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Hindustan Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Doctors, teachers and junior bankers of the world, unite!
The best place to consider class consciousness in Britain today is beneath the canvas of a £283-per-night ($381) yurt at Hay Festival, a literary jamboree in Wales. Revolutionary fervour is building among those who 'glamp', as if someone had given Colonel Qaddafi a subscription to the London Review of Books. Class consciousness is a simple concept. Before an oppressed class can throw off their shackles, they must know how hard they have it. Karl Marx had workers in mind when he devised it. Increasingly those who are most aggrieved in British society are not those at the bottom but those stuck in the middle. Overtaxed by the state, underpaid by their employers and overlooked by politicians, middle-class consciousness is growing. It started with Brexit. For many in the middle class—the relatively well-off, well-educated band of voters who make up about a third of the country—this was a radicalising moment. Comfortable lives were rudely interrupted by politics. Marches against Britain's departure from the eu represented the 'id of the liberal middle classes', argues Morgan Jones in 'No Second Chances', a forthcoming book about the campaign to undo Brexit. Britain's middle class is less disparate than it seems. The banker and the bookseller have much in common. Even those in normal jobs now face high marginal-tax rates. Strangely, the Conservatives bequeathed an overly progressive tax system to Labour. Direct taxes on median earners have never been lower; those who earn even slightly above are hammered. What ails a junior banker today will haunt a teacher tomorrow. If teachers accept a proposed 4% pay rise, the salary of the median teacher will hit £51,000—shunting them into the 40% tax bracket. A tax bracket designed for the richest will soon hit a put-upon English teacher watching 'The Verb', Radio 4's poetry show, in a tent near the Welsh border. It should be no surprise that middle-class unions are now the most militant. Resident doctors—formerly called 'junior'—were offered 5.4% by the government, but the British Medical Association has called a strike ballot. It wants almost 30%. This would be its 12th strike since 2023. Labour had tried to buy goodwill by agreeing a pay rise worth 22% in 2024. It did not work. 'Bank and build' is the mantra of the middle-class Mensheviks. Before their stonking pay rise, doctors liked to point out that some young doctors earned less than a barista in Pret A Manger. It was a delicate point. Everyone likes doctors; no one likes snobs. Yet it is a grievance that afflicts an increasing number of middle-class workers. Graduate salaries are often squished in real terms while the minimum wage cranks ever higher. Cleaners and barmen enjoy better pay thanks to the state; middle-class jobs are left at the mercy of the market. The gap between a publisher on a jolly in the Welsh countryside and the person serving them gourmet macaroni cheese is shrinking. Some do not like this. The history of class in Britain is the history of status anxiety. Partly, middle-class consciousness is a defensive move. When Labour looks to raise money, broad-based tax rises are ruled out. That means niche attacks on the middle classes are in. Pension pots are a tempting target. The Treasury gazes longingly at ISAs, the tax-free saving accounts that are a tremendous bung to middle-class people. Middle England feels about ISAs the same way rural America feels about shotguns. Being ignored and, at times, abused by politicians is a new sensation for the middle classes. For decades, their wants and needs drove political debate. As recently as 2017, entire books were written about the exclusion of the working class from British politics, arguing that the middle classes had a monopoly on political attention. Brexit inverted this deal. Now every major party (except the Liberal Democrats, who speak for England's most prosperous corners) falls over itself to offer something to an imagined working-class voter. If Brexit taught anything, it was that voters in want of attention eventually throw a tantrum. Aux barricades, doc It is easy to mock the middle class. Perhaps the well-off whingeing about their tax burden, or taking to the streets because a holiday in Europe is now less convenient, is inherently ridiculous (much like spending £283 on a night in a yurt). Politicians can overlook such voters only for so long. It is hard to rule without them; they are simply too numerous to ignore. From the grumpy Remainer to the junior banker scouring Reddit for ways to cut his tax bill to the doctor on the picket line, middle-class consciousness is spreading. Few are content—least of all those in a luxury tent. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Economist
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economist
Doctors, teachers and junior bankers of the world, unite!
The best place to consider class consciousness in Britain today is beneath the canvas of a £283-per-night ($381) yurt at Hay Festival, a literary jamboree in Wales. Revolutionary fervour is building among those who 'glamp', as if someone had given Colonel Qaddafi a subscription to the London Review of Books.
Washington Post
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A year in the life of a 60-year-old runaway (from marriage)
For the uninitiated, Nina Stibbe is a beloved and very funny British writer best known for her first book, 'Love, Nina,' a collection of letters she wrote to her sister during her stint in the 1980s working as a nanny to the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers, then the deputy editor of the London Review of Books, and the director and producer Stephen Frears. In other words, Stibbe, a keenly observant 20-year-old, had stumbled into a gold mine. That book, first published in the United States in 2014, was later turned into a BBC television series adapted by Nick Hornby. Stibbe has since gone on to write several acclaimed novels and works of nonfiction.
New European
29-04-2025
- General
- New European
Reaching out to loved ones
I found myself agreeing. 'Loved ones' is not an expression which was in widespread use in Britain until relatively recently, and it never made it into my consciousness until American reports of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City started appearing in the British media. Prior to that, we would probably normally have said something like 'family and friends' or 'friends and relations'. In 2020, the American writer Jane Miller wrote in the London Review of Books: 'I resist all talk of 'loved ones'.' She continued: 'It calls needless attention to the likelihood that we all have friends and relations we don't much like.' The Americanism 'loved ones' was initially felt to be rather jarring on this side of the Atlantic, because it seemed to ignore the obvious if uncomfortable fact that it is not necessarily the case that all of us automatically love all of our friends and certainly not all of our family, as Miller was correctly pointing out. And some of us over here felt that it was not for American journalists to tell us who we were supposed to love and who not. Evelyn Waugh's famous short work of fiction The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy is a satirical novella which was first published in 1948. It focuses on the funeral business in Los Angeles, as well as on the British expatriate community in Hollywood. Clearly, Waugh found precisely this phrase – loved one – to be an absurd locution, and he used it in his novel to symbolise different aspects of the cultural divide between Britain and the USA, not least in the employment of American-style sentimental euphemisms and touchy-feely expressions filled with sincerity and optimism. 'Touchy-feely,' by the way, was first used in print in the New York Times in 1968 and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning 'given to the open expression of affection or other emotions'. We can now see this phenomenon illustrated in a number of linguistic usages which have increasingly started coming into use here. I was rather surprised a few years ago when an American academic colleague thanked me for 'sharing' a scientific paper with them when, as far as I could see, all I had done was send it. These days it is also rather common for people to be said to be 'reaching out' to one another, which, again as far as I can tell, is simply another way of saying 'getting in touch with'. Languages and dialects all over the world differ not only in terms of words, grammar and pronunciation but also in terms of language usage. When you learn a foreign language, you have to learn not only the language as such but also what the norms are for using it – for example, what the rules are for using greetings, farewells and expressions of gratitude. Certainly, British people born before about 1970 were by and large not really encouraged in childhood to express affection and other emotions too openly. But as the influence of American usages and attitudes is now seemingly increasing in this country, we will quite possibly see more of this kind of 'loved one'-type of development in future – or as some younger people now increasingly seem to say, in a sincerely positive and optimistic way, 'going forward'. AUTOMATIC Automatic originally meant 'self-acting, moving on its own'. The basic root of the word is Ancient Greek autos 'self'. In Modern Greek this is pronounced aftós, and has a range of meanings and grammatical functions including he, it, and that, as well as self.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman review – the radical lord of light entertainent
Music is extremely difficult to write about. First, because it has no plot, no figures, no images, and second, because it is, as the critic Walter Pater pointed out, the one artform to which all the others aspire. Remember those earnest mini-essays on the backs of album covers, which told us everything and nothing about the piece or pieces we were about to listen to? Ian Penman writes: 'As with sex, we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel.' Penman, a journalist, critic and biographer, has written not only for the London Review of Books but also the New Musical Express. To say that he is eclectic in his tastes is an understatement; he gives the same level of consideration to Burt Bacharach as he does to Bach, and along the way puts in a word for the genius of the likes of Les Dawson – that's right, Les Dawson. If Penman's cheery chappiness can at times seem studied, he is for the most part admirably accommodating and affirmative, and always enthusiastic. He has little time for the grand Germanic musical statements of the 19th century, which Erik Satie and Debussy gigglingly referred to as Sauerkraut. Satie is an ideal subject for him, and Three Piece Suite is, as you would expect, a glorious celebration of this most elusive and ambiguous of early 20th-century composers. Satie was born in 1866 to a French father and a British mother. He studied first at the Paris Conservatoire but left without a diploma; later, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum and was more successful. For a time he played the piano in a Montmartre cabaret. He had a five-month liaison with the trapeze artist and painter Suzanne Valadon, but lived for the latter part of his life alone in a small and extremely cluttered room in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, making frequent forays into the city, where he became a well-known figure in cultural circles that included Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau. He was a true eccentric, instantly recognisable for his neat grey suits, bowler hat and inveterate umbrella. One Paris wag nicknamed him Esotérik Satie. He drank a great deal, and died of cirrhosis when he was 59. His last words were, so Penman reports, 'Ah! The cows …' He composed mostly miniatures, especially for the piano, his best-known pieces being the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes – 'They feel as old as sand,' Penman beautifully writes, 'but strangely contemporary' – but also wrote what he called a symphonic drama, Socrate, commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac, and two late ballets. Penman loves him for his light and humorous touch – 'What's the big problem with happiness?' – and for the depths he managed to plumb by way of seeming superficiality. Penman situates Satie among the proto-surrealists, along with René Clair and Francis Picabia – 'the three amigos' – but distances him from the likes of André Breton, he of the 'pursed lips and castigating impulse'. The amigos 'proved that it was possible to be radical and lighthearted at the same time'. However, Satie was at heart solitary – solitary, that is, in the midst of the social whirl. At Arcueil he organised public concerts, took groups of schoolchildren on Thursday afternoon outings, and was, Penman notes, 'made a superintendent of the Patronage laïque of Arceuil-Cachan and honoured with a decoration called the Palmes Académiques for services to the community'. Yet the music, despite its apparent simplicity and sunny surfaces, turns upon inwardness. All true art is enigmatic, but the art of Satie is an enigma hiding in plain sight. His 'furniture music', musique d'ameublement, the composer himself wrote, 'will be part of the noises of the environment… I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself'. Not to impose: it could be Satie's musical motto. Disconcertingly, the audiences refused to ignore the furniture. Milhaud reported after one performance: 'It was no use Satie shouting: 'Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen!' They kept quiet. They listened.' But was Satie displeased, really? Was there not here a joke within a joke, a blague within a blague? Penman associates Satie not only with later composers upon whom he could be said to have had an influence, such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, even Morton Feldman, but also with artists in other forms, the novelist Raymond Queneau, for instance, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and, of course, the painter René Magritte – in the 'Satie A-Z' section of the book there is a telling cross reference: 'See also: BOWLER HAT; MAGRITTE; UMBRELLA.' One remarkable aspect of Three Piece Suite is that in its more than 200 pages there is not a single word of adverse criticism of its subject. Ian Penman is of an unfailingly cheerful disposition, which makes his book a delight to read, but you cannot but wonder if he never finds himself even a teeny bit exasperated by Satie's relentless whimsy, by titles such as Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Dummy or Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and references in the scores to the likes of 'Turkish Yodelling (To be played with the tips of the eyes)'. All the same, who could resist a work of musical criticism that closes with the diary entry '10.8.24. Such a lovely blue sky today'? Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
