The TLS blog

History's master narratives

BY DAVID HORSPOOL

Considering how low down on the academic agenda history tends to be in our schools (well behind English and Mathematics, and these days a poor relation too of Science and ICT), it perhaps should surprise us more than it does how much of a fuss is made of proposed changes to the National History Curriculum. Earlier this month, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, published his consultation document on the whole National Curriculum, and although there has been some discussion of various parts of it (Sir James Dyson, the knight errant of vacuum cleaning and inventor of that savage hand drier, didn't much like the prospects for Design and Technology), it is History that has twisted the most knickers. Perhaps that's because, encouragingly, we all feel we have a continuing stake in history, whereas other areas of the National Curriculum tend to devolve, after we leave school, to others' specialisations.

The German Shepherd bows out

Pope Benedict XVI © Tony Gentile/Reuters

 

BY RUPERT SHORTT

 

To many, the news was seismic. No pope has resigned since the fifteenth century. Perhaps, though, the portents of Benedict XVI’s abdication were there all along. Two years ago he told a German interviewer, Peter Seewald, that a pope could step down if he were too physically or mentally frail to do his job. Even John Paul II, renowned for the doggedness with which he pursued his ministry in the face of chronic ill health, is said to have entrusted his private secretary with a resignation letter to be published if he reached a certain level of incapacity.

But John Paul’s mental condition see-sawed. His toughness won the admiration of many; overall, though, the effect on the Church was very mixed. The barque of Peter was steered this way and that by competing Vatican officials, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger among them. The contrast between sclerosis at the top, and the vibrant grassroots of the Church in Latin America, Africa and Asia, looked stark.

Margaret Atwood on Wattpad

By CATHARINE MORRIS

This week, The Times ran an article about Beth Reeks, who has secured a three-book deal at the age of seventeen. The article mentioned that she had built up a readership via Wattpad, a free online novel-sharing platform for amateur writers that “Margaret Atwood has hailed as the future of the form”.

If only Atwood had had access to it when she was a teenager: at a recent RSL event in Canada House in Trafalgar Square, she told us that her first step in becoming a writer was buying a publication called Writers’ Markets, which said that the money was in true romance stories. She told us: “I thought, I‘ll do that during the day and write my deathless masterpieces at night”. There was a certain formula to these stories, she said. “There would be a choice between two men – one would have a motorcycle and one would work in a shoe store. The woman would get involved with the unreliable one . . . . There were various ways of ending the story. The best way was patching things up with the shoe store guy . . . . But there would always be a scene on the sofa: ‘and then they were one’. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That wasn’t going to happen.” 

The wounded Earth

A man walks along a damaged street in the city of Homs, January 1, 2013. REUTERS/Yazan Homsy 

 

"Enough of War the wounded Earth has known;
Weary at length, and wasted with destruction,
Sadly she rears her ruin'd Head, to shew
Her Cities humbled, and her Countries spoil'd,
And to her mighty Masters sues for Peace . . . ."

From Act Three of Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane (1701), a once popular verse drama about – among other things – a tyrant (admittedly Turkish rather than Syrian), his downfall and the irreparable damage he does . . . .

Books of the year, from love to hate – and from Zoffany to Acceptance

By MICHAEL CAINES

This week's issue of the TLS devotes several pages to the generally positive exercise that is "Books of the Year" (or "International Books of the Year", depending on who you ask; the adjective emphasizes an notable aspect of our contributors' wide reading). I say "generally positive" because you do sometimes learn a bit about what writers, scholars, scientists, artists et al dislike as much as what they like.

For example . . .

Out of East Anglia

by Thea Lenarduzzi

Journalists, students, proud parents and friends gathered around bowls of crisps (those ones with beetroot) and bottles of British sparkling wine last night for the launch of the UEA Creative Writing Anthologies 2012 at the LRB Bookshop in London. A selection of graduates read roughly three minutes’ worth of their work, the Tracy Chevaliers and Kazuo Ishiguros of the future; we listened.

Archives under threat at Ruskin College

By DAVID HORSPOOL

The move of a red-brick Oxford College from one part of the city to another is not an event one would expect to interest anyone beyond the postman and Pickford's. But a spot of decluttering presided over by the College Principal, Audrey Mullender, has caused some consternation. The College itself has concentrated on their "discovery" of a portrait of Bernard Shaw by the Fabian artist Bertha Newcombe, painted in 1892, and previously thought to have been lost during the Second World War. Actually, it has been on the wall of the College common room. “When we got it down, on the back it had a sticker that said “owner: Labour Party”, so I thought they might want it back", Professor Mullender explained to the local paper.

The Labour Party were pleased to receive the painting, and Professor Mullender was photographed with Ed Miliband to seal the deal. No one seems to have asked whether the Party might actually have donated it to the College, and whether they should keep it. GBS's biographer Stanley Weintraub thinks that the College's decision is "sheer blindness . . . .The label on the back of the painting offers no evidence of loan or gift. The Labour Party has no serious exhibition space for it and very likely it will go on the auction market once the issue quiets down, and make the big money Bertha Newcombe could never earn". Apart from any other consideration, one wonders, if the painting is sold, why the College, rather than the Labour Party, wouldn't want the money.

But if giving away prize assets seems a little cavalier, that is nothing compared to the upset caused by Mullender's decision to destroy admissions records from the College's early years in the move. A blog by a historian, Hilda Kean, who once worked for Ruskin, called this decision an "act of philistinism". Prof Mullender told me that the destruction of the originals happened after the data they contained had been digitized, though not the "subjective material" that, she says, would contravene the data protection act if it referred to people who were still alive. She also wanted to make it clear that suggestions that a banner from the 1984 Miners' Strike and a historic plaque had been lost were inaccurate. One was back on display in the College's new premises, the other is on loan to the Marx Memorial Library in London.  

Sprint for Shakespeare - or beware Bohemian bears

BY PETER STOTHARD

Every day the Durrants company sends the Man Booker judges the latest advice, speculation and comment on our work from the pages of the press.

For those of us with long newspaper memories this is still a strange arrival. The name Durrants means to me  those old  library envelopes in which their cuttings service used to be kept last century, the cuttings that were prey to chaos and carelessness in every newspaper office but which were still the nearest thing to permanence that most of our articles ever had.

Now, of course, Durrants is all electronic, a line of blue www-type in place of the yellowing print. But by Durrants we Man Bookerists still get to know how we are seen — from Bombay to Bournemouth — and which of our long list is judged the most worthy or likely to win the prize in October.

Alongside my distinguished and industrious colleagues I have been living with this decision all year. We now have a long list of twelve from an original cast of 145 novels. And in a few weeks we will have a short list of six.

But shhh! Say it quietly. For the past few days the Chair of the Man Booker judges has been off the job. Guiltily (for with our long dozen to reread and reread by the end of the month I ought not to be straying) I have been reading The Winter’s Tale instead.

Camus censored

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Albert Camus cut his journalistic teeth on the Alger Républicain, before switching to the Soir républicain, a two-page daily sheet he set up with his friend Pascal Pia. It first hit the streets in September 1939. He was twenty-six at the time. 

As editor-in-chief, Camus wrote almost the whole paper and, according to his biographer Olivier Todd, signed himself variously “Vincent Capable”, “Demos”, “Irène”, “Nero” and “Cesare Borgia”. Todd describes the sheet as “iconoclastic”. It soon fell victim to the state censor, a certain Col Florit. Todd writes: "Camus and his newspaper accepted censorship about military matters, but 'we do not accept mental censorship'". 

Macha Séry, a journalist on Le Monde, recently uncovered a box in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, containing Camus’s unpublished articles from the Soir républicain. She wrote about her discovery in Le Monde of March 17.  Séry's cache includes an eloquent manifesto in defence of press freedom, dated November 25, 1939, which never saw the light of day. It opens “It’s difficult to talk about press freedom today without being accused of being a Mata-Hari, . . . of being Stalin’s nephew”. Camus goes on “We don’t see Hitler . . . using Socratic irony. It remains the case that irony is a weapon without precedent against those with too much power”. 

Later “No one wants, in twenty-five years time, to repeat the experience of 1914 and 1939”. 
On January 10, 1940 Camus was summoned by M Bourrette of the Algiers Special Police and told that publication of the paper would be suspended, after 117 issues. Pascal Pia returned to Paris. Within months Camus would find himself in Paris too.

Santorum and the Cicero brothers

BY PETER STOTHARD

I can barely hear the the words Super Tuesday without wishing I had been in Ohio or Georgia this week.

For any political journalist (as once I was) it is the best of times.

Today I made a tiny contribution to the coverage in the Wall Street Journal with a piece on the Commentariolum Petitionis (translated in its most recent version as How to Win Elections) a practical, cynical and eerily modern guide to winning votes that is commonly (and probably correctly) attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero's younger brother Quintus.

I thought of Robert Kennedy's help to JFK and Jeb Bush's for GWB and Roger Clinton's and Billy Carter's hindrances. 

And I wondered what help the younger Santorum brother was giving.

I asked but no one seemed to know.

Is anything fraternal happening out there?