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New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
There is no contemporary fiction
I write contemporary fiction. Sometimes it's more contemporary than some people find entirely decent: I published a lockdown novel during lockdown and was bemused to find that for some critics and readers it was 'too soon', as if the major global event that had dominated everyone's lives for two years needed to be put away to mature like wine or cheese before we were allowed to make art with it. Who would ring the bell, I wondered, when it was time? Where are the gatekeepers of contemporaneity? I have just published a novel with a subplot about European Jewish intergenerational trauma. The narrator is an Englishwoman living in the west of Ireland; I was interested in the literature of guilt and complicity, a major strand of post-colonial and postwar fiction but not much developed within these islands. My move from England to Ireland five years ago had made me more conscious of my Englishness than I had ever been, even though I was born in Scotland and grew up in a household divided between Russian-Jewish-American and Yorkshire allegiances. I wrote my PhD on British voyages of exploration in the 18th century, and so knowledge of imperialist art and colonial land-grabbing has been part of my thinking for decades. But I had not felt so personally implicated until arriving in Ireland. My immediate love for particular places and landscapes – often geologically familiar from my Scottish and northern-English childhood – had complications, because English people's admiration of Irish land has, historically, not gone well. I wanted, of course, to do the right thing, to think the right thoughts, to school my desires and pleasures in moral ways, but it wasn't clear that goodness and Englishness could be compatible in Ireland. Even the self-laceration and abnegation that come easily to me didn't meet the case, because the self-loathing oppressor is if anything more malignant than one with healthy self-esteem. I'd read and written about plenty of English people playing out their masochistic dramas on other people's territory and that wasn't good either. These cultural legacies were not about me and still there I was, here I am, living with them. Uncomfortable, intriguing: let's write a novel about it. I made my central character half-Jewish partly because I am and the half-ness is interesting, partly because her ambivalent status opened my theme of belonging. In the weirdly binary popular history of oppressed and oppressors, goodies and baddies, for most of my life the Jewish identity – at least in western Europe – felt like one of victimhood. I spent my teenage summers on exchange in West Germany, where grandparents at the neighbourhood pool sometimes tried to apologise to me for the Holocaust. My Old Testament name and stereotypical appearance were enough to trigger guilt, and – especially in my half-ness – I felt an imposter. Broadly mainstream feelings about Judaism in Europe changed while I was writing the book, as Israeli violence in Gaza escalated. I want to add 'unimaginably' to that last clause, but there's nothing unimaginable about a well-armed state's elimination of a weaker neighbour, and the horrible familiarity of that event is part of the point of my novel, Ripeness. Down the generations, descendants of survivors and of perpetrators, we all live with the consequences. Violence breeds violence. No such thing as an innocent bystander. Is there an innocent passport? Trauma passes down the family, and what about guilt? What if most of us carry complications? I set Ripeness at more or less the same time I started writing what became the final draft, in the spring of 2023, six months before the events of 7 October, though far enough into the war in Ukraine that I could include the presence of Ukrainian exiles in Ireland. As I wrote, of course, events continued to unfold, as they do, and so sometimes I could nod over the page to the reader's and my shared knowledge of what would happen later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe A different set of characters in different circumstances would have had more concern for Middle Eastern politics in spring 2023, but Ripeness is interested in the decline of my parents' and teachers' generation, in the last years of the European postwar sensibility and in its bequests, in its visions and blind spots, of which one might argue that Palestine was often one. Even a politically engaged woman in her early seventies living in County Clare might not have been preoccupied with Palestine in those months. From the beginning, I imagined the novel as an elegy for the flawed, Eurocentric and fundamentally optimistic ideas of the world that shaped the (flawed, Eurocentric) postwar liberal consensus. That idea of the world order was always – but coyly – rooted in violence and repression. We all always knew that our gadgets ran on rare minerals produced by the forced labour of children far away, that our food and clothes were produced by underpaid workers at the cost of poorer nations' land and water. We knew that there were wars and famines and droughts about which our governments, liberal and conservative, were not concerned, and indeed from which they and we benefitted. We guarded our social security and healthcare systems against undeserving outsiders. We have known for decades that our abuse of our planet is accelerating towards our own obliteration, killing poorer people before richer people, and we know how to slow down, but it's too much hassle, someone else's problem. There's no point in listing large-scale and ongoing examples of human inhumanity in which almost everyone not personally involved is uninterested, because you already know about them. With the destruction of Gaza and the election of Trump, the fictitiousness of the postwar 'rules-based order' is patent. But those rules always applied to some and not others. The old world order has come to an end. I set my novel in its final months, at the latest possible point where a reasonable person could have believed that the liberal European world-view would prevail. There will be novels about what has happened in the Middle East in the last two years, as there will be novels about Trump's re-election and whatever happens next in Ukraine. They will be written by people who have, through experience or research, an understanding of the intimate, material detail of individual lives in those times and places, because fiction runs on intimate, material detail. Other people living other lives, including me, will continue to write about other matters, all of which continue to be related to each other. But to an extent there is no such thing as 'contemporary fiction', because however fast a book might now or in the future travel from writer to reader, the process of writing – in which I include much of the work of literary publishing – does and should take time, sometimes a lot of time, and also, crucially, because a fundamental promise of fiction is that there will be an ending. It is in the writer's invitation to the reader, the handshake on which the reader's suspension of disbelief is based. Comic, tragic, neither or both: I will make meaning for you. I will offer you a pattern. And this means that the writer must make an ending, not merely an end, which means that the events of the novel are concluded. Endings are the hardest part of realist fiction because they are where reality diverges most from realism: in reality there are ends, not endings. Reality is a mess, realism makes meaning. I cannot write well or honestly about real-life events ongoing at the time of publication because I write at the time of writing. All narrative is retrospective, because of the ending. I am startled that I feel the need to say that the durations of art are not those of the internet. There is an interesting question about a novelist's responsibility to portray 'current events', whether that currency relates to the time of writing or the time described. It's a compelling idea that it's outrageous to write about anything but war while war is ongoing, but one might also reasonably write about the way people living out of sight of war do, mostly, continue to go about their business, to attend meetings and send emails and weed their gardens and recycle packaging and celebrate birthdays and indeed read novels exactly as if thousands of people were not being murdered over the horizon, or even down the road. Very few of us not personally affected down tools and stop everything until the killing ends, and in my experience those individuals who do are often not especially kind or pleasant in personal life. Our inclination to keep calm and carry on is at least as worthy of attention as the rarer and perhaps better tendency to stop and howl. Art is not activism. If your sole desire is to stop genocide, writing a novel – or making music or dance or painting – does not rank highly among ways of achieving that aim, and only partly because by the time it is published the war may well be over. I do not mean to exonerate artists from politics, much less morality. Shelley's claim that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' has always been true, but only in the loftiest sense. As totalitarian regimes continue to demonstrate, in the short term at least, the police, or ICE or the IDF, have a far stronger case. There may be case for war reporting as an art form, but the difficulties are plain and the obverse – that art is war reporting – is plainly untrue. Even if we consider such readily located examples as Picasso's Guernica or Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, what makes them important and enduring is precisely their truth beyond a particular time and place. Guernica speaks to massacre and civil war, not just a particular town in Basque country in May 1937. Badenheim 1939 is about the human capacity to ignore, to uphold routine, to deny accumulating evidence of both ascendant evil and imminent personal danger. That is why they are still interesting nearly a century later, when we might also note that massacre, civil war and the ability to deny accumulating evidence of ascendant evil remain current. It is a delusory narrative of 'progress' that insists on the power and obligation of art to make people better. Art is as old as people – the making of art is a plausible definition of humanity – and we are not better. There are many ways of making contemporary fiction contemporary. So I may, I think, write about the intergenerational effects of genocide and forced migration without betraying an obligation to write about the particular genocide taking place just after the novel is set. I may let the shadow of contemporaneity hang over a story that becomes historical as fast as I write. I hereby make unacknowledged legislation. I ring the bell. Sarah Moss's 'Ripeness' is published by Picador [See also: The dark reality behind Trump's embrace of white South Africans] Related
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This English-born 20th century conservative could be an inspiration for the next Pope
The only English-born pope was Adrian IV in the twelfth century. But another such candidate came close, in successive conclaves in 1903 and 1914, when it was effectively impossible for a non-Italian to be elected. Rafael Merry del Val was insuperably qualified by experience, character and a cosmopolitanism that made him almost emblematic of the universal aspirations of Catholicism. He was the most widely admired cardinal in the curia. He would have been a perfect pope for his times. His rational, discerning conservatism would also make him a model for the sort of pope we need now. His birth in London's Portman Square in October, 1865, was an accident of his Spanish father's diplomatic career, but Rafael absorbed Englishness along with the sporting ethos of his prep school in Bournemouth. When his first job in the Church took him to a chaplaincy for the poor in a Roman slum, he taught the boys cricket as well as catechism. He always dreamed in English and longed for an English parish, but his talents made him indispensable in Rome: mastery of music and languages; perfect recall of faces and conversations; a lively sense of mischief, tempered by tact; inexhaustible energy and efficiency; charisma and commanding presence, which every acquaintance found compelling. The wise and wily Leo XIII picked Rafael for an accelerated career. In 1887 he sent him to tender the pope's congratulations on Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, with the rank of a papal chamberlain and the title of a Monsignor – an almost unheard-of honour for a young man who was not yet a priest. I suspect that, although Leo had a reputation as a friend of the proletariat, he was also a bit of a snob, impressed by Rafael's aristocratic family and friends. Such connections helped. But Rafael rose by merit. When the pope died in 1903, after a pontificate so long that everyone had forgotten how to run a conclave, the cardinals picked Rafael to organise the election, even though, unlike predecessors, he was not Italian and not yet a cardinal. The outcome was the election of one of the simplest and saintliest of popes, Pius X, whom Rafael had to persuade to discard modesty and diffidence for pontificality. The new pope and young priest shared tastes in music and liturgy and exchanged profound respect and love. Pius made Rafael the youngest cardinal and Secretary of State to the Holy See – the best job in which to become papabile, because it gives a candidate a chance to get to know electors and to shine in the curia's most conspicuous role. The Secretaryship demands worldly competence. Rafael combined it with extraordinary sanctity. He dissipated his wealth in charity. He did most of his good works, stringent mortifications and sacrificial self-denials secretly: their scale only became known after his death. Even his faults seemed holy: the exasperating length of his public prayers, his neglect of his possessions, his impenetrable spells of self-scrutiny. However busy with official duties, he never failed to return, every day, to his old slumland stomping-ground, to call on former pupils and their parents, say Mass, slip secret alms under needy doors and take part in the sports he organised and the plays and music he wrote. No one who sought his spiritual counsel was ever turned away. As a diplomat he had to do deals with secular governments, but as a priest he was unyielding with anyone who opposed or rejected Catholicism. He would have brought the same clarity to the papacy – the clarity the Church needs now in rejecting trends Rafael denounced in his day: moral relativism, blurred values, subversion of the family and the conversion of the Church to the ways of the world instead of the other way round. He encouraged beautiful, dignified liturgy, strict sexual disciplines, vocations to traditional married love and unremitting devotion to all the sacraments. He never became pope, but never pined for preferment. The litany he wrote makes a perfect prayer for anyone in a top job in Church and world alike: 'That others may be preferred to me, .... provided only that I may become as holy as I should – Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.' Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a professor of history who has taught at Tufts, Queen Mary and Oxford Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Princess Diana Insisted That Prince William and Prince Harry Forego This Royal Tradition
A new royal book, Dianaworld, chronicles Princess Diana's insistence that her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, attend Eton College, as the men in her family had. By sending her sons to Eton, Diana bucked royal tradition of sending the men in the family to Gordonstoun in Scotland, where Prince Charles attended. A similar debate is reportedly occurring about whether to send Prince George to Eton or to Marlborough College (where Kate Middleton attended) when he changes schools in Diana was groundbreaking for the royal family in many ways—for starters, the way she parented and the way she wasn't afraid to show her emotions in public. Perhaps nowhere is her enduring legacy still felt on the royal family more than the way she parented, which—not an overstatement—truly broke the mold for royal parenting. It can be seen in the way that both of her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, parent their own children up to the present day. As the 'Eton versus Marlborough' debate rages on about where the Prince and Princess of Wales' eldest child, Prince George, will attend school next year, a new book looks back at how Diana bucked royal tradition when it came to where to send William and Harry to school. In Dianaworld: An Obsession (which came out April 29), author Edward White shares that Diana 'insisted' that William and Harry be educated differently than their father Prince Charles and grandfather Prince Philip had been. 'Once her sons were born, she was firmly of the mind that her responsibility was to shape them as new types of Windsors, providing a new style of kingship,' White wrote (via Marie Claire). William and Harry's educational future was 'something that occupied the attentions of rather a lot of people in the late eighties and early nineties,' White continued—not unlike George's future is capturing the royal zeitgeist today. When William and Harry ultimately attended Eton College, it was a tradition-breaking move, as Charles and Philip, as well as Charles' brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, all attended Gordonstoun in Scotland. To put it mildly, Charles had a miserable time at Gordonstoun, but even still wanted his own sons to be educated there. But Diana 'rejected all these suggestions' for her sons 'and insisted the boys be sent to board at Eton College,' White wrote. In the Princess of Wales' mind, 'the Englishness that Diana wanted to install in her children was aristocratic rather than royal.' After all, Eton was where the men of Diana's family, the Spencers, attended—her father and only brother both were Etonians (as were 20 British prime ministers). 'When Diana spoke of raising princes who were in touch with 'the man on the street,' she meant by making them more like the men in her family,' White added. When William and Harry enrolled at Eton—William becoming the first senior royal and future monarch to be educated at the school—White wrote that Diana made 'her sons more typical of the English upper classes than her ex-husband [Charles] has ever been.' Diana's edict won out, and now it remains to be seen whether George will follow in the Eton tradition, or buck it and start a new tradition of his own at Marlborough (which is his mother's alma mater). Read the original article on InStyle
The 42
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The 42
I never thought about AI much until it moved into football punditry. Is my job safe, Siri?
TO SWEDEN, WHERE this column has again seen the future and recoiled in queasy horror. TV coverage of the Swedish football league has lately debuted Aida, whom they say is the first AI-generated football pundit in history. Data science company Twelve Football developed the AI pundit in three weeks, at the request of the broadcaster. Aida is effectively a ventriloquising of their 'opposition analysis tool', which scrapes data and information on how a certain team has set up in previous games before then spitting out recommended tactics on how to combat said team. The data company then took all this opposition analysis, put it into a large language model, and asked it to present it in a way that would be engaging to TV viewers. The synthesising of a complex load of information into something pithy and intelligible to a large audience used to be a signifier of a great broadcaster, but they seem to have now lost the patent on that skill. The TV channel then Victor Frankensteined their new AI pundit, designing an avatar through which the data would speak. They alighted on Aida, stressing that appearance 'wasn't key', but were clear that they wanted the AI pundit to be female. (We're not sure the insistence that their fake pundit would be a woman is the flourish of progressivism they think it is.) 'Although she looks human, it should be clear that she isn't,' producer Marcus Sennewald told the Training Ground Guru website. And so Aida has been switched on for two-minute analysis slots live on air, but this isn't merely an animation of pre-written information: at one point in Aida's debut appearance, she was interrupted by the (human) presenter, and then responded. Advertisement The channel are at pains to point out the AI pundit is merely an addition to the coverage and is not intended to replace human beings and they are sticking by their animation despite criticism in Sweden. The bland and uncanny CGI face of Aida is nonetheless able to inflame all manner of emotion. There is a part of this column which is intrigued by the deeper possibilities of an AI fleet of football pundits, of course. Can broadcasters render AI versions of all of their pundits, to the point that the viewer can choose their own punditry line-up for any specific game? And why do they need to stick with their contemporary pundits? Why not revive the pundits of yesteryear and make them available on air, in a manner similar to unlocking Diego Maradona or Pele on Fifa Ultimate Team? We could bring turn back to the Peak RTÉ Panel Era, and scrape their past judgements on Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and John Terry for the benefit of the ultimate punditry on Jude Bellingham, whose brilliant talent, affronted attitude, tactical weirdness, and sheer Englishness would have made him their greatest muse. Imagine Mid-2000s Dunphy putting together a package titled 'Bad Bellingham Play.' It would be the football punditry equivalent of the De Niro/Pacino meeting in Heat. But these exciting possibilities are quickly mantled by our sheer horror at what Sweden's AI pundit augurs. This column's chief concern is obviously one of self-preservation. If a football pundit on live television can be replaced by AI, what of wry, work-from-home sports columnists? This is first and foremost a shattering blow to the ego of us columnists, this notion that our weekly, deadline-drive thoughts are the product of anything other than the mysterious but genius workings of our singular minds. No columnist can believe themselves to be dispensable. It's such an ego-driven existence that any thoughts of doubt or, indeed, modesty, must be repressed well beyond view. There is a deeper terror to AI: the fact its making us feel complicit in our own obsolescence. With every word we type and every click we make, we are feeding some shadowy force enough information to first imitate us and then replace us. The Greek mythological figure of Autolycus – in punditryspeak, a Bad Lad – had the power to transfigure into the thing he stole, and is a parable of AI. Except in this instance, there wasn't any theft involved. We just signed it all over in return for the dopamine hit of a retweet. Writing in the Financial Times recently, data journalist extraordinaire John Burn-Murodch looked at employment data in the United States to figure out which jobs are most under threat from AI. He found that those working desk jobs best protected from being replaced by machines were those whose work was the 'messiest', ie those in which there was involved the unpredictability of several back and forths with other people. Those most at risk, he found, were those performing a 'predictable recurring linear task.' This uncovers an inconvenient truth about the corner of the world with which we are dealing here. A large chunk of football coverage at the moment could easily be performed by robots, with so much of punditry and analysis now just the trotting out of stats and facts, regardless of their relevance or importance. To pick one recent example: the BBC told us at half-time of Liverpool's win against Spurs that it was the first time that Tottenham have trailed by two or more goals in a Premier League away game after scoring the first goal since a 4-1 loss to Leicester City in February 2023. Er, historic. If the robots are capable of telling us these stats and facts and also of explaining systems and tactics, punditry can try to futureproof itself by leaning into the messier parts of the game, its human and emotional dimension. Give us fewer stats and less tactical jargon; cut out the analysis of referee decisions and the dry word of the football laws. Give us what's knotty and subjective and unpredictable. And they should hold no fear in doing so, because columnists like this one won't be around for much longer to sneer at their work.
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review
The Englishness of English Art sounds like something a parish-pump little Englander might like to bang on about, but it is in fact the title of an arresting study by the German Jewish émigré Nikolaus Pevsner. 'Neither English-born nor English-bred,' as he put it in his foreword, he nevertheless pinned down with startling precision the qualities that characterised English art and architecture: a rather twee preference for cuteness and compromise, for frills and fripperies. This shouldn't surprise us. Newcomers are typically better placed than natives when it comes to deciphering unwritten social codes. Unencumbered by textbook propaganda and excessive knowledge, the stranger's-eye view very often has the merit of freshness, even originality. Bertolt Brecht dubbed this the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, from which Owen Hatherley takes his title. The Alienation Effect is a collective biography of the central Europeans who washed up on British shores between the wars. In the decades that followed, Hatherley argues, they exerted a colossal influence on British cultural life. Sometimes the influence manifested itself transparently, as when Thatcher whipped out a copy of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag and said to her party colleagues: 'This is what we believe!' At others, it hid in plain sight, as in the iconic moquette used for London Transport, designed by the Czech Jacqueline Groag, or in films such as Get Carter, where brutalist Newcastle deserves joint billing with Michael Caine; it is through the Viennese lens of the cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky that we see this unforgiving landscape. They didn't exactly get a warm welcome. Nearly a third of the 100,000 refugees from fascism were interned on the Isle of Man as 'enemy aliens' in 1940. Many more of these supposed Nazis were briefly deported to Australia and Canada, where they surprised their wardens with kosher food requests. So why, then, did they elect to stay in England? It was a peaceable, conservative society that had 'somehow sat out the 20th century', Hatherley says. It appealed to the likes of Arthur Koestler. Here was a land 'bored by ideologies, sceptical about utopias … enamoured of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past'. Even British communism was a tame affair; Communist Party of Great Britain meetings 'were like tea parties in the vicarage'. As a fairly recent migrant, it's a picture I instantly recognise: a land that sets great store by ancient universities, members' clubs and quaint cathedrals – a land where even a Crosland-like Corbyn was presented as Stalin reincarnate. Such migration, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson argued, paradoxically made Britain more parochial, not less. The Hayeks and Koestlers, Namiers and Poppers, did not so much challenge as vindicate insular received wisdoms. Hatherley, who describes himself as a 'sentimental English socialist', offers a gentle critique here. Where Anderson focused on the intelligentsia, Hatherley looks instead at architecture, publishing and film, where radicals dominated the landscape. His conclusion is that the net effect of central European migration was 'largely positive'. The adverb there does some heavy lifting since many figures come in for rough treatment as exhibits of the wrong kind of migrant. The Hamburg-born photojournalist Bill Brandt, for instance, is condemned to Hatherley's sixth circle of hell for his 'extreme Anglophilia': 'One can make out a sickly sexuality, a class-climbing obsession with upper-class women in some of the more ornate nudes.' The popular art historian Ernst Gombrich, meanwhile, stands accused of neglecting social history for the reassuring empiricism of 'Oxbridge English culture'. Hatherley's heroes are the Jewish architects Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger, both unabashed Marxist modernists, the latter of whom was famously turned into a gold-loving Bond villain. Perhaps John le Carré was on the money when he said that there was 'something neo-fascistic' about Ian Fleming's taciturn spy. The radicalism of the émigrés, Hatherley convincingly shows, has been concealed by the manipulations of national memory. Take Pevsner. These days he's remembered solely as a stone-fancier and building-cataloguer rather than a tireless champion of the pioneers of modern design. What's more, he didn't uncritically suck up to the Anglos. There's a touch of Teutonic energy, the spirit of the art historian Aby Warburg, in the grand, 48-volume series he edited, the Pelican History of Art. Warburg's credo was Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Hatherley is a worthy heir to that tradition, and he has a canny eye for lineages. His potted genealogies are dazzling performances in concision, effortlessly gliding from the new brutalism of his home patch of Camberwell, London, through the works of art historian Rudolf Wittkower to the 15th-century Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti – all in a single page. To be sure, Hatherley might tell you more than you might care to know about every inch of Hampstead. But these perambulations still yield some lively vignettes. We meet the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, doyenne of the north London enclave, who painted a voluptuous naked woman on a small boat crossing the Channel to escape Hitler. Solemn critics took the precious piece of cargo she is clutching in the painting to be a Torah scroll – before she revealed that it was in fact a large Austrian wurst. The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
