The stones of Ruskin

For forty years I’ve had an ambition to visit Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house on the shores of Coniston Water, and a couple of weeks ago I achieved it!

Brantwood is big but not grand, and exceedingly interesting because of what it reveals about its owner. I’ve been interested in Ruskin ever since I made my first visit to Venice and read his Stones of Venice, but I hadn’t appreciated what a polymath he was, how wide his interests were and what a powerful influence he was on Victorian life and thought.

The house is set in a 250-acre estate which is threaded with paths designed by Ruskin to make different kinds of botanical and topographic points. We walked the path that circles the estate and leads up to the crag at the top with its sensational views of the lake below and the ‘Old Man’ peak that looms above it. All in all, a wonderful day out. Highly recommended.

The odd thing about the ‘Lake District’

As regular readers know, I recently had an enjoyable holiday in the Lake District, where we rented a house on the nice (i.e. quiet) side of Windermere. But I made the mistake on the blog of referring to “Lake Windermere” — which prompted a nice rebuke from James Cridland (‘mere’ means ‘lake’ so ‘Lake Windermere’ is a tautology), and a dish of humble pie for me.

But it also prompted other nice messages. Quentin, for instance, wrote that,

Enjoyed your comment about Lakes this morning; I remember now (but had forgotten) learning as a child that there is only one lake in the Lake District: Bassenthwaite. All of the others are meres, waters, tarns…

And it prompted a nice story from Keith Devlin:

“When we were first living in Lancaster in the late 1970s, we had 3-story, Edwardian, terraced house, and took an overseas visitor to the top floor to see the view. “You can see The Lakes from here,” I said as we entered the room. The visitor paused, and said, “All I can see are mountains.”

Which indeed was the case.

Quote of the Day

”England still stands outside Europe. Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart, and England is not of her flesh and body.”

• John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Keynes was writing in 1919. Nothing much changes.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Xavier Boderiou | Uilleann Pipes | The Plains Of Boyle (Hornpipe)

Link

Brief, but lovely.

Long Read of the Day

A concrete vision of the liberal democratic future

If we want a better future, then we need to have an idea of what we would want it to be like. This long, long essay by Noah Smith

It seems that the essay was prompted by watching an interview with, of all people, Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley’s idea of an intellectual.

The other day, I saw a very interesting interview segment with the investor and conservative political activist Peter Thiel. In it, he says that the future has to be a tangible thing in order for people to embrace it, and that — as things stand right now — the only tangible futures that have been put forward are Chinese techno-totalitarianism, Islamism, and West Europe style environmentalism.

Smith doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

Key pieces of the liberal democratic future vision remain to be filled in, and doing so will be a difficult and fraught process. Not everyone will be happy with the result, either. But it’s something we need to do, or we will leave the future to the people with darker, more dramatic visions that are sure to lead to nowhere good.

I agree, which is why I liked the essay. Hope you do too.

Lest we forget

I came on this tweet by Seb Schmoller yesterday.

The thread is here. It was Seb who first alerted me to Stolpersteine. Since then, whenever I’ve come on them in European cities, I pause to read and try to imagine what they mean. Seb’s thread includes a photograph of those outside the house where his grandparents lived.

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How not to run a country

This week’s Economist cover

Quote of the Day

”Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness that it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”

• Marcel Proust, 1922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Ark Head

I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly like the guy in the cartoon — except that my concern there’s something terribly wrong with our world, not just the Internet. The difficulty is that remedying any of the wicked problems that beset us lies way above my — or your — pay grade, and perhaps above anyone’s pay grade. And yet nobody writes about this, possibly because nobody wants to admit that we are locked in incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves.

All of which is by way of explaining why I thought this little essay by Venkatash Rao is so interesting. He sees the same enervating dilemma, but has an interesting take on our primary coping mechanism — the (Noah’s) Ark mentality.

We increasingly respond practically to the world without even attempting to make sense of it.

One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake.

We’ve concluded the flood cannot be stopped, and we’re building arks to retreat to…

Marvellous, thoughtful piece.

Putin’s latest frightening gambit lies at the bottom of the ocean

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The strange thing about Putin’s assault on Ukraine was that he clearly hadn’t consulted Valery Gerasimov, the guy who in 2013 had radically reconfigured Russian military doctrine at his behest (and is now chief of the Russian armed forces). Gerasimov’s big idea was that warfare in a networked age should combine the traditional kinetic stuff with political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military activities. This would mean, for example, that before firing a shot, you should first use social media and other network tools to misinform, confuse, polarise and demoralise the population of your adversary. In that way, democratic regimes would find it more difficult to motivate their citizens for combat.

Putin’s invasion in February ran directly counter to this doctrine; perhaps Gerasimov was not part of the inner circle of trusted cronies on whom Putin initially relied. Instead the assault was a 1940s-style blitzkrieg, except in Technicolor rather than black and white. And it hasn’t worked. So as he returns to the drawing board, it’s conceivable that the Russian leader has, finally, been talking to Gerasimov. If that’s the case, then their conversations will have rapidly turned to topics such as deniability, asymmetric warfare and identifying the critical weaknesses of their western adversaries.

Which in turn means that they will be thinking less about pipelines and much more about the undersea fibre-optic cables that now constitute the nervous system of our networked world. ..

Read on

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Britain’s new economic policy

Yours for only £21.24. Note the co-authors.

The Washington Post observed yesterday that the book

argues that Britain had become a “bloated state” with “high taxes” and “excessive regulation” and that only by taking an aggressively free-market, libertarian stance would shake the country into powerful economic growth. In this view, Britain looks particularly terrible when compared with fast-growing Asian economies.

“Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music,” the book wrote.

The authors of Britannia Unchained were, at the time, accused of chasing headlines. But as the Financial Times noted this week, Kwarteng’s other work on economic history shows an embedded distrust of financial markets and bankers that is newly relevant.

His doctoral thesis — focused on the less-than-headline-grabbing topic of William III’s decision to reissue England’s coinage in 1695-96 — argued that “the interest of the goldsmith and banker was anything but inimical to the wider good of the nation.”

Few would argue against the idea that Britain’s economy needs some sort of shake-up. The economy has slumped since the financial crash of 14 years ago, with a mean growth rate of just 1 percent for the years since compared with 2.7 percent between 1948 and 2008.

Kwarteng’s mini-budget appears to be creating a kind of supply-side economics shock therapy for Britain. The inspiration may come from America and, in particular, the U.S. counterpart to the British chancellor’s idol, Margaret Thatcher: President Reagan, who was said to be “starving the beast” when cutting back on state funding by diminishing government income.

My friend the social historian David Vincent (Whom God Preserve) noticed that the two serious actors in this drama — the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England — both wrote PhD dissertations in economic history as graduate students at Cambridge. He also pointed me to Amelia Gentleman’s review of Kwarteng’s rather good book on the British Empire, about which he seems commendably detached — possibly because his family hails from a former colony of said empire and are therefore inoculated against the Imperial Afterglow Syndrome that afflicts Boris Johnson & Co.

Kwarteng’s sharpest criticism of empire, writes Gentleman,

is of the “anarchic individualism” that ran through it. “The reliance on individual administrators to conceive and execute policy with very little strategic direction from London often led to contradictory and self-defeating policies, which in turn brought disaster to millions,” he writes. There are moments where you wonder if the criticism of the inconsistent, haphazard way that Britain’s imperial rule was imposed might equally be applied to the Conservative party’s reshuffle-heavy rule of the UK over the last decade.

You do indeed wonder.

Quote of the Day

”Malcolm Muggeridge, a garden gnome expelled from Eden, has come to rest as a gargoyle brooding over a derelict cathedral.”

• Kenneth Tynan

It’s quite an acute observation about St Mugg, who ended his days as a devout Catholic. But he was right about Stalin’s Russia, when he was a journalist in Moscow in the 1930s and many lefties and British intellectuals were unwilling to criticise Uncle Joe.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Il mio tesoro | Don Giovanni | John Dickie

Link

One of my favourite arias. James Joyce’s friend John McCormack used to sing it beautifully.

Long Read of the Day

Project Fear 3.0 – or the gatekeepers and the Tories

Fine blog post by Adam Tooze, who is as pissed off as I am about the current liberal astonishment at the depths to which Truss & Co will stoop. What did these commentators expect from such people? They are doing exactly what they said they would do — shrinking the state until — as a famous US reactionary once put it — they could drown it in a bucket.

Tooze is on song about this. Sample:

The important point is that in diagnosing your enemy the point is not to correct their behavior. The point is to defeat them.

You are engaged not in a pedagogic exercise, but in reconnaissance. The point is to expose who they are and what they are up to. The point is to help those of us who are opposed to them to be clearer in our judgements and tactics.

It is quite a different thing to write about the Truss government and the mess it is making as though you imagine that your criticism will make a difference, as though the aim of the game is persuasion and improvement. What I wonder do all these highly esteemed sources of economic expertise imagine their exchanges with Downing Street to be about? Who do they think they are talking to? Who, in fact, would imagine sitting down with these people to talk at all? How could you keep a straight face?

This a government of Tory hardliners trying to define the third iteration of post-Brexit Tory identity – May, Johnson, Truss. This is a government that thinks nothing of putting the Northern Irish agreement in play. When they gave away 45 billion to those on top incomes, they were under no illusions. They knew what they were doing. They know it will increase inequality. No harm in that as far as Truss is concerned. Will this drive interest rates up? Of course it will. They appear to relish that too.

So what, given who Truss, Kwarteng et al are, what is the purpose of the drumbeat of opprobrium?

Do read the whole thing.

Erratum

The Karl Popper quotation in yesterday’s edition included a ridiculous typo. It should have read:

”The belief that one can start with pure observations alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd.”

Thanks to Andrew Arends for tactfully pointing it out. And apologies to any Popperians out there who were annoyed by it.

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Langdale

Halfway through our walk.

Quote of the Day

”The belief that one can start with ours observations alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd.”

• Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

I’ve always found this to be a profound insight, but I have a vague recollection that he also expressed it more succinctly somewhere as “All observation is drenched in theory.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Oscar Peterson | C Jam Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Lost Ecological Paradise of the English Fenlands

Lovely essay by Annie Proulx on what was lost when Vermeulen & Co drained the fens.

I wanted to know how humans interacted with wetlands in the past and the present. The old image of an infinitely complex “web of life” holding the world together is still serviceable, but the web’s self-healing gossamer has been torn by humans in so many places it no longer functions. I found the story of the English fens was a story of the tearing-apart.

Worth your time, especially if you like the Fens.

Trump’s Heartless QAnon Embrace

Extraordinary NYT column by Michelle Goldberg about how Trump is now exploiting Qanon believers.

The title of the Reddit post this month seemed almost too shocking to be true: “My Qdad snapped and killed my family this morning.”

The post — by Rebecca Lanis, a 21-year-old from Michigan — was on a forum dedicated to people who’ve lost loved ones to QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy cult that imagines that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against blood-drinking pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. As The Detroit News would soon report, Lanis’s father, 53-year-old Igor Lanis, had indeed gone on a murderous rampage.

Lanis described how her father had fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020 election. He wasn’t violent, however, until the morning of Sept. 11, when he shot her mother, her sister and their dog, and was then killed in a shootout with the police. Lanis’s sister, despite being shot in the back and legs, survived. Her mother and the dog did not…

The era when conspiracy theories were harmless has long gone.

Edward Snowden is granted Russian citizenship

From The Register…

Snowden has been living in Russia since 2013 when the US charged him with espionage and he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport with the help of WikiLeaks and ended up stranded in Russia with a canceled passport. He was granted asylum in Russia and temporary residency until October 2020, when he became a permanent resident. He and his wife Lindsay reportedly applied for citizenship the following month.

My commonplace booklet

It’s not often that one comes across an ad that strikes a chord — but this Heineken one — which is about polarisation but of course also about beer — fits the bill. It’s 4 minutes 25 seconds long.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

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Quote of the Day

”I’d do anything for caviar and probably did.”

• Henry Kissinger — on visiting Moscow.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mendelssohn | Overture ‘The Hebrides’ | LSO & John Eliot Gardiner

Link

Long Read of the Day

Gareth Evans — philosophy’s lost prodigy

Nice memoir by Lincoln Allison in Engelsberg Ideas. Reading it, I was reminded of Keynes’s memoir of Frank Ramsey (another genius who tied tragically young) in his Essays in Biography.

University College, Oxford, October 1964: the economics fellow, David Stout, has assembled the twelve freshmen PPE students for their first class. This is an unusual procedure as lectures and individual tutorials are the normal means of teaching, but Stout is preoccupied with persuading any government and political party that will listen of the virtues of something called ‘value added tax’ and wants to meet all the students together. I am one of them and I have done none of the preparation for this class, being entirely preoccupied with such matters as rugby and new friends, but I am hoping that my ‘A’ and ‘S’ level economics from fifteen months earlier will enable me to get by. Actually, there are only eleven of us. Enter the twelfth to the traditional sarcastic remark from the tutor. The new arrival has long black hair and a black beard and wears a black scholar’s gown. With his hooked nose and rimless spectacles he seems like an edgy and hyperactive raven. He is carrying all six of the books recommended for the class which he deposits unceremoniously on the floor. ‘So this is economics?’ he demands and David Stout replies that these books are about welfare economics which is regarded by many as the foundation of the subject. ‘It’s based on a mistake,’ snaps the raven and the rest of the class is devoted to the tutor defending his subject from aggressive interrogation. It is increasingly obvious that the raven is at least the intellectual equal of the tutor…

Do read on.

Books, etc.

Just the Mann

My wife and I recently finished Colm Tóibín’s fictionalised biography of Thomas Mann. I was less impressed by it than the folks who eulogised it on its dust-jacket. You know the kind of guff — “a remarkable achievement” (John Banville); “a moving and intimate portrait by one master of another” (Anna Funder); “a great imaginative achievement — immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing” (Richard Ford); “no living novelist dramatises artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín, or conveys so well the entanglement of imagination and desire” (Garth Greenwell).

Contd. p.94, as they say in Private Eye.

I was surprised to be so disappointed by it because I had really admired The Master, Tóibín’s fictionalised biography of Henry James. But perhaps the reason is that Thomas Mann was a less interesting character than dear old Henry. Of course had, perforce, an interesting life because of circumstances beyond his control (first Hitler and, later, Joe McCarthy), but in this imaginary he comes across as a solipsistic bore. The really interesting character in the book turns out to be his remarkable wife, Katia — and, as chance has it, she actually wrote a memoir, so maybe that should be next on our list.

My commonplace booklet

Catspeak on Trump’s assertion that he can declassify documents at will.

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Katchenchunga

The Old Man of Coniston, the famous Lakeland peak, seen on Saturday from John Ruskin’s estate at Brentwood on the other side of the lake.

The heroines and heroes of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons christened it Katchenchunga. Nowadays, it frequently crops up in crossword clues.

Quote of the Day

”Goodby, Mr Zanuck. It certainly has been a pleasure working for 16th Century Fox.”

• Jean Renoir, on leaving Hollywood,

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Have I Told You Lately

Link

Long Read of the Day

To the Depths and Back

Christopher Sandford’s utterly compelling review in The Hedgehog Review of Kevin Birmingham’s biography of Dostoevsky. Here’s how it opens…

Shortly after dawn on the morning of Saturday, December 22, 1849, the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky stood on a black-draped scaffold erected on the drilling ground at Semyonovsky Square in his native St. Petersburg, and prepared to die at the hands of a firing squad. It was a cold, overcast, Russian winter day, with flakes of snow falling at the condemned man’s feet. Dostoevsky was bound to a stake between two other men, a biblical trinity he would have recognized, with nine more prisoners awaiting their turn in the wings. All of them had been convicted of what the presiding court called a “conspiracy of ideas” to undermine the tsarist regime. On the frozen ground behind the scaffold stood a row of carts laden with twelve empty coffins.

A black-robed priest mounted the scaffold and faced the first group of prisoners at the stake. He quoted Romans 6: “The wages of sin is death.” Yet by acknowledging their sins, the condemned could still hope to inherit eternal life. All three of the bound men silently kissed the priest’s cross when it was offered to them. It’s said that Dostoevsky remained calm, remarking to the man next to him on the scaffold that he had recently read Le dernier jour d’un condamné, Victor Hugo’s novel about a criminal facing the guillotine who believes that in the end Christ’s law will replace that of man. Perhaps it was one of those timeless moments, when eternity intrudes into the world and we catch a glimpse of what the life of man was meant to be and, by the grace of God, may yet be.

There was a drumroll. No fewer than forty-five soldiers, in three rows of fifteen, shuffled into position in front of the scaffold, their rifles cocked…

I was hooked right to the end.

My commonplace booklet

The problem with rowing your own boat…

… is that you can’t see where you’re going.

But now there’a a solution. And Quentin saw it at the Southampton Boat Show.

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The Valley

The head of the Langdale Valley, Friday.

Quote of the Day

“A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years.”

• Arthur Koestler, 1951, in a New York Times book review.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Autumn Leaves

Link

Seems appropriate at the end of a lovely seasonal break.

Long Read of the Day

 Princeton University is the world’s first Perpetual Motion Machine

I’ve long been sceptical of the esteem enjoyed by Ivy League universities, and for years have regularly referred to Harvard as “a hedge fund with a nice university attached”. But it turns out that Harvard is no longer the leading player in this league. A shocked Malcolm Gladwell (he of the $50k lecture fee) has discovered that Princeton is now the leading practitioner in the education racket with Harvard coming in a poor second.

Princeton University has an endowment of $37.7 billion. Over the past 20 years, the average annual return for the endowment has been 11.2 percent. Let us give Princeton the benefit of the doubt and assume that at least some of that was luck and maybe unsustainable, and that a more reasonable prediction going forward would be that Princeton can average a return on its investments of an even 10 percent a year. That puts Princeton’s endowment return next year at roughly $3.77 billion.

Now—what is Princeton’s annual operating budget? $1.86 billion. The arithmetic here is not hard. $3.77 billion in investment income minus $1.86 billion in operating expenses leaves you with $1.91 billion.

Princeton could let in every student for free. The university administrators could tell the U.S. government and all of its funding agencies, “It’s cool. We got this.”

They could take out the cash registers in the cafeteria, hand out free parking to all visitors, give away Princeton sweatshirts on Nassau Street, and fire their entire accounts receivable staff and their entire fundraising staff tomorrow. They could say to every one of the hardworking professors on their staff: “You never have to spend even a second writing a grant proposal again.” Free at last! Free at last!

So the question becomes: will Princeton do this? Is the Pope a Muslim?

Read it and wonder. What is the point of these Ivy League outfits? Or, at the very least, why do they still charge exorbitant tuition fees? Harvard’s tuition fee this year is $52,659.

Adobe can’t Photoshop out the fact its $20bn Figma deal is a naked land grab

Yesterday’s Observer column:

So why would Adobe want to lay out such a mountain of cash to acquire this minnow? The answer is that its leaders are thinking ahead and they see a strategic threat in the making. In the networked world, more and more work is being done by geographically dispersed teams who have to collaborate online. And in that context, project management and the creation of workflows that are efficient, user-friendly and agile is moving centre stage. As James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, might have said: “It’s the workflow, stupid!”

And Figma, to all intents and purposes, already owns that workflow space, whereas Adobe only makes tools that people use…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Outside a village shop in the Lake District.

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Dish of the Day: Humble Pie

The caption on yesterday’s photograph from our window in the Lake District ended with the sentence “That’s Lake Windermere in the distance”.

This prompted a lovely note from James Cridland.

As my late grandmother would have sharply reminded you, the “mere” in Windermere means lake, and therefore the body of water is Windermere: never “Lake Windermere”. She lived close by for most of her life, after a career that included code-breaking in the war (both in Bletchley Park and Egypt). Every morning was spent in her conservatory, watching the river in Staveley go by, doing the cryptic crossword from The Times. The other thing she was keen on was telling people off if they said they were going to “ring up for a chat”. She, correctly, pointed out that the “up” was superfluous.

I have dispatched an ethereal apology to the lady in question, and ordered up a dish of the blogger’s customary meal.

Quote of the Day

“I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

• John Maynard Keynes, 1917, in a letter to Duncan Grant

I wonder how many current Treasury officials think the same about the current Administration.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton and B.B. King | Worried Life Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How Memes Led to an Insurrection

An interesting introduction to the role that memes now play in our political and democratic life. An excerpt from a new book by Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg.

“We’re storming the Capitol! It’s a revolution!” a woman who identified herself only as Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, told a reporter outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. She had a blue Trump flag slung across her neck like a cape. Police had just maced her in the face, she recounted through tears.

As soon as this video of Elizabeth hit Twitter, it went viral. The insurrection she’d taken part in, a very real and coordinated attempt to thwart the democratic process, was also a surreal spectacle—millions watched the chaos unfold in real time on broadcast TV and on social media—and Elizabeth was one of the minor characters. On Twitter and TikTok, she became fodder for internet jokes. People remixed the video with Auto-Tune. Sleuths spun conspiracy theories: Maybe Elizabeth was a liar who hadn’t really been maced. Maybe the insurrection was a hoax. Content was crafted to fit different political orientations and different platforms, and to delight or offend different audiences.

Elizabeth had been ‘memed’. And one of the significant things about Trump was that he was the first major US politician with an instinctive understanding of how to coin and exploit memes. After all #StopTheSteal was a memetic slogan. And so, of course, was #MeToo.

But social media did not create culture wars. Instead, we’ve found, social media did to culture wars what spinach did to Popeye—it juiced them up. Suddenly you didn’t need a radio show to get your idea to millions of people. You just needed a viral tweet, or to figure out the desires of a Facebook algorithm programmed to boost outrageous and emotionally stirring content. With the scale and ease of social media, culture warriors from across the country and globe were able to find one another and gather in communal spaces where their ideas could grow.

Great essay. Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

From Quentin’s blog.

“If counterclockwisely isn’t a word”, he writes, “I think it should be”.

Me too.

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The view from our window

We’re in the Lake District for a break. That’s Windermere in the distance.

More on that state funeral…

Perceptive and illuminating summing-up on the invaluable Tortoise Media morning newsletter (You have to become a member to receive it. IMO it’s well worth it.)

Planning.It was good and it paid off. The Duke of Norfolk spent 20 years on it. By the end 280 broadcasters, senior military and clergy were attending his meetings, which went on for hours. Sky positioned 275 cameras in Westminster Abbey and along the processional routes. The BBC had 213 more. There were no bad angles. Nothing went wrong, and no wonder: money was no object. Much more than the £8.4 million spent on the Queen Mother’s funeral will have been spent on her daughter’s, and whatever the total it will be seen as a good investment because ceremony is part of the British brand.

PR and self-censorship. In the past fortnight’s praise of duty and service there has been scarcely a murmur about untaxed income, cash for honours, suitcases of Qatari money or the eight-figure sum paid with the late Queen’s help to settle her son’s child sex abuse case. (Also file under: Manners. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.)

Covid. Commemoration of a 70-year reign and a 96-year life was always going to prod people to reflect on their own lives, loves, losses and mortality – but especially so after 180,000 deaths in varying degrees of lockdown.

Past. Forget for a moment holy oils and Arthurian legend, which will return to royal commentary with next year’s coronation. World War Two was the foundation of the Queen’s legitimacy. She and her parents were intimately associated with the war effort, eclipsing memories of the Abdication Crisis and rumours of Nazi sympathies in high places; forging the mantra of duty that served her (and, royalists say, her country) so well; and ultimately enabling her family to claim a stature it could never have claimed anywhere else in complicated northern Europe. It helped that Britain was on the winning side.

Quote of the Day

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think that it’s their fault.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Prelude (Suite No. 1 for solo cello) | YoYo Ma

Link

Long Read of the Day

What’s Breaking Democracy?

Terrific review essay on Project Syndicate by Bill Janeway on Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.

This is an enlightening essay. I can say that because I’ve read both books, and Bill found things in them that I had missed. This is how he opens the subject…

My colleagues Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson share an academic home at the University of Cambridge, and their new books share a common purpose: how to understand the dysfunctionality that has beset Western democracies. They explore that question in very different but complementary ways, offering deep insights into the disequilibrium dynamics of democratic capitalism. When read together, one sees clearly how the dissolution of Gerstle’s Neoliberal Order has stoked the disorder that Thompson analyzes.

The contrast between the two books owes much to the authors’ backgrounds. Gerstle, a historian of political ideas, ideologies, and cultures, writes from an American perspective. In The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, he tracks how initially radical political programs become institutionalized as all-encompassing “orders” when the opposition accepts their terms. Thus, the New Deal Order was established when the Republican Eisenhower administration chose not to try to repeal the Democratic Roosevelt administration’s central institutional reforms.

…

Thompson’s perspective is Eurasian, and her account … is driven by a granular analysis of the geopolitics of energy. Once oil began to supplant coal at the start of the twentieth century, the political economy of energy became international, and securing access to oil became a high priority for most countries. Thompson focuses presciently on Germany, which chose to become existentially dependent on Soviet and then Russian oil and gas. Strikingly, her book was completed just prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Why blog?

Advice from Robin Rendle:

Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm. How do you get started though? Well, screw the research! A blog post can anything, a half-thought like this one or a grandiose essay with a million footnotes. It can look like anything, too: you can have a simple HTML-only website or you can spend a month on the typography, getting every letter-spaced part of it just right.

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.

Or maybe they won’t. But you’ll never know unless you write that half-assed thing that’s in your head right now…

I agree wholeheartedly with his rule about self-hosting. It’s why this blog is also always available on my own site — https://memex.naughtons.org — and it will still be there even if the proprietors of Substack and I fall out.

Thanks to Om Malik (Whom God Preserve) for the link.

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Quote of the Day

”In this country, it is rare for anyone, let alone a publisher, to take writers seriously.”

• Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph, 1979

Despite that, Powell managed to sell quite a lot of books. I’ve never fully understood his charm, but perhaps that’s because I was not brought up as an English public schoolboy.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Four reels: Father Kelly’s; Reconciliation; Mountain Road; MacArthur Road

Link

A hyper-energetic performance at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. Caitlin Warbelow, Patrick Mangan, and Troy MacGillivray on fiddles with Johnny Cuomo and Jake Charron on guitars.

Long Read of the Day

What Makes Brain Fog So Unforgiving?

I’ve been thinking for two years that so-called ‘Long Covid’ is one of the most worrying — and under-discussed — consequences of the pandemic. Particularly terrifying is the “brain fog” which afflicts many sufferers. This startling essay by Ed Yong is the best thing I’ve read about it to date.

Here’s how it opens…

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted…

Worth your time.

Books, etc.

Roy Foster on Seamus Heaney

Roy Foster is an eminent Irish historian — and an accomplished biographer (his two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats is terrific); and Seamus Heaney was a great Irish poet and a Nobel laureate.

This book is a sensitive exploration of Heaney’s poetic journey, written by a scholar who both understands the cultural context in which the poet evolved and loves his work. “I remember”, he writes in the Preface,

”where I was sitting when I read ’North’ in 1975 and felt that authentic sensation of the hairs standing up on my head. Nearly twenty years later, I read ‘At The Well-head’ in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed by enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years. And reading ‘Album’ in his last collection, the attempts to embrace a lost father resonated to profoundly that my eyes filled with tears.”

It’s a truly wonderful book. I have a friend who also loves Heaney’s poetry, and had the great idea of reading it alongside the poems themselves. That’s really what it deserves.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!