The TLS blog

In this week’s TLS – a note from the Deputy Editor

According to the art historian Francis Haskell, Titian was one of three artists who “for no extended period since their lifetimes” had not been considered great painters. (The others were Raphael and Rubens.) The high regard has been constant; but “what people have meant by Titian, what they perceived his high qualities to be – that”, James Fenton writes, “is still a question worth asking”. Biography can help to answer it, and it is all the more surprising that Sheila Hale’s should be the first full Life since 1877 – “it makes one wonder what other more pressing tasks (in the art history world) were in hand”, muses Fenton, who salutes a work that portrays Titian as both “the quintessential court artist” and “a beady-eyed old timber merchant”. Questions as to “whether ‘art’ and ‘art history’ are European concepts better not employed outside their region of origin” are “finessed” by the editors of Art in Oceania, but Andrew Sharp is in no doubt about the rich aesthetic and historical meanings of the works it records – best approached through the book’s “well-chosen and sometimes stunning” illustrations. Illustrations – 1,700 of them, “in all the glory of digital polychrome” – reveal the secrets of London’s hidden interiors, in a book J. Mordaunt Crook finds “electrifying”; while Allan Massie enjoys the poet Robert Crawford’s study of two ancient rivals, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Ten years ago, an article in the journal of the Dickens Fellowship included a passage from one of Dostoevsky’s letters, referring to his visit to Charles Dickens. The “meeting” gained currency in more than one subsequent biography of the English novelist, but specialists in Russian literature were not so sure. Eric Naiman was one, who decided that the article’s sources and its author, Stephanie Harvey, might bear further investigation. His researches drew him into a network of “mutually supportive” contributors to scholarly journals and online publications whose writings all appeared to point to the same raison d’être . . . . A remarkable tale of modern literary life unfolds in Commentary this week.

AJ

The Great Vituperator

By TOBY LICHTIG

Yesterday, on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, William Hague warned of the dangers of "miscalculation" by the North Korean regime, "which has worked itself up into [a] frenetic state of rhetoric". The concern, said the Foreign Secretary, was that Pyongyang would start to believe its "own paranoid rhetoric".

The North Korean government is, of course, notorious for its bellicosity; but it has in recent weeks taken the idiom of diplomatic insult to new heights. These threats and affronts are frequently quoted in the media, but for those interested in exploring at closer quarters the lexicon of aggression and oppression embraced by this most Orwellian of states, it is worth paying a visit to the website of the Korean Central News Agency (available in English- and Spanish-language translation), which collates announcements from The Party, official statements from North Korea's political leaders, and editorials and reports from outlets such as the state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun.

Known to some journalists as "The Great Vituperator" (see Barbara Demnick's excellent book about the country, Nothing To Envy, 2010), the KCNA is a treasure trove of linguistic abuse, throbbing with language of such eccentric crudeness and outlandish bombast that it would be entertaining were it not so disturbing.

In recent days, the "US imperialists" and their South Korean "puppet traitors" have been habitually derided as "mentally deranged", "impudent" and "harassers of peace". They are accused of "sophism", "heinous criminality" and  "letting loose a spate of balderdash". The enemies of Pyongyang are "war maniacs" and "mad about nuclear war". The authorities in Seoul are "a group of murderers who cannot live under the same sky [as North Korea]", while the "imperialist rabid dog" in Washington is "kicking up [a] frantic nuclear war racket".

Sometimes there can be a quaintness to the English – abetted by the apparently dodgy translation – such as in that use of "racket", or in the description of America's "nuclear war manoeuvres" as "madcap".

At other times, the tone is almost lyrical: South Korea is "a tundra of human rights", its leaders "bent on a wild dream", its military masterminds "working with bloodshot eyes" to "inflict heinous war". These "lackeys" and "stooges" are "cancer-like entities", "poisonous herbs" that "should be mercilessly rooted out by arms so that they may not sprout again". The Blue House in Seoul is "the cesspool of all evils". American military support is "a foolish act reminding one of a drowning man catching at a straw". 

Particularly inventive use is made of reported speech. South Korean leaders rarely "speak", according to the KCNA: rather, they "trumpet" (propaganda; hatred; insults; lies) or "fabricate" or "bluster".

The KCNA is vivid in its suggestions about what to do with these "traitors". The citizens of North Korea must "put the warmongers into the red hot iron-pot of Hell". The United States, we are told, "will perish in the flame kindled by it and kneel down before the army and people". Washington will become a "sea of fire" and the enemies of Kim Jong-un will be sent "to the bottom of the sea as they run wild like wolves threatened with fire".

This rhetoric is undoubtedly colourful. To what extent is it dangerous? I'll let the qualified North Korea analysts answer that one, but it may be worth noting a recent story about a former North Korean army officer who fell foul of Kim Jong-un. According to reports, the unfortunate individual, Kim Chol, was sentenced to death and promptly executed not by a three-man firing squad, as is traditional in the country, but by a mortar round. This is to say, he was placed in a spot in a field and then bombed. The apparent reason for this imaginative piece of brutality is that the Supreme Leader is alleged to have desired that "no trace" of the man be left behind, "down to his hair".

Whether or not this story is true – and given the historic excesses of the regime, it may be plausible – it's a salient reminder of the powerful effect that words can have, particularly when uttered from on high. Remember that legend about Henry II and Thomas à Becket? Much has been said in thoughtful commentaries not of Kim Jong-un's actual desire for a doubtless suicidal conflict, but of someone making a "mistake" amid the sabre rattling, pushing an ill-chosen word into a hostile deed, and setting in motion a disastrous chain of escalation. We can only hope that even members of Kim Jong-un's inner circle take the rhetoric of "The Great Vituperator" with a hefty dose of salt.

Great (and graphic) Keats

By MICHAEL CAINES

On April 23 the Institute of Ideas hosts the first in a proposed series of literary evenings on the subject of “great books”. They’re certainly beginning with greatness: not only Keats’s poems but his letters, too, with their deep stores of delight: “I will clamber through the Clouds and exist”, for example, his way of describing to Haydon, in 1818, his plans to “see all Europe at the lower expence”; or, the following year, his demand to Fanny Brawne to ask herself “whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom”; or, a year on again, his lament that he cannot “leave my lungs or stomach or other worse things behind me”.

The illustration above, however, comes from quite a different kind of tribute or commentary on Keats: the first in a four-part comic by P. M. Buchan and Karen Yumi Lusted inspired by "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". It has a modern setting, and comes with a “back-up essay” by Miranda Brennan on Keats and feminism, and a link to a soundtrack by Brendan Ratliff. So it’s a far cry from asking, with Jonathan Bate, “What was he really like?”, as in this TLS piece from last year, or from following Keats through his correspondence, towards the clouds.

Instead – intriguingly, and on some pages wordlessly – this graphic Belle Dame draws on Keats's poem for its power. In the middle, Buchan quotes those deadly simple lines from the fourth stanza, the first spoken by the “palely loitering” knight:

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

The first issue merely sets up the story, but I'm hoping its creators are considering a sequel – perhaps a sequel based on a sequel – i.e., on “The Enchanted Knight” by Edwin Morgan, with the rust “Flowering his armour like an autumn field”:

Lulled by La Belle Dame Sans Merci he lies
In the bare wood below the blackening hill . . . .

Edwin Morgan! Now there's a writer of great books for the Institute of Ideas.

Jacob Epstein’s party in bronze

By MICHAEL CAINES

Any time between now and November 24 would be a good time to find yourself in the vicinity of London’s National Portrait Gallery: head up to Room 33 (the high-ceilinged mezzanine before you get to the Victorians), and there you’ll meet a devil’s dozen of portrait busts by Jacob Epstein, mainly in bronze. It’s quite a party, and entry is free.

Several of the guests are literary men – T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, W. H. Davies – among whom Conrad seems to have been most pleased with Epstein’s work, and appears to best effect. This photo doesn’t capture anything like the weird sensation of being able to look him in the eye, as it were, in 1924, the year of his death:

It only enhances the weirdness of the occasion that this wizened grandee perches in a corner with a fuller faced, uneasy Ralph Vaughan Williams on one side of him and a couple of swell large black-and-white photographs on the other. One of these images is of Gina Lollobrigida X 2 – the original is raising a gloved hand as if to ward off Epstein’s curiously unimpressive version of her. I wonder, too, what T. S. Eliot made of what Epstein made of him:

Further signs of interesting sculptor-sitter relationships appear when you turn around and find that young “spiv” (Epstein’s word) Lucian Freud next to you, or Augustus John (looking older than his years), or the NPG’s recently acquired Jawaharlal Nehru (who came by the studio out of curiosity and ended up sitting for Epstein). And at least one sitter always troubled Epstein: himself. Here he is, looking vexed by the whole business, and wearing the cap that the chilliness of his studio obliged him to wear:

Head and shoulders above them all, however, is the great actress Sybil Thorndike, over five feet above the ground, as if on a stage (and as stipulated by the sculptor). In fact, with her eyes fixed on heaven, Thorndike is here playing Saint Joan, the part Bernard Shaw wrote for her, and this further sets her apart from her neighbours; they are Epstein’s impressions of personalities as well as faces, but in this case a third party is present. Whether the third party is the actress or her role is more difficult to say.

At least it is clear what Thorndike thought of the bust: she kept it on a pedestal in her sitting room and praised it as “a perpetual stimulus and inspiration”. Shaw’s wife, by contrast, wouldn’t let him keep his in the house . . . .

 

Photographs © National Portrait Gallery, London

Jared Diamond’s other worlds, compulsory reading for the military, grandiose triptychs

 

In this week's TLS - A note from the History Editor

 

The layperson used to have a pretty good idea of what anthropologists did. They were white men (usually men) from “civilized” countries who went to “live among” a tribe and record their ancient ways. This was the model that Margaret Mead (the exceptional woman) promoted when she became perhaps the world’s best-known anthropologist in the middle of the last century. Anthropologists’ discoveries were also offered as instructions for how to improve our own ossified Western ways of doing things, from making war to bringing up children. But this kind of anthropology started to get a bad name, as it was realized that, in various ways, it valued cultures differently. Anthropologists started to turn up in coffee bars or offices more often than longhouses. Reviewing a new work by Jared Diamond, one of the best known anthropologists since Mead, Ira Bashkow welcomes a return to the sort of anthropology that unashamedly sees indigenous societies as offering lessons to the West. But he also warns against the “historical” view that such societies demonstrate “how all of our ancestors lived” in the not too distant past, which leads Diamond down some murkier byways.

Our reviewers’ discriminating natures tend to ensure that books are rarely greeted with unstinting praise in our pages, so it may be worth pointing out that this week, two new masterpieces are announced. Michael Howard reviews War from the Ground Up by Emile Simpson, a former Gurkha officer in Afghanistan, and finds a “work of such importance” that it should be “compulsory reading” for all levels of the military. He concludes that the book “deserves to be seen as a coda to Clausewitz”. In Fiction, Hal Jensen puts aside his initial scepticism about the latest Faber Finds reissue, the work of the little-known American novelist David Stacton, and discovers an “astoundingly good” writer. Stacton wrote contemporary novels and pulp productions under various pseudonyms, but it was in his three historical “triptychs” that his “melodramatic and a mite grandiose” talents really shone through.

DH

 

You say Bombay, I say Mumbai . . .

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1996, largely at the instigation of Bal Thackeray, the firebrand politician who died last year. Thackeray founded the Hindu far right Shiv Sena party, which provoked inter-communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims both in the city and across India. As for “Bombay”, he felt the name had too many associations with the city’s colonial past – its replacement is said to honour the city’s patron deity, the Goddess Mumbadevi. What, I wonder, did Thackeray make of his own surname, one which his father adopted out of admiration for the Victorian novelist?

The writer Suketu Mehta relates a tense interview with Thackeray in his brilliant contemporary chronicle of his native city, Maximum City: Bombay lost and found (2004) - what must be one of the last books with the old name in its title. At one point Thackeray firmly corrects Mehta’s use of the name “Bombay”.

Mehta points out that if the fourth largest city in the world in terms of population “were a country by itself in 2004, it would rank fifty-four”. On reflection it’s extraordinary that this megalopolis of 20 million plus should have changed its name so easily – was there any protest? I don’t remember now. Admittedly the old name is clearly recognizable in the new one. But nevertheless can you imagine Boris Johnson as mayor of London deciding to rename the city Londinium? Think of the administrative upheaval.

But as Mehta wrote ten years ago: “name-changing is in vogue in all of India nowadays: Madras has been renamed Chennai, Calcutta, that British-made city, changed its name to Kolkata”. Bangalore has since become Bengaluru (but will that one ever properly catch on, with its unnecessary extra syllable?). I loved the name Madras, but I appreciate these decisions aren’t made with my aesthetic preferences in mind. And there’s something to be said for a proper name change like Madras to Chennai, a clean break. As for Mumbai, it doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily (for me at least) as Bombay, but it’s official and one should respect that - I don't live there after all.

Penguin India seem to view it differently. I had an email exchange with a TLS contributor recently over his use of “Bombay” in a review – I suggested changing it to Mumbai but he pointed out that the author of the book in question opted for Bombay, with the clear blessing of his publishers Penguin. You say Bombay, I say Mumbai . . . .

I think of another megacity and how it has got its naming so right: New York, whose names add up to one big topographical prose poem - this is hardly an original observation I’m sure: Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Columbus Circle, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, F.D.R. Drive, Staten Island - the list goes on.

Martin Amis for one saw the music in these names. Think of this riff on John Self’s travails in Money: “My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires”. 

Which brings me to the thought: can place names be ranked aesthetically? I think they can and I’ve compiled a list of twenty that particularly appeal to me. I’ve excluded country names, and written out of contention names that flaunt their beauty, such as Belo Horizonte, Saratoga Springs, Alice Springs, Pacific Palisades, Tierra del Fuego, Martha’s Vineyard, Grimsby . . . .

It’s a very subjective thing of course, and I’m probably revealing a tin ear here (I haven’t tried them out on anybody). I particularly like names that are hybrids, such as Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladesh - or ones that end in “ville” - excluding the deeply unimaginative Townsville in Australia.

Here they are, in no particular order – I could easily come up with 20 more and call them my favourites too, and 20 more after that: Devizes in Wiltshire, for example, or Galashiels. I kick off with Jacksonville, although it was a close-run thing between it and Galveston, both having that rather beautiful stress on the first syllable.

Jacksonville

New Orleans (wherever the stress falls)

San Francisco

Valparaíso

Asunción

La Paz

Brazzaville

Kinshasa

Khartoum

Cairo

Jeddah

Isfahan (and Suza)

Cox’s Bazar

Shanghai

Adelaide

Istanbul

Sarajevo

Nuremberg

Syracuse

Vladivostok (of course)

 

 

Javier Marías, part two: Digressions

By CATHARINE MORRIS

Digressions in the fiction of Javier Mar­ías (see yesterday’s post) can be extensive. “My intention is not that I irritate the reader”, Mar­ías told James Runcie at the Southbank last week. “The digression can be as interesting [as the action that preceded it]. I compare it to . . . the second part of The Godfather – there are the two different times. Al Pacino in the present and Robert De Niro in the past, in Sicily . . . . When the film jumps you’re annoyed. But Sicily is also so interesting that when it goes back to the present you say ‘oh’ . . .". Mar­ías went on to mention Don Quixote ("[They’re] about to hit each other with a sword and Cervantes stops the action. He never comes back to it . . . . That’s even more irritating than I may have been") and Laurence Sterne ("Tristram Shandy interrupted as many times as he wanted") – and suggested that such narrative quirks are justified partly by how our brains work. “Minutes have a different duration in our memories.”

Asked why his sentences were so long, Marías borrowed a reply from William Faulkner: “Because I’m not sure I’ll be alive for the next one”. Runcie observed that they contribute to Marías’s “authority of rhythm”. The fact that this rhythm appears to the reader to remain unbroken strikes Marías as “miraculous”, given his writing process; he writes, as he puts it, not with a map, but with a compass (“If I knew the whole story in advance I wouldn’t write it. I’d be bored”), and he usually writes a page a day, but there are days – sometimes long stretches – when he doesn’t have time to write at all. He told us that he was careful, when returning after a break, not to read too many pages back to himself – “What if you don’t like them?” – and referred to Jorge Luis Borges’s idea that a “definitive” text can result from only two things: religion and exhaustion. (“Why should draft 12 be more definitive than 11? . . . . And there’s always 13.”)

When Runcie praised Marías’s forensic analysis of infatuation – “an accurate portrayal of traumatic love” – Marías explained that the Spanish "Los enamoramientos" has no perfect equivalent in English. “Infatuation” is acceptable, he said, but it has a negative nuance that the Spanish doesn't have; the Spanish is more simply “the process and the state of being in love”. As a title it therefore gives less away. Being in love is something that has a rather good reputation, said Marías. “Many think that it makes us better, more noble . . . . It is also true that it may be the other way round . . . . I have seen noble people act vilely.”

In the question-and-answer session Marías said that he didn't read much literary criticism, apart from reviews, but that a few books – including Mimesis by Erich Auerbach (reviewed in the TLS by George Steiner in 2003) – had been very important to him; and that The Infatuations was perhaps his most pessimistic book, reflecting his belief that people, in his own society at least, are more and more reluctant to take responsibility, increasingly indifferent to crime and prone to blaming their situation – the emotional legacy of their childhood, or the state of being in love – for their misdemeanours.

Marías didn’t forget to acknowledge the translator of his work, Margaret Jull Costa (mentioned by Adrian Tahourdin in his round-up of the 2012 translation prizes): “I have been very lucky . . . . She is very faithful. She finds very good solutions . . . . The quality of the doubts and questions [she has] tell me how good she is”. “I even think sometimes that my novels read better in English.”

Javier Marías on secrecy and reflection

By CATHARINE MORRIS

In his recent review of the The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s metaphysical murder mystery, Adam Thirlwell described Marías’s prose as “sensual and philosophical, simultaneously . . . . His narrators can drift for giant lengths, and yet still re-emerge, calmly, on to the same stage, transformed by their reflections”. He went on to say that Marías’s “acrobatics between paragraphs or chapters can only be coarsely paraphrased”. So it was with interest that we gathered to hear Marías interviewed by James Runcie at the Southbank last week. What would he say about his own acrobatics?

The first thing he revealed was that he began The Infatuations with only a vague premiss: he was interested in the idea of a woman who would stay with a man who had caused her great harm. Doing so might be a strange kind of justice, a compensation, he said; she might wordlessly be saying: “you must make up for this by being by my side for ever . . . and my very presence will remind you all the time of what you have done”.

His next step was to consider what the man’s crime might have been. Then he recalled something a friend had told him – for years she had observed a particular couple in a café every day. But one day the couple stopped coming; the man had been killed. The Infatuations duly begins: “The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met . . .”. The “absolute fiction” starts 25 or 30 pages in, depending on whether you are reading in English or Spanish.

Like much of Marías’s fiction (and a speech he wrote for the Spanish Academy), The Infatuations addresses the impossibility of knowing anything or anyone with absolute certainty. Narrating is something we do all the time, said Marías; someone says “How are you?” and you reply – perhaps with an account of your journey to work. “But even that small thing is very difficult to tell . . . . You had one point of view; others had a different one . . . . It even happens with history. It’s almost impossible to tell these things with accuracy. [But] fiction does that.”

If he had to say what The Infatuations was about, he’d say that it was about secrecy and the convenience of secrecy, how "civilized" secrets can be. He recalled a line from his novel A Heart So White (1992): “ears don’t have lids that can close against the words”. “If you told me that you had killed a woman in the park last night, I’d probably wish you hadn’t told me . . . . I might think ‘James seems like a nice man. I don’t want him in prison, not immediately at least' . . . .”

Moving swiftly on, Runcie observed that the narrative of The Infatuations was full of reflection – he referred to a passage in which a single conversation is revisited again and again. “There are all kinds of novelists”, said Marías. “Some perceive what is normally almost imperceptible and see the meaning in it . . . . Say you spend the whole evening arguing with somebody . . . . It is very likely that what remains in your memory is a small detail, a gesture or a look. That’s what the novels pick up.”

Marías’s narrators tend also to make a lot of literary references – to Balzac, Dumas and Shakespeare, for example – but it is not in a metaliterary way, said Marías; it’s “more in the way we all do it: ‘I’ve seen this film and I talk about it' . . . ”. So the sequence in The Infatuations in which the narrator’s lover relays the plot of Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert – in which a man mistakenly buried after the Battle of Eylau returns to Paris years later to pick up where he left off – was not included for the sake of it; the story is something you might dwell on naturally: “My own father died seven years ago”, said Marías. “[Say] the dead came back five or seven years later . . . . We inherited some money. Probably we’ve spent it by now . . . . And what about the house? . . . It could really be a great misfortune if they came back . . . ”.

More on Marías’s interview to come tomorrow . . . . 

The People of the App

by TOBY LICHTIG

Tonight is Passover, a festival that has gone through various transformations in its three-thousand-year history. I'm not sure whether the first generation of celebrants descended from the slaves who fled Pharaoh's Egypt would have recognized cupboards swept clean of flour, children hunting for pieces of unleavened bread under sofa cushions, and representations of gruesome plagues in the form of finger puppets. But one of the things that helps a religious ritual to endure is its ability to move with the times.

Passover is a great story, full of tragedy, gore and vengeful triumph against the odds. And like all good stories, it has continued to evolve. Now it has gone virtual. The Haggadah – the 2,500 year-old text that describes the tale of the exodus and gives instructions for the order of the Seder – is available in app form.

The Haggadah App (Haggadap?) comes in "modern" and "traditional" Sephardi and Ashkenazi versions, and includes songs, pictures and videos. The app, say the developers, is "an interactive and fully customisable e-book, created to help people of any level of religious knowledge or observance to prepare for the Seder and help them clearly explain the traditions to all participants".

Observers, or rather "users", are able to tailor the e-Haggadah "so that the running time is adjusted to their needs". They are also able to adjust the religiosity, making this suitable for revellers from "any kind of Jewish background".

While this venture is to be lauded for its enterprise and plurality, parents struggling to bar their children from hand-held devices at the dinner table may be rather less impressed. Confronted with the question "Why is this night different from all other nights?", some may be tempted to answer, "it isn't".

A Britten top ten

By MICHAEL CAINES

Here’s an aside to Ian Bostridge’s magisterial overview, in this week’s TLS, of several new books published to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. The YouTube-illustrated list below represents what one of those books reckons to be the current “Britten Top Ten” – ie, a list of his ten pieces that are “most popular with the public at large”:

1 The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

 

 

2 Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes

 

 

3 A Ceremony of Carols (so good he posted it twice, if only for the costumes, and the contrast between soprano and treble soloists)

 

 

 

4 Simple Symphony

 

5 Serenade for tenor, horn and strings

 

6 Soirées Musicales (intially taken here at quite a lick, as befits a precocious early suite inspired by Rossini)

 

 

7 “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”

 

8 A Hymn to the Virgin

 

9 “The Salley Gardens”

 

 

10 "Tell Me the Truth about Love" (the opening flourish puts me off this one – possibly a silly prejudice on my part . . .)

 

The source for this list is what used to be The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten by John Bridcut, first published in 2010, and now revised and elevated to the rank of Essential Britten. It’s a “delightful” compendium, according to our reviewer. There’s much more to the composer’s achievements, however, than the popular pieces mentioned above, as Bridcut is quick to point out. It contains “four or five indisputable masterpieces”, he says (although here he doesn’t say which ones; any guesses?), but it only covers “the first half of Britten’s composing life, and includes nothing sung in his fifteen operatic works”.

Funny he should mention that. This summer the Royal Opera House will tackle one of the most notoriously unpopular of those later operatic works: Gloriana, which seems to have discomforted its first audiences, in the Coronation year of 1953, by looking “beyond the cliché of the Elizabethan past as source of renewal”, as Ian Bostridge puts it, “to a more troubling mapping of that past on to the Elizabethan present”. Is this wise? Given the strength of feeling recently expressed against a mere novelist for daring to speak a troubling word or two about the Duchess of Cambridge, I’m not sure we Brits are ready to look beyond Britten’s top ten. . . .