The TLS blog

Trollope A, Forster P, Evans H - and other writers an editor should read

The Browser, I discover, is a website in the style of  a very civilised party - with no rushing or pushing and mostly polite conversation. One of the on-line tricks that we editors must all learn these days is to replicate in cyberspace the gentler associations of social life, not just the get-as-fast-as-we-can-to-the-bar kind. I'd like to think that the TLS site is such a place. The Browser asked me a week or so ago to suggest some books that an aspiring newspaper editor might read. And I offered the following, all of them I now realise from an off-line age fast rushing by.

Civis Romanus Suuuuuuuuuuuuum!

'Civis Romanus sum' was the proudest boast any citizen of the ancient world could make, writes my old   friend Michael Gove in The Times this morning.

It was a declaration of allegiance that entitled the individual to the full protection of the Empire’s resources if their liberty was compromised.

According to Lord Palmerston (if only we had him now instead of Lord Mandelson!), any British citizen whose freedoms were curtailed while in another jurisdiction was entitled to the full protection of the British state. And on such a guarantee the health of liberty everywhere depended.

How different to our own miserable times  when decent Britons languish under the lash of Somali pirates, while "ministers are more concerned with navel-gazing than naval doctrine".

Here in TLS Towers we naturally share Michael's wish that the Somalis release their innnocent prey. Yet we remain ever so slightly nervous at the precedent of using the words 'Civis Romanus sum' to achieve that end.

Perhaps Mary Beard put the problem best in an article earlier this year, discussing the terror campaign of Verres on Sicily in the first century BC as deplored by Cicero.

"The fate of Gavius from the Sicilian town of Consa, who was flogged, tortured and crucified for being a spy, despite the fact that he was a Roman citizen and so legally protected from such treatment, has remained a powerful political symbol.

Gavius died with the words “Civis Romanus sum” (“I am a Roman citizen”) on his lips – a slogan that was later adopted by Lord Palmerston when he sent a gunboat in support of the British citizen Don Pacifico, who in 1847 had been attacked by an anti-Semitic crowd in Athens.

It was famously wheeled out again in 1963 by John F. Kennedy in Berlin: “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum’. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘ich bin ein Berliner’”."

Citers of the phrase tend to forget (if they ever knew) that Gavius died with the sacred words on his lips:

along with the flies and birds and other winged creatures that so enjoy a crucifixion.

Elisa Caleb, David Hare and friends

At 6.45 on Friday night the National Theatre crowd was waiting for the start of David Hare's play about the near collapse of capitalism in 2008. The Power of Yes was a hot ticket (thanks, NT press office for helping out) and I'd expected to be lined up on Row J with a ruck of bankers keen to see themselves on stage, however much mocked, and happy to celebrate the return of their bonuses (ever so cautiously).

Instead, we Yes-goers were mostly men and women who, to judge from their looks and cries, thought that the City tumbrils had stopped too soon and that the playwright's guillotine (and the public's too) should have taken more necks than it did. So a fairly typical audience for a David Hare play.

Our own party had much to celebrate - and did; the first marriage of one of our oldest friends, the cheer and good countenance of a friend who is enduring chemotherapy, and the NT stage debut (as a character  in Yes not an actor) of another. But curiously, two days later, the memory strongest in mind is of the show before the show, one of those singers who entertain the queuing and drinking and don't often get noticed too much.

Elisa Caleb, photographed here by Ian McHugh, is, as I discovered,  already a well known artist playing gigs around town. She sings jazz classics in a light airy Brazilian style and her husband's songs as though they were already classics. After My Funny Valentine, which is my second favourite of all songs and Jo Caleb's The Wind, which I hummed both ways back and forth to the bar, I bought the CD, Carry Me Home, £12 from the singer herself.

Anyone who bought a bit of early Ella Fitzgerald Decca vinyl at a gig in the mid-forties, would have been pleased, I'm sure. Did they ever sell records even at small shows in those days? Did Lady Ella sell them? I don't know.

Anyway, there is just a sparkling hint of the First Lady of Song in Elisa Caleb. I've been listening to pre-show star ever since the bankers left the big stage.

Campaign for Collini

For some years it has been impossible to get much beyond the second drink in an academic bar without a mordant joke at the expense of the RAE, the Research Assessment Exercise, a system whose name is hissed syllable by syllable, separately from the words around it as though in some oral italic of despair.

Since 1986 this RAE has  been the Government's little loved but gradually tolerated  means of evaluating what dons do when they are not teaching. Now, as we discover, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has other plans to regulate what scholars in Thackeray, Thucydides and Thoreau (to take the 'ths' as the first thing in my mind) should try to think, unthink and know.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills?

Never heard of it? Well, you can be forgiven.

Unlike the work in literary criticism that it wants to measure, DBIS has not been around long.

Some  might remember instead the short-lived Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and before that the Department for Education and Skills, and before that the Department for Education and Employment. Or they may not.

But, recognised or not,  the DBIS has a bizarre and destructive plan. And thanks to to Stefan Collini's masterly piece in last week's TLS, a few more of us now more about it.

Does anyone, however, care?

This week I have been out and about more with businessman and political types, men and women sniffing the corpse of New Labour in all its unlovely manifestations, not merely those that emanate from DBIS. So it is not surpring maybe that I haven't heard much response myself.

I had expected that other newspapers might take more interest. To quote Professor Collini's opening words, "what follows is, I assure you, neither a satire nor a parody, though I suppose it might seem laughable were it not so serious".  But so far there are only gratifying reports of TLS offprints being left in samizdat form in administrative offices and classrooms.

There have been letters to the TLS too.

On the Web has there been a truly galvanised response to the proposed principles for
the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the replacement for the RAE that has suffered so much abuse in its life.

To cite Collini though it is best to go directly now to his piece: "The guidelines spelling out how it will operate have just been issued by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE; the other parts of the UK have matching councils). The document declares that certain aspects of the process have yet to be settled, and so it invites responses from universities (and other interested parties) during a brief “consultation period”.
In many respects, the REF will be quite like the RAE, and will require similar kinds of evidence in the submissions (selected publications, information about research environment, etc). But one very significant new element has been introduced. In this exercise, approximately 25 per cent of the rating (the exact proportion is yet to be confirmed) will be allocated for “impact”.

The premiss is that research must “achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society”. The guidelines make clear that “impact” does not include “intellectual influence” on the work of other scholars and does not include influence on the “content” of teaching. It has to be impact which is “outside” academia, on other “research users” (and assessment panels will now include, alongside senior academics, “a wider range of users”).

 Moreover, this impact must be the outcome of a university department’s own “efforts to exploit or apply the research findings”: it cannot claim credit for the ways other people may happen to have made use of those “findings".

So does anyone care?

The absurdity of this - set out by Collini and his commenters - might once have provoked in me too merely the mildest shrug. It could only be the work of a junior official on a jaundiced day. Surely no serious person could see it imposed it. It will all be changed in the 'consultation'. Maybe the newspaper editors of today still see it thus.

But then. . . .

Frank Johnson remembered

Frank Johnson was the funniest - and in some ways the finest too - of all the writers I ever worked with in newspapers

Just as Harold Evans was the greatest editor and Hugo Young the most refined of liberal voices, Frank Johnson was the wisest wit.

All three men were linked - by employment contacts, philosophical and media disputes and worse - and if I were ever asked (I really don't think so) to write one of those 'the Fleet Street I knew' books, they would all have to appear.

Fortunately, the editor of the TLS, if he waits for the right book to come along, can more easily say as much as he wants to or can remember.

Hugo and Harold have already had a TLS outings. This week Frank has his turn.

Now that this blog appears on Facebook, there is a new obstacle to writing anything about him here. I doubt that the greatest parliamentary sketchwriter of his time would have cared for social-networking sites.

On the other hand, Frank loved the TLS - and he may have some Facebook friends too even if they might not have admitted as much to him while he was alive.

My favourite songs?

Your three best songs?

The ones you have to ration yourself from playing too often in case they might ever spoil?

A man on some crackling radio station was asking that question this morning - just while I tried to park before talking to Australian Broadcasting Co's  Bookshow, just as I was preparing to say more about that  Princeton conference on the decline of book reviewing.

If the wonderful Ramona Koval had asked me about top songs instead of about the TLS, I would have said:

1) The Needle and the Damage Done: Neil Young: 1971: with a preference, not shared by many, for the 1993 live version on Unplugged.

2) My Funny Valentine: Rodgers and Hart: 1937: forgetting, since songs mean words, the Miles Davis/ Bill Evans version from 1958, I'd choose Rickie Lee Jones  from Girl at her Volcano, an EP (remember those?) 1983.

3) Lady Stardust:  David Bowie: 1972: again with a preference for the acoustic version added to the resissue of Ziggy Stardust: 1990.

Now, back to the production of this week's TLS.

Facebook friends for the TLS

Today the TLS has joined Facebook. So has the Editor of the TLS. Neither may seem surprising events to many but it is still something of a new world to me. This blog is now supposed to go automatically onto the new Facebook pages. I will believe it when I see it.

So I am not going to write much now - only enough to report two offerings from the new Rudi Thoemmes rare books catalogue covering the History of Ideas.

The first is a seven-volume edition of Benjamin Franklin's works once owned by the British railway tycoon, Edward Ladd Betts, whose library lasted only a little longer than the date of the 1866 banking crash which brought him low. Yours for £2,600.

The second is Bertrand Russell's The Principle of Mathematics, a classic work, deliberately completed on the very last day of 1900, which the author, being a mathematician, thought of as the last day of the nineteenth century. Yours for the suspiciously round mathematician's sum of £1000.

Franklin, Betts and Russell would all have had one thing in common if they were alive now, a fascination with Facebook, I am sure. The picture would doubtless appeal to them too, chosen, as it is, by tapping TLS and Facebook into Google and printing whatever appears.

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It's a Don's Life: the party

Last night we celebrated the publication of It's a Don's Life by my dear friend and colleague Mary Beard.

This is no ordinary book - being a collection not only of her TLS blogs known to readers around the world but of the comments to the blogs too

So it was no ordinary party either - being attended not only by the folk one sees regularly (and is regularly pleased to see) at many a white-wine-and-mini-quiche launch but by Commenters who were meeting Mary and each other for the first time outside cyberspace.

So I have now met Lord Truth and various other of the stimulating contributors that make Mary's blog such a pleasure and It's a Don's Life the perfect Christmas gift.

The road from blogosphere to Burlington House was not without a few potholes.

It took me a little while - at least a small gulp of wine and bite of sausage roll - to twig that the man who introduced himself as his lordship  was not a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in whose Piccadilly home the party was being held.

Somehow an on-line Lord Truth can only be a nom-de-keypad but a real-life Lord Truth might easily be one of those peers one doesn't hear from much these days.

I've also now met Alex Drace-Francis, an occasional commenter on this blog too, an authority on Romania who gave me his own latest book, Where to go in Europe, an anthology of toilet literature including items from Anton Chekhov and Rebecca West, another excellent gift (if you can find it)  for a relative who has a Don's Life already.

Chekhov, it seems, was an acute observer of ventilations sytems in the latrines of Russian penal colonies. The best, we learn, worked on the 'reverse draft' principle pioneered by a Professor Erisman.

West reported from 'a dark hole in the floor' in Pristina where 'there was someting hieratic in the proportions of the place'.

This was a little more than I needed to know but, fortunately for the happy celebrants last night,  the 'necessaries' of the Antiquaries (A D-F is excellent on lavatorial nomenclature)  owed nothing to the pleasures of Eastern Europe.

Here was a Society which earned its Royal Charter in 1751, for  "the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries".

This was surely one of its occasions to remember.

Bookslut on Dollar weakness

 

Jessa Crispin has come out of post-Princeton seclusion with some characteristically robust reflections about our conference on why so many newspapers are closing their book sections. She does not want us to think that her Berlin-based website is immune from the economic troubles that representatives of the Washington Post and New York Times described so well. But she wonders how much that really matters.
 
"Bookslut is kept going now on a month to month basis due to advertising issues and the like. For the first time in my life I have had to think thoughts about the "weakness of the dollar." But the reason I have a hard time with these conversations about the decline of the review, and the death of authority, is because so many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They're rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don't get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It's hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn't care much for them to begin with."

She and I are now going to read more of each other's stuff. I've put Bookslut on our media exchange list so that the 'canon according to the TLS' will (or could) be ever close at hand. It still seems strange to me that I can read her choice of what matters without paying anything at all.

There has been a certain amount of other web-chat about this too. In the meantime, may there soon be strong economic models for all, and, before that, a stronger dollar to bring new Euros to her cause.