fits-all curriculum is no longer the answer. Was it ever? A “send everyone to university” mindset is myopic and foolish.

Many students would clearly benefit from another path. How about a career-centric curriculum? How about the opportunity to take part in an apprenticeship? Not everyone is cut out for coding and the analysis of trigonometric functions.

As Nietzsche wrote: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” By trying to get more students to major in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), claiming that’s where the jobs will be in the future, we are engaging in a form of collective insanity. Many of these jobs will be automated in the not-so-distant future.

The times, they are a-changin. Isn’t it about time that our attitudes to education also changed?

Since publication we have learned that John Glynn, who wrote the piece above, misrepresented his professional credentials. We apologise if any readers were misled.

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Objectively, the role of anti-weapons is abundantly clear. This was the case in the past, whether German 88mm guns in the Second World War or Sagger missiles deployed by the Egyptians in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In the First World War, tanks—highly conspicuous targets—proved vulnerable to mines, artillery pieces firing low-velocity shells, and machine-guns firing armour-piercing bullets. The Allied breakthrough in 1918 owed more to the successful use of artillery-infantry coordination than to tanks. Anti-tank capability exceeded that of its armoured target in the 1920s, and in 1930 George Patton observed that effective anti-tank weapons had reduced tanks’ effectiveness.

In the Second World War, the response of all powers was to increase tank armour, as with the Soviet JS2 and the German Panther and Tiger tanks. This led to more powerful anti-tank guns, both static and self-propelled. In addition, infantry were equipped with hand-held anti-tank weapons. A major advantage was their relative cheapness in comparison to a tank. Thus, Germany produced more than 23,000 PAK 40 anti-tank guns and 6.7 million Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets.

Moreover, mines were responsible for between 20 and 30 per cent of wartime tank casualties. The capabilities of anti-tank weaponry ensured that combined-arms formations were more effective than those focused solely on tanks, as the overcoming of anti-tank guns required infantry support.

As with other legacy systems, the upgrading of tanks has helped to push up their cost, with the result that tank strength is lower than in the Cold War. That means that the loss of each tank is more problematic and also that there is a growing mismatch between the number available and the scale of the target. Thinking in terms of conflict between tanks sidesteps this point, but the mismatch is increasingly relevant given the nature of warfare. Even if destruction can be avoided, damage remains a central problem. The cost of replacing damaged tank tracks is formidable, let alone that of dealing with engine problems.

The limitations of tanks remain those that have existed from the outset, notably problems with reliability and vulnerability. Despite their cross-country capabilities, tracked vehicles tend to be less easy to operate and maintain than their wheeled counterparts, and to require more maintenance and fuel.

Armour is useful for protecting infantry against those opposing them in the urban environment, as was seen in facing the insurrection in Iraq. At the same time, the vulnerability of tanks has been displayed over the last 20 years in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and by the Kurds when resisting attack by Iraqi tanks. Modern American, Israeli, Russian and Turkish tanks have all fallen victim. Thus, in Yemen, the Houthis employed anti-tank missiles to destroy Abrams tanks used by Saudi Arabia, while in 2017 French-provided Milan anti-tank missiles were likewise employed by the Kurds. Losses are to be expected, and there have been considerable advances in reactive armour and electronic counter-measures against anti-tank weaponry. However, there are also significant advances in anti-tank weaponry, both kinetic and electronic. The growing sophistication of armour electronic systems and of cyber-attacks means that tank operations are likely to be part of cyber warfare in future. And the protection cost imposed even by relatively simple anti-tank weaponry is formidable.

The degree of vulnerability to anti-tank weaponry will encourage a search for an alternative to the tank, not least less expensive, miniaturised, unmanned mobile weapons. They will be exposed to electronic attack, but do not suffer from the complex logistical burdens posed by supporting modern tanks, notably in providing fuel. Resupplying their needs not only is a formidable burden involving much manpower, but also needs dumps that require protection.

None of this suits the image of powerful tanks surging forward to deal out destruction. In the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, the cinema seats literally shake when the German tanks advance in the re-creation of the battle of the Kasserine Pass in 1943. It is a marvellous coup de theatre—but, of course, the Germans lost in Tunisia. Mighty-looking weapons are not necessarily the bringers of doom.

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No matter what the language, a lot of humour is lost in translation. German humour tends to be long-winded, like the language; yet another reason why it is hard to translate. I tried out a few simple Count Bobby, Baron Mucki jokes on my son. This one worked: Count Bobby tells an artist: “Paint me a picture of Mary Magdalene!”

“Before or after the sin?”

“During! During!”

Connoisseurs will appreciate this is a Catholic joke, therefore restricted to Austria and south Germany. The Catholic Rhineland would probably consider itself too sophisticated for this sort of ribaldry. Berliners are famous for their wit, which often has a dryness to match our own. In novellas like Master Flea or Little Zaches E.T.A. Hoffmann proved himself a brilliant satirist, sometimes on a par with Swift. Joachim Ringelnatz’s light verse is held up as a good example of Berlin humour, the written equivalent of the artist Heinrich Zille’s depictions of Berliners at play. Clara Waldorff or Wilhelm Bendow kept audiences tickled pink between the wars. Munich possesses its own classic comedian in Karl Valentin, who has his own museum. Valentin is wordy, but he has a funny face and a great comic timing, albeit in Munich dialect.

Political cabaret was a form of humour that thrived both in Berlin and Munich. In the ruins of Berlin Günter Neumann at Ulenspiegel was able to poke fun at the Allies provided he made them laugh, and he did, uproariously. Kleist’s comedy Broken Jug or Zuckmayer’s Merry Vineyard or Captain of Köpenick can be very funny when well performed, but Germans laugh at the Berlin or Rhineland dialects of the characters just as we might chortle at a Brummie or Geordie. An accent alone can be sufficient to set them off. Saxons have nasal accents, and ungainly German tends to be dismissed as Saxon. During communist times, the Saxons ruled the roost in the GDR, and cracking jokes about them was one way of getting your own back.

German jokes are sometimes ponderous, befitting their verbosity. German comedy films are not always rip-roaringly funny. Gerhard Polt’s Bavarian philistines can be an acquired taste but in Look Who’s Back and Schtonk, Germans have poked fun at the Third Reich. There is nothing new in this: Hitler jokes (not to mention digs at Goering and Goebbels) were a way of letting off steam once, just as Honecker jokes were a manner of resisting the GDR (remember the one in The Lives of Others). The historian Richard Grünberger tells the story of a Berliner and a Viennese comparing notes after an air-raid. The Berliner says, “The raid was so heavy that for hours after the all-clear window panes were hurtling down into the street.”

“That’s nothing,” came the reply. “In Vienna, portraits of the Führer were raining down into the street for days after the raid.”

What makes us cry with laughter? When I was young, it was Benny Hill, an almost wordless satyr who was always in hot pursuit of scantily-clad females; or Frankie Howerd, who was—as they said then—“as camp as a row of tents”. Neither would be respectable now, but I would plead in mitigation that the French adored Benny Hill and a generation ago it was almost impossible to visit a provincial bar in France without finding him bobbing about on the television. The same was true of Monty Python, but his Gallic fans were chiefly intellectuals looking for hidden meanings.

German humour can be coarse, but that is by no means a German prerogative. Had the Three Men in a Boat really wanted to know what made the Kaiser laugh, they would have been best advised to put on a drag act and the dirtier the better. One noble courtier had to dress up as a poodle in a skimpy costume with “a marked rectal opening” and perform tricks. William’s military cabinet chief, General Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler, suffered the same fate as our own Tommy Cooper when, at Donaueschingen, he dressed in a bright-coloured ballgown complete with feathered hat and fan; while blowing kisses to the assembled company he suffered a fatal heart attack on stage. The accompanying music and applause continued while the royal doctor certified his decease: yes, it was a pretty sick joke.

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William’s series of misdeeds (often more than one a page) frequently prove exasperating for his middle-class family striving to maintain respectable standards. Yet William operates within his own code of honour, responding to chastisement with such eloquent and indignant protestations of innocence that he appears to convince himself while providing an effective salve to the immediate crisis.

William leads Ginger, Henry, Douglas and the rest of his gang, the Outlaws, by consent. Vigorous free speech is exercised at their meetings, held in an old barn in a field belonging to Farmer Jenks. The Outlaws show great loyalty and courage in their shared endeavours — none more so than William himself. Invariably by the end of each story, the gang have triumphed in a way that earns the gratitude of the adult world so that earlier scrapes are forgiven.

Together with great entertainment, William offers vivid insights into the human condition. While familiar traits are parodied — evasiveness, pomposity, duplicity — William is the culprit often enough. Nevertheless, the reader cheers him on as he pursues his inquiries with such persistence that the grown-ups struggle to get away with much: William picks up the scent of hypocrisy a mile away.

Thwarted ambition and the constraints of childhood represent a source of frustration as William acts to resolve what the Prime Minister would call “burning injustices”. His inspiration might come from the cinema, when William decides to become an heroic screen character. But his energy, determination, and openness to new ideas are also key — and make William a natural entrepreneur. The results are mixed, but no setback discourages the Outlaws for long.

Scepticism towards political pronouncements is a recurring theme. The first story in William the Fourth (1924), “The Weak Spot”, offers a robust defence of the right to private property and a debunking of communism after William’s elder brother Robert helps form the Society of Reformed Bolshevists.Ejected after eavesdropping on their egalitarian declarations about opppression of the workers, William insists: “But I believe all you do — ’bout want’n other people’s money and thinking we oughtn’t to work.” As a compromise he is sent off to start a junior branch.

The elder brothers begin their crusade by asking their fathers for more pocket money. The Outlaws act along similar lines by grabbing fountain pens, cameras, bicycles and other prized objects from their brothers, prompting Robert to abandon the cause and tell his father: “It’s all right when you can get your share of other people’s things, but when other people try to get their share of your things, then it’s different.”

During the Second World War there is abundant inspiring patriotic material — William and Air Raid Precautions, William and the Evacuees and William Does His Bit are all full of such stories. Peacetime often sees improbable crime-fighting successes.

While scornful of teenagers’ clumsy romantic endeavours, William often demonstrates stirring chivalry. The impulse to assist a pretty girl in distress always overwhelms him. At other times, he might come across as selfish, but his exploits always see him pursuing his duty as he sees it, disregarding personal risk.

Superficially, our hero might be seen as an anarchist at odds with the forces of conservatism. But the synthesis between his challenge to official thinking and the ways in which the resulting chaos is resolved, provides us with conservative parables.

Naturally, those from across the political spectrum can also join in the joke. David Aaronovitch, who was brought up in a communist household, wrote in The Times recently in praise of William — demanding a statue for Richmal Crompton for giving us “one of the great characters of English literature” who “stands comparison with Wodehouse and Waugh”.

Yet in an age when much children’s literature has to meet the dreary requirements of political correctness, William is a saviour for conservative parents. Children won’t mind the dated slang or social remoteness. William’s personality transcends such trivial matters as class or history. And who knows? Amid the laughter, young William Brown may also provide some inoculation against Corbynista resentments.

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