Latest news with #FrancisBacon
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Is Labour now the stranger among friends?
An 'island of strangers' (Report, 19 May)? 'If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world,' wrote Francis Bacon. Of course, there are those who consider citizens of the world to be citizens of nowhere, but shared humanity and threats to our planet that affect everyone suggest otherwise. I am the granddaughter of immigrants and would not exist if they had not found refuge in this country. The words of our prime minister sent a chill through my veins. It seems that it is the Labour party, which I have supported all my life (though sometimes reluctantly), that has become DaichesSouth Queensferry, Edinburgh Is it cynical to ask whether the payment of a £1,000-a-year health surcharge while on a time-limited residence permit played a role in the decision to extend the qualifying period for 'indefinite leave to remain' from five to 10 years? After all, these surcharges contributed £1.7bn to Britain's health departments in 2023-24 alone, according to a research briefing in the House of Commons library. Nice little BearneKingsteignton, Devon If the prime minister believes it is OK to require all arriving workers or students and their adult dependents to have good English, he would presumably also support the idea that all British emigrants should have a good standard of the language of the country they are moving to. Maybe universities could increase their income with intensive courses in Mandarin, Hindi and WebbWest Kirby, Merseyside Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Mark Twain's bizarre obsession with ‘killing' Shakespeare
When Mark Twain was convinced of something, he seldom brooked disagreement. Over the two dozen books he wrote, he showed an exceptional level of intellectual vigour, commitment and acuity. Yet he used those mental powers to advance one particular unusual belief: that William Shakespeare had never written the plays attributed to him, and that credit probably belonged to Francis Bacon. Such was Twain's zeal on the subject, wrote his secretary Isabel Lyon, that one would have thought he 'had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime'. For two months, from January until March 1909, Twain beavered away at what would become his final published book, Is Shakespeare Dead? He had a bullheaded certainty. 'I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way,' he told his friend and authorised biographer Albert Paine. 'It is the great discovery of the age.' Twain, it should be noted, cherished Shakespeare's plays, and saw them often. In the 1870s, he and his wife, Livy, had visited Stratford-upon-Avon, and Twain, in these early days, backed the creation of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He had researched Shakespeare while preparing his novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the King and Duke try to palm themselves off as Shakespearean actors, offering hilariously garbled versions of the Bard to backwoods audiences. But Twain had always questioned the authorship of Shakespeare 's oeuvre. His 50-year faith in Bacon dated back to his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, when fellow pilot George Ealer, 'an idolater of Shakespeare', read the plays aloud to him and bashed Bacon supporters royally. Twain begged to differ. After going to see one performance of Romeo and Juliet, Twain even told a companion, 'That's one of the greatest things Bacon ever wrote.' Why did Twain attack Shakespeare with such gusto? Partly it stemmed from his extreme disillusionment with people, which only grew in his later years: his belief that the planet was chock-full of fools and frauds such as the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: 'I think he [Shakespeare] & Mother Eddy are just about a pair – a pair of humbugs.' The Shakespeare cult, as Twain saw it, proved that people were merely sheep who followed a herd instinct and echoed what they heard. Twain's error was using his own career as a frame of reference. In his final years, he had devoted enormous time to his autobiographical dictations, which by this point amounted to 450,000 words: he simply couldn't believe that Shakespeare had left behind no manuscripts or letters. With an extreme paucity of original documentation, Shakespeare biographers had relied on a handful of mouldy anecdotes about the man, many recorded long after he was gone. Twain compared his own literary fame to the glaring emptiness of Shakespeare's record. Had Shakespeare been truly famous in his own time, Twain argued, 'his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my own village [Hannibal] out in Missouri... a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of 60 years'. He mentioned his Hannibal schoolfriends, who regularly retailed legends about him to reporters. Yet the comparison was odd: Twain lived in a very different media environment, one in which a thriving American newspaper industry published features, profiles and interviews, and in which celebrity culture had already taken root. Like many Shakespeare deniers, Twain also observed that the playwright was curiously well versed in law courts and legal proceedings. Nobody, thought Twain, could master 'the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served'. Some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare clerked in a law office before starting his theatre career in London, but Twain was convinced that Shakespeare plays betray knowledge that only a highly educated person such as Bacon might have known. Yet Twain failed to confront many obvious objections to his theory. How could Bacon's imposture have remained hidden during his lifetime and after? Did he confide in no one? How did he make necessary changes to plays during rehearsals? Or did Shakespeare, the man under whose name all this work was disguised, rush to Bacon's home each night for secret revisions? What about cases such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which we know that Shakespeare collaborated with other authors? Twain never dealt with the problem of the First Folio: the fact that Elizabethan actors thought so highly of William Shakespeare that they assembled this legacy for posterity only seven years after the playwright had died. It should further be noted that this wasn't for Twain a unique situation: he had also identified John Milton, not John Bunyan, as the true author of The Pilgrim's Progress. Even Twain's heartiest admirers, Paine and Lyon, appealed to him not to publish Is Shakespeare Dead? Colonel Harvey, his editor and publisher at Harper & Brothers, agreed that it would be ill-advised, both showing intellectual slippage on Twain's part and dealing another blow to his image as America's leading humorist. But Twain was hell-bent on publishing it; worse, he was desperate to beat into print another book, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon by William Stone Booth, which aimed to show that Shakespeare's work was shot through with coded messages pointing to Bacon's secret authorship. As a result of the rushed editing process, Twain's last published book appeared on April 8 1909, a mere month after the manuscript was completed. It was greeted with something less than acclaim: no one endorsed it, then or later, as 'the great discovery of the age'. And the haste landed Twain in an embarrassing imbroglio with another writer, George Greenwood, who claimed that Twain had quoted freely from Greenwood's similar book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, without crediting him – an awkward position for Twain, a militant on copyright issues. The problem, in truth, was a rogue footnote, and Twain's apology ended the kerfuffle. But it may have contributed to the health problems that increasingly plagued him. The Greenwood controversy blew up in June 1909, as Twain travelled to Baltimore. On the day he checked into the Belvedere Hotel, one newspaper carried the incendiary headline 'Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?' Feeling worn out, Twain shunned newspapermen who came to elicit his reaction, and lay down in the hotel room with a book. When he arose and paced the room, he suddenly paused with one hand clutching his chest. 'I have a curious pain in my breast,' he told Paine. 'It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it.' Twain's instincts were accurate: at 73, he was suffering from angina pectoris, with a reduced blood flow to the heart muscle producing sharp, frightening attacks. Twain rallied enough to address the graduates at St Timothy's School, in Catonsville, Maryland, a tiny, elite and very proper all-female boarding establishment. On his way to the graduation, he chomped on a cigar and glanced admiringly at the parade of Baltimore girls traipsing down the sidewalk. 'Pretty girls – and you almost have a monopoly of them here – are always an inspiration to me,' he told a reporter. In addressing the graduates, Twain's eyes sparkled, and he spiced his remarks with trademark mischief. He advised the girls not to smoke or drink to excess, then delivered his punchline: 'Don't marry – I mean, to excess.' It was to be the last speech of his 43-year lecturing career. In terms of health, Twain knew that he had passed a watershed. After the Baltimore trip, among many restrictions the doctor placed on the writer's activities the most onerous was an exhortation to cut down on smoking and try to heal his 'tobacco heart'. Since boyhood, Twain had remained defiant on this score – as defiant as his lifelong pro-Bacon stance. 'It isn't going to happen,' he insisted. 'I shan't diminish it by a single puff.' In the end, he did, slashing his consumption from 40 cigars per day to four. 'I don't care for death,' he wrote, '& I do care for smoking.' But this consummate American showman knew exactly what approached. 'I came in with Halley's comet in 1835,' Twain said. 'It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't.' After 75 years away, in April 1910 the comet returned, appearing above Twain's home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain, having suffered successive angina attacks, was heavily sedated and probably didn't know. On April 21, with the comet still in the sky, he breathed his last.
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Brian Singer obituary
My wife's uncle, Brian Singer, who has died aged 74, was a university lecturer and one of the world's foremost experts in the science of art conservation. His most prestigious work was undertaken for the estate of Francis Bacon, a seven-year-long technical assessment from 2006 of more than 100 works, which, said his former colleague Justin Perry, 'made the job of forgers more difficult and the job of art historians and conservators easier'. Conservation treatment on paintings by Edvard Munch, including two versions of The Scream (1893 and 1910) and Madonna (1894), were based on Brian's research. One notable finding he delighted in was showing that Munch had left one of his paintings outside to dry, as one section of grey/white pigment proved to be bird droppings. He was born in West Ham, east London, to Ernest Singer, a welder, and Hannelore (nee Ebbing), who came to England from West Germany after meeting Ernest when he was part of the peacekeeping forces there. The family moved to the new town of Basildon in Essex, and then to nearby Billericay. Brian passed the 11-plus and went to Sweyne grammar school in Rayleigh, then Leeds University, receiving a first-class honours degree (1971) and a doctorate (1976), both in chemistry. He taught chemistry at Nelson and Colne College, Lancashire (1975-84), then moved to the north-east to take up a job teaching art conservation chemistry at Gateshead college. In 1990 he joined Newcastle Polytechnic, soon renamed Northumbria University, where he developed a research interest in the analysis of artists' materials, and taught students in the art conservation and applied sciences departments. His mentorship was delivered with warmth and attentiveness, said Perry. While at Northumbria, and after his retirement in 2012, Brian ran his own art conservation consultancy for more than 20 years, working with museums, auction houses and collectors across the world. Brian was a union man, acting as departmental rep for many years, and a Labour voter and member until 2023, when he left the party, writing to the Guardian about the treatment of the North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll. He was a keen fisherman, and loved playing the fiddle over pints of ale at the Fox and Hounds pub. But he said he was most proud of his daughters, Erica and Elsa, from his relationship with Veronica Killen. He met his wife, Dot (nee Harris), in 1999 and they married in 2002. In later years he became deputy chair of Riding Mill parish council, campaigning to get a football pitch reinstated and for updated play equipment. He is survived by Dot, Erica and Elsa, two brothers, Ken and Robert, and a sister, Ann.
Irish Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Kneecap should be commended rather than condemned
Artists excel in the art of controversy. Art has a duty to challenge societal norms and beliefs. It should make us think and spark public discourse. Occasionally, this lands artists in hot water, as DH Lawrence, Francis Bacon and Sinéad O'Connor all discovered. Now, it is the turn of Kneecap . The Irish-speaking rap group from Belfast attracted widespread condemnation in the UK for their actions at some of their recent gigs. At the end of their show at the Coachella music and arts festival on April 18th, messages appeared on the screens behind the band, including 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people' and 'F**k Israel; free Palestine'. Counter-terrorism police in London are now investigating videos of incidents at two gigs in London. Predictably, Kneecap's support for Palestine and their alleged violent words against Tory politicians have been unanimously denounced by everyone on the political spectrum in Westminster, from Labour's prime minister Keir Starmer to the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, including the SNP first minister of Scotland John Swinney. READ MORE The fallout has been considerable. Several of their gigs have already been cancelled, including three in Germany, and the British government has called on the organisers of Glastonbury to 'think carefully' about allowing a planned appearance by the band to go ahead. They are being punished for their words, which is a reminder of the weight of language, but also the moral responsibility that comes with it. The three musicians found fame when their semi-fictionalised film Kneecap was released in 2024 to international critical acclaim, winning a British Academy of Film Award in February 2025. Apart from the music, the energy, the comedy and the drama, what the film is essentially about is the power of language to shape our identify. Our language defines who we are. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues, we define our identity always in dialogue, with our contemporaries but especially with our ancestors. Language is a strange alchemy, to be used judiciously. Words can be inspiring, heartening, bolstering, and they can also hurt. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of language of the 20th century, remarked that words don't just reflect meaning, they get things done. By saying something, we do something. Shouting the words 'shoot!' at the television screen when my team is playing football is harmless, and very different from the same words being uttered by the officer of a firing squad. The question is, are Kneecap fanatic supporters of a cause or executioners? Yelling 'up Hamas, up Hizbullah' at a live concert is a speech-act. These words are not just expressing a sentiment, they are a rallying call with the aim of encouraging people to act in support of a particular cause. Kneecap are using their words to try to persuade, convince or motivate their listeners in the audience to do something about the enduring brutality and crimes against humanity in Gaza. While all words have consequences, it would be wise to abstain from making rush comparisons between slogans shouted at a concert, and the infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech by Enoch Powell from April 1968; or Donald Trump's incendiary speech on January 6th, 2021, to a crowd of people intent to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC: 'We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country any more.' Lest we forget, Kneecap are artists in their late 20s and 30s. Trump was, at the time, president of the United States of America. [ Westminster never forgets its murdered MPs - which is why Kneecap's comments could not be overlooked Opens in new window ] However, one cannot help wondering at the ethics, and stupidity, of Kneecap's reported choice of words at a gig in November 2023: 'The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.' That's inexcusable. Even Taoiseach Micheál Martin has called on Kneecap to 'urgently clarify' these ill-judged comments. Kneecap's subsequent apology to the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox (who was killed in June 2016) and David Amess (who was killed in October 2021) is also a speech-act, of sorts. For philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is the essence of the human condition. Furthermore, action entails speech and speech entails action. Actions occur when we do something but, equally, action occurs via omissions when we fail to act. Paradoxically, by not doing something, we do something: severe neglect, or negligence, is the result of our failure to act. Consider what the Vatican did (not) do when faced with the evidence of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Similarly, an omission of words is also an action. To keep silent in the face of gross injustice is to be complicit in the wrongness. We have a moral duty to speak out against human rights violations. If there is one thing that is even worse than being silent, it's being silenced. By accusing anyone who is questioning the current policies of the Israeli government of anti-Semitism, the Israeli government is silencing all its critics, just as it has silenced foreign journalists covering the conflict in Gaza. Kneecap are also being silenced, but not by Israel. The fact that politicians in the UK are trying to influence who should be invited to play at festivals is pure and simple censorship. A long list of prominent musicians, including Christy Moore, have signed an open letter calling for 'artistic freedom of expression' and denouncing a 'concerted attempt to censor and de-platform Kneecap'. The day politicians decide what music we should hear is the day democracy dies. Exchanging words is always better than silence. Doing something about human rights violations is better than doing nothing. Their choice of word may have been crass, misguided, irresponsible and boorish, but at least Kneecap were using their art form to create a space for politics. What is happening in Gaza today is unspeakable, which is precisely why we need to speak about it. Denouncing a genocide is doing something and it's better than being silent. Kneecap are to be commended, not condemned – although I suggest they read Hannah Arendt on politics or Wittgenstein on philosophy of language before their next gig. Vittorio Bufacchi is Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork. He is the author of Why Cicero Matters (2023)
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The End of the Enlightenment?
Today the concept of academic freedom may seem obvious to Americans. But the roots of academic freedom, which can be traced back to medieval European universities, were never certain. Back then, when scholars demanded autonomy from Church and state, they were often rebuked—or worse. What began as a slow-burning fuse eventually led to the concept of the modern research university a few centuries later, found in the writing of the English philosopher Francis Bacon and his 1627 novel, New Atlantis. There, Bacon envisioned a college called Salomon's House, in which scientists and others worked in an atmosphere of generosity and freethinking. This college came to be known as 'the noblest foundation (as we think) that ever was upon the earth; and the lantern of this kingdom,' as the Governor of Bacon's fictional utopia put it. 'It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.' Twelve of the resident fellows, called 'merchants of light,' sailed to foreign countries to bring back books and knowledge from other lands. Several devised experiments in both the 'mechanical arts' and the 'liberal sciences,' eventually creating such technologies as microscopes and hearing aids. Invention flourished in an ethos of imagination and unfettered investigation. Bacon was a forerunner of the Enlightenment. After centuries of intellectual progress, Americans must face a terrible question: Are we now descending from light into dark? Since April 22, more than 500 leaders of America's colleges, universities, and scholarly societies have signed a statement protesting the unprecedented interference of the Trump administration into higher education, interference that included external oversight of admissions criteria, faculty hiring, accreditation, ideological capture, and, in some cases, curriculum. As the statement says, higher education in America is open to constructive reform. However, 'we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.' Especially targeted by the administration have been international students. At my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at least nine members of our community—students, recent graduates, and postdocs—have had their visas and immigration status unexpectedly revoked. MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, recently sent a letter to our community, part of which read: 'To live up to our great mission, MIT is driven to pursue the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence. That means we are, and must be, in the business of attracting and supporting exceptionally talented people, the kind of people with the drive, skill and daring to see, discover and invent things no one else can. To find those rare people, we open ourselves to talent from every corner of the United States and from around the globe.' In the past, MIT and the many other institutions of higher learning in America have been Bacon's 'merchants of light.' Both tangible and intangible benefits flow from academic freedom. First, the tangible. The business world should be alarmed by the proposed jamming of the greatest engine of invention, innovation, and economic prosperity in our nation. To name just a few examples: The internet, in the form of the ARPANET, was developed by researchers at UCLA, Stanford, and MIT under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s and '70s. Key concepts and materials for lithium-ion batteries were developed at the University of Texas and the University of Oxford. The first artificial heart was developed by Robert Jarvik and colleagues at the University of Utah. Google originated as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Natural-language processing, neural networks, and deep learning—all fundamental parts of AI—came out of research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Toronto. Pivotal work in CRISPR gene editing was done by Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley. (She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.) Many other technological inventions, although not directly produced in our universities, were nurtured by the training and knowledge gained in them: computers, vaccines, smartphones, social-media platforms, Global Positioning System (GPS), insulin synthesis, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), lasers. Of course, the intellectual and creative freedom in America has enabled great productivity far beyond the precincts of science and technology. Exemplars include William James in philosophy and psychology, Toni Morrison in literature, Noam Chomsky in linguistics and cognitive science, Hannah Arendt in political theory, Martha Nussbaum in law and ethics, Margaret Mead in anthropology, W. E. B. Du Bois in sociology, John Rawls in political philosophy, Susan Sontag in cultural criticism, John Dewey in philosophy and education, and many, many more. Our country, a relatively young country but a country weaned on freedom dating back to the American Revolution of 1775, has helped build the modern world, has helped human beings reach their fullest capacity and creativity. Academic freedom is what has made America great. By contrast, invention has been suffocated in authoritarian countries with choke holds on academic freedom. In China, despite major investments in research and higher education, topics such as political reform, Tiananmen, and human rights are taboo. These restrictions have limited open inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. In Iran, restrictions on gender studies, religious critique, and internet freedom have weakened its academic institutions and discouraged global collaboration. In Russia, the crackdown on academic freedom since 2010 has driven out many independent thinkers and scientists, weakening innovation and policy critiques. Talented academics and researchers frequently leave for countries with more freedom, taking their expertise and innovation potential with them, as illustrated recently by the very public departure of the Yale University professor Jason Stanley, who is leaving the U.S. for Canada. Where restrictions have been lifted, flowers bloom. South Korea was a military dictatorship up to the 1980s, and then became a democracy. In the authoritarian era, universities were tightly controlled, with crackdowns on student protests and censorship in curricula. After the removal of these restrictions, South Korea quickly became a global leader in technology and innovation, home to companies including Samsung and LG. Taiwan transitioned from martial law under the Kuomintang to a liberal democracy in the 1990s. The humanities and social sciences, previously constrained by anti-communist ideology, expanded significantly. Taiwan developed a strong knowledge economy, with competitive universities and thriving biotech and electronics industries. In particular, Taiwan is the home of the world's leading semiconductor foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. What exactly is academic freedom? It is the freedom to express and debate ideas without fear of censorship or reprisal. It is the freedom to explore. It is the freedom to let the imagination wander. It is the freedom to exchange knowledge with colleagues and others. It is the freedom to question authority and received wisdom. It is the freedom to test ideas against experiment and to reject those ideas that fail the test. It is the freedom to be honest, even if that honesty challenges prevailing views. It is the freedom to be one's true self. Academic freedom is the oxygen and the light of higher education. Growing things need both. Aren't colleges and universities the nurseries of faculty, students, and their surrounding society? We need air. Instinctively, we seek light, just as some plants will change their pattern of growth in order to receive the sunlight needed for growth. It's called phototropism. The petals of sunflowers actually track the movement of the sun throughout the day, changing their direction to point toward the sun. I have served on the faculties of several universities in America and visited a hundred more. And I have felt intellectually safe in all of them. More than safe, I have felt encouraged to express myself and to listen and debate and question. The ethos of academic freedom is subtle. It is a kind of liberation, a buoyancy of the spirit, a nourishment of the mind. It is a basking in the light. Academic freedom is the greatest lesson we can give to our students. Our young people are shaping the future. Do we want them to be afraid to express their ideas? Do we want them to be afraid to explore, to invent, to challenge the status quo? Do we want them to be afraid of being who they are? We set examples for our young people and students, moral as well as intellectual. Do we want them to see us restrict what we teach because of the rules imposed by some outside authority? Do we want them to see us hide evidence that challenges a prevailing viewpoint? Do we want them to see us deny admission to other qualified students because of quotas or ideological litmus tests or country of origin? Do we want them to see us conform to outside decrees that undermine our values? Do we want them to see us prioritize money above all other things? Do we want them to see us as cowards, lacking the courage to stand behind our values and convictions? The surrender of academic freedom in America and, in fact, freedom of all kinds may happen gradually, little by little. First with the disproportionate power of money and the wealthy who have it, then with attacks on the free press, the control of information, the weakening of checks and balances, the suppression of dissent, the surveillance of the population, and finally the normalization of repression. In George Orwell's novel 1984, a superstate called Oceania is ruled by a dictator called Big Brother, who is supported by his personality cult and the Thought Police. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, works for the state, at the Ministry of Truth, but he secretly hates the ruling regime. He joins what he thinks is a resistance group called the Brotherhood but which turns out to be part of the state apparatus. Smith is then arrested and subjected to months of brainwashing. Eventually, he is released and comes to believe that he loves Big Brother after all. This is what happens when darkness replaces light, when the freedom to think, dream, and invent is squashed. We cannot let that happen to us in America. *Illustration Sources: The Naturalist / Getty; mikroman6 / Getty; Huizeng Hu / Getty. Article originally published at The Atlantic
