England's shameful conquest of itself

Nearly three decades ago, Danielle and I saw a remarkable production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Slightly over three decades before that I saw the same play, as a special treat offered to us schoolkids, at a remarkable place: the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, which is outdoors and cut into the rock above a sea cliff. That means you get a stunning view of the sea in the background and gulls occasionally swoop over the stage, which is wonderful.

However, the special treat was neither special nor a treat to me. Because one of the things about the Minack is that we had to sit on seats cut into the granite of the hillside. I guess people who’ve been before bring cushions, but we had no such comfortable accessories. The performance, at least as I remember it, and to be fair I should underline that fourteen-year-olds aren’t the most patient of audiences for classical drama, was slow and tiresome. Well before the play had ended, my backside was telling me that it had been far too long. 

The experience left me anything but well-disposed to the play.

But then came that second and outstanding performance, at the National Theatre in London, in 1995. What made it so outstanding? 

First and foremost, it was the casting of Fiona Shaw in the part of the king. A woman playing a king? It was an inspired choice. I think one of the central concerns of the play is the contrast between the king, seen as effeminate and weak, and the character of his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, strong and manly. One of the things the great directors of Shakespeare can do, with writing of that quality, is turn some of the messages around, so The Merchant of Venice, for instance, becomes the tragedy of Shylock rather than the triumph of Portia, or The Taming of the Shrew turns from a celebration of husbandly authority to teach an uppity wife a salutary lessons, into a shocking presentation of male abuse of a woman whose only offence was to show a little spirit.

Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard showed him as feminine rather than effeminate, while Henry came across as macho, not manly, as a bully, not a figure of strength.

Fiona Shaw as Richard II
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

That was breathtaking. But it wasn’t the only aspect of the performance that has stuck with me. One of the great speeches of the play is the dying soliloquy of John of Gaunt, in which he describes England as ‘this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’. It’s one of those Shakespeare speeches like ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet which has an audience listening to it in silent awe, and I imagine puts massive pressure on the actor to bring new life into what might otherwise come across as clichéd.

Gaunt had just got going and tomblike silence had settled on the place when, suddenly, a mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the audience.

I don’t know whether its owner has recovered from the PTSD with which the experience must have left him. All I know is that Gaunt paused while the owner scrabbled in his pockets with the eyes of the entire audience on him, tracking the phone down to silence it. And then Gaunt went on.

Now the thing about that speech is that it sounds at first as though it’s going to be a hymn to England. Indeed, if it’s ever quoted at all, it’s always just the bit about the ‘sceptred isle’ that gets trotted out. If you go on to the end, though, you find it’s quite the opposite. What Gaunt is saying is that England has been brought low, and its decline is down to corruption and pettifogging officialdom. Above all, it’s something England has done to itself. 

That England that was wont to conquer others  
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

It conquered itself. No one else is to blame. The wound was self-inflicted.

That all came to mind when I came across a recent poll that showed that a clear majority of British voters now understand that Brexit has done the UK harm.

Overall, only 22% still think that Brexit has been good for the economy, while nearly 50% think it has been damaging. Only 9% believe that it has done any good for the National Health Service while over 45% think it has been harmful, which is particularly ironic, since the snake-oil salesmen that championed Brexit, especially Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, promised that it would provide an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Perhaps more telling still, while many voters backed Brexit not for any high-minded principle, but out of simple xenophobia and against immigration, 53% now believe that Brexit has made it more difficult rather than easier to control British borders.

Brexit, it seems, no longer has any redeeming features for most British electors. And yet who gifted that poisoned chalice to Britain? Why, voters themselves. 

Predominantly English voters.

Well, if the bard’s to be believed, that was upholding a long tradition. England imposing a shameful conquest on itself. Which leaves only one question.

If it inflicted the wound on itself, does it have the spirit, now voters have recognised the mistake, to find its own cure too?

The pathetic fallacy, or not the weather we hoped for

It was forty-five years ago, but I still remember as if it were yesterday a pronunciation exercise I was given in language classes as part of my French degree.

It proclaimed that if a Frenchman talks about the weather, that means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather, whether that’s the weather as it is today, the weather of the past or the weather we might have in the future.

I was reminded of this today by a piece of news Danielle mentioned. She’s a member of several groups of expatriates living in the Valencia region. It seems the associated websites are being inundated by regrets from foreigners who have recently moved here.

Certainly, the weather’s giving us plenty of material for English conversations.

My way home from the shops this morning
The heavens weeping at our sad condition?

“We came for the glorious weather. And it just keeps pourng,” they complain.

To which the locals reply, “we love it! You don’t know what you’re wishing for. We know the heat that’s coming. Enjoy this while you can.”

On the more literary side of my degree course, we also studied the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is the belief that inanimate objects, even the whole of nature itself, can sometimes reflect human moods or events.

One of the most powerful examples is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. On the day before the Ides of March, a terrible storm strikes Rome. The character Casca is awestruck by it:

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

Yep. Not quite “A deep depression has moved over the East coast of Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea, bringing high winds and potentially electric storms to Rome.” 

No, this isn’t meteorology. This is the sauciness of humans (got to love that way of putting it) getting right up the noses of the Gods. And, indeed, Rome’s in for a bad time the next day, the Ides, when Julius Caesar will be assassinated.

Windswept moors, as in Wuthering Heights

There are plenty of other examples. Why, the very title of Wuthering Heights uses the pathetic fallacy: ‘wuthering’ is the howling wind worrying away at the people and the buildings it encounters. Again, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip comments on the weather just before things turn a bit hairy:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs… Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Not exactly “turned a bit blowy and wet”, is it? Not “are we ever going to get a Spring?”, either, or “bet Wimbledon gets washed out”. Rather more intense than the usual comments Englishmen tend to make, however expert they may be at talking about the weather. Also rather more portentous, rather more wrapped up with human events than I generally look for in my weather reports.

Well, with all due respect to Shakespeare, Dickens and Emily Brontë, I always took a bit of a supercilious view of all this kind of stuff. “What, the weather reflects moods on Earth? Pull the other one,” I’d tend to say.

Now, though, I’m less sure. Is it simply a coincidence that the weather’s been atrocious for over five weeks now, which is just as long as the Coronavirus lockdown’s lasted in Spain? As any good conspiracy-theorist would say, I think not.

No. With my apologies to those who moved to Valencia for the lovely weather and have found nothing but disappointment so far, I have to say that you may have been caught up in something much bigger than any of us.

This could be the very heavens weeping over our lack of preparedness for the pandemic. Over our terrible and constraining lockdown. Over the illness and death sweeping the world.

Still. At least you can share the awe. This may be the first time that we’ve ever been privileged to see the pathetic fallacy actually borne out in reality.

Something to remember with pride, I’d say, and rejoice in while it lasts.

Mistakes commemorated, whether a revolution's or my own

Ah, the seventh of November. A bit of a special day. For me and for Russia

It’s the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Lenin addressing the crowd during the October Revolution
A moment that didn't lead to quite what was hoped
But that isn't the only mistake its anniversary brings to my mind

“The October Revolution?” I hear you cry, “In November?”

Indeed. One of the reactionary aspects of the Russian Tsarist regime, overthrown by the Bolsheviks in that great revolution, was that it had stuck with the old Julian calendar long after practically everyone it dealt with had moved to the Gregorian.

The Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar who launched it, didn’t get the leap years quite right. The result was that as the centuries rolled by, the calendar year got further and further out of step with the actual movement of the earth around the sun (or, as modern science has it, the movement of the earth and the sun around each other). The time it takes for the earth to go around the sun (or, as modern science has it, etc.) isn’t exactly 365 days, but more like 365.256 and then a bit. That extra fraction eventually begins to add up.

So the Gregorian calendar adds an extra day every four years, in leap years, but then adds the additional refinement of not making century years leap years except, as a further refinement still, if the century year is a millennium year. 1900 wasn’t a leap year but 2000 was.

That keeps the years pretty closely aligned with the earth’s movement.

But the Gregorian calendar was launched in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Well, the Protestants and the Orthodox were a bit wary of anything papal, so they didn’t immediately switch with the Catholic nations. That meant that Britain, for instance, was ten days behind most of Europe in the seventeenth century, leading to such charming little discoveries as the coincidence of the deaths of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, and William Shakespeare on the same date, 23 April 1616, but ten days apart.

It’s a lovely coincidence only slightly tainted by the fact that scholars today claim that Cervantes died on 22 April and the 23rd was the day he was buried. Still, why spoil a great little story just for the sake of the truth? After all, few of our political leaders these days do.

So you can see where this is heading. The revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power happened on 25 October 1917 in Russia. Pretty much everywhere else it was 7 November. That is the date that the event is now commemorated.

Why’s it so special to me? Well, not because of the revolution. Once I thought it was a pretty remarkable event, opening the doors to a better future for the victims of oppression everywhere. Not any more.

These days, it seems to me that the Russian revolution was tainted in its very roots. Not by the violence to which it led. The revolution itself involved little violence, and it was only because of the attempted counter-revolution against it that a bloody civil war broke out.

No, the problem was that it was led by people who knew they were right. They were expressing the force of history, which is at least as magnificent and all-powerful as the force of divinity, for those who believe in that idea. So anyone who stood in their way, wasn’t just a critic or an adversary, he was a traitor to a fundamental force that was unstoppably moulding human destiny. To sweep him away wasn’t merely justified, it was obligatory. If that involved a little torture, some forced confessions and an execution, well you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The result was a regime that lasted over 70 years and killed more people than Hitler’s, mostly because it had so much longer to do so. That means the anniversary of the seizure of power is hardly a matter to celebrate.

Instead the reason I smile each year the date comes round is in memory of a deeply frustrating afternoon I spent in the library of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific academy, in London. I was researching a French scientist who had spent some time in London and, specifically, at the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century.

What I couldn’t cope with was that a letter of his announcing his departure from Paris was dated after another announcing his arrival in London.

Yep. I was being pretty dumb. I knew all about the problem of the Julian calendar in Britain and the Gregorian on the Continent. And yet I spent several hours racking my brain to try to understand how Maupertuis could have written a letter from Paris after his arrival in London. How I kicked myself when the solution to the conundrum came to me at last in a flash, as I remembered the difference in calendars...

7 November reminds me each year how badly I too can fail. Making it a salutary lesson in the importance of humility. Among the faults people attribute to me, and they are legion, excessive humility is not one that is often mentioned.

So the lesson is invaluable.

600 years on, haven't the few, the happy few, done well?

It’s a good time for the centuries-old English sport of Frog-bashing, or being nasty about the French.

In fact, it’s a good year for it, since the second centenary of Battle of Waterloo occurred on 18 June. That ’s the battle where the French were so comprehensively beaten by the Prussians.

Apologies, of course I meant the British. After all, one of the commanders arrayed against Napoleon was the Duke of Wellington, who was English. Well, Irish actually, but you know – Anglo-Irish.

He commanded 25,000 Brits, out of the nearly 200,000 men eventually engaged, which really underlines the extent of the purely British victory. A majority of those 25,000 were probably English, so Waterloo certainly provides some kind of basis for Frog-bashing.

This week was another high point within that year. Wednesday was the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, a much more solidly British triumph. Nelson led a British fleet against a joint French and Spanish force off Cape Trafalgar, providing a name for one of London’s most spectacular squares. I always make a point of taking French visitors there, to remind them of one of those occasions when we came out on top.

John Gilbert's Morning of the Battle of Agincourt

Today, the 25th of October, is an even more significant day. It’s Saint Crispin’s, dedicated to Saints Crispin and Crispianus, or Crispian. That’s as in “this day is called the feast of Crispian: he that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, and rouse him at the name of Crispian.”

Yes. 600 years ago today, that fine Englishman, Henry V, led his gallant band into battle against the French on the field of Agincourt. They were hugely outnumbered, of course, some claiming by as much as 10:1, others by just 6:1. This made the English victory not just all the more glorious but also puts it hors concours, as we like to say in English, as the greatest ever case of Frog-bashing recorded.

That huge disparity in numbers also gave rise to another fine moment in the Shakespeare speech, from his play about the King cleverly entitled “Henry V”, which I’ve already quoted above.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition

Great stuff, isn’t it? It also tells us so much. 

For instance, “gentle” clearly didn’t mean sensitive and delicate or anything that soft. It meant being part of that select brood that called itself “gentlemen”, and as the speech makes clear, you didn’t get access to it by being gentle – on the contrary, you did it by shedding your blood with the King on St Crispin’s day.

Presumably, though, Henry would have preferred it if you shed the blood of the dastardly enemy. He was quite a soldier, so I imagine he’d have shared the view expressed some centuries later by US General George Patton: “no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Shakespeare puts into the king’s mouth a smart contrast to “gentle”: the opposite is, it seems, “vile”. Clearly it’s being used here to mean common, base-born, of inferior standing. So if you’re vile, it seems you can raise your standing – gentle your condition – by killing a lot of Frenchmen and showing them (or at least the ones still standing) that, whatever their numbers, they can never be the match for fine upstanding Englishmen.

Funnily enough, it’s worth taking a look at those numbers again. Anne Curry, who did a book about Agincourt ten years ago, argues that the odds were more like 4:3 in favour of the French, and may indeed have been closer still than that to equality. Still, we won’t insist on that point here, since it rather reduces the Frog-bashing quality of the incident, and hence the anniversary.

Instead, let’s focus on the great achievements of the victory. The things we value deeply and which wouldn’t have been possible without that famous English victory. Off-hand, I can’t think what they are, but they have to be there somewhere. Surely.

It is, no doubt, to those gains that we, in the nations that think of themselves as civilised, owe the blessings we enjoy today. Most notable of those blessings is by the rule of gentlemen, made gentle either by birth or by the skilful use of lethal force, caring for the rest of us vile commoners with all the tenderness we’ve come to expect. And never being vile themselves, of course.

In that spirit, let’s take up the suggestion from Shakespeare’s Henry to celebrate this day in “flowing cups”. Then we can help ensure that

Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d

Well, OK, they shall be remembered, not we. But, hey, you know what I mean.

Hear the knives sharpening, this Ides of March

2058 years ago today, a shady politician turned up for a meeting whose importance he had probably not yet fully grasped, but soon would. 

He was there despite being warned that it was a bad day for him to do anything. Indeed, as he arrived he caught sight of the man who’d given him the warning. He turned to him and, rather too smugly as it happened, commented:

“The ides of March are come.”

To which the soothsayer replied:

“Ay, Caesar, but not gone.”

It wasn’t many minutes later that Julius Caesar lay dying at the feet of the statue his late rival Pompey. ‘Late’ in great part thanks to Caesar himself. All terribly ironic. Especially since it was men he thought he could count on who turned their knives on him.

Why did they prove the soothsayer right and turn the Ides of March into such a bad day for Caesar? They thought he was about to realise his ambition and establish his personal power in Rome. They made sure that didn’t happen.

15 March. Not a good day for Julius Caesar

Of course, things may not have gone exactly the way I described. I’m only quoting Shakespeare, and I suspect he wasn’t there. I mean, did they even speak English in those days?

Somebody who could no doubt tell us about all of that is the present Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The man’s a bit of a classicist. He even wrote a book called The Dream of Rome which was a bit glitzy and superficial, but had its merits.

He knows all about powerful men cut down in their prime by their own supporters. So he must have had a bit of wry smile yesterday.

Because being Mayor of London’s only a consolation prize for him. What he’s got his eye on is Downing Street. And with his ‘friend’ David Cameron, the current tenant of number 10, making such a mess of things, he must fancy his chances of getting the Conservative Party leadership after Cameron loses the next election and gets sacked. Then he’d spend a parliament getting ready to mount his own challenge for 2020.

Not all his ‘friends’ are entirely happy about this shady politician realising his ambition, any more than the ‘friends’ of his predecessor were two millennia ago. These days, though, we don’t generally settle these things with knives. So one of Johnson’s ‘friends’ has found a much smarter and sneakier way of doing things.

Boris Johnson
The target?

Michael Gove’s established himself as a special kind of education secretary. For instance, he tells us that he is “a decentraliser. I believe in trusting professionals.” Despite that, he has managed to infuriate pretty much the entire teaching profession, not least by his outspoken defence of the use of unqualified teachers. 

It was also he who sent a bible to every school in the country, which I presume was intended to be some kind of inspirational move. Personally, I have difficulty believing that students are pouring into their libraries for the opportunity to consult their Gove bible lovingly and with rapt attention. 

What has Gove done now?

Something truly surprising. He’s turned his fire on the number of old Etonians in the cabinet – the cabinet in which he serves. That includes his boss, David Cameron. Gove, in an interview with the Financial Times, draws a parallel between the present cabinet and that headed by Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury over a century ago.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil,” declared Gove, “the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about and all the rest of it. It is preposterous.”

It doesn’t bother him individually: “It doesn't make me feel personally uncomfortable because I like each of the individuals concerned, but it's ridiculous.”

And he wonders “I don't know where you can find some such similar situation in a developed economy.”

Extraordinary. Here’s Gove decrying his own government. A Conservative-led government. And for being elitist, of all things.

It seems inexplicable until you remember that David Cameron’s not the only Etonian around. Another is the present occupant of City Hall in London. Oh, yes. Boris Johnson’s another graduate of Eton College.

And that gives us the subtext to Gove’s interview, and with Tories, it’s always the subtext that counts. He’s saying we’ve got an Etonian Prime Minister, and that seems ridiculous in this day and age. On the other hand, he’s already there. Leave him in place. But we certainly don’t want another. 

Michael Gove
The dagger?

Boris has been warned. He needs to watch his back, where his so-called friends are standing. And sharpening their knives.

Then again. 2058 years ago today, Caesar was warned too. Perhaps we can still avoid a Johnson premiership.

Does a black face fit?

Years ago I saw a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II with Fiona Shaw – a woman – in the title role.

It worked superbly. One of the contrasts in the play is between the effeminate Richard and his much more macho cousin, Henry, who would eventually usurp his throne. Feminine playing effeminate? A stroke of genius.

But if a woman can play a male role, then why can’t a black actor play a ‘white’ role? After all, take a character like Hamlet. The original was probably white, but it’s extremely unlikely that he spoke English. Let alone in iambic pentameters.

If an Englishman can play the Prince of Denmark, why does he have to be white?

It seems, though, that we’re a long way from its being broadly accepted that non-whites can play the great parts in the Shakespeare canon. So it was fascinating last Saturday to go and see Lolita Chakrabarti’s play Red Velvet, starring one of our finest English actors, Adrian Lester, who happens to be Chakrabarti’s husband. And also black. 

Actor and writer.

The play is based on the life story of Ira Aldridge, the only black American to appear among the 33 actors who have brass plaques to their memory in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

He was born in 1807, New York and free, but nearly half a century before slavery would be abolished in the US by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. He began to act in New York but soon hit a brick wall; he travelled to England at the age of 17 to try his luck on our stages.

He did well on the provinces stages, even winning the acclaim of the outstanding Shakespearean actor of his age, Edmund Kean, for his portrayal of Othello. Which has a certain irony, Othello being a ‘Moor’ and therefore non-white himself. Though it’s far more ironic that Aldridge got his break on the London stage when Kean fell sick and Aldridge was called in to replace him – as Othello.

This is the central part of the action of Chakrabarti’s play. Because London received Aldridge’s performance badly. It was felt that using a black to play a Moor was, somehow, inappropriate. “An African is no more qualified to personate Othello than a huge fat man would be competent to represent Falstaff,” opined one of the reviews quoted in Red Velvet, “... English audiences have a prejudice in favour of European features, which more than counterbalance the recommendations of a flat nose and thick lips.”

Ira Aldridge playing Othello

Curious that the review correctly identifies the opinion as a prejudice but seems to feel that this somehow justifies it.

Aldridge was taken up on the Continent, and played to great success in Austria, Prussia and Russia. Indeed, he died in Lodz, today Poland, but at that time a Russian possession, where Chakrabarti shows him preparing to play Lear.

He had a successful career, and became probably one of the wealthiest free Blacks in Europe or America in his times. But one ambition eluded him: to play Shakespeare to acclaim in London and New York. And he’s faded into undeserved obscurity since, that plaque in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre notwithstanding.

We’ve moved on since his day. But how far? Are black actors through that particular glass ceiling yet?

That’s the question that Chakrabarti so skilfully leaves us asking, in a challenging and compelling play.

Shakespeare at 14, Joyce at 60

It’s extraordinary how many self-appointed experts claim that what modern education needs is a proper grounding in the basics. You know. Shakespeare. Dickens. To say nothing of fractions. And dates in history.

Pontificating politicians from across the political spectrum make this claim. Pundits of the right unsurprisingly proclaim it, but to my disappointment so do people who ought to know better on the left.

In my view, those who feel kids ought to learn dates lack a fundamental quality for the study of history: a memory. They’re obviously incapable of recalling their schooldays and the murder of memorising dates, particularly at an age when dates are things you crave for not things you learn by rote. A sense of chronology is useful in history, but you could probably work out that the Second World War came after the First without precise knowledge of the dates of either.

The study of fractions is even more ghastly. Who on earth has ever needed to know, outside a classroom, what 4/17 of anything was? The only time you ever get anywhere near this kind of division is when you’re cutting up a cake and, hey, all you do is cut the slices small so it goes round with some left over for the greedy ones.

And it’s just as bad with literature. Great books? Oh, you mean Dickens? Or Shakespeare? I bet you the Bard would be mortified (if he weren’t already dead) at the idea of nearly twenty generations of kids being bored mindless by great chunks of incomprehensible blank verse. What fourteen-year old know or cares what it means to make your quietus with a bare bodkin?

A really inspirational teacher can bring all this stuff to life. I remember my boys quoting chunks of Macbeth to each other, at home. Forsooth. It was the most striking testimony to a fine teacher. But such teaching is rare and most kids leave school convinced that there is nothing duller than Shakespeare, except perhaps Dickens.

It’s curious, however, that there comes a time in life when you can suddenly discover a taste for all these things. I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was about sixteen and was fascinated by it, as well as appalled by the description of hell. I switched to Ulysses. Utterly turgid. Stream of consciousness? It left me unconscious within minutes.

And that view stuck with me for over four decades. Until a couple of weeks ago when I downloaded an audio version of the book. What a fabulous novel! A pace that just whips along. Writing full of humour and charm. A real delight.

I had to get the Kindle version too so that I could check up on some of the material and it’s as much fun to read as to listen to. Turgid? You’ve got to be kidding.

That fine Dublin fellow Joyce.
Worth waiting to get to know

But I’ve realised all that as I approach my sixtieth birthday. Trying to foist Ulysses on me in my teens would have put me off completely. 

What we need to communicate to teenagers is simply a desire to read anything at all, a sense that there’s pleasure in it. And let them read what they like. Pride and Prejudice if they want, Harry Potter if they prefer.

So why is there this deadly consensus that we need to force kids to deal with the classics at a time when they have no interest in them? Why impose on them what we found deadly when we were their age? Why do we think that what we hated is good for others?

But here we’re at the central question of power in society. It’s wielded by people who have little feeling for other people’s concerns.

And the worst of it? Some of them get into positions of power precisely because they share those concerns and want to help. Somehow it’s the very fact of holding power that drives the fellow-feeling out of them.

My message? Wake up. Don’t tell others what they should be doing, particularly if you wouldn’t be prepared to do it yourselves.

And, in particular, stop forcing Shakespeare on fourteen-year olds. Let them decide when they want to get to know classic writing. Even if they only meet Joyce at sixty.

The Ides of March: reviewing progress

In Shakespeare’s play, as Julius Caesar approaches the forum he spots the soothsayer who has warned him against the Ides of March, and calls out mockingly:

‘The Ides of March are come.’

To which the soothsayer replies, ‘Aye, Caesar, but not gone.’

Given that we know what’s about to happen inside the Senate building, I think that line qualifies as the most sinister in Shakespeare.

Well, the Ides of March are come again. 2056 years ago today Julius Caesar was struck down by a group of die-hard Roman aristocrats, who left him to bleed out at the foot of the statue of his great enemy Pompey. 

If only he'd listened

It’s worth pausing a moment to ask how far we’ve come in those two millennia.

Caesar’s enemies were Senators, as he was, in other words members of the elite of Rome who exercised all power over the nascent Empire, thanks to their colossal wealth. Around them, the mass of Romans struggled to get through the day, finding work where they could, begging where they couldn’t, all in order to live in conditions inconceivably miserable to their wealthy masters, when they could make a living at all.

By being an outstandingly talented manipulator of the sentiments of those masses, whose support he skilfully bought, and at the same time a highly successful general who could command the total loyalty of his soldiers, Caesar was making a formidable, to some apparently unstoppable, bid for total power on his own. His adversaries decided that the only way to hang on to their own share of authority, was to kill him. The rest is a bloody body on the floor of the Senate.

Today, in many countries, wealth still often combines with control of the army to support power. Look at the Assads in Syria, revealed in their e-mails to be spending on interior decorations sums of money it would take their citizens several years to earn, while they turn heavy artillery on those same citizens when they try to change that arrangement.

In the wealthier nations, military strength is not these days a factor in determining who will rule us. Nor, fortunately, do we tend to decide the fate of our leaders by assassination. Wealth, on the other hand, remains inseparable from power: the US election this autumn is set to be the most expensive in history. And the unscrupulous and wealthy still use manipulation of the masses and purchase of our support to get and hold onto political power.

So on this Ides of March, looking back to that distant one 2056 years ago, what should the report card read? 


How about ‘has made some significant improvements but still has a long way to go; a serious increase in effort is needed if expectations are ever to be fulfilled’?

Losing your shirt

Mankind loves its metaphors.

If the Euro collapses, economies will fall like dominoes. Our economies are in the hands of financial institutions playing in the last chance saloon. The leading figures in finance are heartless incompetents incapable of raising their eyes above the shortest possible term and the satisfaction of their own greed. 

Sorry, that last bit wasn’t a metaphor, merely a statement of fact, but you get the picture.

It strikes me that even quite trivial matters can be made to stand as metaphors for much more fundamental ideas. I find, for instance, that my progress through life can be traced by a humble article of clothing. It may not have the same ring as Shakespeare’s original words, but I might say ‘all the world’s a stage, and one man in his time wears many shirts.’

As a child, my shirts were chosen by my parents which, I suppose, meant by my mother. Little stripy T-shirts, for example, all the more comfortable for their familiarity. 

Then I went to a conventional English school with smart white shirts and ties. For reasons that are now obscure to me, I used to bite the cuffs which must have limited the smartness, but no-one ever complained.

As a young man I chose my own shirts but I was lousy at it, so I took refuge in the principle that I would never compromise so far with bourgeois society as to wear clothes that complied with its demands for conformity. I wore ghastly worn out things that didn’t coordinate with the rest of my clothes. Fortunately, the only people I was keen to impress were young women and they seemed able to cope with the idea that it was what was inside the shirt that mattered more than the outside.

I never learned the trick the son of a friend of mine later perfected, of popping down to his local charity shop and buying a string of shirts at a pound each, then wearing them until they really couldn’t go any further without washing, at which point he’d give them to the same shop and pick up some replacements. A pound apiece, he felt, was a reasonable price for laundered shirts.

Then I started work. That principle of non-conformity had to go. I realised that I could after all compromise so far as to wear a suit, a ‘smart’ shirt, even a tie. I who had sworn I would never be a businessman, and therefore certainly never look like one, quietly slipped into the part with no sense of committing perjury.

Of course, I was a British businessman, so I dressed with exactly the casual elegance and eye-catching charm for which British businessmen have won a worldwide reputation.

And then time moved on again. A friend of mine pointed out to me how amused he was, at Parent-Teacher meetings, to see the men in casual trousers and office shirts – as though they had only had the time for a minimal change of clothes before heading out again, or at least wanted to give the impression that they were that busy. That was a sufficient spur to get me to change my shirt as well as my trousers when I got home in the evenings.

As for the ties – these days I only wear one to certain meetings and I put it on in the car park outside, taking it off the moment I’m back behind the wheel, before driving away.

So where does that take me? The Bard assigned seven parts to his view of man – the baby (‘mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms’ ’ what a way with words), the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the slippered pantaloon, and finally second childishness. And I’ve listed five shirts in my life – the child’s, the schoolboy’s, the young man’s, the businessman’s, the father’s.

The other day I discovered I’d reached my sixth. I got home and decided to slip into a shirt less formal, of thicker and warmer cloth. But when I reached for it, hanging in our bedroom, a room we never heat, I noticed it felt horribly cold. I decided that I was now at a stage in life when I could indulge yet another desire for creature comfort and hung the shirt on a radiator in another room for a few minutes.

Just how completely I had reached the next stage of life became clear when a little later I decided to put the shirt on. Back in the bedroom, I was shocked to discover that it was no longer there.

‘But I’m sure I had it just then,’ I said to myself. ‘Danielle must have tidied it away’ (terrible how much easier it is to blame one’s partner than to accept responsibility for one’s own idiosyncrasies, isn't it?) (OK, OK, inanities not idiosyncrasies). 

It took me a while before memory returned. By then the shirt was beautifully warm. But it certainly brought home to me how clearly my use of shirts mirrored my ageing.

The experience also rather suggested that I might be closer than I’d like to the seventh and final shirt. Which would presumably be some kind of bib.




Totally unrelated postscript


You can say what you like about Luton, but when it comes to the Christmas spirit, we know what it takes.

The Christmas spirit takes off in Luton

Not so much when it comes to taste, decorum or understatement. But revelry – for that we defer to none.  

A fearsome anniversary

Today, the 29th of March, is the anniversary of the bloodiest single day’s fighting in the entire history of England – indeed of Britain. The key battle of the Wars of the Roses that took place near the village of Towton in Yorkshire on this day in 1461 confirmed the grip on the throne of the White Rose of York, in the person of Edward IV, and ensured that the Red Rose of Lancaster, represented by Henry VI, would never win it back.

Estimates vary but most commentators agree that about 28,000 were killed at the battle of Towton. The notoriously awful first day of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War cost just over 19,000 dead.

The dead at Towton represent about 1% of the English population at the time, which is pretty scary. To give a sense of what that means, it would take between eighteen and nineteen days for the number of passengers travelling through Heathrow airport in London to reach 2.8 million; the equivalent of Towton would involve something like 150 to 200 crashes over that period of just more than two and a half weeks, with every passenger lost.

Of course, as a friend pointed out, estimates suggest that the Black Death a bit more than a century earlier had killed between a third and over a half of the English population; without the Black Death, the Towton dead wouldn't have represented such a high percentage. Equally, by causing two or three million deaths, the Plague showed itself to be a more impressive killer than our puny little wars (only by the twentieth century had we progressed enough to become as efffective as diseases in killing our own kind).

Even so, wiping out 1% of the population in a single days remains prettry remarkable – the First World War achieved a bit over 2% in four years. Towton achieved that distinction with swords, arrows, axes and spears. There were no machine guns, tanks or modern artillery pieces.

Perhaps all this proves just how bitter civil wars are. After all, despite the terrible bloodletting in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War, despite the senseless butchery of Vietnam, the single conflict in which the United States suffered the greatest loss of life remains the Civil War. Americans have never died in such numbers as at the hands of their fellow Americans.

It’s also amazing how pointless Towton was. After all, who cares today whether the Wars of the Roses were won by the house of York or the house of Lancaster? Edward IV and Henry VI were both Plantagenets – they were cousins. We sacrificed 1% of our population to sort out a family tiff.

The spin masters of the time dressed it all up as a matter of noble sacrifice, heroism and glory. Shakespeare, over a century and a half later, made a pretty good job of giving the whole sorry tale the nobility of an epic in the third part of Henry VI. In reality, it was just two branches of a family sorting out their naked drive for power and possessions by means of violence. The poetry was better, but Shakespeare’s history plays were really just the equivalent then of The Sopranos today.

At Towton itself, there’s not much to mark the site of the Battle, no real monument. Perhaps it’s more appropriate that way.