The Critic Magazine

NOVEMBER BROUGHT VAST “FREE Palestine” marches to the streets of Britain and the world. Those who protested were not put off by unabashed demands for Israel’s elimination or that organisers included Muhammad Kathem Sawalha — whose history as a senior

Editor: Christopher Montgomery Deputy Editor: Graham Stewart Art Director: Martin Colyer Designers: David Rice and Sofia Azcona Production Editor: Nick Pryer Deputy Production Editor: Neil Armstrong Literary Editor: David Butterfield Executive Editor

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INTERNATIONAL LAW TENDS to be poorly understood, even among lawyers. But it retains an aura among laymen which frequently leads to its invocation as a form of higher law, though often in a severely mangled form. Recent events such as the wars in Ukra

Political heroes are difficult to find these days. This may be one reason why Rod Dreher, along with members of the American Alt Right, has taken to eulogising Viktor Orbán (GUARDIAN OF LIBERAL FREEDOMS, NOVEMBER) along with the Hungarian prime minis

THE BBC RECENTLY REPEATEDa documentary series I made some time ago, which provided a lovely opportunity to hear from members of the history community. One lady emailed under the suggestive subject line “inappropriate handling”. She continued: I’m jus

• “Jingle Bells!” Rishi is singing. “Starmer smells! Corbyn ran away!” We are putting up decorations to get ready for Christmas in a place called Chequers. It is a house in the country like the one we have in Yorkshire, only not as nice. The swimming

THE RECENT PUBLICATION of the independent legal review into NatWest’s ill-starred attempt to debank Nigel Farage gives me the excuse to offer what I trust will be the very final words on this curious affair. When you cut through the thousands of hyst

‘‘FOR WANT OF A NAIL, THE SHOE WASlost,” the proverb begins. “For want of a plan, the pandemic was lost” should be where Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry turns its gaze. Deeply enjoyable to the media though it is, with its spectacle of repeated “gotcha”

● The dishonesty of the standfirst given to a letter to the Guardian struck me at once: DESPERATE MIGRANTS ARE CROSSING THE CHANNEL BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE. In other words, the migrants are automata, machines. Having no choice, they get int

NO ONE SHOULD BELIEVE THAT THIS country is corrupt in any serious way. Despite decades of networking and friendships it has been shown to me how uninfluential I am. Not that I attempted to flex. When one of our planning applications was called in for

“HANS … ARE WE THE BADDIES?” The moment of ‘‘Hans self-realisation in a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch as two Nazis in a bunker examine their uniform and realise that their symbol is a skull. “I mean,” says David Mitchell, “what do skulls make you t

● YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN for not having heard of Edwin Savage. Professors of twentieth-century literature have gone through entire careers without having so much as heard the mention of his name. In fact, Savage (1892-1956), as a glance at the 400-wor

IF I TOLD YOU THAT A COLLECTION OF POEMS written 2,000 years ago was sent by his wife to a man serving in the trenches of the First World War, and he replied to her that he was devoting five minutes a day amid the fighting to reading them, you might

HAS THE OLD LADY of Threadneedle Street lost her marbles? Can the Bank of England still do anything right? In its first 25 years of independence from the Treasury and the politicians it delivered an inflation rate which, on average, was exactly on t

THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THEY WERE doing, those wandering scholars of yore. Around 1208 an unknown number of clergymen left Oxford for Reading, London, East Anglia — even Paris. An Oxford woman somehow died, one or more scholars were summarily hanged, a

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME how best to solve the crisis in the Middle East. Perhaps this is because I have close personal experience of different cultures, having spent part of my gap year on one of my father’s private islands in the Seychelles. (Also, when

STOOD SIDE BY SIDE THESE TWO BOOKS look like a comedy double act. At 820-plus pages long, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming is an Oliver Hardy-sized volume. Adam Sisman’s The Secret Life of John le Carré, on the other hand, is thinner than Stan Laur

OUR ISLE MAY BE SCEPTRED, OUR PLOTblessed, but in one respect we English have been rather unlucky. In Dante the Italians have a poet who feels knowable: anyone who glances at the Divine Comedy becomes privy to his likes and dislikes, his tastes and h

TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines

AQUESTION FOR YOUR NEXTChristmas quiz: which knighted British architectural historian went to the same school as the composer Richard Wagner? Answer: Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), the émigré German scholar who became one of the most influential pub

IN JUNE LAST YEAR GENERAL SIR PATRICKSanders, the Chief of the General Staff, told an audience, “This is our 1937 moment … We must, therefore, meet strength with strength from the outset and be unequivocally prepared to fight …” Just a few months lat

ANYONE WORKING IN JOURNALISMhas received letters from people claiming to have evidence of a vast conspiracy against them, often handwritten in tiny scrawls over many pages. They are terribly sad, and they go straight into the bin. HarperCollins, rece

IN 2013, ROBIN THICKE RELEASED “Blurred Lines”, a song that would swiftly become infamous for its “rapey” lyrics and objectifying video. Progressive think-pieces denounced it, student unions banned it, and Thicke’s career never recovered. Like many a

KEHINDE ANDREWS, PROFESSOR OF“Black Studies” at City University, Birmingham, has made a name for himself as the go-to talking head for punchy racial culture war debates on British TV. Once, on the BBC programme The Big Questions, Andrews and I were i

THE YEAR 2023 HAS BEENrich in works composed in tempore belli. The most impressive is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (William Collins, £26) by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. This is an ambitious and

A BOOKISH FRIEND SAID TO ME recently, “It’s been a terrible year for books.” Well, up to a point. The sheer volume of new novels, together with the difficulty of seeing through the thickets of bandwagonesque trendcentred publishing, mean it’s easy to

FOR ALL THE TIDES OF fashionable cant that continue to spill out of its upper reaches, the UK publishing industry is, was, and you suspect always will be a deeply reactionary concern. Nowhere is this innate conservatism more flagrant than in the clou

Anton … and on ● THIS IS A WARNING OF HEAVY weather ahead. Next year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Anton Bruckner with incoming gales of his symphonies, nine of them numbered and two marked “0” and “00”. To add to the confusion, the symphonie

● I HEAR THINGS ARE PRETTY rocky over in the Middle East, but how infinitely more dreadful had the Cambridge “Uni” production of Handel’s Saul actually gone ahead! Just in time, thank God, they realised how inflammatory it would be to perform this un

● YOU CAN STICK YOUR LITTLE biscuits, Proust: music is how I travel in time. Family Sunday lunch, mid-1980s? That’s a double bill of Love’s Forever Changes and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark (thanks, Dad). Swapping my Co-Op tabard for my Miss Selfri

● THINGS GENERALLY TEND to move at a stately pace in the museum world but currently there is a frenetic air to proceedings. In Britain, the reported theft of some 2,000 items from the British Museum set in course a train of events that still has a lo

● THERE NEVER WAS A RIVER in an Ibsen play or a gun in a Chekhov without a drowning or a shooting as the outcome. Nor are there many stage renditions of Irish life in the countryside which proffer good cheer about familial coexistence.Marina Carr’s 1

● BIOPICS ARE A TRICKY BEAST. Anyone who’s lived a life worth putting on a cinema screen will have done a hell of a lot more than you can squeeze into two hours. You can try to offer a bunch of tiny slices from childhood to adult triumph or defeat, o

●ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT investments in contemporary architecture in the last 15 years has been made by Alain de Botton, the writer and public intellectual who established his reputation young by writing a novel, Essays in Love, published in 1993

‘‘I GOT SOME!” My mother, round about 1989, plonking a Sainsbury’s carrier bag triumphantly on our scrubbed pine kitchen table. She’d driven to Chester at 7am on a Saturday to queue for a little jar of magic that was going to transform our lives. Cer

CHRISTMAS IS JINXED. It’s a notoriously good day for crimes, invasions and massacres. I’m not sure that floods, tsunamis and earthquakes are more frequent at Christmas than at other times, but, because they are more newsworthy, the media love to spoi

• SCOTLAND BOASTS MANY SPLENDOURS. Wherever one looks there is something at which to wonder. Look down upon Lochs Lomond, Lubnaig or Maree at the majesty and the mystery of their deep waters. Look up from Sauchiehall Street, or from Union Street and

THE USUAL WAY TO LEARN about wine, championed by various “educators” and “communicators”, is to focus on grape varieties and how they taste. You will learn how cabernet sauvignon smells of blackcurrants, sauvignon blanc is redolent of green peppers a

YO, MOOKS. And, also, ho, ho, ho mooks. For, lo, the baby Jesus is upon us and He’s a total stickler for what we wear, favouring twinkling this and glittering that, and a whole lot more coruscation going down. At this point, please insert the usual l

FOR A MULTI-BILLION pound industry largely funded by businesses renowned for cold-hearted ruthlessness, racing is astonishingly naive. The sport is facing an existential crisis. For years there have been worries about poor prize money, small fields,

SCHOOL FEES PANIC is intense. The irony being that we don’t pay them … our parents do. But naturally the onus is still on Will and me to keep up with the scare stories, while the boomers contemplate their clutter i.e. Imminent VAT on school fees, wit