O Magnolia!
This tree takes me by surprise every spring. I went searching to see who else has felt ambushed by it. Claude came up with Robert Lowell, who wrote of “blossoms on our magnolia that ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white.” Odd, that: beauty as a kind of violence. Hmmm…
Quote of the Day
” The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.”
- Thorstein Veblen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
De Danann | The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (in Galway)!
I wonder what Handel would have made of it. Note the virtuoso performance on the Bodhrán by Johnny McDonagh.*
Long read of the Day
Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite
Riveting review by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books of Andrew Lownie’s book about the creep formerly known as Prince/Duke and the memoir of the girl to whom Jeffrey Epstein introduced him, and who took her own life last year.
Here is O’Hagan on Randy Andy.
In the days of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun – with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.’ Among the prince’s early girlfriends were Koo ‘Starkers’ Stark and Vicki Hodge, an actress whose better-known works include The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.
Mummy loved Andrew, and what Mummy loved, Mummy protected. By 1984, it seemed he’d got the basic point about dropping the floozies and finding the sort of woman who would ‘understand him’. Enter ‘Chatterbox One’, the codename given to Sarah Ferguson by air traffic controllers when she was learning to fly, a woman in happy possession of two O-levels who exuded jolliness and scads of suitability. (Her father was Prince Charles’s polo manager and it was Diana who set her up with the fourth-in-line.) After a few country weekends and acres of japes, Ferguson was installed as the Duchess of York.
Along with that ‘love of fun’ admired by the tabloids, Fergie brought a few money problems and a talent for reaching beyond her grasp, though not beyond Andrew’s grasping. As a couple, they have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met. Years ago, before it was fashionable, some of the youngsters in the family were calling Andrew ‘the Nonce’, and there was general dismay at the Yorks’ reckless avarice. The British royal fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions. The writing was on the wall, or on the T-shirt, when Sarah Ferguson appeared in the mid-1980s wearing one that said ‘Piste Again’. The duchess loved skiing and being on holiday and Andrew was addicted to having everything for free. What to do? Eventually, Andrew Lownie records, they were lent King Hussein of Jordan’s seven-bedroomed Castlewood House on the edge of Windsor Great Park. ‘Bored, Sarah started 1987 with three weeks at Sandringham, followed by a fortnight skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy…
And here is O’Hagan on Virginia Giuffre’s memoir…
There are sadnesses in her book, he writes, “that are too deep to rehearse, but all she really wanted was to be among people who had the kinds of freedom she wanted for herself”.
In her memoir she writes that Andrew raped her three times in three different locations. He denies attacking her, but he paid her a reported £12 million to go away. Throughout the process, Giuffre was hounded by the press and eviscerated by those who live with the terrifying delusion that royalty has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Maxwell took this young girl to Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends, who lived in a universe of deniability. People who know the former prince say that his main concern, after the Newsnight fiasco, was to ensure that his daughters would not be deposed and have to give evidence in support of his lies. (The Pizza Express in Woking will be for ever tattooed on their silent hearts.) A second reason for his ‘falling on his sword’, as they like spuriously to say, was that he wanted to make sure Giuffre didn’t spoil his mother’s platinum jubilee. After the best efforts of lawyers Harbottle & Lewis had failed, and as the plug was being pulled on her favourite son’s charities and his military affiliations and royal patronages, the queen still hoped that he might keep one or two titles, just to cheer him up. Time and Scotland Yard will tell if he can stay out of jail.
Books, etc.
This is delightful little book — a collection of 47 newspaper columns by a great Italian theoretical physicist. I like him especially because, like me, he’s never really accepted C.P. Snow’s ’two cultures’ distinction. Topics range from Aristotle and Copernicus to Mein Kampf , Black Holes and why he’s an atheist. And there’s a particularly fascinating essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s scientific work as a lepidopterist. The essays remind me of the newspaper columns of Umberto Eco, which are likewise a delight. And I’m personally grateful to Rovelli for suggesting a special fountain pen that I’d been looking for — the TWSBI Eco
It’s special because it fits neatly in a trouser pocket, never leaks and writes beautifully. So it goes everywhere with me.
Feedback
From Greg Jeffreys
It’s not that I disagree with your Gatsby observation, more that it’s a form of Venn diagram missing important elements. So we do have these people for whom the impacts upon the ‘little people’ of their actions neither register nor matter. But we’re missing the longeurs of their old money through this lens – for Trump could have been Gatsby in the novel, and the ‘nouveau’ of his ‘riches’ are disdained. And ‘the force that through the green fuse the drives the flower’ for Trump, Musk et al is a frantically energised thing: the need to be noticed at any cost – and the fact that they would be happy if the world ended when they did. Hence Iran is paying the price of the dark jewels lurking in the Epstein files…
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!
