At 101, Ralph Clarke is believed to be the oldest defendant to face a court in British legal history. Last month, this retired lorry driver pleaded not guilty in Birmingham to 31 charges related to sexual abuse of children in the 1970s and 1980s. He was bailed until December when, if found guilty and given the custodial sentence such offences usually carry — and if he is still alive — he will become the oldest prisoner ever incarcerated in a British jail.

There are currently more than 12,000 over-fifties in UK jails, making up 14 per cent of the total prison population of 86,000. Those over 60 — 4,100 and rising — are the fastest-growing age group behind bars. Their numbers have tripled over the last 15 years, while the 15-to-24s have been going down and the 25-to-49s staying roughly the same. Figures for 2014 (the most recent available) show 102 over-eighties and five nonagenarians.

In part, it is just another aspect of the changing demographics of the UK. Since crime is not restricted to the young (four of those convicted of the 2015 “Hatton Garden Heist”, stealing valuables worth £200 million from a safe-deposit vault, were 76, 74, 67 and 58), an ageing population means an ageing prison population. And an OAP bus pass — such as the one used by the Hatton Garden gang’s leader, Brian Reader, to travel to the scene of the crime — cannot double as a get-out-jail-free card.

But there are more specific factors at play. The first is the dramatic sentence inflation that has taken place in recent decades under governments of all colours. The “tough on crime” and “prison works” rhetoric has been accompanied by ever-longer sentences, which in turn have resulted in a more than doubling of the prison population in the past two decades. Longer sentences mean more older prisoners.

The second factor is the increase in the number of elderly men jailed on historic sex abuse charges. Rolf Harris (86), Stuart Hall (86), Max Clifford (73) and Gary Glitter (72) are the most notorious among those whose past crimes against children have finally been brought before the courts in the wake of revelations about Jimmy Savile. Some 42 per cent of men over 50 in prison today are there for sexual offences, though only 10 per cent of sex offenders behind bars are there for gross indecency with children.

As made plain in Social Care or Systematic Neglect?, a new report jointly published by the Prison Reform Trust and Restore Support Network, our prison system is struggling to cope with the specific health, educational and social care needs that go with such an influx of elderly inmates. Many jails were built in Victorian times and were not designed with the lifts and ramps needed to accommodate wheelchair users or those with limited mobility.

Given the crimes that some of these elderly men have committed, and the many years they evaded justice, you might be tempted to ask: why worry about them and their needs? Haven’t they forfeited our concern? Surely, even within the remit of prison reform, there are others more deserving, especially when resources are limited?

It is an argument we regularly have at the Longford Trust. This small charity, set up in memory of that indefatigable prison reformer, Lord Longford, after his death in 2001, gives scholarships of money and mentoring to serving and former prisoners who want to rebuild their lives by studying for degrees at university. We are currently in the midst of our annual awards round and applications have been flooding in. We receive ten for every scholarship we can fund, and so the trustees prioritise the young on the simple, pragmatic grounds that, armed with the education many of them missed out on as youngsters for a whole host of reasons, they will have the most to gain from a chance to turn their lives round.

It is a rational choice for us, but still a troubling one. It means a pile of rejected forms from the over-fifties, many working purposefully in prison education departments, mentoring younger inmates with literacy and numeracy problems, while at the same time using their sentences to good effect by enrolling in distance-learning degree courses with the Open University (OU). They are, however, often unable to get funding from anywhere else to cover the costs. Once there was a central pot to pay for such studies, but since 2012 a student loan is the only option. And, if you have more than six years left on your sentence, or previous degree-level qualifications, you don’t qualify.

I have seen at first hand the wasted opportunities this means. I recently sat on Dame Sally Coates’s review panel on prison education, which reported in May to the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove. Among the many images that stick in my mind from the six months we spent visiting 30 jails is that of a group of older male prisoners, in a bleak and brutal high-security prison (which meant they had committed serious or violent offences, carrying long sentences). In the drab, desperate conditions of a scantily-resourced education room, with out-of-date computers that can’t be linked to the internet for security reasons, they positively lit up with their enthusiasm for their studies. When I asked them a question on their chosen specialist subject, they gave me an essay in reply. “It is the only thing I have left,” explained one. “It keeps me sane,” confided another.

Most had been able to access a short taster OU course, for which there are still public funds available, but as the name suggests, it had only whetted their appetite for more. And that wasn’t going to be satisfied because there is no money. The prison governor had no extra resources for distance learning courses, he explained, even though in principle he recognised it would be money well spent on occupying otherwise bored, destructive and potentially dangerous men. The resulting idle hands would probably take up many more officer hours and cost much more in budget terms than an OU module ever would. Yet all he had to offer was Scrabble Club.

“I never realised until I came into prison what the term ‘doing time’ meant. I’ve been marking time now for almost 30 years — ticking the days, months and then years off. I’ve seen so many others come and go and, although they say they will keep in touch when they get out, only one or two ever have.”

Restore Support Network is a user-led charity that assists older prisoners during their time inside and when they are released into an always indifferent and sometimes plain hostile community. Part of its work is to collect stories and insights such as this from an inmate serving a long sentence, who had grown old in prison.

“The world I used to know has gone. I don’t know if any of my relatives are alive and I have no friends to visit me. I increasingly feel I am slowly dying away — ‘dead man walking’ as the saying goes.”

Mental health problems afflict 64 per cent of elderly prisoners, with more than a third of that number having suffered a major depressive episode. The isolation of those such as this lifer is a recurring theme in his work, says Stuart Ware, the chief executive of Restore. About 40 per cent of older prisoners never receive a visitor.

“I started my sentence before my grandchildren were born,” explains another of those whom the charity supports, “and because I’ve been moved around so much [between prisons] and now am at the other end of the country, I have not seen them or my daughter for over six years. We write occasionally but as time has gone on it has become less. She has to bring up the kids all by herself and there is little chance she could get here to see me. I should get out when I am 72 years old and I would love to live nearby and help out. She did say that she would love to have me near home, but that was some time ago and she may not want me as we have not seen each other for a long time now.”

Without family or friends willing to take them in, the prospect of a probation hostel, the usual standby on release, terrifies some. “I am so afraid of what I might expect when I have to go into a hostel,” one soon-to-be-paroled older inmate confided to Restore, “where maybe younger men use drugs and the staff will not know about my hearing problems.”

Which leaves old people’s homes. Even though many about to be released are only in their early seventies, they suffer disproportionately from poor health and have complex needs. “Older people in prison,” says the report, “have a physical health status 10 years greater than their contemporaries in the community, often the long-term effects of rough-sleeping and addictions.”

Yet it can be almost impossible to secure such residential accommodation, and “Shady Pines”-style establishments up and down the country are not about to roll out the red carpet for a newly-released prisoner with probation officer to boot, Ware points out. “It is bad and getting worse. We are regularly involved in the cases of older people, with no relatives, who have nowhere to go, and who are wheelchair users or need care assistance, and no one wants to take them.”

It creates a situation where some see no option but to return to prison as quickly as possible. “I committed my last offence to get back inside,” confesses one elderly Restore recidivist. “I didn’t really do any crime — just couldn’t be bothered to turn up to see my probation officer, which I knew would get me recalled [to prison]. Truth is, there wasn’t anybody there to help or support me. So now I’m in my seventies and back ‘home’. This is where I’m going to die — not that I want to spend the end of my life in prison, but what else is there for me?”

He has chosen to surrender his liberty in favour of a prison environment of open stairs, stacked landings, narrow doors and basic bathrooms ill-suited to accommodating an ageing population. When in 2014, Nick Hardwick, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, visited Winchester jail, he drew attention in his report to the plight of “two older, severely disabled men who shared a small cell, built by the Victorians for one”. Neither, he said, was able to do prison work, “so they spent 23.5 hours a day in their cell. Although there was a shower on the landing, it had not been adapted for use by people with disabilities and so they were unable to use it. Neither had had a shower for months but did their best to wash in their cell. They relied on other prisoners for help with tasks such as collecting meals. Wing staff were unaware of these problems when we brought them to their attention.”

In mitigation for those staff members, officer numbers have been reduced by 30 per cent in recent years as a result of the austerity drive, while the prison population has remained the same. “I meet elderly people in prisons who are totally immobile and I wonder what they are doing there,” says Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust. “They are in completely unsuitable facilities, but because we refuse to face up to a situation that is largely hidden away behind bars, we don’t address it and rely instead on prison officers to act as social care workers.”

And, at times, as hospice workers. There is a long-established system of “compassionate release” for those prisoners within three months of death. It relies, though, on them having somewhere to go, and many simply don’t. And because it requires approval from the prisons minister, it takes time to get the paperwork together.

In a report two years ago, Nigel Newcomen, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, revealed that, during a specific period he had studied, 78 requests were made for compassionate release, of which 13 were granted. In 26 cases — one third — the prisoner died while it was being considered. That left half being turned down.

Between 2009 and 2013, 45 inmates aged over 50 died of natural causes in prison. In 2014 that number was 107. In such desperate circumstances, prison staff do as good a job in 85 per cent of cases as those outside in community facilities, Newcomen concluded, but in a quarter of “foreseeable deaths” there was no palliative care plan in place, as prison service guidelines require.

Prisoners’ dilemma: HMP Winchester (above), like other Victorian-built prisons, was not designed to accommodate older, disabled inmates (©Chris Ison/PA Archive/PA Images)

His greatest concern, however, was about the use of “restraints” — usually handcuffs — on the terminally ill. “Protecting the public is the principal role of prisons,” he acknowledged, “but this is not achieved by inappropriately chaining the infirm and dying.” It is never, he emphasised, appropriate at the point of death, but it happens.

In 1996, the then prisons minister, Ann Widdecombe, ran into a political storm when it was revealed that women in custody were being chained while they gave birth. There was public outrage. Handcuffing prisoners as they die is no less an indictment of our humanity. Yet when the ombudsman first publicly criticised the practice, it prompted hardly a murmur.

Widdecombe is today firmly on the side of those who oppose jailing the very old. “It was, admittedly, a lesser problem in my day,” she says, “but we should not be even considering imprisoning someone of 101. We have to look for a commonsense alternative.”

What might that look like? The Prison Reform Trust/Restore Support Network report makes two principal recommendations. The first is a cross-departmental national strategy for meeting older prisoners’ health, social care and rehabilitation needs. It is not a new request. The Prison Reform Trust has been asking for this since 2003, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons since 2008, and the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice since 2013.

The official answer is always that individual prisoners are judged on their particular needs, not their age group. There are, of course, precedents for such a national strategy — regarding the treatment of young offenders, for example.

One problem thrown up by proceeding on a case-by-case basis is that it assumes that provision across the prison estate is uniform. It is not. For every beacon of good practice, there are plenty of dark holes. So there are some prisons that give their staff training in dementia awareness (it is estimated that there are 4,200 serving prisoners with dementia but no one seems to know the exact figure). Some even have special wings for the elderly to stop them being bullied. And at HMP Whatton in Nottinghamshire there is an award-winning specialist programme dealing with the release of sex offenders, including the elderly, run in association with the charity Circles UK.

Yet at the same time the new report highlights lamentable failings in dealing with the most basic needs of older people– for example, it quotes the very high numbers of elderly offenders who do not even get a referral letter to take to a local GP on release. Since eight out of ten report serious illnesses or disabilities, and three-quarters are on medication, this should be a routine procedure.

In theory, the situation of the over-fifties on release is getting better as a result of the Care Act of 2014. For the first time, it made the local authority in the area where a prison is located responsible for the social care of all its inmates. “Older people with eligible needs are entitled to the same quality of social care in prisons as they would obtain outside,” reads a guidance note to this legislation.

There was even “new money” set aside for those local authorities affected, but it wasn’t ringfenced. Hence it could equally well be spent filling in potholes, usually a higher priority for local residents than the care needs of elderly convicted paedophiles in their midst.

“There are some local authorities who have been sympathetic and completed assessments and care plans for older prisoners in custody,” says Stuart Ware of Restore, “but once that individual is released, if they want to move away from the area of the prison, it can fall apart. We have a man we are supporting who came out of a prison in Devon. He has a care plan in place, but wants to settle elsewhere on the south coast. The local authority there just doesn’t want to know.”

Some believe that the growth in the number of older prisoners demands more radical solutions. “Whacking them in unsuitable old prisons, even if you put them in specialist units — or what officers have started referring to as ‘bingo wings’ — is a huge waste of public money,” argues John Podmore, a former governor who is now a prisons consultant and author. “Since most of the older prisoners we are talking about are immobile and infirm, and therefore in no position to escape, we don’t need to hold them in expensive prisons designed to contain fit young men. Realistically, at 82 they are not about to scale the prison walls.”

It costs around £40,000 per year per place to keep an inmate in a conventional prison. As part of Michael Gove’s plans to build a new generation of prisons suited to the 21st century, Podmore would like to see something bespoke for older prisoners. “It could be based on the model of an open prison, located in the middle of the countryside, making it even harder for those who can’t run to run away, and if necessary electronic tags could be used.”

Yet it won’t happen, he says, while the prison service remains in the grip of a culture that is too reliant on blanket risk assessments. In the case of elderly prisoners, that means it treats all of them as if they are the same as the most able and the most dangerous. “You should not keep bedridden, doubly incontinent old people with dementia in conventional prisons because one or two people of the same age are still active.”

Stuart Ware has a variation on the same theme. His charity has a long-term ambition to open and operate secure care homes, where infirm elderly prisoners sent down by the courts, and those ready for release but with nowhere to go, can be held at a fraction of the current cost of a prison place.

“We are not talking about a comfortable old people’s home,” he stresses, “more a halfway house with the basic facilities they need. We even had discussions with the previous governor of Albany on the Isle of Wight about building it on a spare piece of land within the prison perimeter. Anyone wanting to go there would have to be carefully risk-assessed. But then that governor moved on and it was off the table. I’d appeal to Mr Gove to look again at the plan. I believe it fits with his reform agenda.”

At the heart of Gove’s proposed reforms of our prisons are the linked themes of rehabilitation (giving people a “second chance” is the phrase he often uses) and cutting reoffending. With between 50 and 70 per cent of inmates (depending on which measurement you use) currently ending up back in prison within 12 months of release, the public is not getting good value for the money spent on incarceration. Since there is no prospect in the current economic climate of more money for prisons, Gove has been intent on making what resources he already has work better.

That was a key theme of the prison education review, whose recommendations he has accepted in full. It can work just as well in answering the specific needs of older prisoners. Stop paying out for a level of security that most elderly inmates don’t require, and hold them instead in appropriately equipped, less expensive facilities, with more care workers and fewer officers. That would free up space, resources and officer time for the rest of the estate.

But this isn’t just a practical problem. It is a moral one, as distasteful as that may be for those fearful of “going soft” on criminals. It can’t be said often enough that it is the going to prison — i.e. the deprivation of liberty — that is the punishment, not what happens inside. That doesn’t mean it should be the “holiday camp” of myth, but neither should it be degrading of human dignity. Getting the balance right is particularly tough when it comes to older prisoners. Yet, as their numbers continue to grow, it is increasingly vital.

The post We Shouldn’t Let Old Men Rot Away In Jail appeared first on Standpoint.

“The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” So said former United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. He was alluding to the timeless issue of intergenerational tensions that are passed from grandparent to parent, from parent to child.

Although George Osborne has shelved the next stage of his “pensions revolution” which he was due to unveil in his latest Budget, the issue will not go away. There is a growing sense of cross-generational dissatisfaction, exacerbated by the media, quick to report that today’s “millennials” — those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, also known as Generation Y — are the unluckiest generation since the Second World War, while people nearing pension age find the welcoming horizons of retirement receding ever further.

Aggravating factors include economics; advances in science and technology; shifts in cultural attitudes; and the proliferation of communications. The reason the argument is taking a critical turn now is because the British population is swelling — and fast.

According to the Office of National Statistics, we have grown by more than 10 million people since 1964 (an overall population increase of 18.7 per cent) and approximately half of this growth has occurred in the last 15 years. Not only are we growing in number, but we are getting older. A recent government report stated that ten million people in Britain are over the age of 65 and that this number will have nearly doubled to approximately 19 million by 2050. And as the number of elderly citizens rises, so too does the number of very old citizens. There are currently more than three million people over the age of 80, and if current patterns continue this figure will have almost doubled by 2030.

The demographic shift is largely due to improvements in healthcare. The changing face of the British population compounds the increasing pressure on the younger generation to support the old in the long term.

Consider the financial implications of these demographic changes: an ageing population will place a heavy financial burden on the state. Some 65 per cent of Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure goes to those in retirement. If the population increases at the current rate, the government will need to spend an additional £10 billion per annum for every additional one million people in the retirement age bracket. How will it do this? By taxing those in work — in other words, the middle-aged and the young.

The first baby boomers have themselves joined the ranks of pensioners. I asked boomer Alexander Gregory, a father of five, what he thought the effects of an ageing population would be on his offspring. “We don’t know but we must find out. There is a huge need to really think about the challenges it will bring both on a macro and micro basis, and to start working on policies to react to those challenges. Everyone pays lip-service to this problem but the state is not really working on it. Adopting a wait-and-see policy will lead to reactive short-term planning rather than suggesting solutions for the next 50 years. Long-term planning will lessen the burden for young people.”

It is plain to see why millennials are feeling the strain: not only are they working away with no end in sight (the state pension age is rising: currently at 65 for men and 63 for women, it is predicted that the retirement age will be 67 for all by 2026) but they are also working to support an ageing population. On the surface this may seem both unjust and economically troubling, but dig a little deeper and the problems aren’t quite as burdensome as they initially appear. The population has been ageing for decades now; previous generations were faced with the same dilemma. The working population has increased as well, so there are more people putting money in the pot.

Generation Y gets a mixed press; some are sympathetic to their plight while others label them as “lazy”, “unrealistic in their aspirations” and “demanding”. But it is certainly true the cost of living has made life harder for young professionals today than ever before, particularly when considered alongside average earnings. Property is the only investment that seems both secure and worthwhile, but with ever-rising living costs, saving for a deposit on a home is, for many young people, a pipedream. So graduates are increasingly forced to return to the family home: according to the ONS, the number of young adults aged 20-34 living with their parents has increased by 25 per cent since 1996; 3.3 million of them now live at home.

Ed Howker, journalist and co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth, says: “The economics are quite clear. It’s clearly disproportionately expensive to be young and to try and get a roof over your head in the UK now, more than it was a generation ago, even several generations ago.

“At the end of the day, the state is responsible. It’s difficult for schools and pupils to work out what they need to do to make themselves more relevant in this labour market. Anything we can do to improve the market signals between these two sections would be really helpful.”

The government has recognised young people’s wish to secure their future by investing in property. In 2013, it introduced the equity loan Help to Buy scheme. By 2014, it had allowed 53,000 households to buy a home with a fraction of the deposit they would normally require. A year later, the Rent to Buy Scheme was introduced. The government said it would “boost building of new rental homes that will also help hard-working people later upgrade into home ownership”.

But is this assistance enough? Katya, a 23-year-old graduate who lives in London, thinks not. “It is totally impossible to get on the housing ladder,” she declared. “The only people that I know who have managed to do so have had help from their parents. The rest of us have just given up and accepted that we will be renting for the rest of our lives. Buying a house in London isn’t an option that anyone my age can even consider, unlike the previous generation, who presumed that getting a house was a rite of passage. The sad reality is I am never going to be able to afford a house.

“Help to Buy isn’t as viable as it sounds — in fact it is quite restrictive. It’s a good idea, but doesn’t translate in practice. I still can’t afford to participate in the scheme, even on a London salary.”

It is clear why some young people feel that the world is against them, and life was better for their grandparents. However, resignation will not solve their dilemma. A change in attitude is required. We are conditioned to believe that owning bricks and mortar is the most tangible way of securing one’s future, but Switzerland’s home ownership rate is 44 per cent, compared to Britain’s 64.8 per cent. If we followed suit, savings could instead be invested in emerging businesses.

On top of financial worries, technological advances, travel and communications are all creating social change, which means that our behaviour is altering alongside socio-demographics — and it is more complicated to measure.

The internet is the most palpable indicator of change. In 2014, Ofcom released a report that found one in three children in the UK aged 15 or below had their own tablet, a figure that had doubled in the 12 months preceding the report’s publication. In the same year, the ONS found that 97 per cent of households with children had internet access. And it’s not just the young: 76 per cent of adults in the UK access the internet every day. What are the implications in terms of intergenerational tensions?

The proliferation of internet usage is not the only indicator of change: the ways in which the internet can be used is more indicative of how the world is changing in favour of the young. The internet is something of a Sargasso Sea, separating workers and pensioners, which widens as its possibilities multiply. Originally designed to ease communications, web applications now enable users to function with extraordinary convenience: one can order food, book transport, control finances and shop online simply using mobile telephones. The rapid increase in apps and their usage has given birth to a new wave of start-up businesses and the renaissance of the entrepreneur, particularly among the young: recent research found that the number of under-35-year-olds starting businesses has increased by more than 70 per cent in the last decade.

Howker concedes: “This is a fantastic time to be alive. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly missing those improvements.” Along with technology and communications, ease of travel increases year on year, meaning that we can trade, and access lifestyles that were previously unimaginable. Traffic to, from and within the United States is predicted to grow at an annual growth rate of 3.2 per cent, says the International Air Transport Association. Cheap flights and package deals make holidays more accessible to all.

Social strategist Paul Flatters argues that there has never been a better time to be young. “Young people live longer lives, they are likely to be healthier and because of many of the wonders of life in the 21st century, they will enjoy a much more varied, richer life.

“If we think today’s young people are having a difficult time, it begs the question: when did they have a better time?”

Lydia, a third-year History undergraduate at Edinburgh University, says: “I think there is and always will be criticism of younger generations by their elders, and I can see that due to the era of globalisation and massive technological revolution that we live in, the divide could get bigger.”

But she argues that the “old vs. young” argument was largely sensationalised, and expresses general contentment with her lot. She sees tensions as simply a matter of perception and perspective: “Freedom of movement in the EU, for example, can be seen either as an opportunity, for someone to live and work abroad with ease, or as a way that opportunities are taken away from one nationality and given to another.”

Lydia is optimistic despite obvious obstacles, such as student debt. “After university, I know that the job market is pretty tough, but I also think that while at university people could spend a lot more of their time contributing to their resumé while being happy and productive members of society. The increased difficulties of employment should encourage this, and not moaning. We are, when you think about it, one of the luckiest groups alive today.”

The post Don’t Pit Generations Against Each Other appeared first on Standpoint.

Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 at Tate Britain (April 12-August 29) looks at the first flush of the movement, when it had, regardless of the quality of the work, a rationale, and before art schools such as St Martin’s and Goldsmiths started using it as their default house style, unleashing a wave of students with a sense of entitlement but without the most basic skills. The period on show covers a vibrant tranche of British politics, from Harold Wilson’s first government to the election of Mrs Thatcher and ignores the internationalism of the style and therefore figures such as John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein (and also the Brazilian Cildo Meireles whose 2009 exhibition at Tate Modern caused consternation when the deaths of aquarium fish used in his exhibits led to the intervention of animal protection organisations).

The exhibition comprises some 70 works by 21 artists, many of whom have disappeared from public consciousness. Some of the others rapidly sloughed off conceptualism to return to the more concrete verities of traditional forms. Michael Craig-Martin was one of these. His An Oak Tree of 1973 — a glass of water on a high glass shelf, alongside a text suggesting possible meanings of the work — nailed one of the central problems of conceptual art. The text stated that the glass of water was in fact an oak tree and this claim hung on “belief that is the confident faith of the artist in his capacity to speak and the willing faith of the viewer in accepting what he has to say”. If you don’t have that willing faith then the glass of water is just that and the artist is no such thing. Craig-Martin soon turned to making large colourful outline paintings of everyday objects.

If Craig-Martin looked at the nature of art, Mary Kelly, in Post-Partum Document (1973-9), looked at the mother-child relationship by compiling an ongoing record of her baby son’s development. Using everything from nappy linings, a plaster cast of his hand, card indexes of his first words, all laid out as evidence of a scientific process, she sought to combine feminism, psychoanalysis and motherhood to present an alternative to traditional Madonna and child paintings. 

Roelof Louw’s Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) of 1967, on the other hand, was a memento mori of conceptual art, in which ephemerality and decay were given literal form as visitors were each encouraged to take an orange from a pile of 5,800 of them, so that the work would gradually disappear before their eyes. Margaret Harrison, meanwhile, examined wage equality and women’s rights in Homeworkers (1977), a collage showing various products of piecework — gloves, buttons and brooches — alongside texts giving their prices and how long it took to make them, and painted hands to represent the women who made them. In Self-Burial (Television Interference Project) (1969) Keith Arnatt played with man’s (and the artist’s) transience and nature’s permanence by gradually burying himself in the landscape. One photograph of each stage of his immersion was shown on German television for two seconds a time on nine consecutive days — without explanation.

The concepts behind such works are indeed worth expressing and examining and in the case of Arnatt and Louw the artists devised a visually interesting way of putting them across. The flaw, already inherent in some of the works, though, is that in divorcing meaning from aesthetics many artists lose the viewer’s interest. Making the viewer work hard is not a crime but boring them is.

Concept is also the subject of the Royal Academy’s extraordinary In the Age of Giorgione exhibition (until June 5) featuring 50 works from Venice from the first decade of the 16th century, all of the very highest quality. Giorgione, who died at 33, has always been one of art’s most celebrated figures — for both the scarcity of his work and its enigmatic nature. There is, though, no consensus among art historians as to how many works by him still exist and this exhibition includes eight that have a good claim to be by his hand (though some scholars believe there are only six extant paintings). There are also works by the succeeding generation of Venetian golden age artists he influenced so strongly, the likes of Titian (whose pictures as a young man are indistinguishable from Giorgione’s), Sebastiano del Piombo, Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani. These painters were quick to learn Giorgione’s language of poetic landscapes, psychological portraits and air of elegy and mystery.

While Giorgione’s paintings do have subjects (real people, landscapes with figures, nudes), what they actually meant was never clear. When Vasari saw Giorgione’s now-destroyed frescoes on the German merchants’ building on the Grand Canal he confessed: “I for my part have never been able to understand his figures nor, for all my asking, have I ever found anyone who does.” And a contemporary chronicler described The Tempest, one of the most famous paintings in art, as simply “a little landscape with the tempest and a gypsy and a soldier”. Giorgione’s “concept” may in part have been just this — to provoke debate, incite curiosity and wrap the spectator in a mood. Because of his preternatural skill he has not just caught the attention of viewers down the centuries, but gripped it tight.

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Once, when I was young enough to be impertinent, I sat on George Bernard Shaw’s bicycle. The bike, like everything Shavian, was a museum piece, as rusty as Shaw’s beard and as wobbly as his morals. It stood in his sitting room at Ayot St Lawrence, by a table set for tea, as if the master of the contrived eccentricity had just ridden in for a slice of lemon drizzle cake.

Why did I do it? The bike had magical powers. A great man had ridden it, and I knew that some of that greatness might rub off. Hence, the market in autographs, association copies, and objects fondled by celebrities. As Sir James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough, the scientist and the magician both believe that the “performance of the proper ceremony” elicits the “desired result”. The magician merely misunderstands the laws of physical nature — but not those of human nature.

The homes of the great or merely famous become museums. Every modern museum needs to do “outreach” through “interactive” events. In literary museums, the interaction is between a living writer and the genius loci. The thinking is that the guest, temporarily inhabiting the space of the dead, will absorb genius by osmosis, or be inspired to summon some up.

The great shrine of this fetish is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Since 2005, and the restoration of the Frank apartment to its wartime state, the entertainment includes writers in residence. Each year, the Amsterdam Foundation for Cities in Refuge invites a “foreign writer threatened with censorship or persecution” to an Anne Frank-themed holiday; the first inmate was Algerian poet El-Mahdi Acherchour. Unfortunately, the writers live in the three-room flat, not the secret annex.

The poets’ housing crisis has further been eased by residential programmes at the cottages of Wordsworth and Ted Hughes, and now by the saving of the cottage in which William Blake wrote “Jerusalem”. Only two of Blake’s nine residences survive: a London flat in Great Molton Street, and this seaside house in Felpham, West Sussex. “Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there,” Blake wrote, “The ladder of Angels descends through the air.” He lived there from 1800 to 1803 when, having turned a soldier out of his garden and been tried for sedition, it seemed time to return to London.

Heather Howell, who had lived in William Blake Cottage since 1928, wanted to sell the house to the William Blake Society. But the society’s members, like their man, are not really business types. They could only raise £93,000 of the necessary £520,000. Fortunately, a mystery donor, one hopes not the proprietor of a dark satanic mill, ponied up.

These days, Felpham is the smart annex of Bognor Regis. This does not preclude the lowering of the ladder of Angels for a writer in residence, though the neighbours might object to Blakean nudism in the garden. Bognor’s literary pedigree is often overlooked. Gandhi, whose autobiography is one of the great modern fables, holidayed there as a law student. Marx and Krishnamurti visited too. In the original draft of The Waste Land, before Pound decreed that Margate Sands was the place, Eliot wrote “three weeks at Bognor” — more than enough time to feel that “nothing connects with nothing”.

Down on the wild coasts of the western Peloponnese — the Greek Bognor — Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house decays. In the Eighties, Leigh Fermor, squeezed by a tax demand, made over his house to the Benaki Museum of Athens as a writer’s retreat. He lived until 2011: three years longer than the Greek economy. With the Benaki unable to fund the house’s conversion, a group of British readers have formed the Leigh Fermor Society, and offered to maintain the place. Meanwhile, fans climb over the walls. Last summer, the London Review of Books carried a letter from a Paddy-phile who, having climbed up from the beach, infiltrated the garden and found two topless sunbathers and Italian writer Roberto Calasso in residence.

The Benaki plans to host academic conferences in the summer, and needy writers in the winter. Applicants interested in spending the winter on a cold, windswept promontory in the company of a small group of neurotic strangers — a Hellenic Jamaica Inn — are encouraged to apply.

The only thing worse than living in the mausoleum of a dead writer is living with a bunch of living ones: peevish small talk about word counts and agents, and always trying to deduce each other’s advances. At William Drummond’s old home, Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh, batches of writers reside four at a time, with unlimited porridge at breakfast and a “quick snifter of sherry” before dinner. One 2012 inmate, Vanessa Gebbie, describes having gone “stir crazy” there. Some of the guests went to Edinburgh at the weekends, and Gebbie went to London. Just like day release from a psychiatric hospital.

As I limber up to remount Shaw’s bicycle and write my masterpiece, I am planning the posthumous use of the coffee-spattered, chocolate-smeared cell in which I work. The committee — my widow, a couple of famous friends, the daughter who edits my unwritten letters — will solicit proposals on Procrastination in Non-Fiction, and select a lucky victim.

To preserve the inspiring ambience of Daddy’s Study, speakers will pipe in nothing but Beethoven, Vivaldi and The Clash, with interruptions from the disembodied voices of small children, demanding sweets. The inmate will be expected to drink all the coffee and eat all the chocolate, ride out the mid-morning panic attack and the mid-afternoon sugar drop, and keep at least three webpages open at all times. Immortality: my name will outlive my work, I shall remain the most important person in the room, and my lifelong project, counting the leaves on the tree outside the window, will finally be completed. 

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For 12 days in late November, members of “Brandeis Students of Color” and “Concerned Students 2015” squatted in the corridor outside the president’s office, demanding that the university hire more black faculty and admit more black students. On a Facebook page detailing their “activism” was guff about the “intersectionality” of race, class and gender oppression, mixed with requests for vegan food, accusations of “white supremacy”, and encouraging comments from various faculty members. “This is a revolution,” one student opined, before falling silent, stupefied by his own vacuity.

True to Sixties precedent, the Humanities faculty suddenly noticed that they were jailers at a racial gulag, and issued messages of support. Helpfully, several departments offered to undo academic apartheid by expanding their budgets for faculty hiring. Interim president Lisa Lynch surrendered immediately.

I took my doctorate at Brandeis. I could feel my degree devaluing as I read Lynch’s email. To foster a “more diverse, inclusive, and academically excellent community”, Brandeis will hire a Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion, to issue an annual “report card” on the university’s moral failings. More “faculty of colour” will be hired, more “students of colour” admitted; degree requirements may be lowered accordingly. Still, many of Brandeis’s non-academic staff are already cleaners and gardeners of colour, so full marks to Brandeis on that front.
“Brandeis University has RE-COMMITTED to their founding values and principles,” the students announced, displaying the grammar that your children too can acquire at an elite college costing $60,000 a year. Not that President Lynch, who aspires to make Brandeis a “more academically excellent” place, would spot the error.

“Please respect that emotional labour and the time needed to heal from administrative lies and violation,” Kiana Nwaobia posted on Facebook. “For now, allow us just to be here in this moment of after, even as it exists at the intersection of success and pain, and to experience our moment of after in the ways we see fit.”

Immaturity, narcissism, mob politicking, radical posturing, racial pandering, and bad grammar: the New Left’s march through the institutions. Or some of them: the science and business faculties did not issue letters of support. The Sixties radicals lost the economic argument in the world, but took their “safe space” in the Humanities as a consolation prize.

It’s the parents’ fault. The students are only doing what they’re told. Their teachers claim that education means talking truth to power, but they have been in power for decades. Their revolution is institutionalised, and they are now the enemy.

In this, our moment of after — after the revolutionary mobilisation of the Humanities, and the post-1970 collapse of enrolments — we can only hope for the bursting of the private education bubble. Bad teaching aside, the Humanities are becoming too expensive to study. Why should rich private universities use the Humanities as a political playpen? Power to the people!

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The other Saturday I found myself in a restaurant where I was meeting friends for brunch, an emerging cultural (American) pastime that feigns interest in food but in fact occurs at the antisocial hour of 11am. We were served a mashed avocado on toast alongside a glass of flat prosecco. The culture of brunch is one of many signs that we are abandoning the traditional family meal at home in favour of individualised eating and new dining experiences.

And that’s for those of us eating at all. The same survey also found that one third of people never eat breakfast, one fifth of us skip lunch as well, and 18-24-year-olds were the most likely to skip meals. Shockingly, 88 per cent of all interviewees preferred snacking to sit-down meals.

The decline of social eating comes as increasing numbers of healthy restaurants and cafes are emerging across the UK. Restaurant chains such as Leon (“naturally fast food”) and Pret A Manger (“organic coffee: natural food”) allow urban dwellers to access healthy meals on the go. Israeli restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi has written four best-selling books that promote the use of fresh and colourful ingredients. Jamie Oliver began his Food Revolution more than a decade ago, campaigning for healthy school lunches and donating his cookbooks to libraries in order to make good food available to the masses. Incidentally, all Oliver’s TV shows show him eating his recipes, with his friends and family, after he has cooked them.

The government, too, has tried, but largely emphasising healthy meals as opposed to social eating, in order to alleviate the financial implications on the NHS. The Live Well Five A Day Scheme is the spearheading example of official attempts to curb warnings from the World Obesity Federation that two-thirds of Britons will be overweight or obese by 2025.

The irony, of course, is that although we are in a phase of food fanaticism, with more focus than ever on healthy eating, we have forgotten to eat together and to enjoy doing so. Who are you dining with tonight?

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The seminar I am attending is not speed dating or a singles event, but a course entitled “Love & Soulmate with Kathryn Alice”. For £75 a ticket, delegates are treated to a motivational talk from the warm-up act — a young man who explained to us how we could open our hearts to each other — and a seminar from the love guru herself. 

Alice, a Californian, resplendent in flowing blonde locks, pale-grey linen and a fixed, serene smile, is the author of Love Will Find You: Nine Magnets for Bringing You and Your Soulmate Together (Avalon, 2007), plus a number of CDs and audio products. Alice lectures on love all over the world, and has, according to the delegates on my table, something of a cult following. “I was about to fly to California to meet her,” said Irene (not her real name), a middle-aged Asian woman who has been single since her husband left her a decade ago, “but then I saw an advertisement for this seminar. I could not believe it. It must be fate.”

Although the seminar is clearly a money-making event, Alice is not raking it in like a number of others in the “love for sale” market. The hire of the hotel ballroom on a Saturday evening, plus the DJ, warm-up act and administration and advertising costs, would not leave a huge amount of change out of the joining fee. Perhaps such events are seen as loss-leaders, there to promote supplementary materials and encourage people to sign up to the more expensive one-to-one sessions.

The UK organiser of the event, Gail De Souza, agreed to speak to me following my revelation that I was at the seminar to research an article on the commercialisation of loneliness. De Souza told me that she had made a financial loss on the event, but that she did it “out of love”. The room was only about half-full, and many of the people there were linked to the organisers, but nevertheless such an approach to finding your true love can be addictive. Many of those attending had been to several such seminars previously and said they would continue until they found their soulmate.

Some will acquire a taste for such methods of meeting a partner and will go on to hire personal “dating trainers” to help them with their online search skills; pay for advice from a “flirt coach”; or even travel the world to other events like “Love & Soulmate”, believing that, as they are about to be told by Kathryn Alice, “There is someone for everyone out there. You WILL find them.”

This event is one of many examples of the increasing commercialisation of loneliness. The advertising industry has capitalised on people’s desire to find their soulmate and live happily ever after, and it has gone way beyond online dating services.

The dating scene is getting seriously pricey. A year with bespoke dating agency Berkeley International will set you back £10,000. Then there are dating “boot camps” such as Kama Lifestyles, which costs £800 a day.

Not only is the online dating business huge, there are now virtual dating assistants such as Vida Consultancy that, as it claims on its website, “specialises in getting dates with women you want to date, does all the work. YOU get all the credit. It SUCKS sending message after message to women who never write you back. What’s worse is if you’re getting any messages at all, they’re probably not from the girls you want to meet.”

Then there is Sam Owen, one of a number of so-called relationship coaches, based in Cheshire. Owen offers sessions at £125 per hour. There are also “flirtology” classes, such as the course run by Jean Smith, who describes herself as a social and cultural anthropologist. Smith claims in her publicity that “flirting is a science”. The course costs £1,797.

How did anyone manage to date, fall in love, or find a life partner before these people began charging you money to achieve it?

Money and sex have long gone together. We only have to look at the scandal involving hacked and leaked information on its members from the online infidelity site Ashley Madison. “I only signed up to catfish lonely liberal women,” commented one former member below an online article on the topic.

Dr Catherine Hakim, in a report for the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), recently argued that prostitution should be legalised and treated like any other financial transaction, such as paying to eat in a restaurant. In her report, Supply and Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century, Hakim claims that the “sexual deficit” among heterosexual men (meaning that they want more sex than do women of the same age) can be addressed by legitimising the purchase of sex, and that decriminalising Britain’s £4 billion sex industry would increase protection of women. Despite there being no credible evidence for her claims, there are a number of countries in recent years, including the UK, that have had their GDP boosted by estimates of their economies that include the profit from the drug and sex industries.

In the past decade, increasing numbers of entrepreneurs have come up with new ideas for making money from loneliness: mail-order brides, dating coaches, synthetic “partners” such as RealDolls (life-like human dolls, created initially for sex, but also in more recent years for a type of faux companionship), and reproductive services to produce children to provide solace for the solitary.

Loneliness is a growing problem in the West, with some studies claiming it has become an epidemic among young adults in the UK. It is also a significant problem for older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over 50, and is set to get far worse as populations age even further.

Many of us live alone. According to the census, there were 7.1 million single-person households in England and Wales in 2011, an increase of 1 million from the previous decade. In the UK as a whole, 13 per cent of the population lives alone.

People spend money, join groups and organisations and put serious time and energy in the attempt to rid themselves of the feeling of loneliness. Surely, many would argue, finding a variety of ways to assuage loneliness is a positive thing, even if cash changes hands?

I have long been critical of commercialised sex and have spent decades, alongside other feminists and human rights activists, campaigning to abolish the international sex trade. The hostility I have had directed at me, by those on the liberal and libertarian Left and Right, has been extraordinary. My work on domestic violence, rape and child sexual abuse has left some men feeling defensive, and whenever I speak, or attempt to speak at universities these days I am more often than not “no-platformed” by the National Union of Students for, among other things, “whorephobia”.

“Because money is made out of prostitution, there are plenty there to defend it,” says Rachel Moran, a survivor of the sex trade and author of Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (2012). “Those shouting us down about how great selling sex is would not dream of defending domestic violence in this way, because it is not a commercial business, relying on good PR and advertising.”

My recent “no-platforming” was a few weeks ago. I was due to speak at the University of Manchester at a debate on feminism. My opponent was to be Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator and professional anti-feminist. One of the justifications of banning me (but keeping Yiannopoulos) was the fact that I consider prostitution to be a cause and consequence of women’s inequality. It would appear that my critique of commercialised sexual abuse is more dangerous and unpalatable than misogyny spouted by men like Yiannopoulos.

Few would see the connection between the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I attended, and prostitution. But profiting from those seeking love is surely as unethical as making money from sexual gratification.

I wanted to find out from the delegates at “Love & Soulmate” whether paying money in the pursuit of love paid dividends. Jane (not her real name) is in her early thirties and works in the charitable sector in London. At the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I spotted her looking somewhat embarrassed when, as part of the obligatory ice-breaker exercise directed by the warm-up act, she was asked to turn to the person on her left, place her hand on his heart, and look directly into his eyes. (At this stage I pretended to be taking an urgent telephone call.)

Jane has been looking for a life partner since the break-up of a four-year relationship eight years ago, and had previously tried online dating. Having spent “hundreds of pounds” joining various sites and going on “pointless dates with unsuitable men”, she saw an advertisement on a women’s magazine website for the Kathryn Alice seminar and decided to try it out.

The seminar was at least two-thirds women. One woman was in her eighties, and had been looking for love since her husband had died some time ago. The majority seemed to be fairly young to middle-aged. The tables were set out in the style of a wedding breakfast and were littered with glitter and tiny red love-hearts. Red heart-shaped balloons decorated the room, and a DJ stood behind a deck in the corner, spinning tunes such as Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything”, and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady”.

I met Jane, a conventionally attractive woman that I would have assumed would have no trouble in the dating world, during the break. Had she benefited from the advice given so far by Alice and her colleagues? No, she told me. “It was all about what we needed to do differently,” she said. “The problem for a lot of women is that many of the men out there are not very nice, and tend to be afraid to commit. Most women can get dates if all we are looking for is a fling or a one-night stand.

“We were told that the only reason we had not met anyone yet was because we had not opened ourselves up to the possibility of it yet, or opened our hearts. But the reason why most of us would have been there was precisely because we had been looking, had been open to it, but had not been able to find the right person.”

Although women dominate such seminars and the types of online dating sites and apps that are geared towards finding relationships as opposed to casual sex, a growing number of British and American men looking for a wife will access a commercial service rather than use the traditional methods. This is an expensive business, according to a Reddit thread earlier this year. Men can pay as much as $50,000 (£32,700) to meet a woman this way.

For the women in the Thai sex industry, the prospect of a foreign husband and a nice house in the West is a far better than dire poverty. But the fact that some women are desperate enough to sell themselves to such men is no excuse for us to accept the fact that thousands of British men take advantage of their lack of choice. If a man cannot acquire a girlfriend the old-fashioned way, he should accept that it is unlikely a beautiful young woman in a faraway country will desire him. The UK government should take a stand against men who travel abroad to buy sex, as it allows poorer countries to sell its women like cheap holiday tat.

In Russia alone more than 25,000 women per year sign up to the country’s 1,000-plus marriage sites. Only 5-7 per cent of the women who sign up eventually find a foreign spouse, according to a study conducted by an American university.

The mail-order bride industry, now linked to online dating, has roots going back to when early European settlers in North America requested wives. The Virginia Company of London sent several shipments of mail-order brides in return for payments in tobacco. The first documented mail-order brides started where so many now end up: London. Today, the mail-order bride business is huge and extremely lucrative, with men being far less stigmatised for finding a spouse this way.

Prior to travelling to the potential brides’ country of origin — often the Philippines or Russia — the customer will look through an online catalogue to choose women to whom he is attracted. I spoke to Jim (not his real name), a British Asian from London who had recently been widowed and wanted “a second chance of happiness”. He told me that he was “bombarded” with advertisements for mail-order bride services via his email and social media sites while linked to several internet dating services. “It would never have occurred to me to actually look to buy a wife,” said Jim. “I wanted to date lots of potential partners so I could choose from them. But I became convinced that it would be best if I cut all the middle stuff out and chose a bride in one go.”

First, he had to pay money to access the email addresses of the women he liked the look of from the catalogue, and then for their addresses in order to send letters and gifts, which the customers were encouraged to do. Most of the women do not speak English so Jim had to meet the cost of translators and interpreters whenever he wrote to one of them or when they spoke via Skype. “It ended up costing me £10,000,” he told me, “just to sign up to the service, make contact with the girls and send them gifts and money. And I never did find my bride.”

According to a study conducted in Hong Kong and published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2013, those who have few friends, feel alone at work, or are sad about a break-up are more careless with their money, because they associate being wealthy with being socially accepted. The study found that lonely people can be drawn to gambling. Online poker and other forms of gambling attract lonely individuals as they almost always include a chat facility where players can get to know those involved in the games. Often this can lead to addiction and, of course, excessive spending.

Then there is the “girlfriend experience”, where prostitutes are paid to pretend they are in love with the man, and do all the things with him, including sex, normally associated with a close and intimate relationship. These women can be rented by the week, the month, or even longer. These services can be bought from any brothel and escort agency in Britain, but many men choose to travel abroad for the “girlfriend experience”, maybe because it gives them access to subservient women. I have interviewed women who have provided these services. They each told me that having to pretend to be in love with the punter is akin to torture. But when love becomes another service provision or commercial exchange, the one handing over the cash has the power.

Disabled men, including returning war veterans, are the latest to be targeted by those with money signs in their eyes. TLC (Tender Loving Care) Trust, a service set up by former pornographer Tuppy Owens, is linked to a charity (Outsiders Trust). It is, nevertheless, peddling the commercial services of individuals and escort agencies advertising sexual services. Checking the websites of the escorts listed shows that they are not particularly targeting disabled men, but simply adding to their customer base.

In 2010 the Telegraph revealed, following Freedom of Information requests, that some local authorities in England had used taxpayers’ money to pay for the services of prostitutes to be delivered to the homes of disabled men, similar to the Meals on Wheels scheme, and occasional visits to lap-dancing clubs. One man who suffered from a brain injury had had “sex work” built into his council care package. I took part in a TV debate earlier this year alongside a women who had bought a brothel in the north of England for her disabled son after taking him to Amsterdam (where prostitution is legal) for his first sexual experience.

The financial exploitation of loneliness can lead to a view that those without pots of money are destined to remain without a partner. Last year, a study conducted by retail analysts Mintel found that just 4 per cent of those with an annual income of more than £50,000 had never found love. However, the proportion of the loveless increases as you go down the income brackets, reaching 17 per cent for those on less than £9,500 a year. The research also found that those with an income of more than £50,000 were most likely to have fallen in love five times or more during their lifetime.

But is this love, or a synthetic version that is more to do with the wallet than the heart? Take the boom in buying a baby via surrogacy services. Babies can appease loneliness, and today it is easier than ever to order one over the internet. All you need is plenty of money. First, you are supplied with a catalogue by the commercial service supplying the eggs. The women selling the embryos are typically young, highly educated and conventionally attractive. Once the eggs are purchased, a womb, usually belonging to a poor, desperate woman, perhaps in India or Ukraine, is rented. If sperm is required, another catalogue is produced, this time full of photographs and life histories of good-looking, high-achieving men. At the end of the process, the gestational carrier will hand over the baby to the purchaser.

Last month, an Idaho woman named Brooke who had served as a surrogate three times died while carrying twins for a Spanish couple. Surrogate pregnancy is illegal in Spain and other European countries. The European Parliament called surrogacy and egg sales an “extreme form of exploitation of women” in an official resolution.

I called Jane a few days after the seminar to ask how she was feeling. Depressed, she told me. “I feel I was told at that seminar that meeting someone right for me is not a matter of chance or good luck, or even going to the right places, but that it is something I am doing wrong,” she said. “I was left feeling like I had no further knowledge about how to find a partner, and more determined to go out and meet men face to face and be prepared for disappointment. I don’t believe that if you follow her advice it will happen as a matter of science. You can’t buy your way into a perfect relationship.”

The post Money Can’t Buy Us Love: Profiting From Loneliness appeared first on Standpoint.

Lewis Lockwood is regarded as one of the major Beethoven scholars and is presently the Peabody Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of Harvard. The bulk of his new book introduces each of the composer’s nine symphonies, all individual and different in their magisterial genius, and paints a vivid picture of the creative context of each. Lockwood recalls much of the political and social upheavals of the time, ranging from revolution and war to the development of European concert life.

Beethoven’s symphonies have come to be seen as the pinnacle of artistic achievement in music. The distinguished art historian Alessandra Comini described Beethoven’s music as having “revelatory dimensions”. The composer himself described his work as a divine art, and Lockwood points out that Beethoven regarded his symphonies as “not merely products of high craftsmanship, but . . . expressions of a moral vision, a deeply rooted belief that great music can move the world”.

The composer saw his life and work as a mission and a vocation, as many artists have done in centuries and generations gone by. The fact that the modern, and now post-modern, world with all its pessimism and scepticism, has nothing convincing to contradict this assessment of the high-minded inspiration behind Beethoven’s greatness points to the unique unassailability of the composer’s achievements and eternal reputation.

The idea of the symphony has had its bar set extremely high by Beethoven and he has inspired the most ambitious composers in the two centuries since. His influence can be detected in all the major composers in the genre, from his immediate contemporaries like Schubert and then through the decades — Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. Even the ones who self-consciously and deliberately turned away from prevailing traditional formal patterns towards programme music and the symphonic poem display the mark of the master — Berlioz, Liszt and Richard Strauss. Wagner’s transformation of opera into “music-drama” shows the impact of a lifetime’s study of Beethoven’s instrumental music, and in particular his Ninth Symphony. Lockwood reminds us that “Wagner grew up in the 1830s under Beethoven’s spell, as he openly confessed.”

I have been asked why composers still want to write symphonies today. Haven’t all the best ones been written already? Is the form and idea not redundant in the 21st century? Hasn’t modernism (and post-modernism) moved the “cutting-edge” agenda away from the tried and tested? Is it not just nostalgia and conservatism to fall back on an idea from the past? Every composer has considered the possibility of writing a symphony and the questions that will be asked of him or her. Some decide it is not for them, but a surprising number in recent years and in our own time have persevered with the concept.

Hans Werner Henze wrote ten. Alfred Schnittke also wrote ten, and so far Peter Maxwell Davies has also written ten. Michael Tippett wrote four. It was obviously a viable form and concept for these titans of modern music. But there are many others who would never have given the question a second thought — Boulez, Birtwistle, Lachenmann. Is it just the more “conservative” composers of our time who are interested in the symphony? No doubt there will be strident voices from the avant-garde hard-line who would maintain just that. But what makes Maxwell Davies conservative? Perhaps this leads to the impossibility of defining the word and idea. Can anything be a symphony now? Galina Ustvolskaya’s Fifth Symphony is about ten minutes long, scored for only five players and involves an actor reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Russian. Her Fourth Symphony is for voice, piano, trumpet and tam-tam and lasts only six minutes. Concepts of musical conservatism and radicalism have a tendency to wax and wane in our own time, so who knows how the self-proclaimed radicals of our age will be viewed decades hence?

The origin of the word symphony is from the ancient Greek (symphonia) meaning “agreement or concord of sound”. It can also mean “concert of vocal or instrumental music” or just simply “harmonious”. In the middle ages there were instruments called symphonia which could be anything from a two-headed drum to a hurdy-gurdy or dulcimer. It begins to mean “sounding together” in the work of Giovanni Gabrieli in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in his Sacrae Symphoniae.

It is this meaning of symphony that is attractive to many, as it can open up possibilities unconstrained by Germanic, Romantic (or even Classical) origins. Stravinsky used the term a few times, most interestingly in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments from 1920. Note the plural. It comes from a very different place — there are no string instruments, and it is one movement which lasts only nine minutes. It has a solemn, almost funereal character, with a chorale seemingly evoking Russian Orthodox chant — an austere ritual, unfolding in short litanies. It must have baffled its original audiences. Indeed its world première in London was greeted by laughter and derision. I have conducted this a few times and love its episodic nature. It doesn’t develop in any expected “symphonic” way, but through a series of fragments, juxtaposed and expanded on each sounding.

An earlier challenge to or broadening of German symphonic principles was Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique of 1830. This is programme music, but what a programme! The music is psychedelic, hallucinatory, opium-fuelled even. It is an interesting riposte to those who see the symphony as the pinnacle of absolute abstraction. Composers can be inspired by the strangest things. Here is a weird story of poison, despair, hopeless love, nightmare, witches, devils and public execution — the composer’s own! We also see subjective impulses coming to the fore in the inspiration and explanation of the work, in particular Berlioz’s fascination with the English actress Harriet Smithson.

His work was written only three years after Beethoven’s death and Berlioz must have recognised a similar revolutionary spirit in the work of the master. My boyhood dreams were shaped by Beethoven’s symphonies and in particular his third, the Eroica. The sheer drama and romance of this work is compelling and people talk of its convulsive impact on the history of music. Lockwood reminds us of this and its astonishing effect at its first performances. Those two stabbing E flat major chords at the beginning of the first movement, which grab the listener by the scruff of the neck, are so simple and so bold. But then the melody begins in the cellos, outlining the E flat major triad, immediately veering off to a note that you least expect — C sharp — incredibly distant tonal territory in a musical world and era expecting careful modulations between closely related keys. So right from the first few seconds of the work, Beethoven is presenting us with a so-far unparalleled tension. The opposition in purely musical parameters is taking us into uncharted territory, where resolution and irresolution coexist side by side.

Most people know about the dedication story of the Eroica. Beethoven originally intended to dedicate the score to Napoleon Bonaparte but withdrew this violently, tearing the dedication page off, on hearing of Napoleon’s self-proclamation as Emperor. I have always been heartened by Beethoven’s rejection of a tyrant and his recognition of the true nature of revolutionary fervour as destructive, divisive and corrupt. It is a lesson from history to all artists not to put their trust in politicians and rabble-rousers.

The 20th century saw a procession of artists who were beguiled and seduced by evil men. There was no shortage of poets and writers ready to praise Lenin and Mussolini especially, but also Stalin, Hitler and Mao, even into our own time. In my own country our most prominent poet Hugh McDiarmid, beloved of Scottish nationalists and socialists even today, wrote not one but three hymns to Lenin. He also admired Mussolini, arguing in 1923 for a Scottish version of fascism and in 1929 for the formation of Clann Albain, a fascistic paramilitary organisation to fight for Scottish freedom. As late as June 1940 he wrote a poem expressing his indifference to the impending German bombing of London, which was not published during his lifetime:

Now when London is threatened
With devastation from the air
I realise, horror atrophying me,
That I hardly care.

In 2010 the Canadian academic Susan Wilson unearthed some correspondence in the National Library of Scotland between MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean, his friend, fellow poet and fellow radical political thinker. In these letters, as late as 1941, it is revealed that MacDiarmid regarded Hitler and the Nazis as potentially more benign rulers than the British government in Westminster.

He was known for his controversial views as a young man. In two articles written in 1923, “Plea for a Scottish Fascism” and “Programme for a Scottish Fascism”, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. But the revelation of ambivalent, even pro-Nazi sentiments during WW2 has come as a shock.

These are sobering recollections for Scots, but also for artists generally. Hugh MacDiarmid’s art and his wild, radical, “progressive” idealism can be difficult to disentangle. Artists can be agents of good in society, but we can see that some of them end up supporting evil, blind to the roots and inevitable ends of their thinking.

I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of MacDiarmid’s shenanigans. The Russian’s Fifth Symphony came in the wake of Stalinist purges, the gulags, quotas for punishments against “anti-Soviet” dissidents, millions disappearing, murdered and imprisoned. He could have taught MacDiarmid and the Western fellow-travellers something about utopian fervour and its consequences. He wouldn’t have needed to say a word — the sometimes plangent, sometimes overwhelming blasts of his Fifth Symphony say nothing but imply everything.

There is here a particular modern genius, born in the abyss of political nihilism and despair which produces music that can be heard and understood in different ways. This skill, this facility saved Shostakovich’s skin, but delivered a sarcastic and subtle blow against Marxist totalitarianism. They say that there was a 40-minute standing ovation for this work at its première in Leningrad in 1937. The audience seemed to realise that the music spoke of their pain, tragedy and desolation. Some wept in the slow movement, some said they could feel all the disappeared: they would have known friends and family taken away and murdered by the Communists.

In various 20th-century symphonies we can detect the foreboding of the times — the fear and destruction of war and political oppression. There are some works which, in retrospect, have been regarded as barometers of their era, including a couple performed in this year’s BBC Prom concerts. Elgar’s Second Symphony was written in 1911 and some detect in it the melancholy tread of civilisational collapse. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was written a few years earlier and is known as his “Tragic” Symphony, full of loss, culminating in literal hammer blows of fate. Furtwängler described this work as “the first nihilistic work in the history of music”. This is a limited analysis of a score which certainly has its fair share of darkness and hopelessness, but also has so much more. The final movement is like a stream of consciousness, astonishingly vast and unusual, with no set sonata pattern or design, strange recapitulations or no recapitulation at all. Like the Berlioz it is hallucinogenic and nightmarish, but it is only at the very end that the music becomes truly despairing.

Perhaps the crucial and central point in Beethoven’s legacy, flagged up in Lewis Lockwood’s exploratory new book, is his moral vision — a prophetic lesson which was to grab the imagination of composers over a century later. These more modern works, like their Beethovenian models, give the impression of having to be written — a compulsion even beyond the will of their creators. I am reminded of this every time I conduct Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, for example. He saw this piece as pure music, unlike his first three. It is also more severe and angular in its language, not immediately inviting like some of his other music. It is not conventionally beautiful and seems troubled. Written in 1935, two years before Shostakovich’s Fifth, it seems to detect the coming storm in Europe. Later the composer said of it: “I’m not at all sure if I like it myself now. All I know is that it’s what I wanted to do at the time.”

Vaughan Williams went on to write a further five symphonies. I have also reached my number four. My first three symphonies employed programmatic elements, whether exploring poetic imagery or literary references, but my fourth, premièred by the BBC Scottish on August 3 under the work’s dedicatee Donald Runnicles, is essentially abstract. I was interested in the interplay of different types of material, following upon a fascination with music as ritual that has stretched from Monteverdi through to Boulez and Birtwistle. There are four distinct archetypes in the symphony which can be viewed as rituals of movement, exhortation, petition and joy. These four ideas are juxtaposed in quick succession from the outset, over the first five minutes or so. As the work progresses these are sometimes individually developed in an organic way; at times they comingle, and at others they are opposed and argumentative in a dialectic manner.

The work as a whole is also a homage to Robert Carver, the most important Scottish composer of the high Renaissance, whose intricate multi-part choral music I’ve loved since performing it as a student. There are allusions to his ten-voice Mass Dum Sacrum Mysterium embedded into the work, and at a number of points it emerges across the centuries in a more discernible form. The polyphony is muted and muffled, literally in the distance, as it is played delicately by the back desks of the violas, cellos and double basses.

The symphonic tradition, and Beethoven’s monumental impact on it, is an imposing legacy which looms like a giant ghost over the shoulder of any living composer foolhardy enough to consider adding to it. Some turn away in terror and even disdain, preferring to carve out a rejectionary stance. It might be the safer option. Others can’t help themselves. Perhaps not fully knowing what writing a symphony “means” any more, some of us are drawn towards it like moths flapping around a candle flame. We might get burned. I feel a fifth coming on. Dah-dah-dah-dum.

The post The Symphony: A Moral Vision Revealed In Music appeared first on Standpoint.

The director, Jed Mercurio, has recently remarked that since the novel’s struggle to represent sex has been successful, he didn’t want to labour this aspect of it. There has been much comment in the press about his adaptation’s relative lack of visual and verbal sexual explicitness, as compared both to the novel and to its earlier adaptations. But the novel’s battle was not in fact to represent sex explicitly per se, but to depict it in a way that would achieve the aim stated in “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, the essay written by Lawrence in the year after the novel was finished, and placed as the introduction to the second authorised edition.

The essay is a variation on Lawrence’s central theme that in European civilisation the mind and the body have become damagingly separated. The solution which it proposes is not — as elsewhere in his writings — to lose mental consciousness in “blood consciousness”. Rather, it is to force the mind to make a connection with the body:

In the past, man was too weak-minded, or crude-minded to contemplate his own physical body and physical functions, without getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered him . . . Yet they should be related in harmony. And this is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly. Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually, complete and clean.

The last sentence resonates poignantly with Lawrence’s position of writing the novel whilst dying. But the sentence which precedes it makes it clear that the book is not an incitement to action (“Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after gamekeepers for lovers. Far be it from me to suggest that they should go running after anybody.”) Its stated aim is to be profoundly read and thought. The descriptions of Connie’s and Mellors’s “fucking” — so much less realistic and vulnerable to a certain kind of ridicule on the page than in film adaptations — are not aiming at clinical mimesis, but at jolting the reader’s mind into an awareness of what sex, as approved of by the mind, is.

Thus Mellors mirrors the novel’s function, since in talking sex to Connie he helps effect a similar integration in her. But her accompanying practical lessons are not, it turns out, necessary. It is sufficient to learn by overhearing Mellors and Connie’s consciousness when love-making: “Today, the full conscious realisation of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully.”

Of course, for Lawrence to “know” sex “fully” did not mean to know it as Don Juan, Swinburne or Freud knew it, but to have “a proper reverence for it”. In his essay “Pornography and Obscenity”, written at the same time as “A Propos”, he argues that what is considered obscene not only varies between cultures and over time, but between the judgment of what he calls the “mob self” and the “individual self”. The former, which is allied to public opinion, is defined by Lawrence as itself obscene, because it has turned sex into a dirty secret. The innocent understanding of sex which characterised Chaucer was lost in the Renaissance, since when European art has either denied its existence (as in the art of Gainsborough), or treated it as a forbidden fruit (as in Jane Eyre). To do the latter is, to Lawrence, pornographic: “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.” It is also far more likely to incite masturbation than the “moderate rousing of our sex” which is produced by, for example, Botticelli’s Venus. Hence “Boccaccio at his hottest seems to me less pornographical than Pamela . . . or a host of modern books or films which pass uncensored” — or vulgar seaside postcards or smoking-room anecdotes: “ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty.”

There have of course been many literary and film representations of sex as not degraded since Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and many of these are in the novel’s debt. But Lawrence was less interested in blazing a trail in art than in souls. And the latter work is, to put it mildly, unfinished — at least, if not especially, in Anglo-Saxon countries. Certainly Lawrence considered England to be peculiarly pornographic: “I am sure no other civilisation, not even the Roman, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid, dirty sex. Because no other civilisation has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.” Even the young bohemians, kicking against their parents’ “eunuch century”, “have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust.” Waxing (as Lawrence tends to) physiological, he explains that the sex and excretive functions are opposite “in direction” despite being proximate — tending respectively towards creation and disintegration. In healthy people the distinction between these is sharp; in degraded people it is obliterated, and “sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt”. It is obvious how strong this connection remains, especially in what is today called pornography.

Lawrence’s attempted solution is a frankness which will dispel the masturbatory “dirty little secret”. The giggling media reactions to such sex as there is in the latest adaptation confirm that the representation of sex is almost invariably treated as the “rubbing of the dirty little secret”. The “mild little words that rhyme with spit or farce” (or punt or cluck) remain restricted by BBC decency guidelines which Mercurio chose not to push. Lawrence wanted us to be “able to use the so-called obscene words, because these are a natural part of the mind’s consciousness of the body” — and I am sure that many a modern couple refers lovingly to “fucking” and the “cunt”.

But if what Lawrence called “word-prudery” was in his own time directed at any use of these terms, it has now morphed into a fatigue at those aggressive and contemptuous uses of the words, which Lawrence himself would have shared (“even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously”). Mercurio’s sparingness with taboo words may have in part been acquiescence with the BBC’s decency guidelines (Mercurio commented to me: “Currently fuck is strongly discouraged and cunt is unacceptable. They count number of uses and proximity to programme start. Every use of fuck would have to be approved at Controller level”; and the Controller might of course judge with his “mob” self). But if so, it was acquiescence with a rule which in the balance of cases today Lawrence would have thought well applied.

It is equally clear that Lawrence would have condemned a high proportion of the books and films which his novel’s unbanning (and its establishment of precedent for application of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act) helped to bring into the world. Lady Chatterley’s Lover not only didn’t shrink the volume of pornography in the world, it encouraged a deluge of it, and remains associated with it in the popular consciousness. Mercurio’s adaptation recently occasioned a newspaper article on “racy period lingerie”; “A Propos” explicitly deplores modern men’s greater concentration on female underwear than on sex itself. If Mercurio was right that the battle to represent sex has been won, his decision not to reprise that victory was tactful in the light of the novel’s flagrant unintended consequences.

Yet Lawrence’s contempt for the modern bohemian manner of taking sex “lightly” also made him aware that bohemians in his own time would condemn the novel: “They despise a book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is much too simple and ordinary for them. The naughty words they care nothing about, and the attitude to love they find old-fashioned. Why make a fuss about it? Take it like a cocktail.” This too is echoed in the present. Holliday Grainger (who plays Connie) was recently quoted saying of the novel that she “doesn’t see what all the fuss is about”, and Richard Madden (Mellors) has said, “Come on guys, we’ve got Google . . . There’s nothing that’s going to shock us that we’re going to do in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is there?” Plus ça change — but also true, and preferable to the attempt to read the novel pornographically.

Still, the novel’s contempt for bohemianism led me to question a moment in an early draft of the script in which Connie — at the ball at which she meets Clifford — asks the musicians to switch from their sedate classical music to ragtime. This echoed not only a similar moment in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, but the scene in Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love in which Birkin mischievously asks a pianist accompanying Hermione’s Ballet Russe to switch to ragtime. This latter detail (like many in the film) was more Russell than Lawrence, and in the context of Lady Chatterley’s Lover it was even more unfortunate, since jazz is throughout the novel associated with shallowness. Tommy Dukes (the closest thing to a Lawrencian in Clifford’s Cambridge crowd) characterises modern love as “Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks”. Connie finds Venice as “almost enjoyment”, “all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!”

In fact, Connie is a middle-class, cosmopolitan, highly-cultured Scot — more Howard’s End Schlegel girl than proto-flapper. I therefore successfully suggested to Mercurio that the events be reversed. Rather than Connie requesting that the music be changed from classical to ragtime, she could be given the opposite request, and would make her first connection with Clifford whilst doing so. Similarly, I questioned Clifford’s being made to manifest indignation on discovering that his new bride was not a virgin, because it contradicted his character as someone to whom neither sex nor virginity were of much importance. Lawrence too cared little for virginity, but for the crucially different reason that he saw someone’s sexual history as irrelevant to their sexual present.

Just as “the mob” has over the decades read Lady Chatterley’s Lover looking for the “dirty bits”, so it has watched its various adaptations. This is a risk which any adaptor faces. But there are others. It is likely that Lawrence would have disapproved of audiences watching naked actors, and would have classified their acceptance of money in order to appear naked as literal and metaphorical prostitution. He may also have classified the interaction between them and an absent film audience as an ersatz connection bearing a similar relationship to real physical encounter as First World War warfare did to sincere hand-to-hand combat. Of course, he presented naked bodies abundantly to the eye in his paintings (as exhibited, then imprisoned, in the year following Lady Chatterley’s Lover), but these remain firmly within the artistic sphere of the imitative, as the nudity of an actor cannot.

On set last October my sense of this was reinforced when seeing how abruptly the actors were moved between non-contiguous scenes. They were indeed being paid to — all of a sudden, and acording to a shooting schedule of military-style discipline — snog a near-stranger; this must perforce be done with more sang-froid than mind-body connection. Economic imperatives demanded that the lead actors be more visually attractive than in the novel, and this is of course a problem faced by all adaptations of novels of which the protagonists are not spectacular beauties. As is the way with “costume” dramas, the costumes assumed a large visual importance, recalling (if not justifying) Lawrence’s point in his essay “Introduction to these Paintings” about “Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough”: “The coat is really more important than the man. It is amazing how important clothes suddenly become, how they cover the subject.”

But Lawrence concedes the intrinsic difficulties of the visual medium. “It is easy in literature . . . You can get some of the lusciousness of Hetty Sorrell’s ‘sin’, and you can enjoy condemning her to penal servitude for life. You can thrill to Mr Rochester’s passion, and you can enjoy having his eyes burnt out . . . But in paint it is more difficult. You couldn’t paint Hetty Sorrell’s sin or Mr Rochester’s passion without being really shocking.” Here he implicitly admits why it is harder for a film adaptation to achieve the aims of Lady Chatterley’s Lover than the novel itself.

Mercurio and I therefore had considerable discussions about the advisability of including oral sex. In one draft there were a few instances as performed by Mellors, and yet I thought the act anachronistic, depicted nowhere in Lawrence, and likely to have been disapproved of by him had he thought about it. Mercurio thought that there was less historic variation in sexual practice than I did, and that in any case he was adapting the novel for the present in the sexual language of the present. We discussed masturbation similarly, and this was cut entirely, so strong was Lawrence’s condemnation of it as solipsistic, barren, and that towards which “pornography” tends.

The scenes which enraged Second Wave feminists (Connie’s worship of the penis and Mellors’ disparagement of the clitoris) were not included. Much needed to be cut in order to contract the novel to 90 minutes, and in any case Mercurio felt that the novel on balance was pro-women, and that Mellors (like Clifford) was a knowing representation of aspects of the fractious, dying Lawrence.

Many viewers will not have noticed their absence. So successfully did Second Wave feminism knock Lawrence from the perch on which 1950s and ’60s adulation had placed him that he is now relatively little read, and the offending passages, like the outrage about them, have been largely forgotten.

There is one final irony in the novel’s fate — subtler but no less pervasive than those mentioned above. Lawrence’s idea that meaningful sex is part of a good life has become distorted into the idea that if you aren’t having lots of “good sex” (not what Lawrence meant by this), then you are somehow inadequate. Sex to us is still a cocktail, but it is important to our sense of self-worth that we drink — or are thought to be drinking — very many very good cocktails. And yet we are also — especially when we think about porn — beginning to wonder whether we have lost our way in our relations to sex. It might help to revisit the novel which, more than any other, got us to where we are in the first place, and which more than others tries to remedy precisely this problem. Revisiting it in this wisely restrained adaptation — or still better in its original words — we might see what medicine Lawrence was really trying to give us, and decide whether we want to — or can — take it.

The post Why ‘Lady Chatterley’ Still Provokes Us appeared first on Standpoint.

His thesis is not new: Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution and once the envy of the world in manufacturing and engineering, managed to squander that inheritance for a variety of reasons but has triumphantly discovered a lucrative new role as the world’s cultural powerhouse, a journey beautifully (or ludicrously, according to taste) encapsulated in Danny Boyle’s opening extravaganza for the London Olympics of 2012. So while the world long ago rejected our cars, it now laps up James Bond, our rock music, Harry Potter and so on. Sandbrook charts the journey of “the popular culture that has so entranced the world”. His emphasis is on the word “popular” and one of his central planks is that far being subversive, as so many self-styled cultural historians like to describe it, Britain’s popular culture “is actually much more conservative than we think” and owes everything to the influence of the Victorians.

This approach will doubtless enrage media studies academics and progressive columnists but that’s just how Sandbrook likes it. Indeed, he loves to debunk received opinion. Take the Beatles, again: “In the 20th century, perhaps only Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth rivalled them as symbols of Britishness,” he comments. But while their talent and hard work were not in doubt, their main interest was not revolution but making money.

Sandbrook takes a quirky approach to his subject, dividing it into four parts. The first is an account of how Britain changed from a country that made things into one that told stories for a living, a trail leading from J. Arthur Rank to Damien Hirst. Second is an examination of how British popular culture did not subvert the established order but actually reinforced it, epitomised by pop stars’ fondness for buying English country houses. Harry Potter and James Bond have their origins in Victorian public-school fiction: Tom Brown’s Schooldays still casts a long shadow over 21st-century story-telling.

Part Three looks at the lasting influence of Dickens and H.G. Wells, without whom, says Sandbrook, there would have been no Catherine Cookson, the influential science fiction writer John Wyndham, or Doctor Who (Sandbrook’s judgments are mostly very sound but he displays rather too much reverence for the BBC’s tiresome time traveller). And finally comes an examination of what Sandbrook terms “the single most striking theme in Britain’s popular culture in the last century: the cult of the individual”. The poster boy here is John Lennon, for whom Sandbrook reserves his most trenchant loathing — a self-mythologising narcissist who ended his days in “his promised land: a world of almost unlimited wealth, in which he never had to do any work”.

The book sometimes reads like an extended version of this magazine’s Overrated/Underrated feature. Lennon heads the Overrated line-up, closely followed by Ian Fleming, Damien Hirst and the rest of the YBAs, not forgetting their godfather Charles Saatchi, while J.K. Rowling gets an honourable mention for lack of originality.

The Underrated column contains many more names: to take a few, Billy Bunter, Catherine Cookson, George MacDonald Fraser (creator of Flashman), J.R. Tolkien (perhaps Sandbrook is a trifle too respectful but his analysis of the roots of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is masterly), the Boulting Brothers and Agatha Christie, condemned by the ineffable Polly Toynbee of the ultimate crime, that of being middle-class. But Sandbrook demonstrates how dark Christie’s work is and how it reflects the profound changes that Britain underwent after the First World War, in particular the slow disintegration of rural society and its replacement by a world where nobody knew where anybody really came from any more. Sandbrook might have added that Christie also analysed the notion of the banality of evil several decades before Hannah Arendt.

Along the way there are entertaining reflections on the role and roots of Britain’s extraordinarily successful videogame industry; on the importance of art schools in the 1950s and ’60s in promoting creativity in music as well as art; and on John Braine’s ruthless and amoral hero Joe Lampton, the archetypical aspirationist, as the fictional figure who epitomises the spirit of postwar Britain.

But perhaps, concludes Sandbrook, a real person, albeit with an invented name, best fills that role: Reg Dwight from Pinner, a grammar school boy who became a world-famous rock star as Elton John, came out long before it became routine for celebrities to do so, gave generously to charity, played the piano at Princess Diana’s funeral and was duly knighted. Most significantly, he turned the movie Billy Elliot, which itself addressed some of the key issues of the Thatcher era, into a hugely successful musical, another worldwide hit for UK Ltd. But decent man though he may be, there is something rather depressing at the thought that he defines an era. John Lennon or Elton John: not much of a choice, is it?

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