Laurence Fox: from actor to Reclaim Party leader
It's a far cry from the actor once best known for his roles in Lewis and Becoming Jane, and his high-profile marriage to actress Billie Piper. But what exactly has Fox done — and what controversies has he found himself in?
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Spectator
7 hours ago
- Spectator
‘Genius' is a dangerously misused word
For several centuries, the word 'celebrity' meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by 'genius'. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal. Her indictment of the genius myth – the idea that a small cadre of special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers – is that it is not only corrosive and unhelpful, but also inaccurate. Genius, she argues, is fundamentally immeasurable; it is better understood as residing not in individuals but in teams or milieux. It is used to license terrible behaviour in those awarded the title; it appears inevitable in retrospect but in prospect is highly contingent; it is a temptation to ultracrepidarianism. Above all, genius is a misleading schema – a seductive, ready-made, familiar pattern we can use to make sense of the world. Lewis takes a long journey through the history of IQ testing – from Francis Galton's eugenicist championing of hereditary genius, to Louis Terman's longitudinal studies, to Mensa, and on to the increasingly recondite and fissiparous world of ultra-high IQ societies. IQ exists in a curious apposition to genius, as, arguably, a necessary-but-not-sufficient component – but one that is more easily measurable. This history is littered with fraud, including Cyril Burt's suspiciously perfect, probably invented data and Hans Eysenck's questionable studies. Some of Lewis's criticisms of the industry are inarguable. The widely used tests have cultural biases baked into their terminology – 'savages' in a questionnaire that dates back only as far as 1993 – and patriarchal assumptions underlying questions that depend on identifying surnames or habits of dress. But she also complains that 'the test selects heavily for speed', even though on the face of it this feels entirely reasonable. Her real complaint is that high general intelligence is used as if it were interchangeable with genius – but delivering acts of genius also takes application and patience. In the second half of the book, Lewis dives deeper into the genius schema and the ways in which it is often used to explain or to excuse behaviour ranging from poor to criminal. Tolstoy, for example, exploited his wife Sofia; Lee Krasner struggled to escape the shadow of Jackson Pollock; Gertude Stein 'stole her partner's voice' in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and used it to praise herself. 'When you admire an artwork or a scientific invention,' Lewis asks, 'what duty do you owe to those harmed in its production?' She does not quite stay for an answer, though a chapter on the avant-garde theatre director and serial abuser Chris Goode, and the mental contortions employed by his collaborators to ignore the people harmed in his productions – and then, after his suicide, occlude the historical record – sharpens that question. People who are hailed as geniuses find that their words on any subject, however unrelated, somehow magically carry extra weight. At a trivial level, this is why social media is full of greetings-card sentiments misattributed to Einstein or Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. Lewis identifies a few special cases of this. There is the seemingly irresistible pull towards race science among the high-IQ. There is the lure to the overconfident of posing as a rebel disrupting consensus paradigms (as during Covid, passim), which is only intensified by the fact that sometimes these rebels are correct. And there is the read-across from qualification in one field to other unconnected ones. Lewis makes no mention of Jordan Peterson, but she does of Elon Musk, whose achievements are duly acknowledged even as his idiosyncrasies are mocked. Unhappy the land that has need of geniuses, as Brecht might have said. But lands that do not wish to stagnate do genuinely have need of genius – at least, of the instances of scientific and technological genius that lead to growth. So finding the best path to steer is important. A lot of the problems become clearer if we compare 'genius' with its lower wattage cousin 'talent'. No one would claim that talent does not exist, or deny that different people have different talents. You can test pretty reliably for talent. Equally, talent is very clearly domain-specific and non-fungible. Being a talented newspaper columnist, for example, does not make you a talented fighter pilot. The contributions of others to creating contexts where talent can flourish are obvious and uncontested. Talent offers no immunity. Organisations, and indeed nations, if they want to be successful, will have strategies for recruiting and developing and retaining the specific talent they need, whereas a 'genius strategy' would be nonsensical (except for 'key man risk'). If we thought more about talent, perhaps we could benefit from genius without having to pay obeisance to geniuses.
New Statesman
13 hours ago
- New Statesman
Outrageous: a Mitfords rehash too many
I feel about the Mitford industry a bit like I do about the Jane Austen industry. Read the books, I beg you. Enjoy them, learn from them if you can or must (though don't you dare say the word 'relatable' out loud if you're standing anywhere near me). But these endless spin-offs; these wild, parasitical imaginings. Around all of them, anachronisms, myths and clichés grow, like thorns in a fairy tale. Outrageous, a series based on Mary S Lovell's 2001 biography of the six Mitford sisters, is the work of Sarah Williams, who also co-wrote Becoming Jane,a film about the early life of you-know-who, and its title alerts you (just like the peppy jazz trumpets on its soundtrack) to its sensibility. The siblings' vaunted eccentricity is very much to the fore, whether we're talking about the rat Unity Mitford (Shannon Watson) keeps in her evening bag on the night of her coming-out party, or the tin hat Decca (Zoe Brough) wears in her bedroom when she's pretending to be a revolutionary ducking hand grenades. It's cartoony and exaggerated and rather too determined to be modern and droll. The subtitles that explain locations read 'That Damp London Flat' and 'Diana's Country Pile', as if too much specificity might be off-putting – these rich people! We take up the story in 1931. Our narrator is the oldest Mitford, Nancy (Bessie Carter), by this point the author of two funny, but slight, novels (her best books will come later). For the family, it's a time of relative innocence. Diana, married to the filthy rich Bryan Guinness, has yet to run off with Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Unity has yet to develop her horrifying crush on Hitler. Pressing matters include the finances of their parents, aka Farve (James Purefoy) and Muv (Anna Chancellor), which threaten their allowances, and Nancy's ongoing status as a spinster (she's a perilous 29). On the rebound, soon she'll marry the utterly unreliable Peter Rodd (Jamie Blackley). So far, so good. I adore Carter as Nancy Mitford, at this point in life an unlikely combination of innocence and cynicism, and all the performances are deft: galumphing, scary Unity with her Nazi eyes; stout, scrunch-faced, farm-loving Pamela (Isobel Jesper Jones); Deborah (Orla Hill), the youngest, who sits on staircases at parties, nosy-parkering at the Champagne-fuelled glamour below (one day, she'll be a duchess). If you want houses and clothes and jewellery, your eyes won't hurt at all. But still, I wonder who this is for. If you're interested in the Mitfords, and have read lots about them, this is a primer of which you've no need. If you're not interested, you'll be baffled as to what the hell all the fuss is about. Is Outrageous a soap? A slightly more plausible Downton Abbey? Context, by necessity (because there's so much to get through), has been peeled away. Things happen so suddenly – Diana and Unity's little away day to Nuremberg, to take just one example – they seem outlandish. Nancy's cleverness and wit, or Decca's unlikely left-wing politics, cannot be fully explored, or even much revealed, which renders them little more than daffy, privileged aristos with a nice line in turquoise earrings and Fair Isle tank tops. Behind all this, I sense a low-level buzz of anxiety on the part of the producers. Are the Mitfords dodgy, or heroic, or both? Are we allowed to like them, or not, and what will it mean for the drama's chances of success if we don't? On the soundtrack, the trumpet players stick mutes in their instruments, but even then the newcomer may be uncertain as to what she or he is supposed to feel (possibly nothing). For my part, I was caught between admiring its stars and production values, and a kind of proprietorial irritation at its rapidly moving parts. If I hadn't read most of them already, Outrageous wouldn't send me to the novels, letters, diaries, or even to the many excellent biographies that have been written about the Mitfords. But then, I was also convalescing after a medical emergency. I looked down at my dressing gown – not to boast, but it's just the kind of thing Nancy might have worn the morning after a big night at Quaglino's – and decided to stick with them all just a little while longer. Let's see. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Outrageous Available on U [See also: Gen-Z is afraid of porn, and Sabrina Carpenter] Related
The Independent
a day ago
- The Independent
Hugh Laurie praised for ‘baller' response to Dr House invitation
Hugh Laurie reportedly declined an invitation to revisit his role as Dr Gregory House, stating he "frankly doesn't care about the audience or reliving the show." Dr Mikhail Varshavski said he had received the curt refusal after inviting Laurie onto his podcast, Doctor Mike, to discuss the role. Episode guest Noah Wyle (ER 's Dr John Carter) called the response 'baller,' while Varshavski labelled it a 'direct and honest reply.' Fans online noted the curt response was in character for the misanthropic Dr House, with one sharing a clip captioned: "Hugh Laurie embodied House in that moment." The British actor and comedian, 66, played the cantankerous Dr House on the Fox medical drama series House from 2004 to 2012.
