About Andrew Cusack
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A Christmas Gift from the Governor
Just in time for Christmas: some excellent news for the Knickerbocker Greys.
Her Excellency the Governor of the great Empire State of New York has signed into law a requirement that this venerable Manhattan cadet corps be allowed to remain in its quarters at the old Seventh Regiment Armory (as The New York Sun reports).
Over recent years the Park Avenue Conservancy has restored the building — a gem of American architecture and interior design — but also effectively expelled the military units still based at the Armory.
The Greys managed to hold out in their “800-square-foot broom closet” (as the New York Post described it) but the Conservancy moved to evict the youth group in 2022. The Greys have fought the eviction in court.
In June a bipartisan bill guaranteeing the Knickerbocker Greys “access and use for permanent headquarters” of the Armory “for the purposes of programming during periods which are not periods of civil or military emergency” passed in the State Assembly and Senate but has only now been signed into law.
The hope is this new legislation will persuade the Conservancy to drop their eviction proceedings which the Greys have been challenging.
Gellner’s Prague
He was Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics before heading to Cambridge to become the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology. With the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism, Gellner returned to his native Prague as head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism there.
Gellner had many intellectual enemies — proponents of linguistic philosophy, Western Marxists, the post-colonialist offspring of Edward Saïd — but his hard-hitting attacks on them were often tempered by good humour and a skilful ability to tell a joke that only further infuriated his opponents.
The sociologist David Glass once said that he wasn’t sure whether the next revolution would come from the right or from the left, but he was quite sure that wherever it came from the first person to be shot would be Ernest Gellner.
Despite living most of life in exile, Gellner was above all a child of old Prague. Professor Stefan Collini explored the professor’s background in Bohemia in the LRB:
His parents were assimilated German-speaking Jews, Habsburg subjects before 1919, and thereafter citizens of the new state of Czechoslovakia (where it seemed wise to speak Czech, at least in public).
Prague in the interwar years was cosmopolitan even by the standards of Central Europe: alongside Czech schools, it could boast German gymnasia, Russian and French lycées, and an English grammar school.
It was to the last that his parents sent the nine-year-old Ernest in 1935, perhaps prudently preparing for a time when they would have to flee mainland Europe. They almost left it too late; they were fortunate to make it to England in April 1939, eventually settling in Highgate.
Gellner’s parents were representative of that stratum of educated, middle-class Jews who, profoundly grateful to Britain for providing them with a home, nonetheless continued throughout the war to speak to each other in the language of the now hated enemy.
Before his 1995 death, Gellner was interviewed by John Davis for the February 1991 issue of Current Anthropology.
In the exchange, he touched upon his relationship with Prague, the “Crown of the Realm”.
EAG: My family lived in Prague, and we were deeply urban, yes.
JD: Was Prague particularly anti-Semitic?
EAG: Yes. Very openly so in the working class, nauncé elsewhere.
This was Kafka’s Prague: tricultural, with two universities, a Czech and a German. The German university was very, very distinguished and had at one time Carnap and Einstein and so on, and of course benefited from Hitler by the influx of scholars. Two universities and three cultures and ethnic tension was certainly very emphatically part of it. I mean: if you are asking me whether this was a crucial part of my environment in Prague, then the answer is yes.
It’s a stunningly beautiful town, and during the first period of my exile, which was during the war, I constantly used to dream about it, in the literal sense: it was a strong longing. We came to England in 1939 after the German occupation of Prague.
EAG: One of my main recollections of Prague in ’45 was a communist poster saying “everyone with a clean shield into the Party,” that is, everyone whose record was good during the Occupation.
It meant in reality exactly the opposite: “If your shield is absolutely filthy we’ll scrub it for you; you are safe with us; we like you the better because the filthier your record the more we have a hold on you.” So all the bastards, all the distinctive authoritarian personalities, rapidly went into the Party, and it rapidly acquired this kind of character.
So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional hold which Prague had previously had over me. I could foresee that a Stalinoid dictatorship was due: it came in ’48. The precise date I couldn’t foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons.
Above all, in ’45 the Czechs expelled 3,000,000 Germans with considerable brutality. I think the estimate of the number of killed in the process was 200,000 thought I don’t know how reliable that is. And at the same time everyone was scared stiff of the Germans and remembered Munich, so they handed themselves bound and helpless to Stalin as the only protection against the German revanchism which they confidently expected at the time.
They don’t expect it now, interestingly enough; but they did then. All this occurred in conjunction with the quite skilful communist exploitation of the situation. And I wanted no part of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it.
Monsieur Bayrou
Monsieur le président has appointed François Bayrou as Prime Minister of France – for how long, who knows.
It is worth revisiting the assessment of him the late Maurice Druon (1918-2009) published in the pages of Le Figaro in 2004:
Monsieur François Bayrou, a secondary character and destined to remain so, is remarkable only for his perseverance in undermining the higher interests of France. He eminently possesses what the English call ‘nuisance value’.
At what point did his self-image begin to cloud his judgement? Here is a Béarnais, the son of a farmer, who, gifted for studies, became an agrégé in classical literature. At twenty-eight, he took his first steps in politics by entering the office of Monsieur Méhaignerie, Minister of Agriculture. At the same time, he joined the centrist party that Giscard d’Estaing created to serve his personal elevation. This party, which participated in overthrowing General de Gaulle in 1969, would become the UDF.
Monsieur Bayrou settled there and prospered. He was elected general councillor in his native department, then regional councillor. He was also an advisor to Monsieur Pierre Pfimlin, to the presidency of the European Assembly. Monsieur Pfimlin was an excellent man in every respect, who exercised very high functions with rectitude. He had only one fault: he was a centrist, that is to say, like all centrists, he was mistaken about the hierarchy of values.
He is credited with having made Paris lose its status as the capital of Europe. Indeed, it was agreed between Adenauer and de Gaulle that the institutions of the European Community would have their headquarters nearby. A large complex would be built in the near Paris region. On this, Pfimlin, an Alsatian, intervened, proclaiming: “Strasbourg, Strasbourg… the link between France and Germany, between the two cultures… reconciliation… Strasbourg, a symbolic city!” Could Alsace be insulted? The Parisian project was shelved.
The move was well-intentioned, but it was a misjudgement.
Paris, a great metropolis of the arts and business, as well as an international communications centre, had all the attractions for Members of the European Parliament, diplomats, and civil servants; Strasbourg, beautiful but provincial, with limited entertainment and above all poorly served, requiring changes of plane to reach its often foggy aerodrome, exercised little charm on the new community population. If the monthly sessions of Parliament – at what cost and for how long? – continue to be held there, everything else, commissions and services, has moved to Brussels and it is Brussels that has become the administrative capital of the Union.
Let us return to Monsieur Bayrou, who is following a fairly typical political path. Elected to parliament, he quickly showed a ministerial appetite by making education issues a specialty. He founded and chaired a permanent group to combat illiteracy. A laudable program. Unfortunately, during the time he was Minister of National Education, illiteracy continued to increase and the general level of education continued to decline. Was it during this period that he experienced a somewhat excessive expansion of his ego?
It is said that one night he woke up the members of his cabinet, urgently summoning them to the ministry, to consult them on a vision he had just had of his presidential future. The anecdote has been circulated with too much insistence for there not to be, at its origin, some reality.
Why am I dwelling so long on Monsieur Bayrou, when we have concerns that seem to be of greater importance? It is because, not content with creating disorder in our domestic policy, he is currently acting contrary to the interests of France in the European Parliament.
Monsieur Bayrou is a candidate for the presidency of the Republic: we know that. He has made it known urbi et orbi and, stubbornness being in his nature, there is every reason to believe that he will be one for life. He also ran in 2002 and, having arrived at the back of the pack, with 6.8%, he immediately put on the jersey with the bib number marked 2007.
Assuring that he is part of the majority in the National Assembly in order to keep his electorate, he keeps his parliamentary group on the fringes, under the pretext of refusing corporatisation; he never stops criticizing the government’s actions, often using the opposition’s arguments, and only votes for it with his fingertips, when he does not abstain, visibly waiting for its fall. Beautiful political logic! This is what Monsieur Bayrou calls cultivating one’s difference. When one benefits from such great support, one ends up preferring adversaries.
His programme? It is made up of nothing but worn-out words and formulas that have become hollow from being used too much. It is as if we had returned to the “more just, more humane Republic” of thirty years ago. Everything ages – even demagoguery. […]
What a waste! And all in keeping. Those who stick around François Bayrou for career interests, like those who stay there out of personal loyalty, expose themselves to serious disappointments.
In politics, I have no other criteria than services rendered to the country.
Prince Talleyrand said: “Without wealth, a nation is only poor; without patriotism, it is a poor nation.”
Dempsey Heiner, Art Critic
Dempsey Heiner was neither coward nor fool: he lied about his age to join the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and later studied at Harvard, Yale, and the Sorbonne. His schoolmate from St Bernard’s days, the Paris Review founder George Plimpton, described him as “the brightest boy in the class, a genius”.
In addition to his wide reading and erudition (which he wore very lightly), Dempsey was also one of the kindest, gentlest creatures the world has ever known. He spent most of his life uncomplainingly caring for his disabled wife day in and day out for decades. By the end, she was immobile, blind, and nearly comatose.
As his parish priest put it, “Not once did I ever hear him speak of her as anything but a blessing… and he seemed never so joyful as when he tried to make her drink through a straw.”
He died in 2008 and I still think it was one of the greatest privileges in my life to have counted him amongst my friends.
Dempsey’s most famous act — one would be tempted to use a bit of New York tabloid hyperbole and say most notorious act — occurred on this week in 1999. It is might best be described as the nexus between filial piety and art criticism.
In the late 1990s, Charles Saatchi put on an exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled ‘Sensation’ displaying works from his own collection produced by ‘Young British Artists’ or YBAs. The show was largely an act of self-promotion and the Royal Academy was accused of collaborating with Saatchi to increase the value of his own collection for eventual re-sale.
Among the works on display was a depiction of the Blessed Virgin which was surrounded by pictures cut out of pornographic magazines, although the press tended to centre in on the artist’s use of cow dung in the painting.
By 1999, Saatchi’s exhibition had crossed the Atlantic where it found a temporary home at the Brooklyn Museum. Despite being one of the best collections of art in the United States, the Brooklyn Museum has suffered somewhat from its borough’s perception as something of a bag-carrier for the more glamorous neighbouring isle of Manhattan.
Dempsey, a convert to Catholicism, had a profound devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He wasn’t keen on the idea of some art-market scheme profaning the image of the Mother God, so in December 1999 the 72-year-old New Yorker bought a bottle of latex paint, smuggled it into the Brooklyn Museum, and daubed the paint on the insulting artwork.
As luck would have it, the Magnum photographer Phillip Jones Griffiths was visiting the museum with his daughter and was in the room when Dempsey began his rather pro-active work of art criticism. Jones Griffiths caught Dempsey in the act with his camera and the next day the image was splayed on the front page of the New York Post.
The security guards detained him pending the arrived of New York’s finest, but Dempsey told me that once his police escort was out of view of museum officials they each patted him on the back and congratulated him for his deed.
Dempsey’s act of defiance was almost certainly a felony-level offense but, as the Museum did not want to put a value to the artwork, the Brooklyn DA’s office felt obliged to reduce the charge to a misdemeanour — still carrying the possibility of up to two years in prison.
At trial, Dempsey said the exhibition’s gravest sin was neither blasphemy nor profanation but its “suggestion that there is no beauty in the world.”
“It’s like what Jean-Paul Sartre said: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’,” he told the court. “I reject Sartre’s view of humanity. Art is also supposed to be about skill. There was none of that in ‘Sensation.’”
A spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Museum deployed almost comical de haut en bas at the trial: “I don’t think we’ll respond formally to Mr. Heiner, beyond pondering what in his background makes him an expert on artistic skill.” (His Yale degree was in law and his Sorbonne degree in medicine, so I’m not sure if Dempsey ever formally studied art.)
One of the museumgoers in the room at the time told the Post that, while he disagreed with the vandalism, he “understood” Dempsey’s reaction: “Someone had to stand up and say, ‘This is not right.’”
“I think it was heroic,” our own Irene Callaghan (who died this year) told the Post. “He did it for all the Christians. I’m sure if he smeared paint on the window of a fur shop everyone would think it was marvellous.”
In the end, as the Post reported, Dempsey escaped a prison sentence:
Calling it a “crime not of hate, but of love,” a Brooklyn judge slapped a $250 fine on the man who defaced a dung-daubed image of the Virgin Mary, instead of tougher penalties prosecutors sought.
State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber released Dennis Heiner with the fine on the condition that “so long as he has paint in his hands, he’s required to stay away from the Brooklyn Museum.”
Farber, who has called the Heiner case one of the most difficult of his career, said the frail, gentlemanly Roman Catholic advocate had taught him something new.
“I had assumed that an act like this would always be committed by an angry man motivated by hate,” Farber said. “But this was a crime committed not out of hate but out of love for the Virgin Mary.”
“When the row eventually fades,” the then-editor of Art & Auction magazine, Bruce Wolmer, wrote, “the only smile will be on the face of Charles Saatchi, a master self-promoter.”
Saatchi made a mint off the artworks he sold, sparking criticism of museum institutions’ alleged complicity in inflating the prices of YBA works.
What happened to the offensive painting? Heavily insured, it was lost unto the ages in a warehouse fire. None of the art world figures who chimed in to praise it at the time mourned its passing. Sic transit opprobrium mundi.
Dempsey himself had no regrets, but he said he wouldn’t engage in any more public acts of paint smearing.
“I’m too old,” he told the press, chuckling. “I’ve said my piece.”
May he rest in peace.
Vote AR
The lush and verdant tree formed in the shape of the Netherlands grows from deep roots spelling out ‘AR’, the name of the main Protestant party — once led by Abraham Kuyper.
As Kamps and Voerman point out in their book on posters from the Dutch Christian-democratic tradition (in print / online), this poster is a “rather complicated allegorical representation”.
Articles of Note: 12 December 2024
Luttwak first came to my attention when, about 10 or 11 years old, I was given a copy of Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (I think one of the many I received from my relation Henry, R.I.P.). He has been interesting at every turn I have had to read him or his thoughts ever since.
Santi Ruiz of Statecraft has released a delicious new interview with Luttwak.
“Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped,” Luttwak contends. “The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. I think what happened is that people learned to reverse engineer.”
He relates the story of Gen. Oufkir’s attempted coup against Hassan II of Morocco: “Oufkir bled to death, and he did so over a copy of my book.”
Luttwak’s explanation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s manipulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to assert racial dominance over the Arabs is sharp.
■ Ever since school days, we are Argentinophiles. The Financial Times, of all people, has a helpful “long read” examining the surprising successes of President Javier Milei.
■ Dr Katherine Bayford writes on the rift that doomed the American Confederacy.
■ Dan Hitchens reviews the film ‘Conclave’.
■ Niall Gooch is always reliable on railways. He compares Britain’s rail woes with the experience of our continental neighbours and concludes that we are still in for difficulties:
Culture is just so hard to prod in a positive direction; people get stuck in their ways, and find it hard to move the assumptions and perspectives which dominate beyond the station forecourt. Yet, shifting the dial isn’t impossible, if the will is there, and this is yet another arena in which British offerings can improve.
■ The prospective — all though not yet assured — loss of London’s Smithfields Market is a portent of doom for the metropolis, Sebastian Milbank prophesies.
One day, I believe, we will have to reclaim London for England, and create an economics of human flourishing rather than of usurious speculation and rent-seeking.
He is right, of course, and I think this will happen, but the English are slow movers and our political class is pretty immured from the ideas and thinking going on below.
The emerging consensus hasn’t yet reached up to those actually making decisions, and it may be five or ten years before it does. Much more damage can be done in the mean time.
■ “Turning back the clock is proverbially impossible in history,” Wessie du Toit writes, “but apparently not in architecture.” An exploration of the architectural ambitions of Viktor Orban.
■ We are well into the preparatory tide of Advent. The ever-estimable Eleanor Parker reminds of Conditor Alme Siderum, one of the office hymns of this season.
The Secret Chapel of Harkness Tower
Yale’s Harkness Tower is, by my estimate, the finest tower in the United States and its designer, James Gamble Rogers, one of the best American architects of his day. JGR is in the Pantheon of his craft, though not quite as highly appreciated as Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue or Ralph Adams Cram.
Harkness Tower is a monument to verticality: from the ground up at each and every stage you expect it could end right there in completeness and beauty — but then it goes another stage higher. Rogers was inspired by the “Boston Stump” of St Botolph’s Church in Lincolnshire but he took that form and creatively expanded and elaborated upon it.
The tower rises 216 feet — one foot for every year Yale existed by the time of its construction.
Yalies – “Elis” – are inveterate founders of drinking clubs which, in order to cultivate a deliberate air of inscrutable mystery, they call “secret societies”, even though many of them are (thankfully) nothing which might rightly be called such.
It was years ago on one of my occasional stays in New Haven for some convivial merriment organised by just such a cabal that my old friend A.B. and I were passing Harkness Tower and I was expounding upon its beauty.
“You know, of course,” A.B. alleged, “it has a secret chapel in it.” I had no such knowledge, and pressed for more information. “Well it’s not quite a chapel, but it feels like one. The university almost never lets anyone use it.”
Universities never do. Once a university has anything, they do their best to stop people using it. (Anyone at Edinburgh University: just try throwing an event in the Raeburn Room in Old College and find out.) (more…)
London’s Unbuilt University
The Bloomsbury Scheme of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens
The University of London is a curious institution that these days no one really knows quite what to do with. At its zenith it was an imperial giant, validating the degrees of institutions from Gower Street to the very ends of the earth.
University College was founded — as “London University” — by the rationalist faction in 1826, prompting the supporters of the Anglican church to establish King’s College with royal approval in 1829.
Neither institution had the right to grant degrees, which led to the overarching University of London being created in 1836 with the power to grant degrees to the students of both colleges — and the further colleges and schools that would be founded later or come within its remit.
The University was run from the Imperial Institute in South Kensington but soon outgrew its quarters within that complex. The 1911 Royal Commission on University Education concluded that the University of London “should have for its headquarters permanent buildings appropriate in design to its dignity and importance, adequate in extent and specially constructed for its purpose”. But where?
Lord Haldane, the commission’s chairman, preferred Bloomsbury. University College was already there, as was the British Museum, and the Dukes of Bedford as the local landowners were happy to provide sufficient space to build a proper centre for the institution.
Charles Fitzroy Doll, the Duke’s own surveyor, designed a rather heavy classical scheme for academic buildings on the site north of the Museum but no progress was made before the Great War erupted.
Season’s Greetings from the Seventh
Alas, the Seventh Regiment Mess is no more, though we had a few family Christmas-time (and other) celebrations there in its final years.
Happy days when Linda MacGregor was at the helm of it.
Simon Verity: An Englishman in New York
An Englishman in New York
Not many people can claim with any accuracy to have crafted a Portal to Paradise, but Simon Verity was one. The master carver was born and raised in Buckinghamshire but made a significant contribution to the stones of New York.
At the Protestant Cathedral of St John the Divine in Morningside Heights — “St John the Unfinished” to many — tools had been downed following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. When the Very Rev’d James Parks Morton became Dean in the 1980s he decided it was time to re-start work on the gothic hulk — one of the largest cathedrals in the world.
Morton commissioned the Englishman to come and become Master Mason at the New York cathedral based on his experience on the other side of the Atlantic. Verity tackled the main task of finishing the carvings on the great west portal of St John the Divine — the “Portal of Paradise” — training up a team of local youths in stonecarving to help with the job.
“Mr. Verity took the long-dead worthies of the Hebrew and Christian traditions and made them things of wonder for people in our own day,” the current Dean said following Verity’s death earlier this year.
Most memorable was his ostensible depiction of the destruction of the First Temple, which actually showed the Twin Towers and other familiar New York skyscrapers collapsing into ruin and fire.
Late in 2018 — after the collapse of the actual World Trade Center — an unknown vandal took it upon himself to smash the stone towers off the facade, but the Cathedral has since had them restored by Joseph Kincannon who carved the original depiction under Simon Verity.
Eventually the money ran out and the stonecarvers at St John’s had to down tools yet again so Verity returned to England, but he maintained close connections with New York. He was responsible for the carving and lettering in the British & Commonwealth 9/11 Memorial Garden in Hanover Square, for example.
When the trustees of the New York Public Library proposed clearing out the stacks from their glorious Bryant Park main building and moving the books to New Jersey — a truly criminal plan since, thankfully, abandoned — Verity drew a series of doodles in opposition, many depicting the iconic lions Patience and Fortitude who guard the Library’s entrance.
A few of the mentions of his death this summer are gathered here:
The Daily Telegraph — Obituary: Simon Verity
The Economist — Simon Verity Believed in Working the Medieval Way
The Guardian — Obituary: Simon Verity
Cathedral of St John the Divine — A Message from the Dean on Simon Verity
Make Merry in thy Festival
I nipped over to Civitas in Tufton Street yesterday for the launch of Esmé Partridge’s report Restoring the Value of Parishes: The foundations of welfare, community, and spiritual belonging in England.
She has produced a succinct and well-researched overview of the crisis facing Church of England parishes not just in rural areas but in our towns and cities too.
The discussion following had strong contributions from Danny Kruger MP, Imogen Sinclair, the Rev’d Marcus Walker of Great St Bart’s, Rebecca Chapman who sits on the Anglican Church’s General Synod, Eddie Tulasiewicz of the National Churches Trust, Bijan Omrani, and more.
As a devotee of England’s cult of the saints, what interested me particularly was the contribution from Rupert Sheldrake of the Choral Evensong Trust.
He explained that the CET was doing its bit for parish churches by creating a Patronal Festival Grants scheme to encourage more churches to celebrate the feast of their patron saint or dedication.
Grants of up to £500 are available to provide for choral evensong sung by a visiting choir and – deeply important – a party afterwards at which food and drink are free to those gathering.
“For example,” the Trust informs us, “at St Michael and All Angels in Dinder, near Wells, over ninety people attended a choral evensong on Michaelmas, sung by the Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir. The church was filled to capacity, with many attendees participating in church activities for the first time.”
This is a genius scheme for encouraging greater devotion to the saints as well as more frequent use of now sadly often shut C-of-E parish churches.
As it says in Deuteronomy, “thou shalt make merry in thy festival time, thou, thy son, and thy daughter, thy manservant, and thy maidservant, the Levite also and the stranger, and the fatherless and the widow that are within thy gates.”
More information on the CET’s 2025 Patronal Festival Grants can be found here and the deadline for next year’s applications is Candlemas (2 February 2025).
That evening I was a guest at high table in an Oxford college which is exhibiting signs of health and societal repair.
A few years ago, the head of house disregarded the strident protests of the students and banished the college grace as well as all dress codes for dining. (To the gratitude of many, she did not last long.)
After this unwelcome interruption, the college grace before meals has now been restored (in Latin), in addition to the return of formal meals with gowns (and, on Sundays, black tie).
In some place, where you let it and protect it, nature is healing.
Meanwhile, below, some beautiful music for Advent from my own parish church, St George’s Cathedral in Southwark.
This beautiful performance of Veni, Veni, Emmanuel by Malakai from St George’s Cathedral Choirs, performed at St George's Cathedral is a reminder that Jesus is God with us who witnessed to the love of the Father by dwelling among us.@StGeorgesCath @StGeorgesChoirs pic.twitter.com/L8VY31FmNA
— Archdiocese of Southwark (@RC_Southwark) December 5, 2024
Amsterdam
Is die Amsterdamse stadsargitektuur die mees hemels in die wêreld? Winkels, huise, alles baie aangenaam. Burgerlik. (Ek moet teruggaan.)
Die Nederlanders het ’n samelewing met ’n semi-republikeinse mentaliteit maar met (amper) al die geseënde vrugte van ’n koninkryk. Beste van alle moontlike wêrelde…
Silver Jubilee
The Critic invited me to put together a few musings on the aesthetic, economic, and political impact of the JLE and the fundamentally Conservative vision that drove it. You can read it here:
■ The Half-Forgotten Promise of the Jubilee Line
Since it went up this morning, I received a kind email from Tom Newton, son of the late Sir Wilfred Newton who (as you can read in my piece) envisioned and managed the project:
You may be interested that as a family we well remember his intense frustration with the government of the time when they tried to cut back the cost of the project by reducing numbers of planned escalators across the new stations – he had to fight tooth and nail to keep the designs intact and indeed offered to resign over the matter and ultimately successfully defended the designs against cuts. He was very firm that he had no intention of building something which suffered the same capacity issues as the Victoria line resulting from similar reductions in capacity required by government during its construction. This was one of the very few times I ever saw him angry about anything.
He developed excellent relationships with railway engineers and architects whilst in Hong Kong and loved being involved in these large scale infrastructure projects – he was made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Engineers as a result. He loved being involved in the JLE project very much. He was absolutely fascinated in how the engineers managed the risk of tunnelling across London without damaging other lines and keeping Big Ben standing.
He was asked to lead the construction of the new Hong Kong airport but decided it was time he had spent enough time in Hong Kong.
As a director of HSBC he knew Sir Norman Foster well from when he was the architect on the HSBC office building in Hong Kong. However, when he was asked by the HSBC board to oversee the building of the Canary Wharf office with Sir Norman as the architect, he was asked by the board to make sure Sir Norman was kept on a very tight leash on this build after the massive cost overruns on the Hong King building.
As regards the canopy at the JLE Canary Wharf station Dad had some robust conversations with Sir Norman about adjusting its design to make sure it would be possible to keep clean.
He always had an extraordinary ability to talk to anyone, cut through to the essentials of anything and take a very principled approach in dealing with people and problems.
Many thanks, Tom, for contributing this closer historical perspective of the Jubilee Line Extension’s construction.
Articles of Note: 11 November 2024
Caro had been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard studying urban planning and land use when he came up with the idea for the book. He thought it would take him nine months, but extensive research and over five-hundred in-person interviews meant it took eight years to complete.
Caro then started working on his study of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the first volume of which emerged in 1982 and the fifth (and final?) one he is still working on. (At the end of the fourth, LBJ had just become president.)
But where does he write? Christopher Bonanos of New York magazine finds out:
It’s an ageless space, one where it could be last week or 1950 inside, matter-of-fact and utilitarian. A couple of bookcases, a plywood work surface, corkboard with outlines tacked up, an old brass lamp, an underworked laptop for emails, a Smith-Corona typewriter. The desk chair is hard wood with no cushion. There’s a saltshaker next to the pencil cup for when Ina brings a sandwich out at midday. The desk has a big half-moon cutout, same as the one back in New York, so he can rest his weight on his forearms and ease his bad back. That arrangement was recommended by Janet Travell, the doctor who grew famous for prescribing John F. Kennedy his Boston rocker. She, with Ina, is a dedicatee of The Power Broker.
He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”
Does he write out here every day? “Pretty much every day.” Weekends too? “Yeah.” Does he go out much while he’s on the East End? “We have two friends who live south of the highway, and I said to Ina, aside from them, I’m not going this year.” There are other writer friends nearby in Sag Harbor, and they get together, but at this age, Caro admits a little sadly, they’re thinning out. He’ll be 89 this fall.
■ George Grant is a still-underappreciated giant of political thinking in the English-speaking world. He is too little known outside his native Canada, which he sought to defend from the undue overwhelming influence of its sparkling and glamourous southern neighbour. Next year marks the sixtieth anniversary of his Lament for a Nation.
Of all people, a research fellow at Communist China’s Institute for the Marxist Study of Religion — George Dunn — has written a thoughtful introductory overview of Grant’s life and thinking: George Grant and Conservative Social Democracy in Compact.
■ Katja Hoyer mused on an overlapping theme in a recent Berliner Zeitung column which she has helpfully presented in English as well:
A diplomat close to the SPD recently told me that he couldn’t understand why working-class people in particular voted for the AfD. Things weren’t so bad for them, after all. I didn’t bother pointing out that rampant inflation, high energy prices and rising rents have had a hugely detrimental effect on the living standards of people with low and middle incomes because his analysis completely misses the point.
Germany’s working-class voters, Katja argues, feel forgotten by the parties founded to represent them.
■ Since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and earlier in Angledom — political conservatism has effectively been taken over by economic liberalism.
This has denied the centre-right from learning from and deploying useful experience from outside liberalism, with the wisdom of figures as varied as Benjamin Disraeli, Giorgio La Pira, Charles de Gaulle, and Thomas Playford essentially ignored or sidelined.
Kit Kowol’s new book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War explores the visionary side of wartime Conservatism. Dr Francis Young offers his take on Tory utopias in The Critic.
■ From a similar era, Andrew Ehrhardt writes at Engelsberg Ideas on Ernest Bevin and the moral-spiritual dimension of British foreign policy.
■ Our friend Samuel Rubinstein has studied at Oxford, Leiden, and the Sorbonne — technically the oldest universities in their three respective countries (although we all know that Leuven is in fact the doyen of Netherlandish academies).
Sam offers an incredibly interesting comparison of the experiences of these three institutions in a humble essay on his Odyssean education:
I arrived in Leiden, armed with my phrase-book, with some ambitions of learning Dutch. The first blow came at the Starbucks in the train station, when the barista answered my Ik wil graag in English without hesitating. The second came the following day when I tried again, at a different café – only this time it seemed that the barista (Spanish? Italian?) didn’t know much Dutch either: even the natives were placing their orders in English. So I gave up – save one hobby, reading Huizinga in the original. I got myself an attractive coffee-table edition of Herfsttij and managed a page or so a day, strenuously piecing it together from my English, German, and smattering of Old English. I still haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce any of it.
■ And finally, those of us who love Transylvania will enjoy Toby Guise’s summary of the Fifth Transylvanian Book Festival in The New Criterion.
Why do you read?
We were both attending one of those formal dinners that punctuate the terms of the year so, as I was going to see him anyhow, I gave in.
With his kind permission, it is reproduced here:
I truly have no idea. I’ve never stopped to think about it. It’s probably a compulsion of some kind. I’ve always been a firm believer that some things you must stop yourself every now and then and analyse and there are other things you should never question and just accept. Reading falls in the latter category.
You’re a very social person though.
So I’m told.
And you live in London – a very social place. Is it difficult to get reading in then?
Yes and no. You need to force yourself to read before bed. It’s important to always have a book on the go. If you’re in London you’ve got tube journeys or the bus or whatever as you get from A to B. You have to maximise that time. Put it to use.
That’s why all books should be available in handy paperback editions that can fit in your coat pocket. This is much easier in winter when you’ve got a coat. In summer – also an excellent reading season in many ways – I don’t like feeling encumbered. I don’t like to carry things around. So unless it’s an old Penguin size – the perfect size – that I can slip into my back pocket then I tend not to read on the go.
You’re very passionate about book design and production.
I’m very correct about book design. It is unfathomable how incredibly and completely wrong the entire publishing sector in the English-speaking world is. I know the grass is always greener, but I’ve pointed out again and again how much better it is in France and also Germany a bit. Germany for the classics they have those excellent Reclam editions – Universal-Bibliothek – that are so useful. They are dirt cheap, small size, the easiest thing in the world to purchase, read, use, carry around. Insanely practical.
In backwards Angledom meanwhile every new book comes out in clunky hardback first and you have to wait a year or sometimes longer before you can get it in a form human beings can use. Why? Okay, maybe someone likes sitting in an armchair in their “study” smoking a pipe and reading a hardback book — D. W-B in Edinburgh, I imagine. Good for them. Do you really think that’s most people? I don’t have a commute – I have a fifteen-minute walk to work – but who wants to lug a massive hardcover on a train or a tube? Ridiculous.
But you’ve…
Another thing! It’s also perfect proof of the lies that the liberal capitalists would have us believe. They contend that if there’s a market for something it will just magically appear and the need will be fulfilled. Balderdash of the highest order. Culture exists. And publishing culture in the English-speaking world ordains you must publish the clunky cumbersome version first and then wait to issue a paperback version. Oh and when the paperback edition comes out it’s also too big in size. If ever I wield supreme dictatorial power you better believe I’d be forcing a return to the old Penguin size. Penguin don’t even use it anymore. Idiots.
But you’ve said you don’t read living writers so I guess you’re not buying newly published books anyway.
Okay, yes, maybe. Everyone knows to be a writer worth reading you’ve got to be dead. Turns out this isn’t exactly true. There are actually a good number writers scribbling away today who are perfectly worth reading, even if maybe they’re not high literature and they won’t end up in the Pantheon. Middle-brow – even popular novels – can be extremely enjoyable and worthwhile. They use up a different part of your brain. But they can be exceedingly clever. Just look at detective fiction. Agatha Christie. Insane talent, deployed in a very specific fashion. Not Shakespeare, not Racine…
Racine was a dramaturge, not a novelist.
Ooooh! Look at you! “Dramaturge”. You mean a playwright, a dramatist. “Dramaturge.” I mean really… Racine was a writer, tout court. You know what I mean. Incidentally I bought some French drama recently. Molière.
You’ve been involved in some French drama recently.
In a manner of speaking… [Several sentences of this interview redacted from public display to protect the guilty.]
…But I’ve got Molière on my pile for this winter.
Do you read a lot of French writers?
Hmm… No… Maybe? No, I don’t think so. I try and keep abreast of things. I probably read more Arabs at the moment. Right now I’m in the middle of Amara Lakhous: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Pizza Vittorio. So far it’s very clever, very human. But Lakhous is an Arab in Europe. Or is he in New York now these days? But he was in Italy for years and writes in Italian sometimes and in Arabic.
Majdalani. Charif Majdalani: he’s a proper Arab writer. Lives in Beirut.
He used to work in France though.
Okay, okay, yes. But he’s a proper Lebanese writer, alive too. I think he’s teaching at Saint-Joseph. I have him on my pile at home but I haven’t read him yet.
A little lighter – well, not in subject matter – but I’d like to read Yasmina Khadra, the pseudonym of the Algerian detective writer Moulessehoul.
Khadra lives in France, too.
Okay! Yes! I get it! Maybe you’d live in France too if you were an ex-army officer who criticised Bouteflika. Anyhow. His police novels, they’re Algiers. Gritty. I need to read them.
Lakhous is clever though – I hope not too clever. A little whimsical. It’s the world of the non-European in Europe. Chika Unigwe writing the experience of Nigerians abroad. Her writing has a very basic primalness to it.
But the non-Euro experience of Europe: Maybe there’s not enough of that – or maybe there is but it’s done by crap writers who are praised just for their backgrounds. Turns out there’s no need because there are actually good writers doing things.
But there’s plenty of rubbish. In general.
Oh ho ho – so much rubbish. But you can just ignore that. Never get distracted by it. Life’s too short.
You’ve often said that people need to curate their attention span.
Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! There’s so much beauty in the world, whether in real life or in art and writing and plays and everything. You will be so much better off if you just ignore the crap. It’s not worth your attention. It sure as hell ain’t worth mine.
Who else of the Arabs?
Alaa al Aswany – is he any good?
I haven’t read him. You live in London: how do you keep up with Arab writers?
Oh you just do, somehow. Via French for one thing. Keep your eyes on Le Figaro littéraire. They’re in there a lot and then you have to see if they’ve been translated into English. Often you find the author but not the latest as they’re either written in French or translated into it pretty quickly. But you hear about a writer and you see what’s been translated into English. And obviously L’Orient littéraire is superb for trying to get to know the ecosystem of Arab writers. And Arablit Quarterly.
Do you read novels in French?
No – my French is actually terrible. I’m good at reading things like newspapers and non-fiction in French. Probably misunderstanding half of it, but good enough. I cannot read fiction in French, not good enough. Or maybe I just don’t try.
At a sort-of conference the other day, Adrian Pabst — what a gent he is — he introduced me to some visitors as a “fellow francophone”. Generous — I had to correct him. Anyhow, I need to learn French better. Tout le monde civilisé parle, lit et pense en français.
Est-ce que tu es civilisé ?
Ah! Nous – les celtes, les anglais, whatever – on est un peu des barbares. But the light of civilisation has fallen upon us as well. Celts in particular – I think we like to do things with words. We can deploy them in amazing subterfuges.
And then there’s Stoppard.
Stoppard: the nexus of Jewry, Mitteleuropa, and the English language.
Precisement. I know he’s a show-off. Everyone always says he’s a show-off. But come on, he’s amazing.
By the way, this is my first year where I will have in one calendar year seen three different Stoppard productions. ‘The Real Thing’ at the Old Vic – that was brilliant, just ended – and earlier ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’ at the Hampstead Theatre. Nathaniel Parker, excellent on stage.
I love going to the Hampstead Theatre because the congregation is very Jewish and it makes me feel at home.
New York.
Exactly. And then next month there’s something at… well I don’t know which theatre. Or which play.
The Invention of Love?
Yes! The Invention of Love.
That’s also the Hampstead Theatre.
Perfect. I think the first Stoppard I saw was there. They’re into him. I think he’s into them, too.
What about history though? What history are you reading?
You know, the American colonial period and the early republic have produced so much historical writing. A lot of it is very good. Okay, a lot of it is crap, too. There’s far too much pious nonsense – all that Founding Father worship, it’s excessively tiresome. Jefferson? Nein danke! Did you see they took the statue of Jefferson out of [New York’s] City Hall? Yeah they did it for the wrong reasons but – why was he there to begin with?
He’s Virginian.
He’s Virginian! And not one of the good ones! But there are so many interesting characters and amazingly accomplished people. I find George Washington boring but there are so many fascinating people from this time. You just have to avoid the pious stuff that a certain kind of respectable established American writer type can write about them.
There’s that wonderful institute at William & Mary.
I thought you were anti-Virginian.
I’m pro William & Mary. The college, that is – definitely not the monarchs. Anyhow, they have this institute for early American history and it publishes excellent historical stuff. Has done for decades. They have a quarterly journal.
Favourite Virginian writer?
Poe. Am I allowed to say Poe? Was he a Marylander?
He was born in Boston.
We won’t hold that against him. Baltimore claims him. No one associates him with Boston. I think his formative years were in Virginia. He was kicked out of West Point. And we also have Poe Cottage in New York.
Is Poe a good writer for Hallowe’en?
Oh of course. Reading is very seasonal, isn’t it? I only got into that horror stuff – what do you call it? Gothic, I guess. I only started enjoying that a few years ago. We read Poe at school, of course. But a few years ago, one winter’s evening — I was at a dinner at Boodle’s and sitting next to a princess…
Finally, the name dropping. I was warned it would come.
Just for that I won’t say which. Well she started going on about M.R. James and how brilliant he was and his stories and the settings and everything, so I got into M.R. James. And I read all his short stories. Or maybe they were just the Penguin selected ones? Anyhow, I told this to my friend – my best friend, in fact – and he said he’d recommended M.R. James to me years ago and I did nothing about it. Oh well. Sometimes you need someone to tell you things in the right setting, the soft candlelight, the gentle murmur of a table full of people in a hall… Robertson Davies! His ghost stories as well. He was made head of Massey College at Toronto — basically the All Souls of Toronto — and would write a new ghost story every year to be read aloud after some annual dinner in hall.
Speaking of which, I believe we’re being called in to dinner.
Procedamus.
Thank you.
Thank you.
India
This wartime map of India can be found in the archives of the American Geographical Society.
The AGS is a body of geographers proper founded in 1851, as opposed to the better-known National Geographic Society (f. 1888) which exists to “increase and diffuse” geographic knowledge.
The American Geographical Society and its capacious archive — at one point believed to be the largest map collection in the world — formerly lived at Audubon Terrace in New York. Since 1978 its map collection has been housed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, while the Society’s offices are in Midtown.
The Lithe Efficiency of the Old Constitution
There is a wonderful glimpse of the old days in the memoirs of the late Lord Waddington (1929-2017).
David Waddington was a Lancashire man who became a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Government Chief Whip, Home Secretary, peer of the realm, and eventually Governor of Bermuda. (In that final role, he was the last of the big dogs — all the ones since have been civil servants.)
The old British constitution — before New Labour’s ill-judged reforms — had a lithe efficiency in those days aptly reflected in quite how few people were employed by the highest court in the realm — and how unfussedly they were officed:
I had only been in the House for two days when I received a telephone call from the clerk of my Manchester chambers asking me if later in the week I was prepared to sit as a deputy County Court judge somewhere in London. This would allow my colleague Bob Hardy, who had contracted with the Lord Chancellor’s Department, to sit as a judge on that day, to take over a brief of mine, a libel action in Leeds.
At the eleventh hour someone pointed out that if I were to sit, my career as an MP would come to an abrupt end because as a result of the House of Commons Disqualification Act I would have disqualified myself from membership of the House, thereby precipitating another by-election. I was then begged by Bob to go and explain to the lady in the Lord Chancellor’s Department why he could not sit and why I had turned out to be an inappropriate replacement.
I set off and, after journeying along many corridors and ascending and descending many staircases, I eventually found a little old lady sitting alone in a tiny office at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the House of Lords.
I apologised for troubling her and she said: ‘I can assure you it is no trouble. In fact I am delighted to see you. I have been in this office for thirty-five years and you are the first person who has ever visited me.’
Waarburg
Hawksmoor House, Matjieskuil Farm, Wes-Kaap
Sometimes the perfect house meets the perfect owner: if so, then Hawksmoor House and its current owners, Mark Borrie and Simon Olding, have been an ideal match. The old manor house of Waarburg probably dates from the mid-eighteenth century and, after falling victim to neglect and unsympathetic updates, has been meticulously restored in the twenty-first century.
The history of this property, with its various names and numerous owners, now spans three centuries. In 1701, the Dutch governor of the Cape, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, granted sixty morgen of land at Joostenburg in the district of Stellenbosch to the dominee Hercules van Loon.
He was the predikant of the Reformed congregation in the “City of Oaks”, where he lived in a house on Dorpstraat just a few doors down from my former abode.
Occupied in town, van Loon also purchased farmland in the surrounding district, naming one Hercules Pilaar and another Waarburg, after the German castle of Lutheran lore.
The earliest surviving map of the property shows that there was a house here by 1704, but it is believed it was rarely used by the preacher who was occupied with his duties in town.
One day in that same year, Ds. van Loon rode from Hercules Pilaar towards Stellenbosch and, in a field outside the town, cut his own throat with a penknife. His flock were astonished and recorded that no-one knew why the preacher had killed himself.
Matilda Burden has argued that the existing house was built between 1758 and 1765 by the then-owner Jacobus Christiaan Faure. By 1826, Waarburg became known as Matjeskuil or Matjieskuil which it retained for most of its existence.
A Prize for the General
France’s Top Military-Literary Prize Awarded to François Lecointre
IT SHOULD surprise no-one that the French Army awards an annual prize for military literature. Since 1995, the Prix littéraire de l’Armée de terre – Erwan Bergot is awarded every year for “a contemporary work of French literature that demonstrates active commitment, of a true culture of audacity in service to the collective whole” and is named in memory of the paratrooper officer, writer, and journalist Erwan Bergot (1930-1993).
This year’s prize has been awarded to Gen. François Lecointre, the former Chief of the Defence Staff who now serves as the Chancellor of the Légion d’honneur.
A graduate of Saint-Cyr, Lecointre’s book Entre Guerres (Between Wars) relays his long service to France in the land forces, including operations in Central Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia, the First Gulf War, and elsewhere.
As a young captain in Bosnia, Lecointre was concerned when his company lost radio contact with the French UNPROFOR observation post on Vrbana bridge early on the morning of 27 May 1995. When he went himself to investigate, Captain Lecointre discovered that Bosnian Serb soldiers in captured French uniforms had seized the post and taken French soldiers hostage.
Lecointre immediately informed Paris, where President Jacques Chirac circumvented the UN chain of command in Bosnia by allowing soldiers under Lecointre’s command to retake the post on the northern end of the bridge with a bayonet charge that overran the Serb-held bunker. Vrbana bridge is believed to have been the last bayonet charge of any French military operation to date.
General Pierre Schill, Chief of the Army Staff, awarded his comrade-in-arms the Prix Erwan Burgot this weekend. The prize includes a monetary award of €3,000 which Gen. Lecointre has donated to the association Terre Fraternité that provides support to France’s wounded soldiers and their families.
Entre Guerres had already won the Prix Jacques-de-Fouchier awarded by the Académie française earlier this year. (Above: Gen. Lecointre with the académicien, lawyer, and writer François Sureau.)
The Erwan Burgot prize’s jury was chaired by Gen. Schill and included the son and widow of Erwarn Burgot, alongside Col. Loïc de Kermabon, Col. Noê-Noël Uchida, the journalist and writer Guillemette de Sairigné, literary figure Laurence Viénot, Général de Division Jean Maurin, Général de Brigade Gilles Haberey, prix Goncourt winning novelist Andreï Makine, writer Christine Clerc, former head army medic Dr Nicolas Zeller, journalist Jean-René Van Der Plaetsen, Professor Arnaud Teyssier, and the historian François Broche.
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