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The Guardian
13-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist
AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria's letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar's first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – 'vulgar stuff and not my manner at all'. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master. Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered 'the diarists' pantheon'. But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James's 'idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical'; Arnold Bennett was 'a cad'; of Housman: 'I don't think he is quite a gentleman'. His musical opinions were even worse. In a concert that included works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, he declared the best work to be one by Waldemar Bargiel, a composer otherwise unknown to history; while, 'fifty years hence people will probably talk of Wagner as claptrap and wonder how anyone could admire'. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares? Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam are, unlike Benson, distinguished academics. They have bestowed on these diaries all the apparatus of contemporary research, treating the commonplace utterances of obscure dons as if they came from great statesmen – but to what end? Anyone with misplaced nostalgia for a supposedly golden age of civilised living – an age that fortunately is long gone and which no one of sense would wish to see resurrected – may enjoy immersing themselves in Benson's observations. But they would have to be almost as steeped in a certain crusted-over establishment atmosphere as he was. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys. In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship. No doubt the question of whether the master's children should be allowed to use the Fellows' Garden was a matter of great moment to the dons in May 1914 but its historical import is unclear. The account of college squabbles lacks even the waspishness that we find, for example, in the letters of AJP Taylor or Hugh Trevor-Roper. They at least serve to confirm Henry Kissinger's dictum that academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it's one we shouldn't fall for. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Benson Diary by AC Benson, edited Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, is published by Pallas Athene (£60). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
12-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist
AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria's letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar's first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – 'vulgar stuff and not my manner at all'. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master. Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered 'the diarists' pantheon'. But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James's 'idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical'; Arnold Bennett was 'a cad'; of Housman: 'I don't think he is quite a gentleman'. His musical opinions were even worse. In a concert that included works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, he declared the best work to be one by Waldemar Bargiel, a composer otherwise unknown to history; while, 'fifty years hence people will probably talk of Wagner as claptrap and wonder how anyone could admire'. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares? Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam are, unlike Benson, distinguished academics. They have bestowed on these diaries all the apparatus of contemporary research, treating the commonplace utterances of obscure dons as if they came from great statesmen – but to what end? Anyone with misplaced nostalgia for a supposedly golden age of civilised living – an age that fortunately is long gone and which no one of sense would wish to see resurrected – may enjoy immersing themselves in Benson's observations. But they would have to be almost as steeped in a certain crusted-over establishment atmosphere as he was. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys. In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship. No doubt the question of whether the master's children should be allowed to use the Fellows' Garden was a matter of great moment to the dons in May 1914 but its historical import is unclear. The account of college squabbles lacks even the waspishness that we find, for example, in the letters of AJP Taylor or Hugh Trevor-Roper. They at least serve to confirm Henry Kissinger's dictum that academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it's one we shouldn't fall for. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Benson Diary by AC Benson, edited Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, is published by Pallas Athene (£60). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Spectator
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
‘I've taken to sleeping in my teeth' – the wartime admissions of T.S. Eliot
In 1944, T.S. Eliot is 56 years old. He seems older: 'I am getting to be a wambling old codger.' He is war-worn: 'I have taken, when in London, to sleeping in my teeth.' As a fire-watcher sharing shifts, his sleep is hampered by understandable pudeur: 'I haven't got enough phlegm to undress completely, and I think it best to sleep in my truss, in case of sudden blasting, which is not very comfortable.' He knows, too, that his letters are dull. To Anne Ridler, 19 June 1942, he confesses: 'If I had any small gift for letter writing, it has been ruined years ago by the pressure of the kind of correspondence I have to practise most of the time.' Namely, the business letter, where you can see Eliot now and then resorting to the formulaic. For example, touching on the prose poem, he says: 'Years ago I did a little of the sort myself but was never able to persuade myself that the result was more than just a note for a poem to be written.' A year later, he is rejecting the poems of Kay Dick: 'The effect is rather of notes for poems or notes for something, rather than of poems. And a few months after that he is applying the formula to D.H. Lawrence, who 'wrote a kind of free verse, but it seems to me to be mostly notes for poems'. In January 1944, Eliot turns down the poems of Michael Burn (of whom more in a moment): 'I should call them notes for poems than poems.' Now and then, very rarely, these rejection letters sound a note of pained asperity. To one Arthur Sale, Eliot is momentarily incontinent, in his measured way: 'One is ready to concede admiration, rather than put oneself to the torture of reading to the end.' And he closes, stingingly: 'I have never read poetry that irritated me more than yours, and it would irritate me if there was nothing in it.' The editorial annotation tells us that poor savaged Sale later went on to teach at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his pupils included Michael Hofmann and Bamber Gascoigne. Of course, Eliot – ever compliant, exhausted by good works, school prize-givings, readings for wartime causes, endless theological faffing and fussing, broadcasts to India and servitude to the British Council – could occasionally ironise the public man he had become. To Mary Trevelyan (29 June 1942): I ought to have explained to you long ago that I had an Irish grandmother, of a respextable [sic] family founded by a man who tried to steal the Crown Jewels. This accounts for a good deal but is far from being the whole story. In my father's family is a hereditary taint, going back for centuries, which expresses itself in an irresistible tendency to sit on committees. A rare frisk. John Haffenden's footnote tells us that Eliot's mother believed she was descended from Thomas Blood (1618-80) who tried to steal the Crown Jewels in 1671. These spectacularly unspectacular letters are salvaged by the footnotes. For example, we learn that Michael Burn was bisexual, slept with Guy Burgess, met Hitler at a Nuremberg rally, was briefly persuaded of 'the values of National Socialism' but later became a communist after witnessing poverty in the Barnsley coalfields. He joined the commandos and was wounded and captured during the raid on St Nazaire in 1942. He was awarded the MC and sent to Colditz. There, he was the recipient of an aid package from a Dutch one-time lover, Ella van Heemstra. On his release from Colditz, he sent her food and cigarettes. She sold the cigarettes to buy penicillin to save the life of her 'ill and undernourished daughter – the future actress Audrey Hepburn'. Gossip. Top gossip: 70 per cent proof. Three more footnotes. On a British Council trip to Sweden, Eliot stayed with Sir Victor Mallet at the British Legation. Haffenden has read Mallet's unpublished memoirs, of which this is an extract: T.S. Eliot pursued his quiet way with the Swedish Pen Club and other intellectual bodies and achieved an outstanding success. We were much amused when he came home late one evening from one of these parties, his cheeks covered with lipstick from being embraced by a number of enthusiastic Swedish girls after reading his poetry. F.R. Leavis secures Eliot's help in preserving Scrutiny, which is threatened by the paper restrictions. In a letter of thanks, Leavis adds: P.S. Ralph, my small son, looks forward to seeing you again. He said to his mother at bedtime after you had gone last Whitsun: 'Now I only want to meet Mr Shakespeare.' What we want, fervently, from letters is the authentic, unofficial version of events and people – indiscretion. Here, the widow of the American literary critic Irving Babbitt is trying to edit the correspondence between Babbitt and his late colleague Paul Elmer More. She complains to Eliot that More's widow has redacted everything of interest from her husband's side of the correspondence. The following –another footnote – is from a letter to Valerie Eliot about her husband, dated 20 February 1972, written by Dr Elizabeth Wilson, the daughter of a Surrey GP whom Eliot had consulted 'at some time in the 1940s': After tea we invited him to join us for a swim. He had no costume but a very antique ladies model (navy wool, to be tied round his waist by an old tie) was found & we walked to a nearly artificial lake, at one time properly dredged as a swimming pool but by then pretty muddy & well supplied with tadpoles. There were, of course, no changing facilities, only bushes. Mr Eliot never expressed by word or expression, any dismay – he appeared to quietly enjoy himself although I always wondered whether he was aware that the moths had feasted on the posterior of his borrowed garment. This seems worth much more than the clunky, jaundiced repudiation by Eliot of his own literary output: 'The structure of the play [The Family Reunion] is very defective theatrically.' He can't bear to re-read his critical prose. The unrevised The Use of Poetry is 'one of my works with which I had the least cause to be satisfied'. The moth-eaten cossie trumps this bogus, high-fallutin' incitement to endless hermeneutics: 'I don't know whether there is any 'complete understanding' of a poem that has any depth to it.' Think of a very good poem like W.H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', the fall of Icarus representing the world's indifference to individual tragedy – easily understandable and profound nevertheless. Eliot is merely hiking the price on his own sometimes difficult poems. And personally I would prefer to hear about Stephen Spender's elastic stocking for his varicose veins; or Eliot's delight when the Chinese minister of information addresses Spender as 'Steve'; or about the (incomprehensible) message from William Blake conveyed by Mrs Millington, Eliot's blind masseuse; or the survival of Omar Pound's bombed stamp collection; or about Winston Churchill (the grandson) saying grace then standing on his head, rather than read this example of Eliot's prose at its most comatose: I admit frankly this personal difficulty in reading because I know it may be something of which the reader is very much more conscious when presented with a part of the book than he might be if he had the complete work before him and read it from cover to cover. A sentence that is asleep, sounds asleep, before it reaches the full stop. These letters, with their rich annotation and the intimate correspondence with Emily Hale, are the real biography of Eliot. We don't need Peter Ackroyd's off-the-cuff impressions and cavalier opinions. Nor Robert Crawford's numbly industrious two-volume biography and its dour judgments. The life of the life is here – in its dullness, in its detail, in its attention to the very texture of Eliot's existence. The boredom and the horror and the glory.
The Sun
01-08-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Four-day week ‘will be normal in 10 years' despite ‘vicious' backlash after UK's biggest pilot, professor says
A FOUR-DAY week is set to "be the norm" within a decade despite "vicious" backlash from opponents, according to one expert. Professor Brendan Burchell, an expert on labour markets and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, stated the shift towards the condensed working schedule is already in motion. 1 'In ten years' time, a four-day week will be the norm,' he told The Times. 'If any organisation advertises a five-day role, no one will apply — why would you?' The UK's most extensive public-sector pilot, by South Cambridgeshire district council, has reported improvements in recruitment, cost savings of nearly half a million pounds a year and without a drop in worker performance. Burchell added that the five-day week is so baked into the culture of work in the UK, which is why it is yet to be implemented. 'The idea that you can reduce hours by 20 per cent and maintain output sounds too good to be true,' he said. 'But case after case, that's exactly what we're seeing.' 'The work ethic is incredibly deeply embedded. 'People see being busy as virtuous.' However, Burchell conceded not all professions would be able to benefit from the four-day working week - especially frontline workers. 'You need to think about how the whole system changes,' he says. I earn £10k a month doing a job no one wants - I only have to work half the year & get to travel the world 'And remember, a lot of the people who are economically inactive are qualified professionals who left because the job became intolerable.' 'Our great-grandparents did in a week what we now do in a day. So why are we still working the same hours?' WORK IT OUT It comes as after the full list of firms offering a four-day week was revealed, as experts hail "there is no turning back." Since April 2024, workers have a right to ask for flexible work but firms do not have to agree. As of July 2025, over 230 companies across the UK offer employees the chance to work a shorter week, according to research by the 4 Day Week Foundation. This is an increase of 35 more firms, compared to previous research carried out at the end of last year. The organisation recently concluded its latest pilot with a 100% success rate. The six-month trial began last November and 17 companies took part in the study. Alan Brunt, chief executive of Bron Afon Community Housing with 420 staff, who are extending their pilot further, said: 'Almost as soon as we started talking about it, our teams got together to set about making it work which was brilliant. 'We've closely monitored our performance and customer satisfaction. We're happy with the results so far and will continue to make sure we're delivering for our customers. 'I expect that most organisations will be doing this in the next 10 years or so.'
Times
01-08-2025
- Business
- Times
Four-day week ‘will be the norm in ten years'
Professor Brendan Burchell's tranquil office on a Cambridge University staircase seems an unlikely staging ground for a revolution in how we live and earn, but his research may help transform how — and how much — the country works. Burchell, an expert on labour markets and a fellow of Magdalene College, is a key voice in the growing debate over the merits of a four-day week. As trials proliferate across both the private and public sectors, he believes that a shift has begun. 'In ten years' time, a four-day week will be the norm,' he predicts. 'If any organisation advertises a five-day role, no one will apply — why would you?' For two years, the veteran sociologist has been studying the UK's most extensive public-sector pilot, run by South Cambridgeshire district council. The data now spans 27 months. The results are, in Burchell's words, 'phenomenal'. The council has reported improvements in staff recruitment and retention, cost savings estimated at £400,000 a year and better or stable performance on most of the services that were monitored — all while employees worked one day less every week with no loss of pay. The scheme, which the council voted last month to make permanent, follows the so-called 100-80-100 model: 100 per cent of pay, 80 per cent of the hours, 100 per cent of the original productivity. It is not about squeezing the hours of a conventional working week into fewer, longer days and it covers the entire workforce. These details seem important. Burchell's research has shown that benefits to worker wellbeing diminish if a shorter working week involves a pay cut, or if most of your colleagues still work five days. His findings also suggest that the mental health benefits of work plateau after surprisingly few hours. In 2019, he published a study exploring the idea of an 'optimal dose' of employment. Unexpectedly, the data suggested that one day a week was enough to confer the psychological rewards associated with work, which stem from structured routines, social connections, the sense of contributing to a collective venture and building an identity. 'It doesn't have to be a great job,' he says. 'Even average jobs are good for you — but only up to a point.' In South Cambridgeshire, critics — including Conservative councillors — have argued that the four-day week shortchanges taxpayers while making it harder to deliver for residents. But a recent report co-authored by Burchell suggested that the feared drop in productivity had not materialised. 'The idea that you can reduce hours by 20 per cent and maintain output sounds too good to be true,' he concedes. 'But case after case, that's exactly what we're seeing.' So what is holding Britain back? Partly, he believes, it is culture. 'The work ethic is incredibly deeply embedded,' he says. 'People see being busy as virtuous.' This mindset, rooted in centuries of Protestant tradition and reinforced by the modern cult of productivity, may, he says, help to explain the criticism the South Cambridgeshire trial has encountered. Although early media coverage of private-sector trials was largely positive, the council faced fierce political attacks. Burchell describes the scrutiny as 'vicious', a backlash that has chilled interest among other local authorities. Around the world, though, from Portugal to South Africa, companies and institutions are trialling four-day weeks and announcing positive results. In the UK, the model is gaining momentum among companies grappling with recruitment challenges, burnout and low morale. Burchell is now collaborating with health economists to explore applications within the NHS, where recruitment crises and burnout are endemic. • The Times View: Four-day week for council workers sets a disastrous example He acknowledges that not all jobs fit neatly into the four-day model. Nurses, delivery drivers and other frontline workers cannot drop a day without adjustments elsewhere. But he argues that change is still feasible. 'You need to think about how the whole system changes,' he says. 'And remember, a lot of the people who are economically inactive are qualified professionals who left because the job became intolerable.' It was only in the mid-20th century that the UK transitioned from a six-day to a five-day week, a change that was met with furious resistance at the time but is now taken for granted. Burchell suspects we are now at a similar crossroads. 'Our great-grandparents did in a week what we now do in a day. So why are we still working the same hours?' he asks. Part of the answer may lie in consumer culture, rising housing costs and entrenched managerial models. But Burchell suspects something deeper is also at play: a collective inability to reimagine how we divide our time. 'Most of us,' he says, 'still think of the five-day week as natural, as if it's encoded in the human condition. It's not.'
