Then, as if acting as warm-up man for the coming entreaclement of Luton Airport’s runway, the UK’s former energy and climate change minister, Sir John Hayes, went on Radio 4 to argue that all this fuss over a heatwave showed that “we’ve lost our sense of what’s normal”. (“I can remember the summer of 1975,” he declared, puzzling anyone who could remember the summer of 1976.) Three days later, his home county sent a four-wheeled gritter named Spreaddie Mercury to discharge itself over Lincolnshire roads liquefying at a record-breaking 56.3°C.

Then, just as I was about to finish this piece, Esquire magazine revealed that Chris Evans — the Knives Out one not the TFI Friday one — had been detected trying to “normalise” something. When you hear about things being normalised, it’s usually in reference to lying or racism or toxic masculinity, but thankfully Evans had just decided to go to the premiere of The Gray Man wearing a white vest under his suit jacket. “The normalisation of sexy, sexy menswear,” the mag confirmed, “has been coming for some time.”

At our moment in history, is the word “normal” exhausted beyond use? Is it time to retire it? We expect it to do so much. The normality of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for example, resides in its characters’ struggles with mental illness; the novel argues for the ordinariness and ubiquity of experiences that fiction might once have treated as exceptional. It’s not the same normal as Planet Normal, the Daily Telegraph podcast that offers views on Covid policy that are not broadly shared by either the public or the scientific community. So what, if anything, does it now mean?

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Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

These are questions for Sarah Chaney, research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, which in recent years has produced exciting work on British weeping, shame in early modern Spain, and Busman’s stomach (a psychosomatic disorder that troubled double-decker drivers around the time of the 1937 Coronation). Chaney’s new book, Am I Normal? takes a single term and, like a long, chatty entry from Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords (1976), traces its sources and explores the different uses to which it has been put.

Her first lesson about “normal” as we understand it today is that its history is short. In essence, her book is an account of an escape. In 1800, “normal” was a mathematical term designating a straight line perpendicular to the tangent. But in 1840, along came Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician who loosed the term into the space of a new discipline he called “social physics”. (Auguste Comte had thought of it first, but coined another word — “sociology” — to ensure nobody confused their work.) Taking data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers from a two-decades-old copy of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Quetelet plotted these numbers on a graph to produce an average chest size, rather as astronomers used multiple readings to establish the length of a planetary orbit. As revolution brought chaos and disruption to Belgium, Quetelet found that on paper, all measurable human qualities — from height and weight to propensity for suicide — fell into the quiet and simple order of the bell curve. We still call this “normal distribution”.

Quetelet knew that his calculations were not offering a simple description of reality. The average soldier who emerged from his numbers did not exist. Not all who followed in his footsteps were so clear-sighted. As Todd Rose relates in The End of Average, the spectral figure of the average man led US Air Force designers to produce a generation of jet planes with cockpits that fitted nobody. (It’s also why nuclear families are easier to find in adverts than censuses.)

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There’s another story here that’s just as big. Chaney spells out the problem with the data itself: it shows an enormous bias towards white middle-class individuals, who comprise less than 12% of the world’s population, but make up 80% of subjects in medical studies and 96% of subjects in psychological ones. The normal isn’t just a phantom; it’s one raised from the experience of a minority. Yet it is used to create standards for a world in which everyone must live.

Quetelet’s work generated a universe of good and ghastly work based on averages — the Body Mass Index, typologies of criminals, Florence Nightingale’s hospital reforms, John Snow’s discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera, the IQ test, the Kinsey Report into the sex habits of Americans, eugenic projects from Francis Galton to the Nazis.

Amazingly, Am I Normal? suggests that the data didn’t even have to be real in order to have an impact. For instance, statistics about the poor physical state of British recruits to the Anglo-Boer War are often credited for starting the process that gave us the 1904 Committee on Physical Deterioration, free school milk and — eventually — the National Health Service. The numbers are scary. 8,000 of the 11,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, it was said, were unfit to serve. Chaney uses a 2008 paper by the medical historian Vanessa Heggie to show that this figure has no source but the rambling polemics of Arnold White, a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate with a thing for antisemitic conspiracy theories. (“When we survey other nations,” he wrote in Efficiency and Empire (1901), we “perceive how weakness, self-indulgence, want of foresight, self-respect, culture and industry are enabling astute, industrious, or unscrupulous Jews to destroy the power of whole classes.”) A culture convinced of its own declining state did not ask for White’s receipts. It had a picture of itself that matched its prejudices.

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But Chaney’s work also yields a warning about making the same kind of mistake about the past. In one of her chapters, she uses the brutal practice of the clitoridectomy to illustrate how 19th-century medicine attempted to regulate female sexuality. The operation, she argues, was “a cure for sexual desire” that “acquired a dubious reputation after the discrediting of its main advocate, gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown, in 1867”. She is not the first to use Brown to tell a story about normality imposed by a surgical blade — but I’m not sure whether the facts really serve her thesis.

Scandal erupted around Brown when it was revealed that he had been operating on patients without consent. The subsequent inquiry also allowed his peers to pass judgement on the procedure itself. They used words such as “barbarous”, “quackery” and “terrorism”. I can find only one example of an English doctor other than Baker who ever carried out it out. It was the opposite of normal. It was shockingly extreme.

Moreover, the case that brought Brown down was not the one that we might naturally imagine – a Victorian wife punished for her desires. The central figure in the affair, Mary Hancock, suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. She saved pus from her blisters in a gallipot, believed that she was turning into a crystal, imagined that she was Princess Charlotte of Wales, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Her doctors were concerned about what they perceived as a manic sexual energy, but marriage, not mutilation, seems to have been their preferred cure.

All this became a matter for the courts only when her husband, Robert Peaty, fought, unsuccessfully, to save her from the machinations of her family, who wanted to annul the marriage for financial gain. As the astonished press coverage indicates, there was nothing normal about any of this (except, perhaps, the punishment meted out to the doctor who cut Mary Hancock with steel scissors of his own design). A misplaced scholarly tradition of seeing the clitoridectomy as an exemplar of Victorian cruelty may be the only reason that Chaney implies otherwise.

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Ironically, Am I Normal? is just the sort of book that might save a researcher from error. Its pages are full of implied warnings against the unquestioning use of data, particularly when it fits preconceived ideas too neatly. But as Raymond Williams reminds us, this is hazardous work. Many of the entries in Keywords begin by saying that the term under discussion is “one of the most difficult words in the language”. “Normal” is not on his list. But, as Chaney demonstrates, it merits the same careful handling. It’s a word that imposes a false picture of the world and may sometimes cause us much pain. But it’s one for which we’re grateful when we’re trying to work out how many Paracetamol to take, or how to read a red hot weather forecast.

A few weeks ago, a clip of the scruffy CBBC personality Hacker T. Dog went viral. It was a short moment from a 2016 TV show in which he made a strange emphatic statement to his co-presenter, Lauren Layfield. “We’re normal men!” he declared. “We’re just innocent men.” Layfield, her face close to his snout, dissolved into incapable laughter.

Hacker is a little glove puppet with button eyes, but this was probably a more intelligent and sensible deployment of the word “normal” than the examples at the beginning of this piece. It demonstrated its meaninglessness and its power. It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives — despite being fragile to the point of absurdity.

The Time Machine was published in 1895, and its image of the end times is shaped by the fears and discoveries of the late nineteenth century. The idea that evolution might slip into reverse, producing organisms fit only for the twilight. The idea that the earth was losing energy that it could not replace. “The time must come,” wrote Darwin’s great defender, T. H. Huxley, in 1888, “when evolution will mean adaptation to a universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low and simple organisms as the diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and the protococcus of the red snow.”

Today’s envisioned apocalypse is hotter. And sooner. Fire and flood and lots of it, the day after tomorrow. No need to set the dial to the distant future: we can see the glaciers melting. The intolerable world is one our grandchildren may know. How can we avoid this? Well, one way would be not to have any grandchildren.

Last month the Guardian published a mournful article about young men who have chosen to face the challenge of climate change by taking themselves down to the vasectomy clinic. Its principal interviewee, a 30-year-old council administrator from Essex, explained how he had come to the decision. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse.” The report made no grand claims about numbers, but he is not the first to identify the idea as a strengthening current.

In 2019, the journalist Wes Siler wrote about his decision to have the same operation for the same reason. “Is this a world we want to bring kids into?” he asked. In December 2021, Australian national radio carried an interview with a 24-year-old who had also chosen sterilisation as a way to reduce his impact on the environment. “I find it very frightening thinking about the way that the world is right now and what scientists are predicting the world will look like in 20 and 30 years,” said Aaron. “I didn’t think that was a great place to bring up a child.”

And last year, Dr Esgar Gaurin of Iowa, enthused by a service in Mexico City, put North America’s first mobile vasectomy van on the road. He chose Earth Day as his launch date, which he spent carrying out operations while parked outside the Holiday Inn Des Moines-Airport.

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The vasectomy is now such an ordinary and unsensational birth control method that you’re as likely to hear about it in a comic context as any other. “Snip-snap, snip-snap, snip-snap,” says Steve Carrell’s character in The Office. “You have no idea the physical toll that three vasectomies have on a person.”

But 100 years ago, vasectomy discourse was very different. The operation was sought out by men who wanted to increase their impact on the world, not reduce it.

William Butler Yeats can serve as a starry example. In 1934, he complained to a friend that his creative and sexual energies were flagging. His friend, half-jokingly, recommended that he get “Steinached” — that is, have one of his two vasa deferentia cut and sealed.

The procedure had been all the rage in Vienna the previous decade, after Eugen Steinach carried out his first operation on a middle-aged coachman who, 18 months later, claimed to feel like a much younger coachman. Sigmund Freud underwent it in the hope of keeping his mouth cancer at bay. Yeats read Rejuvenation (1924), the only English language book on the subject, and made an appointment to see its author, the Australian medic and sexologist Norman Haire.

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Easy to imagine the scene in Haire’s six-storey Harley Street home, a riot of Chinoiserie and antiques with a bed “big enough for three,” according to Diana Wyndham (author of Norman Haire and the Study of Sex). The 68-year-old Yeats, under the silver ceiling of the top-floor consulting room, confessing that he is all out of poetic ideas, and that his erotic life is similarly moribund. Haire, boasting of the “rather less than 200” artists and intellectuals he has aided with his steady scalpel hand. Yeats rising from the table to enthuse, as he did to the poet Dorothy Wellesley, about “the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination.”

What was happening here? Not much, biologically, except the Placebo Effect. But stories like this are evidence of a strong impulse in early twentieth century culture to consider national (for which read white male) enfeeblement to be a problem with a medical solution.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Creeping Man (1923), for instance, Sherlock Holmes investigates the case of an academic exhibiting weird, aggressive behaviour. His “ape-like fury” turns out to be almost literal — a doctor in Prague has been supplying him with a serum derived from the black-faced langur, “the biggest and most human of climbing monkeys”. This wasn’t Doyle going off with the fairies. That same year, the Russian-born surgeon Serge Voronoff came to London to tell 700 fellow doctors that his monkey-gland grafts would revolutionise “male vitality”. (I don’t know whether the whole audience rose, but they certainly burst into applause.)

The idea took hold. So many rich, exhausted Jazz Age men wanted the op that Voronoff opened a monkey farm on the Italian Riviera. In July 1927, John Beckett, a rebellious Labour MP who later joined the British Union of Fascists, asked: “Could not a Voronoff gland be grafted on the English Government?”

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The humiliation of the Elephant Man

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It’s all pleasingly colourful and preposterous. At the level of social policy, however, we might be less inclined to snigger. Here, H. G. Wells comes back into the picture. Wells was a friend and supporter of Haire — Wyndham suspects he, too, may have been Steinached in Harley Street — and his work is shot through with his view of sterilisation as an instrument of eugenic reform.

His speculative essays Anticipations (1900) put it in the most extreme terms, suggesting that “the People of the Abyss” — those with transmissible diseases and disabilities — must be weeded from the population. “The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss,” he wrote, “will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.”

Wells’s position, if not uncontroversial, was entirely commonplace in early twentieth-century culture. When he was Home Secretary, Winston Churchill read a pamphlet by the vasectomy doctor H. C. Sharp called The Sterilisation of Degenerates (1910), and immediately began firing off questions to his officials. “What is the best surgical operation?” Churchill then wrote to H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister:

“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

We don’t need to look too hard to find the echoes of these ideas in contemporary politics. They ring loudly in the Great Replacement theory — a white supremacist fantasy propagated by the far-Right French Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour and the glassy-eyed Fox News host Tucker Carlson — which suggests that white Europeans are being outbred by unacceptably fecund immigrant communities. Why are these men so fixated on the idea of flagging white virility? Why do they seem obsessed with the quality of Muslim sperm? Freud, alas, is not around to supply an answer.

But if he were, he might tell us that anxiety is a condition of modernity. And admit that, in his own case, a vasectomy turned out not to be a cure for what ailed him.

Every generation faces its existential terrors. Mine, which grew up in the 1980s, watched Protect and Survive films that advised us to put granny’s corpse in a bin bag, carefully labelled, if she died of radiation sickness. Having a vasectomy to save the planet isn’t quite as futile as having one to prevent a nuclear war, but it may come close.

The best we can say, I suspect, is that voluntary sterilisation is a fairly efficient mechanism to prevent a man from fathering another person who will be obliged to face whatever travails lie ahead of us. But an old story might worth taking into account here.

I heard it in a conversation between the US journalist Sigal Samuel and the climate scientist Kimberley Nicholas. It’s about Israelite men who abstained from sex because they didn’t want to create new slaves to Pharaoh. The women disagreed: their generation had failed, but perhaps the next would do better. So they seduced their husbands. Nine months later, Moses was born.

They’ll mix them with synthetic biological matter and cram them into a simulacrum of a corpse blossoming with cauliflower-like tumours. Not just any old fake dead body, but that of an eminent Victorian: Joseph Merrick, whose painful life as “the Elephant Man” is now one of the narratives through which we judge the culture of his age. You’ll put on PPE to protect you from any stray fragments of pig brain and — armed with a real scalpel — you and other paying punters will perform a simulation of Merrick’s autopsy. A two-course meal is provided during this “dinner and dissection” event.

Let’s get something straight about the motives here. It’s not supposed to be a horror show. It’s not intended to demean the memory of Merrick by making his disability the subject of grand guignol dinner theatre. It is “to support and improve knowledge and awareness in the medical space.” Which must be why ITAE was going to stage it in a big top erected in a rugby club car park at Halloween, that traditional time for supporting awareness in the medical space. This was the plan, anyway, until the venue found out about the Elephant angle and cancelled the booking, forcing the organisers to reschedule for January.

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When fake news was harmless fun

By Matthew Sweet

ITAE is the brainchild of Samuel Piri, a former STEM schoolteacher whose business is part-owned by two of the stars of BBC2’s Dragon’s Den. You might have seen the August 2018 edition of the programme in which a young man with a nervous laugh and a product-slicked pudding bowl haircut made an unusual pitch in front of a smorgasbord of pig offal. Bathed in that blue light beloved by directors of Silent Witness, he proselytised the value of artificial cadavers in education and training and explained that his ticketed events, open to the public but popular with NHS staff, could generate an income of £15,000 per day.

The Dragons were a little weirded out by the idea that Piri served dinner at his dissections, but liked his numbers and his originality. Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones, the programme’s most enduring reptiles, offered him £90,000 for a 10% stake in his company. It looked like a perfectly respectable enterprise. A way, perhaps, of demystifying the subject of physiology. The evisceration of real historical figures was not discussed. Nobody, certainly, mentioned the Elephant Man.

It’s hard to get a clear view of Joseph Carey Merrick. That’s partly the fault of the work through which most of us know his story — David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), a film that mimics the aesthetics of Victorian photography so perfectly that you might believe you were gazing directly into the past. No film so fully generates the illusion that the 19th century actually took place in black and white. But the movie is misleading. Its quorum of real historical figures — John Hurt as Merrick, Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves, his surgeon patron, John Gielgud as Carr Gomm, chair of the Royal London Hospital — is joined by another figure whom most viewers probably assume is drawn straight from the historical record. But Mr Bytes, the gin-sodden showman who beats Merrick in his drunken rages, never existed.

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Lynch’s main source is Frederick Treves’s memoir, The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences (1923), a book that contains a surprising mistake. Treves misremembers Merrick’s Christian name as John — an error that Lynch repeats. But there are other reasons to doubt Treves’s account. When the book came out, the real showman in Merrick’s life complained bitterly about his portrayal.

Tom Norman insisted that he never spoke to Merrick “harshly” “as if to a dog”. Instead, he claimed a friendly personal and professional relationship in an enterprise that he regarded as less exploitative than Treves’s use of Merrick as a lecture-room specimen. And the money, he argued, was good. Merrick negotiated a 50-50 box office split with his manager and received free board and lodging on tour. In the first five months of their association, he saved £50 from his fees. (A working-class man of that period could expect to earn about a pound a week.) When he and Norman parted company, Merrick did what performers still do today — put an advert in a theatrical newspaper, signalling that he was looking for new engagements.

What’s missing in all this, of course, is Merrick’s unmediated voice. We know that he spent five years in the Leicester workhouse, which he ended, of his own volition, by becoming a human exhibit. We’ll never know the details of this decision, but it seems important, in telling the story of his life, to preserve a place for his own agency. The alternative — Treves’s picture of the contented recipient of charity, “as amiable as a happy woman” — is too simple. And too flattering to us. When the historian Raphael Samuel went to see the David Lynch film, he knew why it was so powerful: The Elephant Man was “moving us sentimentally to tears at the thought of our own benevolence”.

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What judgement should we make about the latest attempt to depict him? The Facebook page of Dinner and Dissection may help us decide. “Roll up … roll up …” it declares. “Learn how The Victorian Greats unlocked the secrets to the human body.” Who were the greats? According to ITAE, Burke & Hare, whose career at the more murderous end of medical research was over about a decade before Victoria came to the throne, and “the Infamous Jack the Ripper”. The company declined to reveal whether it had employed a professional historian on the project. Nor would it confirm whether the Merrick dissection will remain part of the shows it plans for January. I would gently suggest that Samuel Piri gets together with his investors, Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones, to rethink the whole enterprise, perhaps with the benefit of someone who knows more than them about history and ethics. Maybe it’ll be an educational experience for all of them.

In the meantime, a campaign against the mock autopsy of Joseph Merrick event goes on. Adam Pearson, the broadcaster and actor familiar from Channel Four’s Tricks of the Restaurant Trade and his role opposite Scarlett Johansson in the science fiction film Under the Skin (2013) told the BBC that Joseph Merrick “would be heartbroken” by the idea of ITAE’s show. A petition of protest has now gathered over 12,000 signatures.

Looking back at Samuel Piri’s appearance on Dragon’s Den, there is a moment when you can see how all this might have been avoided. One of the dragons, the vitamin entrepreneur Tej Lalvani, offers £120,000 and access to his contacts in the American healthcare system in exchange for a 25% stake in the business. Piri, though, is drawn to the offer by Meaden and Jones, partly because Jones has experience in events management. Lavalni offers a friendly warning. “I think that if you want to run a circus, an entertainment, maybe that’s the route, but having that network where you have access to the top doctors is key for you.” Piri was unpersuaded.

What would Joseph Merrick have made of this, if he had been in the room? I wouldn’t presume to know. Except to say that in a deal like this, he would have stuck out for 50%.

Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) reported the details to eager readers. Island laws, he explained, were a mixture of imperial edicts imposed by the Japanese Emperor and rules established by the local clergy and monarchy. Slap a priest and you were buried alive. Cheek your husband and he could behead you and keep your carcass for the larder. Other rules kept natural disasters in check: the high priest oversaw an 18,000-boy-a-year anti-earthquake human sacrifice programme. (Girls could be used to meet the quota if they underwent a ritual in which they were passed twelve times through the four elements.) The name of the supervising priest was Gnotoy Bonzo.

Psalmanazar, of course, was a liar. Ian Keable, author of The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth Century England, thinks he may have been one of the greatest who ever lived. Some of Psalmanazar’s dupes had status: the Bishop of London was so impressed by the man (and his fervent anti-Catholicism) that he funded a student place for him at Oxford. But not everyone swallowed. The astronomer Edmond Halley quizzed Psalmanazar about the qualities of the Formosan twilight. (Psalmanazar said the concept was unknown to him.) Those who wondered why he was blond and blue-eyed were told that privileged Formosans stayed pale by living in “apartments under ground”. These assertions were hard to contest. During his time in England, Psalmanazar — or whoever he really was — never met another person who had been to Formosa.

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By Matthew Sweet

There is a canon of classic hoaxes, which have been filling anthologies and saving journalists on slow news days for generations. The best are immortal. The saga of the Tichborne Claimant, the mountainous butcher from Wagga Wagga who presented himself as the vanished heir to a Victorian baronetcy and was discredited in a court case that involved much discussion of his penis size. The affair of Piltdown Man, a confection of bones sourced from an Orangutan and an anonymous medieval human, widely accepted as evidence of an ape caught in the act of evolving into person. The tale of the Cottingley Fairies, the little paper figures pinned to the ground in a back garden near Bradford, that fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

These hoaxes probably wouldn’t work today. Their effectiveness depended on various forms of absence — a missing aristocrat, a gap in the fossil record, the paucity of evidence for a supernatural phenomenon, English ignorance about Formosa. Such voids can no longer be filled so easily. Identity is far less falsifiable than it was in the 19th century. (Some complain that the state knows us too well.) An old bone can be carbon-dated. Photographic trickery is easy to detect. Britain is home to thousands of people who have been to Taiwan, and accurate accounts of it are more accessible than at any other point in human history. But the discourse of the hoax has not faded. Instead, it has become more widespread, corrosive and destructive.

Hoaxes, says Keable, “tend to be short-lived, overturned by an inevitable revelation, newly acquired information or a forced confession”. An eighteenth-century hoax, that is. The examples he gives are lies confected to mislead, often by those who craved attention. But in the information age, the hoax is, characteristically, an imagined act: a fantasy projected into a space where there is no true void of knowledge, just an event to which the fantasist objects. And these unreal hoaxes are far more tenacious than the relatively modest cons Keable describes.

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The Moon landings are the founding modern example. In 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the lunar surface. But a vast literature has worked hard to cast doubt upon this event, and that doubt now exists as a measurable phenomenon in the world. One in six Britons suspects that the Moon landings were faked. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (1976), a self-published pamphlet that focused on apparent anomalies in Nasa photographs, found a receptive readership in a generation that believed, correctly, that the state had lied to them about Watergate and the war in Vietnam.

In the contemporary world, Syria is the ground for similar work, carried out by a small but influential group of British bloggers and academics whose views receive little serious attention at home but plenty of amplification in Damascus and on Russia’s RT news channel. Their principal contention is that evidence of war crimes by the Assad regime has been faked by foreign intelligence agencies. A strong focus of their literature is the claim that the White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that organises search and rescue work in opposition-controlled areas of the country, are not a real organisation, but a CIA or MI6-backed espionage unit that uses actors and dead bodies to create hoaxes calculated to bring the Assad regime into disrepute. (The chemical attack on Douma in April 2018 is, they claim, the group’s most audacious deception.)

Like Moon hoax culture, this world has its own set of stars. Vanessa Beeley, a 57- year-old former waste management consultant who believes that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were faked and that “Zionists rule France”, is among the most prominent. Her dubious work on the White Helmets, boosted by RT and the official Twitter feed of the Russian Foreign Ministry, has led her to assert that the NGO should be considered a “legit target” for Assad’s bombing campaign.

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While Beeley toils in the field — with the co-operation of the Syrian government — a group of British academics and former academics follow the same track from their desks. In May 2019, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and the Media published a document that claimed the Douma chemical attack was a staged event, for which at least 35 civilians were killed to provide human props. “It follows from this,” they argued, “that people dressed as White Helmets and endorsed by the leadership of that organization had a key role in this murder.” There is no evidence for this.

The authors of the report are Piers Robinson (who left Sheffield University after promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories), David Miller (currently under investigation by Bristol University for his remarks about its Jewish students’ society) and Paul McKeigue (an epidemiologist who teaches at Edinburgh University.) None of these people is really a hoaxer. They don’t mean to be liars. Like Beeley, they believe that they are exposing the deceptions of others. But their work does not expand knowledge: it corrodes it. Their pronouncements, published on their blogs, relayed by Russian and Syrian state media, and echoed and re-echoed on conspiracy websites that fail to meet the most basic journalistic standards, and create territories of doubt in which authoritarians can rest easy. New Formosas, founded on a gas-choked ruin in Douma.

But there is, in all this moral awfulness, a little whisper of 18th-century wit. Conspiracy theorists with exotic ideas about the White Helmets are also sceptical about the activities of other bodies investigating war crimes in Syria, including the San Francisco-based Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). Paul McKeigue is one of those sceptics. Last year he received an email from a man who proposed to help him dig for dirt on its employees. His contact claimed to be a Russian secret agent called Ivan. They corresponded for three months, during which time McKeigue sent Ivan hundreds of pages of speculation about spies in the British media, revealed the identity of a confidential source, and suggested that members of his own Working Group were exchanging encrypted messages with a Russian diplomat in Geneva.

In the context of Russian espionage, Ivan might seem as preposterous a name as Gnotoy Bonzo. But McKeigue went on pressing send until his correspondent revealed his true nature — a fictional persona created by Nerma Jelacic, a former Observer journalist, and her colleagues at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, who were investigating the workings of pro-Assad disinformation campaigns in the west.

Eighteenth-century commentators, notes Keable, believed themselves to be living through an age of unique gullibility. In this, at least, they were mistaken.

The loss caused friction among his relations, but at least it fitted the family history. In 1947, Eugene’s dad had won big on the lottery. However, in August of that month, the Romanian government, with no prior announcement, replaced the currency. 20,000 old lei were suddenly worth a single new leu. A low limit was imposed on the amount it was possible to exchange. The name of this policy was the Great Stabilisation. It made Eugene’s dad the owner of an enormous pile of worthless banknotes.

Luck attends our sense of most events of consequence. The stories of whole families might be told through it. Only matters of complete indifference seem untouched. And yet, it’s very easy to argue it out of existence. Luck might best be seen as a fiction we inhabit because we don’t like the idea that many events in the universe are random. We’re attached to the idea of our own agency and merit. We also love patterns — an instinct of immense evolutionary value that leads us to see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or believe that if a roulette ball has landed on red ten times in a row, it’s more likely to hit black on the eleventh.

This is the ground of What are the Chances, a new book by the psychology and neuroscience professor Barbara Blatchley. One of Blatchley’s most persuasive arguments is that we are pretty loose and inconsistent with the language we use when we evoke the idea of luck. We confuse fate (which implies a universe in which invisible forces have determined everything in advance) with destiny (a concept with more room for human agency) and chance (which is beyond the control of gods or humans). But in our daily lives, none of this seems to matter much, because such thinking is usually the means to an end: “We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events,” writes Blatchley, “because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself.”

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To see this in action, watch a quiz show. On an edition of Pointless a couple of weeks ago, a financial consultant called Helen knocked herself out of the quiz by declaring that Kat Slater in EastEnders was played by an actor called Jessie Williams. The totemic scoreboard gave its dreaded red negative twitch. “Very, very unlucky,” sighed Richard Osman, as he revealed that the correct answer was in fact Jessie Wallace.

But unless she had fallen under the influence of some invisible force that erases soap facts from the heads of random victims, Helen had not been unlucky. She had simply been wrong. Her knowledge of Queen Vic landladies was inadequate to the demands of the game. Should Osman have put it in these terms? Absolutely not. It would have been fatal to the pleasures of his own show. A game of skill that has no language of luck is no game at all.

It’s also harder to win. The former cricketer Ed Smith, who wrote Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (2012), was once part of a team that decided it would abolish such consoling words and stop ascribing human fault to the imagined influence of cosmic forces. It took six weeks at the bottom of the results table to reverse the policy. Sometimes magical thinking gets magical results.

But what about games with higher stakes than Pointless, or Kent vs Middlesex? An attractively round 50 years ago, the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), one of the few works of political philosophy to be adapted as a stage musical. The lottery was an important metaphor for Rawls. For him, life issued us with two tickets at birth. One for the natural lottery, in which the prize is a biological potential inherited from our parents. One for the social lottery, in which winners emerge from the womb into highly favourable material, social and political circumstances. Like all true examples of luck, these advantages have no dimension of desert or merit. Luck is unearned.

We can all think of figures in public life — dynastic columnists, aristocratic models, the progeny of 60s rock stars who clutter up ES Magazine — who owe at least part of their success to early receipt of a Rawlsian Thunderball. And in experimental situations, as in life, recipients of this good fortune do not always perceive their privilege. A famous study at Stanford University set up games of Monopoly in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit.

I don’t much like Monopoly, but I do play the National Lottery. Since Covid came, I’ve bought tickets more frequently. I always let the app choose the numbers, because the pure aleatory nature of the process seems both the point and the pleasure. I’d never dream of gambling in anything where knowledge, skill or judgement plays a part. (If, like Sid James and Hattie Jacques in Carry On at Your Convenience, I owned an occult budgie that tweeted on hearing the winner of the 2.30 at Newmarket, I’d consider the bet a fraud on the bookie.)

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The National Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity — mainly by people who regard themselves as clever, many of whom wrongly attribute the thought to Voltaire. The seventeenth-century economist William Petty is a better source. In his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions he wrote that “a Lottery … is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools.” (Thank you, QI elves.) But there are more accurate and less snobbish ways of describing its community of players.

A 2009 study by the ecumenical Christian think-tank Theos found that employed professionals spent around £40 a year on the lottery, £30 a year less than manual workers. Benefit claimants were the most prodigious buyers of scratch cards, and the lowest earners — those on £15k–20k per year — were laying out almost a week’s earnings on tickets for the main draw. Theos hasn’t updated these findings, but suspects, as scratch card sales have climbed and draw tickets fallen, that the Lottery now “leans ever more on sales to lower income players”. Camelot has produced no data to contradict this.

If the lottery is a tax, it is a tax on poverty. Those who pay it do not do so because they lack knowledge or are guilty of some kind of cognitive error. A person spending £1.50 of their £86 Universal Credit on a ticket knows what proportion of their income this represents. That money, however, purchases something powerful. Participation in a game that makes Rawls’s lotteries irrelevant. If, to choose a not particularly random example, David Cameron buys a ticket for the Set for Life draw, he is no more likely to win than anyone else.

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The machine that reduces an ordered stack of National Lottery balls to a random field of tumbling atoms is called Excalibur. This is one of Barbara Blatchley’s conceptual confusions. Excalibur, as any viewer Monty Python and the Holy Grail will know, is a sword of fate or destiny, not chance. The film’s group of soil-eating anarcho-syndicalists would see the contradiction. When one (played by Michael Palin) tells Graham Chapman’s King Arthur that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” he is objecting to two things: a society in which outcomes are predetermined by supernatural forces, and one in which wealth and power are largely inherited. There would be less inequality in a world where mud-eaters were as likely to receive a magical sword as a royal figure who has an ancestral supply of ham and jam and Spam. (You might remember that this conversation ends with Graham Chapman attempting to beat Michael Palin to the ground.)

Most attempts to reduce economic inequality accept the results of Rawls’s social lottery and then try to ameliorate their effects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever suggested working towards the same end by harnessing the power of chance. A massive increase in inheritance tax, for instance, which could be funnelled into the National Lottery, distributing unearned wealth randomly through the population. Having lost — again — on my most recent ticket, I’d be happy to consider it. We could call it the Great Stabilisation.

And the apparatus? Well, that’s the machinery that helps you to decide whether or not to take these words seriously. The masthead of UnHerd. The byline. My bona fides, that sketch what I do when I’m not here, brightening your day. And, most importantly, the little numbers that show I’ve attempted some homework and give you the means to mark it. The footnotes[1.  Thanks for looking. You’re my kind of person. And you may be already thinking: is this a true footnote, or is it an endnote? Digital texts blur this distinction.].

The footnote is a small thing, but so much depends on it. Good writers can use it to supply data that might otherwise disrupt the flow of their story. The single most pleasurable element of Matthew Sturgis’s excellent Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), for instance, is the footnote revealing that Dame Edna’s creator Barry Humphries furnished the information that the subject’s name should be pronounced “Ah-brey” and not “Orbrey”[2. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), p. 30. Humphries heard it from Beardsley’s contemporary, the painter Charles Moresco Pearce]. In fiction, Susannah Clarke and Flann O’Brien have used footnotes to add depth and curiosity to their own strange invented worlds[3. Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) cites a number of invented occult texts; Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) cites invented scholarly works on Professor de Selby, who believes that water can be diluted and that night is a product of “black air”]. In most non-fiction, the footnote (and its sister, the endnote) articulates a covenant of trust between reader and author: an assurance that sources are being used with honesty and integrity. It confirms good and scrupulous work; reveals error, bad faith and intellectual poverty. When it comes to distinguishing the bullshit from the good stuff, the footnote is your friend.

So let’s work through the two examples that made me want to write this piece. They emerged in the last few days from opposite ends of the political spectrum — if such a thing still exists. One went viral, the other failed to spread — though it did provide a glimpse into a deep reservoir of prejudice.

The first came in the form of a scientific paper claiming that face masks were not only useless against the spread of Covid-19, but might in themselves “cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death” [sic]. The study had appeared in the journal Medical Hypotheses in November 2020, but attracted little attention until mask-averse commentators tried to share it on social media — and found that it was being blocked or red-flagged. At which point ‘Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis’ became a cause célèbre.

The celebrants were a familiar cast of culture warriors and conspiracy theorists, among them Diamond and Silk, a pair of pro-Trump activists with 2.38 million Facebook followers, Raheem Kassam, co-host of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and author of Enoch Was Right (2018), and Naomi Wolf, whose current conspiracy theories about vaccines, time travel and Israel’s influence over Dr Anthony Fauci defy both decency and easy summary. As they posted and tweeted, news sites of the kind unlikely to win a Pulitzer lit up like Diwali, many following the line that “Big Tech tyrants” had suppressed a “peer-reviewed study done by Stanford University that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that face masks have absolutely zero chance of preventing the spread of Covid-19”.

Trouble was, this study was neither peer-reviewed nor a product of Stanford University. Its author, Baruch Vainshelboim, is a clinical exercise physiologist with no institutional position at Stanford or apparently anywhere else[4. “The author’s affiliation is inaccurately attributed to Stanford, and we have requested a correction. Stanford University has never employed Baruch Vainshelboim. Several years ago (2015), he was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year, on matters unrelated to this paper.” Email (21/04/21) from Julie Greicius, Senior Director, External Communications, Stanford Health Care, School of Medicine]. (He did not respond to requests to clarify his status.) His paper appeared in Medical Hypotheses, a peculiar anything-goes journal whose tolerance for fringe ideas has led it to accept papers proposing that that high-heeled shoes cause schizophrenia, masturbation alleviates nasal congestion and Gulf War Syndrome is a form of beef allergy.

Did this discredit him? Not much, according to the American Institute for Economic Research, which praised the editorial ethos of Medical Hypotheses and the “well-published and well-cited” Dr Vainshelboim for “a devastating analysis of the harms caused by widespread, universal masking”. Dr Vainshelboim is certainly prolific. According to Google Scholar he has published six papers in the last 300 days, on subjects a various as lung transplants, cardiorespiratory fitness and handgrip strength in the elderly. And his analysis is devastating, if you care about proofreading or believe that a citation should accurately reflect the source to which it leads.

Vainshelboim’s paper has 67 references. If you go to the trouble of following them, you get the measure of his work. His claim, for instance, that masks cause a build-up of C02 in the lungs – now thoroughly debunked – is supported by an article in Medical Hypotheses that seems as flaky as his own. His assertion that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is considerably less than 1% is backed up with a paper from March 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic. A study with which he argues the uselessness of masks actually draws the opposite conclusion: “Surgical face masks,” it reports, “significantly reduced detection of influenza virus RNA in respiratory droplets and coronavirus RNA in aerosols.” When the thread of each note is pulled, all that really remains of Dr Vainshelboim’s thesis is his mangled assertion that he is “providing prosper information for public health and decisions making.”[sic]

Bad work like this circulates because it appears to be academic research in the same way that Mickey Mouse appears to be a mouse. Its apparatus — abstract, footnotes, references, tables — beguiles the eye, particularly one already convinced it can discern the shape of an authoritarian New World Order. When challenged, conspiracy theorists often tell their detractors to do their research — by which they usually mean sharing online articles they haven’t quite finished. Dr Vainshelboim’s paper is a perfect addition to the reading list, and can now take its place in a pseudo-scholarly system where rotten sources move endlessly along lines that were established long before Alex Jones or David Icke were born.

Which brings me to my second example. A deep historical one from the fascinating space of the Twitter feed of the former Labour MP Chris Williamson. “This thread,” he declared last week, “is essential reading for anyone interested in creating a better society that isn’t run in the interests of wealthy elites.” The wealthy elites, it turned out, were the Rothschilds, whose name, in this context, seemed not so much an anti-Semitic dog whistle as an anti-Semitic Spinal Tap guitar solo.

The hero of the thread shared by Williamson was Abraham Lincoln, who, it related, had rejected the offer of a 24% interest bank loan from the Rothschilds bank and instead opted to pay his Civil War troops by issuing the greenback dollar. “Democracy will rise superior to money power,” declared Lincoln, in a quote with a plausible citation —  “Senate document 23, p. 91, 1865” — which was then followed by a cry of Rothschild vengeance, attributed to the London Times of 1865. “That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.” One of Williamson’s followers suggested that this story should form part of the school curriculum.

So where did this come from? Perhaps Williamson wasn’t aware, but the original poster had found these details in an online article by one Justin Walker. It had also attracted the attention of the think tank Modern Money Scotland, and the tax campaigner Richard Murphy, Visiting Professor of Accounting at Sheffield University Management School, briefly an economic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Murphy hailed the piece as proof that the banking reforms he favours were “a battle tested (literally) alternative to debt and austerity based economies” — and posted it on his website. Which was unfortunate. Because all the key sources in this article are false — the invention of 19th-century conspiracy theorists.

The vengeful speech attributed to the Rothschilds never appeared in The Times. It is a fiction that has been circulating since the late 19th century, as evidence of English perfidy. (It had some strange fans, and in 1898 received a sustained disquisition in the house journal of the Koreshans, a Florida cult that believed the earth was hollow.) It is often attributed to The Hazzard Circular, but hereby hangs another strange tale: the Circular is an 1880s forgery that purports to reveal a plot against America by a cabal of English bankers — and may have no material existence beyond its excited quotation in the work of figures such as Sarah Emery, author of Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (1887)[5. The quote is read aloud from a copy of the Hazzard Circular in this Congressional hearing from 1935].

But what about the quotes from Abraham Lincoln? The footnote is our friend. There is no Senate document 23 from 1865. Flip the year to 1939, however, and we end up in a Congressional Committee with Senator Robert L Owen, who is sharing a long string of Lincoln quotes in which the President rails against “money power”. And here’s the really odd bit. Lincoln said none of these things. They are words imagined into his mouth by the Canadian money reformer G.G. McGeer in his book The Conquest of Poverty (1935)[6. Gerald Grattan McGeer, The Conquest of Poverty (1935), pp. 186-7]. McGeer was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist as well as a ventriloquist. The Conquest of Poverty argues that Lincoln was murdered by “the ‘secret foes’ of the nation … the money dealers, the members of the age-old craft of usury, whose prototypes were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.[7.  Ibid., p. 212]”

Richard Murphy quickly removed the Rothschild quote from his website, apologising for his unwitting circulation of something potentially anti-Semitic. But Abraham Lincoln represents a tougher problem. One of McGeer’s phoney quotes forms part of the argument of Murphy’s magnum opus, The Joy of Tax (2016)[8.  Richard Murphy, The Joy of Tax (2016), p. 60.]. It’s part of Murphy’s perfectly reasonable case for reducing the power of the markets over the economy. And no wonder it fits so well: it was written in the 1930s, not the 1860s.

The citation is “Library of Congress, No, 23 … p. 91.” And we know where that leads. Where all footnotes lead. To sources, fair and foul. To those little numbered elements, often ignored, that form the body of the text, and show us its substance, and how it was made, and how to judge it.

An official lays out a swathe of papers on the desk. It’s a document that speaks of evacuations, plebiscites and the Sudetenland, and requires four signatures. Mussolini, Daladier and Hitler ink their names. But when Prime Minister Charles Spencer Chaplin is offered a pen, he takes two, sticks them into a pair of bread rolls he has saved from dinner, and uses them, like a little pair of feet, to kick the Munich Agreement on to the carpet.

It’s a dream, of course. An easy one to have if you’ve seen The Great Dictator (1940) in which Charlie Chaplin plays two of his greatest roles — Adenoid Hynkel, the hare-eyed and preposterous dictator of the fictional totalitarian state of Tomania, and his lookalike, a barber from the Jewish ghetto, who puts on an identical uniform to denounce his tyrannical double from the podium at a Nuremberg-style rally. Hitler might have had the same dream. Chaplin’s films were banned in Nazi Germany, where it was widely believed he was Jewish. (“I do not have that honour,” said Chaplin, when journalists asked him if this was true.)

The fantasy of the Little Tramp in Downing Street first entered my thoughts ten years ago on a visit to the Chaplin archive, a secure and temperature-controlled vault beneath Montreux, where the star’s press-books, manuscripts, photographs and letters were then stored on 75 metres of rolling shelving. Working through a stack of newspaper cuttings relating to Chaplin’s trip to Britain in 1931, I was surprised to discover that their emphasis was not on cinema, but politics.

Chaplin’s views on unemployment, economic reform, industrial automation, the banking system and American and European politics were all recorded by the British press. Reynolds’s Newspaper described his ideology as “left-wing Labour”. The Sphere declared him a “radical millionaire”. The Weekly Dispatch, reporting on Chaplin’s meeting with Ramsay MacDonald, then leader of a minority Labour government, wrote it up as a summit between two heads of state, with Chaplin as “the film premier of mirth”. In the photograph, both men looked serious, as if discussing whether Britain should come off the Gold Standard. Perhaps they were. When Chaplin met Albert Einstein a few weeks later, he bent his ear about price controls and quantitative easing. “You’re not a comedian,” said Einstein. “You’re an economist.”

1931 was a cold rough year in British politics. Ramsay MacDonald spent it in government and in crisis. The summer brought the May Report (which urged urgent action on a £120m budget deficit), MacDonald’s resignation and instant return in coalition with the Tories. The October General Election split the Labour Party and left its leader as head of a Conservative-dominated National Government committed to a £70 million reduction in state spending. Labour would not be alone and united in power until 1945.

The newspaper columnist Henry Hamilton Fyfe — a Fabian Socialist and unsuccessful Labour candidate — wondered if Chaplin might be the man to secure the party’s future. He published his thoughts on the day after Oswald Mosley, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, resigned from government to found the New Party, which offered an economic rescue plan on Keynesian principles. (Mosley’s journey to Tomania was, at this point, far from complete.) Fyfe predicted, correctly, that Mosley’s resignation would hand seats to the Tories. “Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have done that,” he declared. Had the star of City Lights and The Gold Rush been in Mosley’s position, he would have argued the same case, passionately and successfully, from inside Labour. “He would have known that it isn’t enough to have a good story to work with,” wrote Fyfe. “You must be able to catch the fancy of the public. You must grip their interest. You must keep on repeating what you want them to remember. Somehow or other, Mr Charles Spencer Chaplin MP would have managed to get his proposals before the nation in an understandable, attractive form.”

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But what proposals? The answer lies in the cuttings. “I think,” said Chaplin, “there is something wrong with our methods of production and systems of credit.” Like Mosley, he was a fan of Keynes. He was also an enthusiast for Major CH Douglas, a former Stockport Grammar School teacher whose Social Credit system envisioned economic regeneration through the payment of a “national dividend” — an early version of Universal Basic Income. (Douglas’s theories about the relationship between unemployment and profit led Chaplin to convert his stock portfolio into liquid capital in 1928, saving him from the effects of the Wall Street Crash.)

Asked by journalists about rising unemployment and stuttering economies, Chaplin proposed “shorter hours for the working man and a minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labour which will guarantee every man over the age of twenty-one a salary that will enable him to live decently.” The alternative he considered too dangerous to contemplate: “If we continue to view the present conditions as inevitable the whole structure of our civilisation may crumble.” His views were not changed when he travelled on to Berlin, and found Nazi agitators demonstrating outside his hotel. For this, too, he had an answer — one informed by Keynes’s Economic Consequence of the Peace (1919). The issue of $35 billion of a new currency linked to the price of gold, which Germany could use to settle its war debts to the Allies.

Fyfe was not the only person to imagine Chaplin in power. A few days before Mosley’s resignation, Winston Churchill invited the comedian to Chartwell, and, after a robust argument about Lenin and Gandhi, told him to stand for Parliament. Churchill and Chaplin had been friends since 1929, when they met in California by the heated swimming pool of Marion Davies, the actress, producer and mistress of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. They decided to collaborate on a film about Napoleon. Progress was minimal, but a script was developed by another figure from the British political wilderness — John Strachey, a former Labour MP who had supported Mosley’s ideas for a planned economy, and followed him, briefly, to the New Party. The Napoleon project was never concluded — partly because it evolved, under the influence of the rise of Hitler, into The Great Dictator.

With this in mind, let’s try the full counterfactual. Let’s imagine that when Mosley declines to contest his old seat in the 1931 election, Chaplin takes Hamilton Fyfe’s hint and stands for Labour in Smethwick. (There’s a pleasing resonance to this: when Chaplin died in 1977, his daughter Victoria discovered, locked in a bureau drawer, a letter from a man who claimed that Charlie was not born in London, but “in a caravan [that] belonged the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie … on the Black Patch in Smethwick.”)

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Chaplin’s presence in the Labour party stops it from splitting. He is one of the best-loved figures in the world. His art is founded on an intense personal knowledge of poverty. Working-class voters remember him eating his own boot in The Gold Rush and raising a baby in a garret in The Kid. But he is also admired in Conservative circles and curious about Tory politics. (In our 1931, he went on a boar-hunt with the Duke of Westminster, ballyhooed his friend Nancy Astor at a meeting in Plymouth, wore a disguise to hear the Conservative candidate for Woolwich West speak at Plumstead Baths, and even spent time in the company of Churchill’s ghastly son, Randolph.)

In a country administered by a National Government, he is a unifying figure. The Weekly Dispatch joke about two premiers has become a reality. The Chaplin/MacDonald administration rejects the Means Test and a £13 million cut to the dole, and, converted to Keynesianism, welcomes back Oswald Mosley, preventing the birth of British Fascism.

As for the Continental variety, Chaplin has seen its intolerance and brutality for himself. Nazi publications have been denouncing him for years as a “disgusting Jewish acrobat”. When MacDonald dies in 1937, Chaplin, now the Prime Minister of a Labour-dominated National Government, is ready for Hitler. A draft script for the final speech of The Great Dictator, held in the Chaplin archive, offers a whisper of a possible opening gambit: “Let us right the wrongs done to nations. But as a price let us all disarm — totally — till every instrument of death is destroyed.” It’s not an argument that Hitler would ever have accepted. But Chaplin is also close to Churchill, who has already formed an anti-Fascist network with like-minded figures within British intelligence and the British film business. So the Munich Agreement goes unsigned, and after Chaplin has performed the Dance of the Bread Rolls at Number 12, Arcisstrasse, the Second World War is sooner, swifter and shorter.

At which point we wake up — back in the real world, where The Great Dictator was made, despite the Chamberlain’s government’s active discouragement. (Richard Carr’s 2017 biography of Chaplin unearths this story, which includes a government threat to ban the film’s release in Britain.) Thankfully, its star ignored this pressure, and kept the cameras rolling. Churchill saw the film on 14 December 1940. It was screened for him at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he stayed on moonlit nights that made Chequers too visible to the Luftwaffe. He laughed heartily, particularly at a scene in which a totalitarian buffet descends into a food fight. He watched Chaplin’s Jewish barber make his speech against tyranny: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls — has barricaded the world with hate — has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.” Then, after sending a secret cable to Washington, the Prime Minister retired to bed.

Should Ritchie Tozer be worried about his health? No, he says, because the information circulating about this virus is bunk. He calls out a list of rum-sounding aetiologies. Some people think it’s caused by sniffing poppers; others that it arrived from outer space on a comet. It could’ve come from God, or the jungle, or a secret laboratory, or Russia. Captions in the chunky Ceefax font fill the screen with the crowning absurdity: “Homosexuals, haemophiliacs, Haitians.” How, asks Ritchie, can anyone believe in the reality of a disease that only affects groups of people that begin with the letter H? And off he goes, careering around the room, kissing every man he passes.

Ritchie is the protagonist of Russell T Davies’s new Channel Four drama, It’s a Sin, which airs tonight at 9pm. The show assembles a rich and sweet assortment of young and optimistic friends in 1980s London, and then subjects them to the ordeals of the AIDS crisis. Being the work of the screenwriter and producer who regenerated Doctor Who, created Queer as Folk, and cast Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant as Norman Scott and Jeremy Thorpe, it is a thing of passion and mischief and wit. Davies is a writer in the tradition of Victoria Wood and Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street. In 1960, Ena Sharples demanded, “are them fancies fresh?” In 1999, a character in Queer as Folk — played by a Corrie alumnus — reported on the events of the night: “It was as big as a baby’s arm.” Same kind of humour, different object.

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Davies’s work also expresses a coherent political view: critical of the state but supportive of liberal institutions. The characters of his recent dystopian drama Years and Years knew that their lives were becoming less dystopian when the populist Prime Minister was packed off to jail and the BBC restored to public ownership. In his 2009 Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, aliens arrive and insist that humanity hands over 10% of its children. (Young humans, it transpires, are prized for their narcotic properties: the aliens intend to smoke them like joints, and consider it payback for having saved 25 million people from a virulent strain of flu.) Davies takes us into a cabinet meeting in which ministers and special advisers are discussing how to comply with this demand. They order up the OFSTED reports and decide to sacrifice kids from schools with the poorest exam results: “Those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits, occupying places on the dole queue and, frankly, the prisons.”

It’s a Sin has similar points to make. A powerful subplot focuses on a mother who is forced to take her local authority to court to release her sick son from an isolation ward. It’s based on a real case. But as well as obliging us to recall these little-known injustices, the series also gives two other spurs to measure the distance between the present and the past. And they are related.

The first is all the sex. Russell T Davies is good at sex. It’s a subject from which many of his contemporaries seem surprisingly disengaged. In modern free-to-view drama, morgue scenes outnumber bedroom scenes. I haven’t kept a precise tally, but I think that in the last five years I’ve seen fewer orgasms on television than scenes in which characters demonstrate their sadness by lying very still under the bathwater. This was not true of the small-screen culture that formed Russell T Davies and his peers. In the 1970s and 80s, we watched Sheila White’s Messalina hold a marathon orgy in I, Claudius (1976) and Jack Shepherd and Cheri Lunghi pursuing topless conversations about the future of socialism in Bill Brand (1976). We watched Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985), warding off an unwelcome erection with thoughts of Ludovic Kennedy, and, in a less classifiable human act, Bob Peck’s policeman hero in Edge of Darkness (1985) disbursing a grief-stricken kiss to a vibrator he finds among this daughter’s personal effects. Another thing: we watched these scenes with our parents, and survived.

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In Davies’s work, sex is rarely the destination of the story, or a secret that the plot works to expose. It attends the lives of his characters, and accompanies them through the narrative. In Queer as Folk, the hero takes a phone call from the hospital while in bed with a scandalously younger partner: he discovers he’s become a sperm-donor dad just as the teenager reaches his climax. In Years and Years, a breathless and passionate scene occurs in a Portakabin between a housing officer (Russell Tovey) and a Ukrainian refugee (Maxim Baldry), as the other characters are absorbing the news that a nuclear bomb has been detonated in the South China Sea. The two men kiss like there’s no tomorrow, and perhaps there isn’t.

It’s a Sin has another sequence to add to this canon, in which Ritchie (Olly Alexander) has sex with eight men in two minutes as the soundtrack thrums to Hooked on Classics, the gloriously naff Royal Philharmonic disco medley. He experiences something intense and upright with a shock-haired boy in the back room of a pub (to Beethoven’s Ninth); is fellated in his student accommodation (Rossini’s William Tell Overture); fucked against a wall (Marriage of Figaro); has a vigorous threesome by his desk (Fantasy Overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet); throws a long-haired drama student down on the bed (Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16); and whoops with his legs over the shoulders of a barman with blue eye shadow (Bizet’s March of the Toreadors). And though we know that this story is about contagion and illness and death, Davies declines to rob his characters of their pleasure. The premise of his title is always resisted.

Davies has been gathering his energies to dramatise the 1980s AIDS crisis for more than a decade. It’s pure coincidence that filming had just concluded when Covid-19 entered our lives. But this unsought resonance is now one of its strongest attractions. There are scenes in which characters maintain their distance to avoid infection; scenes of anxious deep-cleaning. A memorable moment puts a young character in pale green PPE as he visits a friend on an isolation ward. On set he must have looked like a visiting alien. On broadcast he’ll just look like somebody in Sainsbury’s. He wonders why he needs a mask. “It’s to protect me, not you, idiot,” says his friend, anticipating one of the commonest exchanges of the last ten months.

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And here’s where the series makes its most electric contact with our own moment. It takes pains to track the progress of good, imperfect and downright false intelligence about the AIDS virus through the information networks of the day. The materials may be pre-digital, but the mixture of evolving research, muddled government messaging, ignorant press commentary and outlandish conspiracy theory will be queasily familiar.

Weird though many of them sound, the mess of theories that makes Ritchie deny the seriousness of the AIDS virus are all lifted straight from the historical record. If TV dramas had footnotes — and these days there’s no reason why they couldn’t — then they would have been easy to supply. Ritchie’s list of H-words loomed in the frame of Killer in the Village, a 1983 edition of the BBC2 science series Horizon — which also featured an earnest Manhattan doctor sorting through bottles of amyl nitrate, and calling out their proprietary names: Locker Room, Bolt, Hardware, Thrust. His mention of a secret laboratory memorialises Operation Infektion, a Kremlin disinformation campaign that sought to spread the idea that AIDS was a bioweapon that escaped from a US military research centre.

And that barmy idea about AIDS arriving from space, like a problem from Quatermass? Detailed on the pages of the Daily Telegraph in December 1986 by the astronomer Fred Hoyle and the biologist Chandra Wickramasinghe. “We think it most likely in each instance primary entry was secured through infected rainwater entering lesions in feet in the mainly barefoot populations of the Third World with subsequent transmissions proceeding through human contact.” Today Professor Wickramasinghe is the head of the Centre for Astrobiology at the privately-run Buckingham University. Any future drama about the Covid years will have its choice of similarly cranky characters and ideas.

Should Davies get credit for this historical accident? I think he should. Some writers create stories that are closed and self-contained. Others make work that lets in the audience and their own experiences. He does the latter. It’s a Sin has a quality in common which much of the best art. A glorious promiscuity.

Readers in the 1970s, when Aldiss was writing Billion Year Spree, his history of science fiction, might have thought of Survivors, Terry Nation’s TV series that killed most of the British population with plague — but which, by its second series, was as much a paean to self-sufficiency as The Good Life. Readers in the 2020s may think of other stories: the post-apocalyptic Fox sitcom The Last Man on Earth, or Raised by Wolves — Ridley Scott’s new TV series about an android couple bringing up humanity’s last survivors. There’s even, I think, an echo of Aldiss’s idea in the discussions we’re having — on Zoom calls between friends and at the World Economic Forum — about whether a better world might emerge after the Covid-19 crisis has passed.

The name of Margot Bennett does not appear in Billion Year Spree. It doesn’t appear in many places. She is a scandalously forgotten writer. Even her murder mysteries, for which she received a Golden Dagger Award, have fallen out of print. Only the second-hand section will now yield her blue-spined Pelican, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, or The Furious Masters — a creepy story about an alien spaceship and its influence on an English village. You’ll have to search hard, too, for the book I think is her masterpiece, a novel of 1954 set in a post-catastrophic England that is anything but cosy: The Long Way Back. It is a scaldingly witty corrective to two ills that seem as present today as they did in the 1950s: British self-importance and British self-pity.

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In Bennett’s future, mainland Europe has sunk beneath the waves. The British Isles remain, but the Savoy is gone, there are no cars to be requisitioned and the tins of pineapple chunks and luncheon meat ran out long ago. The plants have turned carnivorous. (Thankfully they can’t move.) Monstrous canine mutants, the sabre-toothed descendants of household pets, stalk the forests. Britons live in caves and on potatoes. They worship a god that is a personification of fear. “We fear,” goes their litany, spoken by a four-foot tall tribesman named Brown. “We fear illness, death, fire, dogs, fever, madness, desolation.”

This is not a story about the conquest of that fear. The Britons we encounter are not the protagonists of the story. We don’t see this country through their eyes. Bennett’s heroes are members of a survey team despatched from the continental superpower of Africa. Grame, a restless technician, and Valya, a tough soldier, have come to “investigate primitive Britain,” an obscure and hazardous backwater whose inhabitants they view with horror, pity and contempt. “Savages,” breathes Valya, when she encounters her first tribal Englishmen. “And speaking in a dialect of our own language. It’s a miracle.”

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The Long Way Back reverses the conventions of imperial literature that we associate with Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Its African explorers speculate about mining British coal and shipping it back home. They worry about the health of the natives. (“If only we could educate the mothers to feed their children properly,” Valya declares, wondering if calcium supplements would help thicken their fragile skulls.)

For Bennett’s original readers — still two years away from the Suez Crisis that triggered Britain’s period of decolonisation – such humour must have seemed astonishing. In the age of Brexit and BLM, it plays differently — demonstrating that, over six decades later, the tensions and contradictions within Britain’s post-imperial identity have yet to be resolved; that the process of decolonisation remains incomplete.

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The real greatness of the Bennett’s novel, though, lies in a quality it shares with the book it most resembles. In Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad takes his narrator, Marlow, from the Thames to the Congo, reminding us that London was once considered “one of the dark places of the earth”. Conrad also questions the imperial paradigm of light and darkness. Not enough for many readers: Chinua Achebe considered it “a totally deplorable book” by “a bloody racist”. His novel does, however, suggest that the colonial impulse is a form of moral malaise, and in Bennett’s technocratic future Africa — a single political entity — this malaise is taking hold.

It’s a warning that all such projects are unsustainable. Not much, perhaps, to console anybody toiling behind barbed wire in Xinjang province, but one that might encourage members of post-imperial societies like ours to look back on the past with more humility.

And here Bennett has a warning for those whose politics are shaped by anxiety about the status of their nation. The British expedition of The Long Way Back is a stunt to restore morale; to make Africa great again. Valya diagnoses the problem: “Soldiers desert from the army… miners don’t want to go down into the earth; mothers hide their children to avoid the grading machine; people walk past the news boards without reading them; and political meetings can’t be held without a conscripted audience.”

Grame is an embodiment of that dissatisfaction and disengagement. He wants to quit his job in IT and study cosmic rays instead, but the reply to his request, issued by an administrative computer, comes as a series of questions: “Have you an adequate tobacco-room? … Have you an adequate sex-cubicle?”

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Frustrated by this treatment, he volunteers for the expedition. A lecture on British history is part of the training — a peculiar, garbled, dream-like account of the nation he is preparing to explore. The Romans ruled Britain. Russia was a colony of the Romans. The Romans were led by Napoleon. In Britain, people kept dogs, played ball games and idolised a figure called Crom Well. The lecture is not given by a single authority, but is picked up like a song, which must be acquired and then passed on to new arrivals. With each repetition, the speech becomes more weird and incoherent. “It ensures the continuity of tradition,” Grame is told.

A similar historical tangle seems to have entered conversations about Britain today. Except these are not happening across a gulf of time and space, they’re in the mouths of ministers and campaigners. They are not as weird as Donald Trump’s historical monologues — in which Frederick Douglass walks the modern world, Canada burned down the White House, and American forces took control of the airports during the War of Independence – but they are a puzzling mess of memories and impulses. Magna Carta. VE Day. Sunlit uplands. Project fear. The Luftwaffe. “The greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200.” Those peculiar exhalations on British national superiority that sometimes emerge from the education secretary. All primary sources for future historians to piece together, in the hope of finding a picture that looks like something. Unless, of course, they’re engaged in other, more urgent projects.

This is the uncosiest thought in The Long Way Back. Margot Bennett’s Britons eat potatoes and fight among themselves. And nobody cares what they think.

Black Britons and poor Britons have suffered the most. This could be a propensity of the Coronavirus, but it might simply be a function of the contemporary United Kingdom, where living in the richest areas of the country buys you almost 19 more years of life than if you lived in the most deprived. If the Victorian researcher Charles Booth were to rise from the grave to draw us some new poverty maps, he’d still need all those different coloured inks.

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One ailment, though, maintains a reputation for discriminating against the wealthy. Gout makes big toes swell painfully and cartoonishly. It causes chalky nodules called tophi — often compared to crustacean eyes — to balloon from knees and knuckles. It hurts. (“Like walking on my eyeballs,” reported the Regency cleric and humourist Sydney Smith.) The condition occurs when excessive amounts of uric acid in the blood cause crystalline needles of salt to gather in the joints and surrounding tissues. Its raw materials are purines — chemical compounds thickly concentrated in seafood, meat and alcohol — which helps to explain why gout gained its status as “the disease of kings.”

“Gout,” concluded Thomas Sydenham, one of the founders of British clinical medicine, “kills more rich men than poor, more wise than simple.”

Three centuries later, that’s no longer the case. The last big British study found that prevalence of gout in the population had increased by over 60% between 1997 and 2012. (Wales and the north-east of England were particularly afflicted.) In US, the “gout therapeutic market” is valued at $1847m, and a report released last month projected it might reach $3820m by 2027.

Thomas Sydenham might have looked at these figures and seen a strange and painful kind of social progress; a pathological levelling-up. In his day, only the wealthy could afford to surfeit on lampreys, pate and port. Perhaps, in 202o, cheap meat, cheap booze, the Iceland prawn ring and the two-metre long Aldi pig-in-a-blanket have made gout a disease to which anyone can aspire.

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The history of gout is as much about culture and class and morals as medicine. It’s a deep and uncomfortable history. Papyri discovered in the 1910s showed that the Egyptians had identified the condition by 2640 BC. In the 5th century BC, the physician Hippocrates referred to it as “the walking disease”. The name by which we know it calls back to the humoral theories of human biology that persisted from Ancient Greece to the early modern period. It comes from the Latin gutta (“drop”), and was first recorded by the 13th century by the French historian Geoffroi de Villehardouin, who asserted that the crusader Hugh IV of Saint-Pol had expired at Constantinople in 1205 because too much fluid — black bile, yellow bile, or phlegm — had spilled down into his legs.

Despite such horrors, gout conferred a kind of blessing. It was rarely fatal, and its presence in the body was thought to keep other, more deadly conditions at bay. “It prevents other illnesses and prolongs life,” argued Horace Walpole, “Could I cure the gout, should not I have a fever, a palsy, or an apoplexy?”

Surprisingly, for a condition that can turn your joints into throbbing satsumas of flesh, it was even considered sexy. Gout talk added a frisson to Benjamin Franklin’s flirty correspondence with Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy, a married harpsichordist he met in Paris in 1777. Franklin teased Brillon that had they consummated their relationship, his feet might be less painful in the night. (“If the ladies at Passy had more of that Christian charity which I have so often recommended to you, in vain, I would not have the gout now.”) She responded with a poem proposing the opposite: a man with “a pretty Mistress” — or two, or three, of four — was more likely to suffer. Franklin’s reply was to stay up late writing a short two-handed comedy in which the personification of his condition, Madame Gout, visits him in his chamber, rather as Fortune visits Boethius in Consolations of Philosophy.

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Novelists and politicians no longer feel the compulsion to turn their uric tortures into light literature. Despite the rise in cases, the discourse of gout has all but disappeared. And yet, the moral ideas that have circulated it since ancient times — its association with excess and indulgence — are still legible. They’re there, for instance, in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2018 film The Favourite, in which the agonies suffered by Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne are attributable to her predilection for self-pity and stuffing herself with massive slices of cake. We see her engorged legs swaddled and smeared in therapeutic unguents. (We’re not told what these are, but one traditional remedy is advised: “Roast a fat old goose and stuff with chopped kittens, lard, incense, wax and flour of rye. This must all be eaten, and the dripping applied to the painful joints.”)

The outgoing Republican administration, though, should be given some credit for reviving gout as a moral metaphor — via the story of Paul Manafort, the disgraced chair of Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Manafort was convicted in August 2018 for lying his way to securing bank loans and evading taxes on the $16 million he earned as a lobbyist for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. His trial produced evidence of a fraud-funded life of eye-watering excess. His $15,000 ostrich-leather bomber jacket became a court exhibit. “The gluttony,” reflected the fashion critic of the Washington Post. “The indulgence. The preening bad taste.”

When he appeared for sentencing in October, he rolled into court in a wheelchair. His body was clad in a green prison jumpsuit labelled “ALEXANDRIA INMATE”, but his right foot was wrapped in bandages. His attorneys used his gout diagnosis as part of a plea for mercy. The judge, passing sentence the following March, was unmoved. “It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved,” said US district judge Amy Berman Jackson. Manafort’s lies to Congress and to the American people, she observed, were perpetrated “not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish – more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear”.

Manafort sat in his wheelchair and listened in silence to the judgement. He wore a sober suit. His right foot remained bandaged. Its swollen condition became part of the story. Gout as an indicator of corruption? Gout as karma, perhaps?

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Too easy. Too satisfying. Champagne and foie gras can exacerbate an attack of gout, but if Manafort is a typical case, his condition is probably genetic. People who live on nut loaf and tap water are not immune and know its nocturnal agonies. The rise in gout’s prevalence in the UK and the US can’t be mapped onto any growth in the sale of purine-rich luxuries. Something more complex is happening.

Obesity is rising. The population is ageing. There are more people alive today in gout’s high-risk groups than there were in the days of Sydenham and Walpole. Let the law punish Paul Manafort, not the cultural backstory of the uric crystals giving his foot the Little Mermaid treatment. And let it bring justice for those others, too, who are enduring illness associated not with privilege, but its opposite.

Thanks to the publication of a new, tightly-argued and rigorously theoretical study from the University of Chicago Press, I now have a word to describe the contents of the kitchen drawer. “Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, “is not a particular object but an existential state of being.”

Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America describes how we have learned to endure, accommodate and sometimes cherish the shortfall between our desires for slackly manufactured objects and the limited satisfactions they provide. “An object’s relative crappiness,” Woloson argues, “lies in the extent to which it offers false hope, was produced to hasten its own obsolescence, has no clear purpose, and/or has no emotional, utilitarian, or market value.” Her prose forms a Generation Game conveyor belt of tat: boob-shaped mugs, Hair-in-a-Can, chipboard bookcases, ceramic tributes to Princess Diana in gold vermeil and dishwasher-proof porcelain.

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The success of such products can sometimes be a mystery to its manufacturers. I once interviewed the exploitation film-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis, a mild-manned mountebank best known for Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), a stalk’n’slash version of Brigadoon. In the early 1970s he left the movie business to make a proper fortune selling collectible souvenir crockery. “They are my natural bastard children,” he told me. “First we did a 12-plate series based on the Book of Genesis. It was so successful that in six months we were on to Exodus.”

The power of the object is outré and mysterious. During lockdown, it compelled me to blow the cost of a good night out (remember those?) on a successful auction bid for a box of Peter Wyngarde’s cufflinks. It has driven me to preserve a Doctor Who chew bar from 1982, which has now entered a state of deliquescence that could only be remedied by Lenin’s embalmers. It is the reason why I can spend a good hour hunkered over a penny falls machine, rolling dirty tuppences in the hope of dislodging a gonk.

Such acquisitions would make Marie Kondo jump on a chair and scream, but I think Karl Marx would have understood the impulse. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” he wrote, in the first volume of Capital. “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

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It may be getting queerer. Marx’s commodity fetishism — the idea that manufactured objects carry an occult charge — thrives online. Wish.com, founded by the Warsaw-born billionaire Peter Szulczewski, is its temple of doom. Here, users can scroll through images of three billion reasonably priced but mysteriously unknowable objects, many of which seem to be the product of some as-yet-undeclared school of avant-garde art. A five-foot long bolster in the shape of a pig’s trotter. A sunflower-seed dispenser with a slot for your mobile phone. Pastry cutters that would allow the gingerbread man Kama Sutra to be your Bake-Off showstopper. Plastic earthworms that smell of fish. Penis shaped wineglasses. Penis-shaped anything. All for a few dollars each, plus postage and packing.

Who buys this stuff? Who makes it? Having no need for a bumless mankini or an $8 angle grinder, I’ve never used Wish. But I did once order some T-shirts from a pop-up ad on Facebook. They looked great on the catwalk model in the picture, but when they arrived, three months later, they turned out to be made of a vinyl material that smelled like a tent from the Early Learning Centre. They are, of course, under my bed in the original wrapping. Posting them back to China and trying to extract a refund would only extend and complicate the misery of the original transaction. It may be that such objects only exist because their sellers have made a calculation about the appetites and apathy of their buyers. Perhaps, in a re-education camp in Xinjiang province, Uighur inmates are breaking their fingernails stitching these garments, which will never be worn, but are mailed west and then despatched to landfill as part of a mechanism for converting clicks into cash.

Its sound like capitalism’s final and most grotesque mutational form, but it has a precedent. Woloson traces it back to the burgeoning consumer culture of the 18th century, but she also finds commerce of this kind where I first encountered it — the back pages of 1970s American superhero comics. The strip stories at the front offered colourful adventures involving radioactive spiders and invisible planes. But the weirdest weirdness happened in the small ads at the back, where boy voyeurs used X-Ray Spex to undress the lady next door, and Sea-Monkeys — pinkish, smiling creatures with crown-like antennae and fan-shaped tails — sported in front of their underwater castle home.

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Those who actually sent their money discovered that X-Ray Spex contained feathers that made the viewer see blurry black lines that few would mistake for the real internal structure of the lady next door. Sea-Monkeys were brine shrimp mailed out in their dormant stage, from which, if you were lucky, they would revive, and go skittering about in a little tank. The man who patented both these products was Harold Braunhut, a former stunt motorcyclist whose other lines included the invisible goldfish — which was an empty glass bowl marked “invisible goldfish” — and a telescopic whip that he direct-marketed to the white supremacists of the Aryan Nation. There’s crap, and then there’s racist crap.

Is it possible to wash it all away? To live a life unencumbered by trashy, dubious and flimsy objects? In 2001, the artist Michael Landy performed a heroic and punishing experiment upon himself. The cataloguing and destruction of all 7,227 of his possessions. He shredded his passport and birth certificate. He broke down his clothes, an artwork by his friend Tracy Emin, and assorted kitchen drawer flotsam — batteries, copper coins, key-rings, plastic cutlery, felt-tip pens. A few years later, his appetite for divesting himself of objects not quite sated, he kindly gave me a copy of the inventory — a bound volume with the heft of a mid-century experimental novel. Along with most of my books and papers, its in the lock-up where I keep all the things I don’t have room for in our flat. There it sits, in storage, waiting to be part of a comfortable, book-lined life that, like most unpensioned participants in the gig economy, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be wealthy enough to have.

“Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, is “deeply revealing, laying bare in ways that nicer things cannot some of our deepest desires, drives, and anxieties: our crap, our selves.”

My access to the kitchen drawer remains unimpeded.

Guys, it’s a big ask, I know. Some people who teach 20th-century literature for a living have never dared tackle The Man Without Qualities. It’s huge. Well over 1,000 pages long. You can’t vanquish it in a couple of afternoons by the pool. You might even have to put it on the nanny’s luggage allowance.

But don’t let that put you off. Even its author didn’t finish it. In April 1942, Robert Musil suffered a cerebral haemorrhage after his morning gymnastics. He was 62 and had been working on the novel for around two decades. His wife, who found him dead in the bathroom, reported that his corpse bore an expression of “mockery and mild astonishment”.

What happens in The Man Without Qualities? Nothing much. Characters have long and seductive conversations about the soul, bisexuality, the blossom in the garden. There are weather reports. A bit of incest looms in the last few hundred pages, but Musil’s final workout prevented its consummation. It lacks a few other things, too. It doesn’t take place across a great span of time and space — Musil gives you a year in Vienna, starting in the summer of 1913. There’s no big cast of characters of the sort you find in Proust or Dickens. Ulrich, the title character, isn’t a tragic hero, but a privileged and directionless dilettante with a background in mathematics, a married mistress and a slightly misguided philanthropic interest in a sex murderer called Moosbrugger.

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But it’s Ulrich’s job that will repay the attention of anyone in power. He is honorary secretary of the Parallel Campaign, a grand project established to celebrate the 70-year jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. It is complex, demanding, a salient matter of state, and completely futile.

Ulrich and his fellow appointees have their work cut out for them. They must decide questions such as “What is true patriotism, true progress, the true Austria?” They must plan a series of spectacular events that will form “a glorious demonstration of vitality”, a “mighty stride forward into the outside world, which would at the same time have a salutary influence on conditions at home”. Most of the committee are content to congratulate themselves simply for saying such things aloud. Ulrich is more insightful. He knows the process will produce nothing. But he doesn’t know what we know: even if these nationalist assertions meant anything, or were possible to realise, the state being celebrated will shortly be dissolved by violent forces beyond its control.

If you’d read this book five years ago, you might have found it comforting. It’s a portrait of a vast, overcomplicated and doomed European entity, fond of long discursive meetings. Plenty to engage a Brexiteer of the sanguine or faint-hearted variety. But this is a modernist masterpiece. If it makes you feel good about yourself, then you’re not reading it properly.

So what are you supposed to draw from it? Don’t take the title as an insult to the PM — Polly Toynbee may have described Boris Johnson as “a man without qualities, devoid of public spirit or regard for anyone but himself … a man to shame the country as its figurehead.” But this is unMusilian: to be without qualities is not a state of moral and intellectual poverty. That’s too easy. Musil is a funny writer, but he’s not an easy one. His protagonist is no self-serving charlatan. Ulrich is possessed of great philosophical and spiritual capital. He knows about history, meteorology, criminology, Buddhism, Leibniz. This wealth, however, remains inconvertible: Ulrich’s command of detail, his passion for ideas, his sensitivity to subtlety and scruple, have brought him to an impasse with himself. And yet, Musil does not ask us to condemn his position, nor even to regard it as an error of judgement.

Told you it was difficult.

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That difficulty, though, is why I’d urge the book upon you. The Man Without Qualities is a novel about negotiating a relationship with your historical moment. Ulrich’s moment is one of the classics. Pre-war imperial Vienna, where everyone seems fit for some couch-time at Berggasse 19, and not for the mud and the bullets to come. And yours? Well, 2020 might also turn out to be one of those years. Your country is estranged from her neighbours, uneasy with a US president as capricious as a syphilitic Hapsburg, and authorities unaddicted to two-thumbed boosterism have judged its official response to the coronavirus pandemic to be world-beatingly poor.

Here, though, is a kind of consolation. Musil shows us that the world is too complex to be completely understood or mastered, and that it is foolish to pretend otherwise. If a phrase such as  “take back control”, “super-forecasting” or “oven-ready” was inserted into The Man Without Qualities, you could imagine it shrivelling to death on the page. It’s a book that encourages you to express self-doubt and to have some cognisance of your limits. Because even if you can’t see them, others will. This is why Ulrich, despite his paralysis, is hard to despise. He can’t see the catastrophes to come, but when they do arrive to shake his little knot of nations to pieces, they will not find him in a dreamworld built of empty phrases.

So start it. Get halfway through the first volume, maybe. Skip a few pages, leave it behind in the holiday home, possibly not by accident. That’s completely fine. Failure is an option here. It might be the only option.

It’s not true anymore. Since the beginning of this century, three million visitors have submerged themselves at The Deep, Terry Farrell’s dockside aquarium. 19,000 immigrants have settled in the city, 4,800 from Poland. In 2017, Hull’s status as UK Capital of Culture attracted 5.3 million people to gallery exhibitions, music events and multimedia shows.

Larkin has become one of the attractions. The poet’s sculpted likeness stands in the city, a solid materialisation of Hull’s cultural capital. He welcomes tourists by the barriers at Paragon Station, through which he once passed to take the London train to attend librarians’ conferences and forage on Old Compton Street for Danish porn. Perhaps your mum and dad have seen him. (At the station, I mean, not in Soho.)

This is not an article about how great Hull is. People from Hull don’t write those. Hull, like Liverpool, has its back to England, and thinks of itself as a separate city-state. But we don’t possess that implacable Liverpudlian self-confidence. We do self-doubt and self-pity and shame as well as pride — and we don’t do pride in an uncomplicated way because we’re awkward and bloody-minded when it comes to ourselves as well as others.

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Hull doesn’t like being told what to do. In the English Civil War, it refused entry to the king. In the EU referendum, 67.6% voted in favour of Brexit, despite the imminent arrival of a German-owned wind turbine factory — its best economic hope for years. (It remains so.) Hull celebrates its association with abolitionism: a massive statue of William Wilberforce soars above the grey-and-turquoise FE College. Generations of Hull schoolchildren have been sent to the Wilberforce Museum and gazed upon the shackles and manacles of slavery.

When Oswald Mosley visited the city in July 1936, crowds turned up to boo him and some local children cut the wires of his PA system. And yet, in 2009, Hull sent a British National Party candidate to the European Parliament. (Unfortunately, the tweedy neo-Fascist Andrew Brons did not stand for a second term, robbing his constituents of the opportunity to atone for having elected him in the first place.)

Do you want the tour? We could continue the far-Right theme and visit the Ferens Art Gallery to meet Percy Wyndham Lewis – Vorticism’s chief explosives officer, Hitler fanboy and amateur airman. He’s easy to spot — in Mr Wyndham Lewis as ‘Tyro’ (1920) he depicted himself as a reptile-green bandit baring his incisors from an ochreous void. To stand before him is to feel the burning contempt of a Modernist Ubermensch — except Hull has caught him and fixed him, like a prehistoric insect caught in amber.

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Less care, unfortunately, has been taken with the friendly face of Modernist Hull — Alan Boyson’s Three Ships, which adorns the side of the British Home Stores building on Jameson Street. It is a landmark of the city and the largest mosaic in the country. Earlier this year, the Council was narrowly prevented from demolishing it — but only for the moment. If they decide it is “unsafe” they might yet pull it down. Hull’s perverse streak showing again.

Hull’s separateness brought Larkin to the Humber and nourished his work. He wasn’t the only one. Hull welcomes artistic migrants. The poet Douglas Dunn was nurtured by the city — it gave him the subject of Terry Street (1969). Basil Kirchin, an audio experimentalist who made soundscapes with birdsong, insect chirrups, the cries of zoo animals and the screams of children, took refuge on the Hessle Road. If you’ve heard his album Worlds Within Worlds (1971), you can indulge your dreams about what he was trying to escape.

Hull is still playing this role. Poets and artists thrive here. It might be because the Humber Estuary is the English landscape’s best shot at true abstraction — three miles of water and an immensity of sky: Larkin’s “unfenced existence”. On the other hand, rents are low, studio space is plentiful, and there’s good coffee on Humber Street.

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Some indicators of Hull’s separateness have vanished. The fishing industry, and the lonely, dangerous lives of its seagoing workers. The Ladas that rolled off Russian boats, then rolled over Hull’s wide, uninclined roads. The chunky dial behind the living room curtain that changed channels on the Rediffusion TV — a stormproof radio and television service that arrived through cables under the pavement. (The famous cream-coloured phone boxes are the last memorials of Hull’s status as the Galapagos of British telecommunications.)

Gwenap, which, until it closed in 2009, was thought to be Britain’s oldest sex shop. (At one stage the sign over the door read: “Blow Up Dolls Suit Reformed Terrorists: Make Love Not War.”) The Radburn-style towers of Orchard Park, where travelling people pastured their horses on the traffic islands, and my grandfather surveyed the East Riding from the fourteenth floor of a twenty-storey highrise. (When one tower, Milldane, came down in August 2013, a photograph appeared to show a ghostly figure standing on one of the balconies.)

Walk down Whitefriargate, past the Land of Green Ginger, and you’ll encounter the true spirit of Hull’s oddness. It’s located just inside the Hepworth Arcade, a light-flooded Victorian shopping mall. The window display has barely changed in 50 years. Thick coils of plastic dog turd. Rubber custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Fake bluebottles entombed in Perspex ice cubes. Soap that makes you dirty. Sweets that burn your mouth. Sweets that make you fart. Sun-bleached envelopes bearing line drawings of people from the olden days with nails through their fingers and their eyes rolling in their heads like roulette balls.

Dinsdales joke shop has been in the same family for four generations. Behind the glass-topped counter, there’s always a member of the clan who will supply the history lecture or delve into a musty cardboard box to pull out a tiny tin of 1930s itching powder. (“Worse that a cartload of fleas,” claims the slogan on the lid.)

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The shop is small. You can’t ignore your fellow customers — or what might be going on inside their heads. On a recent visit I got talking to a cheerful woman in her sixties who was there to buy exploding cigarettes. These, she explained, would be handed out to anyone who tried to cadge a fag from her on the street. (“That’ll teach ‘em,” she said.) Her haul also contained a couple of dozen little plastic bags, the sort you use to take cash to the bank. Inside each was a crumpled fake tenner. She slipped one into my pocket, but the rest were destined for scattering on the pavements of Hull, where they would act as little punishments for anyone whose spirit might briefly be lifted by the idea of getting something for nothing. The joke shop manager, showing a fine understanding of the psychology of her clients, pulled out a stack of fake winning Irish lottery scratch cards. She had, she said, placed one of these just out of reach of her mother-in-law, with hilarious consequences.

If Hull was on the couch, what would it say? That we had a great industry and we mourn it. We mourn, particularly, the legions of the drowned, upon whom our prosperity depended. But we also breathe a quiet sigh of relief that we are no longer that city whose male population disappeared for weeks on end, came back, drank their wages, beat up their wives and disappeared again. And we’re thankful that nobody is suggesting a post-Brexit return to the stinking feculence of the whaling business.

We’d talk about Hull’s image, too. Hull was the crappest town in the Book of Crap Towns (2003) — whose authors declared that the place “smelt of death” and would, come Judgement Day, be “leased out indefinitely to Satan to provide housing for the Damned”. Jasper Carrott used to joke that restaurants in Hull closed for lunch. When The Economist wrote about Hull, it saw “Britain’s rust belt” where “teenagers in baseball caps and tracksuits wander aimlessly”. (A sight never witnessed, of course, in the prosperous South.)

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And we’d talk about Larkin, and his poem This Be the Verse, and its image of misery deepening from generation to generation. The first line is the one everyone quotes: “They fuck you up…” Perhaps, in Hull, we’ve always been a little fucked up. In recent years, the rest of the country seems to have joined us. And I have to say: being fucked up is fine. It’s survivable, anyway. Being fucked, not so much. That’s more serious. The distinction is important. And it would be foolish to pretend, with Covid-19 the subject of our present chapter and a no-deal Brexit the possible matter of the next, that it wasn’t being asked.

Is Britain fucked? Go to Hull. Wander its streets, and you might find out. See its wide impossible sky and the great grey stripe of its river. Gaze upon the pale blues and greens of the Boyson mosaic, the shining contours of Dinsdale’s plastic dog turds, and you may discover the answer. Don’t tell us though. We won’t listen.

Reeves was an energetic and successful socialist campaigner. In New Zealand, she’d helped secure votes for women. In London, where she moved in 1896, she founded the Fabian Women’s Group in her front room in Brunswick Gardens and, appalled by the disparities in child mortality rates across the city, decided to investigate. She and her fellow Fabian Dr Ethel Bentham recruited a cohort of 42 mothers and encouraged them to keep records of their domestic expenditure, with a particular emphasis on diet. Some were not literate, but their children were. Their spelling was often touchingly hard to decipher. Reeves scratched her head at references to items such as “dryaddick”, “sewuitt” and “currince”.[1. Dried haddock, suet and currants, in case you were wondering.]

Reeves and her Fabian comrades wanted to answer questions that attended the discussion of poverty in the Edwardian age, and are still asked today. Why did the working poor spend so much on the wrong things? (Lavish funerals, it seems, were the Sky boxes of 1909.) Why did they eat unhealthy food? Why, for instance, did they have bread and margarine for breakfast when a nice bowl of porridge was cheaper and more nutritious? “The women of Lambeth listened patiently,” wrote Reeves, “according to their way, agreed to all that was said, and did not begin to feed their families on porridge.”

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Over a century later, the preaching goes on. At the end of last month, the staff at my local food bank used Twitter to issue a statement about confectionery:

Some followers have raised concern about us putting certain items on our shopping lists (eg crisps & chocolate). Let me clarify – whilst we agree that they are of little nutritional value, we also believe in blessing our clients with a treat from time to time. (1 of 2)

— Lewisham Foodbank (@lewishamfood) June 25, 2020

The announcement provoked an indignant report in the Lewisham News Shopper and a convulsion of disgust on Twitter — which was quickly converted into pledges of Milkybars and Curly Wurlys.

Human emotions are historically contingent. Nobody today is plagued by acedia, the form of religious despair felt by fourth-century Christian desert hermits between 11am and 4pm. Others are culturally specific. Only the Ilongot group of the Philippines feel liget, an angry enthusiasm that pushes them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. So what’s the nature of the concern felt by those donors who complained about the presence of chocolate in the parcels sent out by the Lewisham food bank?

It’s a powerful emotion, clearly. Powerful enough to move several people to share it with a group of volunteers distributing domestic food aid during a pandemic. (The food bank informed me that objections had been received in private messages, some sent via a local councillor.) But how could we describe its qualities?

Is it a relation, perhaps, of the feeling described by Edwina Currie when she spoke in 2014 of being “very, very troubled at the number of people who are using food banks who … never learn to cook, they never learn to manage and the moment they’ve got a bit of spare cash they’re off getting another tattoo”? Or perhaps it’s closer to the melancholia expressed by Vicky Ford, the children’s minister, who last week declared herself “Saddened to hear of incidents of some parents using free school meals vouchers for alcohol & non food products despite clear restrictions.” Her sadness was so profound that it seems to have rendered her incapable of confirming whether these were anything more than rumours she heard down the newly-reopened pub.

The minister should probably cheer up. The meal voucher scheme is for food. It would be as easy to buy a bottle of gin with a book token. However, as it is funded and administered by the taxpayer, she is entitled to ask questions about it, no matter how tangential.

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The food bank system is different. It takes no money from the state. It is a voluntary enterprise that depends on donations from local people. Donors are not obliged to supply foodstuffs to which they may have a moral or a medical objection. Most people, I suspect, would judge that a food bank package contains little that would imperil anyone’s commitment to a life of monotonous frugality. But if anyone does believe that tinned tomatoes are a gateway to sybaritism, they can simply decline to supply them.

Food bank packages are not like those that middle-class people give each other when they are enduring misery and distress, with their M&S ready meals, bars of Green and Black’s and nice bottle of Beaujolais. (Though I find it hard to formulate any strong objection to a food bank distributing these items, were any donors generous enough to supply them.) And yet the complaints come — and are so strong and numerous that the Trussell Trust issues instructions to its volunteers on how to reply. Hopefully they can use this advice to assuage the pain that threshes the hearts of those who think the poor are not doing poverty correctly.

George Orwell puzzled over these impulses in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his classic account of working-class life in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire. He was reflecting on the sorry history of the Means Test, a much-hated government policy that sent inspectors into the homes of British people to inspect their food cupboards and make suggestions about what valuables they should sell before being confirmed poor enough to receive unemployment relief.

When the test was introduced in 1931, the letters pages of the British press buzzed with debate about how to set the value of this benefit — or, as Orwell put it, “a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive.” One correspondent to the New Statesman sent in his idea of a weekly budget for a single unemployed man — four shillings a week, to be spent on bread, margarine, dripping, cheese, carrots, onions, broken biscuits, dried fruit, oranges and a tin of evaporated milk. (Fuel was not included, as this was all to be consumed raw.)

Orwell suspected that the letter was a hoax. He reasoned, however, that even if its recommendations made nutritional sense, few would follow them. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t,” he argued. “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull and wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’”.

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The point of chocolate is its smooth consoling sweetness; the way it snaps and crumbles and melts against the roof of your mouth. Why deny that pleasure to food bank clients? You might argue that chocolate is bad for you and people should not eat it. You might argue that the receipt of charity should be conditional on the renunciation of pleasure, and that chocolate mars the purity of the contract between the donor and the recipient. But you might also just mind your own damn business.

George Orwell didn’t much like the Fabians. The Road to Wigan Pier reserves some of its most venomous comments for them. Orwell dismissed the society’s leading light, Beatrice Webb, as a “high-minded socialist slum visitor” who, like others of her type, understood revolution as “a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders”.

But he would have had no grounds on which to lecture Maud Pember Reeves. The book in which she published her research, Round About a Pound a Week (1913), is the story of how its author renounced the gospel of porridge. She did so because she listened to the women whose experiences she recorded. They told her that porridge required long cooking and that gas was expensive; that porridge burned easily, and demanded attention when they were busy getting their children up and dressed; that it picked up the flavour of last night’s dinner from the household’s only pan. Moreover, without milk or sugar, children simply didn’t like porridge. (“They ’eaved at it,” one mother reported.)

As for the surprisingly lavish funerals, Reeves also got to the bottom of that mystery. Most working-class parents, she discovered, bought funeral insurance at a penny a week for every child as it was born. She inquired among the undertakers of London and discovered that it cost 18 shillings to bury a baby and 20 shillings for an older child. Cemetery charges could push the final figure to 30s. A family obliged to cover that expense in one week would be forced to ration its food to almost nothing — which risked the possibility of more sickness and death.

Reeves had never experienced poverty, but she was acquainted with grief. Her son, William, had died in infancy in New Zealand. (Another, Fabian, was killed on duty with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917.) She knew there were some calculations that only the poor understood.

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The legacy of Fabianism is ambivalent. It was a formative influence on the welfare state. It also had an authoritarian streak. Some of its adherents wanted to sterilise the poor. That’s not an argument you hear much these days — though in 2012, Ben Bradley, MP for Mansfield, wrote a blog post suggesting that unemployed men should have vasectomies in order to prevent Britain “drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters”. Mr Bradley is another figure worried by the summer holiday extension to the school meal voucher system. “I have,” he told Parliament on 16 June, “one concern …” Thankfully, the education secretary was able to clear it up pretty briskly. No, you cannot use lunch tokens to buy fags, booze or scratchcards.

This week it emerged that in the first six months of 2020, 2,500 children were hospitalised with symptoms of malnutrition — double the rate for the same period last year. The figure was calculated from data extracted from NHS trusts by a Freedom of Information request. As only two thirds of those trusts responded, the total is probably much higher.

I hope some Parliamentary questions will be asked about this grim statistic. It seems kind of urgent. Did these children end up in hospital because they ate too much chocolate? Or is there, perhaps, some other explanation? We should know the truth, however sad it makes us, however bitter the taste.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the headlines told us that an episode of Fawlty Towers was being removed from circulation for its use of racist language. It was. But briefly and from only one platform, UKTV, during which time it remained freely available from Britbox, Netflix and iTunes. After a few days, it returned to UKTV, uncut and affixed with a brief warning about the script’s use of racial slurs that would be unquotable on this page. Predictably, the noise around the story prevented the discussion of the much more urgent and subtle question upon which it turned — how should broadcasters manage the consequences of our new and perhaps perverse expectation that the popular culture of five decades ago should be instantly and eternally accessible?

In the 1920s, movies that were more than six years old were customarily dumped in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, melted down with other plastic trash — gap-toothed combs, discarded Xylonite dentures — and recycled as waterproof paint. Now we confer immortality on every moving image, and expect it to be preserved, archived and streaming on our phones. Our grandparents were never made uneasy by the culture of the past: they’d already forgotten it. We, however, have abolished cultural amnesia. Puzzling out that paradox, however, takes more journalistic effort than cutting and pasting one of John Cleese’s angry tweets.

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This week, though, British comedy provided the field for a much more interesting and enjoyable battle — one that might even suggest a way of resolving these skirmishes. On Monday, Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary with the Rank Charm School manners, provided a deus ex machina ending for a drama that had been rumbling since the moment, a fortnight previously, when a widely-anticipated rescue package for the arts sector failed to appear. The empty space was filled with energetic campaigning by playwrights, directors and actors, worried by the not-unreasonable suspicion that Boris Johnson was about to do to the theatres what Margaret Thatcher did to the mines.

But on Monday morning, Dowden waved his magic wand and promised the imminent arrival of £1.57 billion — some of it in actual money. Then the examination of the detail began. In his round of media interviews, Dowden was asked if the Christmas pantomime season might yet be saved. His answer was a rueful one. It looked difficult, thanks to the epidemiological challenge posed by a noisy inter-generational entertainment involving shouting, singing, and the violent agitation of soap bubbles and wallpaper paste.

It was a realistic answer and it made me sad. It also made the European arts correspondent of the New York Times sad. But not for the same reason. Matt Anderson was disgusted. He tweeted his disgust in block capitals, which made him seem even angrier than John Cleese. And when others pointed out to him that the financial stability of many British theatres was guaranteed by a successful pantomime season, he went the full Abanazar. “If that’s the most important art form for the health of the sector,” he declared, “there’s something wrong with the system.” He might as well have said it under a green light and then flounced off with a peal of diabolical laughter. Theatrical Twitter raised its handbag to its chest and told him that his snobbery was showing.

I may have hissed a little myself. Pantomime produces no disgust in me. It gives me a delicious form of historical vertigo. When I watch a pair of comics perform the wallpaper routine, or the plate-smashing sketch, or some business in a dark forest with a luminous ghost, I know I am in touch with the deep history of British culture; that I’m watching choreography and gags that were first worked out over a century ago. It also makes me part of an audience that is being sounded out on the length of its cultural memory. At the Manchester Opera House in 1992 I saw the celebrated dame Gordon Peters manoeuvre 2,000 people into hooting out the second line of You Made Me Love You — a song from 1913. (“I didn’t want to do it!” they chorused, as if Pavlov had conditioned them.) I’ve also seen those echoes fail: at the Catford Broadway in 2008, I was the only person in the stalls who knew that “Hi-de-Hi” should always be followed by “Ho-de-ho!”

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Pantomime emerged from the Harlequinade, an Anglicised 18th-century version of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Thanks to the 1737 Licensing Act, which permitted only the two Royal Theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to feature plays with dialogue, the Harlequinade concentrated on song and wordless slapstick — executed most effectively by its Clown character, a figure of misrule who sat on babies, prodded people with red hot pokers, and sometimes abseiled up the set on a rope of sausages.

In 1843, the Theatre Regulation Act changed the rules on stage dialogue, triggering the mutation of the form. The silent clowns of the Harlequinade remained silent, but their show underwent a fusion with another popular theatrical genre — the “extravaganza”, in which myths and fairy tales were used as a frame for satirical, pun-filled comedy. Even if the story was set in Ancient Greece or medieval England, a steam train or an omnibus might move anachronistically over the stage — which explains why Widow Twankey’s laundry in Old Peking is always equipped with coin-operated washing machines. The airlock between these two styles was provided by an event that also remains a feature of modern pantomime — the transformation scene, in which, for instance, the pumpkin becomes a coach, or a magic lamp is spotted in a cave full of jewels.

These developments have produced a theatrical form of impressive sophistication and complexity. Pantomime smashes the fourth wall, bends time, space and gender, combines acrobatics, physical comedy and satire on local and national subjects. In 1993, the film director Lindsay Anderson went to the Bath Theatre Royal to see his old friend Robin Askwith, who had played one of those Maoist schoolboy revolutionaries in If…. (1968). The show was Dick Whittington. Askwith’s co-stars were June Brown from EastEnders, Ian Botham and a pair of magicians called Richard and Lara Jarmain. Anderson’s verdict: “Very Brechtian.”

And if you scoff at the idea of the British intellectual in the panto audience, this too is part of the tradition. In 1874, John Ruskin went five times to see Cinderella at Hengler’s Circus, and then to Drury Lane to catch Jack in a Box; or Harlequin Little Tom Tucker and the Three Men of Gotham who went to Sea in a Bowl. In this production, a princess disguised as Bo Peep led a flock of mechanical sheep across the stage and then caused a forest of magic mushrooms to rise up:

You see at present everywhere among us,
A mushroom, popularly called a fungus.
I do but strike my crutch and with this plunge, I
Reveal the funny figures of the Fungi.

Ruskin went straight from the theatre to write an essay contrasting the child actors who skipped through the fairyland of the Drury Lane stage and their hungry equivalents on the streets of Covent Garden. He imagined England itself subject to a transformation scene, in which its street children occupied their own Drury Lane pastoral, instead of “rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles”.

The man from New York Times endured this week’s boos and hisses with grace. I hope, however, he paid no heed to the little knot of culture warriors who imagined that a political motive explained his lack of enthusiasm for watching veteran comics and X-Factor runners-up throw custard pies at each other. “People like him don’t want to be deeply connected to our history,” one insisted. “They prefer to rewrite it.”

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It’s an odd charge. Rewriting history is what historians do for a living. It’s also why pantomime is still here, using 16th-century Italian performance style and stories from the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights to produce topical entertainment that has always enjoyed the freedom to jettison any elements that fall from favour. (Blackface and yellowface vanished along with gags about Mafeking and ration books; the dame and the ghosts remain.) Its history usually defies those who accuse it of abandoning its traditions. Critics who complained that Julian Clary was too rude for Snow White at the Palladium probably didn’t know about all the cock puns in the Drury Lane panto seen by Ruskin in 1873. Those who grumbled about Frank Bruno’s presence at the top of 1990s panto bills had, I suspect, never heard of Daniel Mendoza, the celebrity bare-knuckle boxer who appeared in Aladdin at Covent Garden in 1778.

But why would they? Unlike sit-coms set in the aspic of UKTV, pantomime is mutable, agile, and always renegotiating its relationship with the present day. At the 2019 panto at the Palladium, Nigel Havers got the biggest laugh of the night by climbing out of a bear suit and declaring: “If Prince Andrew is in tonight … THIS is sweat.” At the 2016 Sleeping Beauty at the Hackney Empire, Gavin Spokes’s Dame Nanny Nora trolled on stage in a frock divided between the EU flag and the Union Jack and declared: “I like a bit of both.” In the 2018 Aladdin at the Catford Broadway, as Theresa May suffered another Brexit deal defeat in Parliament, Wayne Rollins’ Abanazar declared: “I will rub this magic lamp and plunge the country into chaos!” Then he paused. “On second thoughts…”

Everyone got it. And the audience, in that moment, seemed a lot less divided than the country.

No? OK. I guess you must be one of those George Eliot types who stays up until 2am devouring German critical theory, and has never dreamt of liking a squirrel video or eating a whole packet of custard creams. But here are the headlines, just in case you’re drifting.

The smartphone is rewiring our brains.

It is shrinking our attention spans.

It has reduced our cognitive competence to goldfish level.

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If you’ve been staying alert, you’ll have heard all this before. And if you haven’t, then you can see it insisted upon in an acclaimed documentary streaming now on a device near you. Screened Out is the work of the Canadian director, Jon Hyatt, and it is full of troubling statistics. The most troubling arrives in its fourth minute. “A study done by Microsoft revealed that the average attention span dropped from twelve seconds to eight since the mobile revolution began,” says the anxious voiceover, “which makes our attention span a second below a goldfish, which is only nine.”

Helpfully, at this point, Screened Out shows us all the relevant numbers and the image of a gormless-looking fish. Not that we need them. As the Guardian’s reviewer pointed out, “Jon Hyatt runs the risk of stating the bleeding obvious by elaborating on facts everyone is already aware of.”

Here’s something that I suppose must be less obvious. Some of these facts are not facts. Many of those that are don’t amount to much. One of Hyatt’s interviewees, Nicholas Kardaras — a doctor who thinks that video games are as addictive as heroin and claims to have treated a boy reduced to a catatonic state by playing too much Minecraft — says this of digital technology: “It’s changing your kid’s brain. It’s rewiring your children, developmentally, neurologically.” This is true. All human experiences rewire the brain. That’s how brains work. If they didn’t, they would be some other order of object. One that would, say, not think to question that scary stat about digital technology and goldfish.

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The Microsoft study quoted so vividly in Screened Out is not a scientific paper. It’s a 2015 consumer report carried out by the marketing team of the firm’s Canadian division. True, it contains an infographic that expresses identical claims about the decline of the average human attention span. But the only footnotes refer to texts that are either irrelevant or untraceable.

But that doesn’t seem to bother the makers of Screened Out. When contacted, they replied: “we say that Microsoft released a study, which is true.”

The exemplary BBC Radio 4 programme, More or Less — currently doing such sharp analysis of the government’s questionable use of Covid-19 statistics — followed this trail in 2017, demonstrating on the way that goldfish have excellent memories. But that hasn’t stopped this phantom study being deployed by a cohort of authors with one thing in common — the desire to sell us books about how we ought to be more attentive and less easily distracted.

Among them are You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters (2020) by the New York Times journalist Kate Murphy, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (2017), by Adam Alter, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Stern School of Business. (Alter is one of Hyatt’s most portentous talking heads.)

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Is there any convincing research in this area? Not much. Mainly because the average attention span is a concept that most psychologists regard as meaningless. The closest I can find in the literature is a recent paper published by the journal Nature Communication, in which the authors attempt to measure the history of our “collective attention span” by comparing the longevity of twitter hashtags with the past four decades of box office receipts and the frequency of certain words and phrases in a century of texts digitised by Google books. “The phenomenon,” they concede, “lacks a strong empirical foundation.”

Like most declinist arguments about human powers of concentration, this work also lacks much of a sense of cultural history. In the last century, variety theatre managements packed their bills with magicians, comics and dancing dog acts. If they bored the audience, they were booed off. (There are eye-witness reports of patrons bringing along their knitting to the show, or shelling peas as they watched.)

If you went to the movies in the first decade of the last century, you would experience a similar vibe — punters got up and down as they liked as a cascade of short subjects flowed on the screen — one-shot trick films, newsreels, a Victorian novel boiled down to five minutes of action. (The film historian Tom Gunning described this as “the cinema of attractions” — movies that you watched for the images and the gags, not for the narrative.)

Were the attention spans of the Edwardians shorter than ours? I suppose we would have to bring a few of them through time to watch Scorsese’s The Irishman (209 minutes), Avengers: Endgame (181 minutes), play through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (80 hours) or listen to some podcast series in which one hour of efficient radio has been fluffed into a 10 part epic. We might also ask them if they considered the hours we spend absorbed in social media to be evidence of an inability to concentrate, or evidence of an excess of that capacity.

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Technologies of pleasure always acquire enemies. The medico-moral language they use to express their objections has remained remarkably consistent over time. In the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines ran think-pieces about the deleterious effects of so-called Sensation Novels, works accused of “preaching to the nerves” and “drugging thought and reason.” These days, they’re published by Penguin Classics. In the 1930s, the wireless was accused of destroying the art of conversation. Now it is regarded as the purest form of public service broadcasting. A sconce in the museum of moral anxiety may await today’s assertions about the narcotic and disabling effects of the smartphone.

I wonder if there’ll also be a place for my theory — it’s not backed up with any empirical research, but I don’t see why that should stop me airing it — that there’s always a space in the culture where social hygienists can turn their worries and their confirmation bias into discourse? I’m not going to claim that this discourse is as addictive as heroin, but it clearly exerts a strong attraction. Strong enough to drive earnest and well-meaning writers and film-makers to make arguments based on numbers that are less substantial than the thoughts of … oh, you know, those little orange animals you used to win at fairgrounds.

The citizens of Bristol have been arguing for years about what to do with the statue of Edward Colston, a big noise in 17th-century mercantilism who built schools and almshouses with the cash made in the slave trade, converting one form of property — human flesh and souls and sinews — into another.

In 2018 Bristol City Council agreed to the addition of a panel explaining the source of Colston’s wealth. Nobody could concur on the wording. Then, last month, a white police officer in Minneapolis exerted nine fatal minutes of pressure on the throat of a man named George Floyd, and the decision became academic: Black Lives Matter supporters in southwest England responded by dragging Colston’s effigy to the pavement, rolling it towards St Augustine’s Reach and pitching it into the docks. Another white police officer, Superintendent Andy Bennett, watched the statue swallowed by the water. “I do understand why it’s happened,” he told a BBC reporter who asked him why he did not order his officers to intervene. “It’s very symbolic … there’s a lot of context that sits around it.”

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The context, however, is not just that of the 17th century. The Colston statue is not the Cenotaph. It is not the statue of Churchill in his greatcoat in Parliament Square. It was not built by Colston’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries. It was erected over 170 years after his death, thanks to the efforts of James Arrowsmith, a Bristol businessman and Colston superfan whose fundraising campaign didn’t reach its £1,000 target even after the statue was unveiled in November 1895. (Having failed to guilt-trip Bristol’s inhabitants into coughing up, Arrowsmith seems to have stumped up the last £150 himself.) The message inscribed on the plinth — “erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city” — does not speak for all those citizens.

Bristol in the early 1890s was not a city at ease with itself. On Friday 23 December 1892 it was the location of a “March of the Workers”, held in support of the women of Sanders Sweet Factory on Redcliffe Street — who were employed on such bad terms that they were nicknamed “Sanders’ White Slaves”. (If they tried to join a union, they received their cards.) On the day of the demonstration, the dragoons steamed in. Two hundred mounted officers tried to split the march. At the end of the night, 57 demonstrators and 51 police had been injured. Those present on that day might have taken a sceptical attitude to a public artwork celebrating Colston’s philanthropy. Their ideas about how to alleviate poverty in the city had been answered with violence.

So it would be wrong, I think, to read the Colston statue as an embodiment of civic or imperial confidence. Better, perhaps, to see it like one of those Porsches bought by men in the thick of a midlife crisis — a gleaming expression of self-doubt and anxiety.

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Why not cancel Nancy Astor?

By Douglas Murray

A world map from the 1890s shows the vermillion expanse of British Empire. But in the year that the statue went up, a strong note of pessimism had already entered the culture. HG Wells published The Time Machine, depicting a world in which all human achievements ended, twitching in the mud. Degeneration, a doomy treatise by the Hungarian social scientist Max Nordau, had became an unexpected bestseller in England, perhaps because he argued that, having been the fastest to develop, it would be the first to decline.

The idea had already occurred to the Victorians: it emerged from the writings of thinkers pondering the implications of Darwinism. In 1880 the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester suggested that for “the white races of Europe” evolution might be switching into reverse. “Possibly we are all drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual barnacles”. Lankester had read his Edward Gibbon, and recalled the idea that Rome had fallen because it had conquered and consumed too much. “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly‐gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.” This is the language of the lecture theatre, but these ideas were not the preoccupation of a minority of intellectuals. They had become mood music of the culture — played out most memorably, perhaps, in Kipling’s Recessional (1897) — a poem for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee that read like an elegy for a dying country.

In 2017, protesters in Durham, North Carolina, used a rope to topple a Confederate statue, and provoked both outrage and approval. But the ease with which it fell told the most interesting story. The monument was less than a hundred years old. It wasn’t erected to General Robert E Lee by those who fought beside him. It was the product of a much later moment — one in which Jim Crow laws were entrenched across the south, and the Ku Klux Klan were enjoying a boost from the success of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Colston’s toppling tells a story of similar recency.

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How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

The statue of Edward Colston is not a pure object upon which later generations have imposed an anachronistic argument. The statue is an argument. About the relationship between the individual and the state, about employers and workers, about civic responsibility and Britain’s place in the world. Its construction was a political gesture. So is pushing it into the River Avon.

The protesters of Black Lives Matter did not drag Colston’s figure out of the city and smash it to pieces. When they submerged it in the docks, they were making a decision about its proper place in the environment — a decision accepted, tacitly, by the officers present on the scene. Perhaps this was not an act of destruction, but a form of endowment. One that may bring wealth to the city far greater than the kind that can be extracted from a black body with the use of a whip.

The 19th century, however, has a caveat to add. The Victorians celebrated their record on the abolition of slavery. Mid nineteenth-century popular culture buzzes with self-regard on this issue. Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) railed against the “accursed and detested system” of slavery — without noting who might have picked the cotton used to make his shirts. Visitors to JR Planché’s spectacular burlesque Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (1854) would have congratulated themselves as they laughed at the anti-American gags in its script:

To the west, to the west, to the land of the free –
Which means those who happen white people to be –
Where a man is a man –  if his skin isn’t black –
If it is, he’s a n—–, to sell or to whack…

But a joke from a later line in this song should give us pause for thought. America, for Dickens and his contemporaries, was a zone of racial violence and exploitation — but it was also the country of laughable prudishness.

Where the legs of the table in trowsers are drest:
Away, far away, to the land of the west.

No 19th-century Briton ever covered up a piano leg for decency’s sake, but in the course of the 20th century, this fiction became one of the most tenacious exemplars of their attitudes. A smug joke that backfired.

The Victorians used American racism as a way to feel good about themselves. So do we. It’s a habit that dissuades us from genuine moral introspection. Another solid fixture we might hurl into the water.

Her posts indicated that she was a Labour Party member whose status was suspended. She was also signed up to an online group “created to defend the integrity and objectives of the Labour Party.” Its name, however, conveyed a different impression. ‘Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies’ used a photograph of the Labour leader as its masthead, above the words: “We support Jeremy Corbyn, not Labour Friends of Israel.”

Its timeline was a cascade of grotesque memes. A monstrous octopus, emblazoned with the Star of David, slithering over Capitol Hill; a Photoshopped image of a group of people urinating against the Wailing Wall; a villain in a yarmulke, tapping his temple, with the caption: “Can’t betray a country that you had no allegiance to in the first place.”

Facebook removed the page in December 2019 after the Countdown presenter Rachel Riley presented the company with a dossier of such material. But it had received and dismissed at least one complaint already. I know because I made it.

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Can we really call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite?

By Tom Chivers

The journal Political Quarterly has just published the first academic study of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. Its authors are the sociologists Ben Gidley and Brendan McGeever, and the historian David Feldman — all attached to the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London.

Their purpose is not juridical. They are not, like the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, investigating whether unlawful acts have been committed by the party or its employees or agents. Instead, they have crunched data on the views of Labour and Conservative supporters, and examined the language with which the arguments of the crisis were advanced, by those who believe Jeremy Corbyn to be a conscious, unconscious or perhaps semi-conscious anti-Semite, to those who regard the whole business as a smear campaign calculated to damage his electoral prospects.

Their conclusions will comfort few. Conservative voters, the data suggests, are more likely to assent to an anti-Semitic proposition than their Labour equivalents. These numbers are alarmingly large: added together, they work out as about 30% of the population.

So why has Tory anti-Semitism failed to become a source of controversy? Because, Gidley and his co-authors argue, a tradition of Left-wing thinking about capitalism — the view that it is a system rigged by a powerful elite — raises questions to which anti-Semitism provides simple answers. (Somewhere in this picture we might find the former MP Chris Williamson, telling his webcam that “a hostile foreign power … mobilised its assets in the UK — which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power multiplier’ — in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government.”)

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Is Chris Williamson an antisemite?

By Tanya Gold

The most emphatic point made by Gidley, McGeever and Feldman is a conceptual one. They suggest that most of the participants in the crisis — from Jeremy Corbyn to Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis — are guilty of the same intellectual error. They have chosen to characterise anti-Jewish racism as a poison, a virus, a disease — a foreign pollutant that has breached the defences of a 120-year-old British institution. “Figures on all sides,” the article concludes, “conceive antisemitism as an exogenous force which contaminates and spoils the political body it inhabits.”

Rather as the 1999 McPherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence rejected the “bad apple” theory in favour of the less localised and dismissable concept of institutional racism, Gidley and his co-authors want us to reject the reassuringly alien idea of the virus. “If we should use a metaphor to comprehend anti-Semitism,” they argue, “it is not virus but reservoir: a deep reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which people can draw with ease.”

To the British, anti-Semitism can seem like someone else’s problem. The Edict of Expulsion was 730 years ago; there were no pogroms in Peterborough, no Shoah in Shepperton; the Mosley men did not pass through Cable Street or the lobby at Westminster. But this complacent habit obscures a past from which it would be wrong to extract a flattering exceptionalist narrative.

The British nineteenth century, for instance, was marked by periodic displays of solidarity with persecuted Jews in mainland Europe. In 1882, Tsar Alexander III instituted the May Laws to curtail Jewish property ownership and freedom of movement: a few weeks later Victorian campaigners had raised a £75,000 in aid. In 1858, the so-called Mortara Affair inspired national demonstrations in support of a seven year-old Jewish boy kidnapped from his home in Bologna by a phalanx of Papal carabinieri. Another good cause — but objections to his treatment expressed as much anti-Catholic as philosemitic feeling.

What about the twentieth century, when Britain licked Hitler and kept the anti-Semitic far right out of power? In the 1930s, the British Union of Fascists failed to gain a single Parliamentary seat, but during the decade their gatherings were listed in the local press among tea dances and cricket matches, part of the pattern of provincial life. During the Second World War, the fight against Nazism coincided with a legible increase in anti-Semitic attitudes — the Mass Observation project recorded British chatter about Jews running the black market or bagging the best places in the communal air-raid shelters.

And after the war, when the population of Britain had gazed on the photographs from the death camps? In April 1946, the Attlee government was discovered to be publishing job advertisements that requested Jews not to apply. The Minister of Labour assured Parliament it would not happen again. Phil Piratin, the Communist MP for Mile End, urged him to speak to the Home Secretary about prohibiting racial discrimination by law, but received no answer.

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Since when did the Tories care about workers?

By Matthew Sweet

To speak of this history, the image of the reservoir is not sufficient: these are turbulent waters, in which anti-Semitism swirls and surges beside other ideological currents. But there are ways of observing their movement. Watching those old black and white movies, for one.

Put Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) on your TV, and see Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll untangle a conspiracy; then go back to John Buchan’s novel and register that the conspiracy is the same as the one in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perpetrated, according to one character, by “a little white-faced Jew in a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake.”

Watch the Boulting brothers’ Brighton Rock (1948) and run with the Italian razor gangs of mid-century East Sussex; then note that the gangsters of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel are Jews, described in unpleasant terms that the author quietly revised out of the text in 1970. Or enjoy the elegantly murderous class war of Ealing’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), then find a copy of its source, Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907), and discover that the protagonist is not an Italian like Dennis Price, but a Jew who kills an aristocratic baby by seducing its nanny and polluting the cot with a handkerchief impregnated with scarlet fever germs. Blood libel territory.

There were, doubtless, people with anti-Semitic views on the staff of mid-century British film studios. Their attitudes, however, rarely made it to the screen. We might explain this with reference to the heritage of the men who kept these businesses running — Julius Hagen at Twickenham; Alexander, Zoltan and Vincent Korda at Denham; Maurice, Mark and Isidore Ostrer at Gaumont-British; and Michael Balcon at Ealing.

We might also say that these institutions created a moral and political culture that offered a model to their contemporary world and to ours. When a hopeful young screenwriter — the nephew of a double-barrelled English playwright — rolled up at Ealing and declared that he was “off to Palestine to beat up those bloody Jews,” it was the studio secretary, Miss Slater, who told him that his services were not required, and marched him out through the gates.

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You can't compare Tory Islamophobia with Labour anti-Semitism

By Douglas Murray

Our present political culture has developed many inadequate ways of talking about racism. When Donald Trump was criticised for telling Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to “go back home”, he protested: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!” Zac Goldsmith used the same expression after he suggested that his rival for the London mayoralty had links with Islamic terrorism. Jo Johnson certified his brother free of skeletal bigotry, the founder of Momentum did it for Jeremy Corbyn. All of these men are correct. If we were to lay them on the slab and fillet them, we would not extract a femur that thinks Enoch was right, a clavicle that loves a minstrel show, or even a distal phalange worried about Turkish membership of the EU.

The deadlines for peer-reviewed academic journals are long. Gidley, McGeever and Feldman were committed to print before the new Labour leader issued his thoughts on the anti-Semitism crisis in his party. Keir Starmer’s language was much the same as that of his predecessor, though he did add a slightly confusing horticultural layer: “Antisemitism has been a stain on our party,” went his victory speech. “I will tear out this poison by its roots.”

Prejudice does not show up on an X-Ray. It can’t be collected on a swab or in a blood sample. It lives in our actions and utterances and encounters, and in the culture they generate — on pages and screens, in workplaces and social media feeds. We are, however, a metaphor-loving society. The present moment demonstrates that. Covid-19 is a virus that we discuss in terms of war; racism is a form of human conflict that we discuss in terms of virology and toxicology.

When words fail, sometimes our ideas are at fault. It is an opportunity to find better ones. Better deeds, too. And better friends.

Then he recalled the recent history of the uranium mine in the nearby town of Elliot Lake. From the early 1970s, the Elliot Lake miners knew that their work was killing them prematurely. The authorities, however, showed little interest. In April 1974 the United Steelworkers union called a wildcat strike that resulted in a bitterly critical government inquiry into the mine’s management, and the establishment of an annual ceremony of mourning for those whose lives had been cut short by cancer and scoliosis.

From this conversation in the car, Lambert and Sentes grew a campaign. In February 1991, the Canadian government passed a private member’s bill naming April 28th as the Day of Mourning for Persons Killed or Injured in the Workplace. The idea spread. Over a hundred countries now recognise International Workers Memorial Day. The UK government gave it official recognition in 2010.

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How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

At 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning, Boris Johnson and his Chancellor stood mute in the Cabinet Office, heads bowed. As the seconds ticked by, news cameras relayed images of groups of nurses, ambulance crews, bus drivers and checkout operators, standing separate and observant. The moment was freighted with symbolism. The 11 o’clock silence recalled the Cenotaph, though the Great War’s familiar ceremonies did not stabilise until years after the Armistice. The concluding applause showed that this was the more formal relation of the now-customary Covid carnivalesque of a British Thursday evening, when pots and pans are banged as they are on a Glasgow hen-night.

None of the sonorous TV commentary, however, acknowledged the significance of the timing; that we were watching a Conservative Prime Minister, whose journalistic output could hardly be said to be a long paean to the virtues of Health and Safety, leading a mourning ritual for personnel who had lost their lives because their employers had failed to protect them from danger; a ritual inaugurated, promulgated and promoted by the international labour movement.

Work is a four-letter word. Worker has six, but it’s still one that sounds surprising when uttered, enthusiastically, by a figure whose political home is not on the Left. “We are going to stand by the workers of this country,” declared the Prime Minister, a fortnight before he fell sick. It’s an easy thing to say: you can stand by someone as you watch them tumble from Beachy Head. But his colleagues started to speak the same language. The figure of the worker is now a presence in British Conservative discourse — a place where it has, historically, often been very hard to detect.

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Who will stand by the workers?

By Paul Embery

The principal festival of the worker, May Day, was inaugurated in 1890 by the first Conference of the Second International, which named May 1st as the day on which the proletariat might eat, drink, be merry and agitate for a radical utopian idea called the eight-hour day. Spain adopted it in 1931: when General Franco came to power he replaced it with a festival in commemoration of himself. Hitler took it up in 1933: it survived him in both post-war Germanys. James Callaghan added it to the British calendar in 1978. (In 2011, David Cameron’s coalition wondered aloud about abolishing it in favour of the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.)

In the Soviet Union, May Day was the foundation of a cult that sometimes sacrificed its own celebrants. When Stalin ballyhooed the achievements of a monstrously productive Ukrainian coal-cutter named Alexey Stakhanov, he condemned him to a place in the realm of the Soviet symbolic. In Moscow they applauded him, garlanded him, and sent him the gift of a horse and cart. In his hometown in Donbass, a gang of miners came after him with knives. Stakhanov died drunk and disappointed, but the beginning of his story is just as instructive. When, in August 1935, he formulated his method for massively increasing the coal yield, his manager told him that he would support him if he succeeded, but disavow him if he failed.

How are we to judge the status of the worker in our own moment? Perhaps ask those who are presently employed on what is known as the “worker contract” — an instrument that suits those for whom flexibility is a supreme priority, but also functions as a mechanism allowing companies and organisations (even respectable ones like the BBC and the NHS) to limit their obligations towards the people upon whose labour they depend. The worker contract provides no sick pay, no holiday pay, no pension, no parental leave, no compassionate leave. It permits an employer to dismiss you without notice, even after years of service. It does not remove your statutory entitlements, but often makes them almost impossible to claim.

This piece of paper was always a potential insult. To this, Covid-19 has added injury. Many of those workers being congratulated for their dedication, professionalism and forbearance, with heartwarming television ads, enthusiastic applause and respectful silence, are engaged on terms for which many of those commissioning those ads, generating that applause or observing the silence would not leave the house, even if it were completely safe to do so.

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Can your ideology cope with coronavirus?

By Peter Franklin

Corona has changed our politicians: their language; their attitudes to public and state institutions; their relationships with their own ideological traditions. Enthusiasts for deregulation and the weightless state — a key element of the Conservatives’ fanbase — must be reeling, and would be forgiven for recalling those 1950s sci-fi films about covert takeovers by the forces of the Red Planet. Are there Martian transistors behind Rishi Sunak’s magnificent ears, directing the former hedge fund manager to advance Tory War Communism? No. The Chancellor is the Chancellor, and his first budget would have been Keynesian without the influence of the virus. Is the real Dominic Raab trapped inside a frothing alien pod concealed in his conservatory in Thames Ditton? No. The Foreign Secretary who talks with apparent sincerity about “our NHS” is the same Earthling who co-authored a 2012 treatise arguing for the breakup of public healthcare.

These are the new Tories. This is the new normal. Thatcher’s children, talking like Clem Attlee was their real dad all along. If Nigel Lawson once worried that the NHS was the closest thing to a state religion, how he must marvel at the zeal of his successors who lead each night’s 5pm Evensong.

On International Workers Memorial Day 2020, the Prime Minister and his Chancellor delivered the same message. “This morning I took part in a minute’s silence to remember those workers who have tragically died in the coronavirus pandemic,” tweeted Boris Johnson. “The nation will not forget you.” Rishi Sunak delivered his promises to camera. “To the workers who continue to help Britain battle coronavirus, thank you,” he said. “To those who have lost their lives, we won’t forget you.”

In the Great War, many families were left without bodies to bury. Shellfire obliterated them in an instant, scattering the fragments over the mud. Families bereaved by Covid-19 will have autopsy reports, medical data, human remains that must be managed from a safe and painful distance. There will be no Tomb of the Unknown Shelf-Stacker. We will know which employers and authorities behaved honourably, and which did not. We will know where the bodies are buried.

In the 1980s, when Ray Sentes and Colin Lambert were campaigning in Canada, they did so with a phrase that remains the mantra of their movement. “Remember the dead. Fight for the living.”

We should do both.

We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.

I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.

Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”

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How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.

The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.

So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.

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How did Naomi Wolf get away with it for so long?

By Douglas Murray

Or maybe you’ve been streaming the 5G-themed fireside chats hosted by the American writer Naomi Wolf, in which she declares that “there’s almost no objective reporting in mainstream media about the real dangers of 5G,” and warns that “your DNA changes to a precancerous condition when you’re around these cell towers”. Her own reporting in this field includes publishing a link to an approving account of a man named Mark Steele, who is convinced that Gateshead council is poisoning its electorate with 5G transmitters hidden inside the streetlamps. (No such transmitters exist.) Dr Wolf also believes that 5G may be responsible for the headaches and tinnitus suffered by her neighbours in New York. “Everybody who lives in my apartment [block],” she says, “is very much more uncomfortable.” I suppose that’s one explanation.

Conspiracist thinking thrives in anxious times. Corona has made it bloom like mould on toast. The Times caught two British academics from Russell Group universities sharing speculations that the virus is a biological weapon. A journalist for Metro announced that he’d submitted an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust, suspicious that Boris Johnson had somehow faked his stay in the intensive care unit. (“The PR timing,” tweeted Marcus J Ball, “is just too perfect.”) London Live, the cable television station associated with George Osborne’s London Evening Standard, made the bizarre editorial decision to air an 105-minute interview with David Icke, in which the former Coventry City goalkeeper was permitted to serve a Covid-scented platter of half-digested matter from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I’ll throw you a bone, here, Eamonn. Intelligent people are not free from these predilections. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis doubts the link between HIV and Aids and strongly suspects that he was once abducted by extraterrestrial racoons. So your willingness to leave a space for conspiracy theories on This Morning does not necessarily mean that you are an idiot. And such an instinct may not always be misguided. Conspiracist thinking can sometimes be virtuous. Ask Bob Woodward, who investigated Watergate, or Chris Mullin, who led the campaign to prove the innocence of the Birmingham Six.

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Who are you calling gullible?

By Timandra Harkness

Those who engage in it, however, need to protect themselves against its corrupting effects. The philosopher Quassim Cassam is, I think, our wisest writer on this matter. I’d heartily recommend his work to you. He points out that conspiracy theories can reduce our confidence in knowledge that there is no good reason to doubt. That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, for instance, is a bare historical fact. But if you swim in the discourse that claims otherwise, you may find yourself describing the history of the Apollo missions as, let’s say, a “state narrative”.

Likewise, there is no reasonable evidence that the 5G phone signal carries a health risk. But there is a discourse that asserts the opposite — based on unsound extrapolations from weak studies, which have been amplified into certitudes by unreliable commentators. Now, like the Moon landings, George Soros, Zionism, Pizzagate and Atlantis, 5G has entered the repertoire of things that conspiracy theorists like to talk about — and will go on talking about until, I suspect, the arrival of 6G.

On Tuesday, as ITV totted up the complaints, you issued a statement suggesting that your remarks had been misunderstood. You reiterated your rejection of any link between Covid-19 and 5G, but then, astonishingly, repeated your original error. “Many people,” you said, “are rightly concerned and are looking for answers.” Well, there are people think that the Rothschilds were responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, and we would know what to think of a broadcaster who thought such a view worth airing.

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Why it's so easy to invent conspiracy theories

By Tom Chivers

Cassam’s book, Vices of the Mind (2019), notes that psychologists have tended to see conspiracist thinking as a problem of mindset. He prefers to regard it as an epistemic vice. A form of intellectual masturbation. And perhaps, if we think of it in this way, it might help to reduce its dangerous allure. So those inclined to regard you as the Noam Chomsky of ITV Daytime, critiquing the MSM between the Danone adverts, might be better simply to think of you as a man who gave into a weakness and discharged something unwelcome in front of his work colleagues.

Nobody would judge you for doing this at home and in private. Visit all the websites you please. Feel free to watch terms such as #soros and #EU and #fourthreich tumble from the hashtag tombola of Piers Corbyn’s twitter feed. And if you want to chat with other people online who are into this kind of stuff, then fine, it’s a free country. But for shame, Eamonn, for shame, not on the This Morning sofa. Not with your wife sitting next to you, and my mum and dad watching at home.

All the best, Matthew

She was told that she would die. Instead, she produced Illness as Metaphor, a polemic that argued against viewing the sick body as an incubator of significance. Sontag hated how illness was attended by the language of war and battle. She wanted to render it meaningless. She wanted to purify it of symbolism. And yet, she began her essay with one of the most memorable metaphors in American literature. “Everyone who is born,” she wrote, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Illness, for her, was a country of the night. Even if we rarely visit, we all enjoy its “onerous citizenship”.

This week, Covid-19 obliged the British Prime Minister to take up residence in that country. It was a migration that shocked and troubled the nation with its speed. The virus is present in Boris Johnson’s body, his body is present in the national discourse, and the language that Sontag so despised is now attached to him like hospital wires and tubes. His designated sub, Dominic Raab, declared his boss “a fighter”, as if he could fell a virus with a strong right hook. The Prime Minister’s father said his son was “optimistic” and “determined”, as if viruses took these attitudes into account as they deform the proteins in the cells of their hosts. “A lot of my son’s character,” Stanley Johnson told the Mail Online, “was formed here and in the local village of Winsford.” (Viruses know about Somerset, too.)

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Sex: a warning from history

By Matthew Sweet

Boris Johnson is the most corporeal of Prime Ministers. We know his appetites and frailties. He drinks, and sometimes ruins sofas when he drinks. He fucks. He touches himself. He’s always touching himself. It is his most visible form of promiscuity. His fingers thresh at his hair. His belly resists the restraint of the trouser belt and the tucked shirt. His torso struggles inside his suit, like the Rhinoceros in Kipling’s Just So stories who can’t rid his itchy skin of cake crumbs and burned currants. This discomfort may be confected: it is mysteriously undetectable in that young man in the Bullingdon Club photo, lounging on the steps in Peckwater Quad.

The bulletins from his colleagues insist on the idea of his comfort, but we know this is a medical euphemism for the absence of any immediate mortal crisis. The Prime Ministerial body we now picture is in a state of genuine discomfort. We are not his family — we are, particularly, not his pregnant fiancée — and cannot know the painful intensity of their experience, but we are thinking about the temperature of his skin, the depth of his breathing, the condition of his lungs and throat. We all know the symptoms, because we’ve been checking ourselves for them for weeks.

There’s a difference, however, between our bodies and his. The Prime Minister’s body has a metaphorical dimension. He is in intensive care, and through mechanisms that are hard to imagine in any detail, he is also running the country. If Dominic Raab sounds hesitant and uncertain when discussing this process — he has sometimes resembled John Cleese in that episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil cannot admit to his friends that Sibyl has left him — then it’s understandable. He is trying to explain an idea that is, in essence, mystical.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

Johnson is an elected statesman with an interest in the classical past. (His great hero is Pericles, killed by plague in 429BC.) The doubled nature of his position has its origins in the political culture of the ancient world, but it’s also present in a concept from English law that was codified during the Early Modern period. The classic study on the subject was written by the German-American academic Ernst Kantorowicz, a refugee from the Nazis who also suffered in his adopted country when he refused to sign a loyalty oath disavowing any association with Communism. In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Kantorowicz traced the theological and legal traditions that identified the monarch as simultaneously a person and an embodiment of the realm.

The ruler possessed a Natural Body — one made of flesh and bone and sinew — and a Body Politic, a more mysterious entity that linked him with the power of the state. It is a relationship registered in the strangeness of the declaration, “the king is dead, long live the king,” and in the discussion between Macbeth and his physician, in which the ruthless, blood-slaked usurper of the Scottish throne dreams away the difference between his own health and that of the nation.

“If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again.”

The chief theorist of this political theology was Sir Edmund Plowden (1518-1585), a lawyer who used the idea to serve a somewhat ignoble cause — securing the rights of Edward VI to the Duchy of Lancaster, which the king had leased before reaching legal age. Plowden asserted that the king’s two bodies were “annexed” together, but that this was not an equal relationship. The body politic was more “ample and large”. It could also correct the weaknesses of its fleshy companion. “The Body politic wipes away every Imperfection of the other Body,” argued Plowden, citing earlier cases on the record. “[It] takes away the Imbecility of his Body natural.” He also proposed an alternative definition of the body politic, under which the monarch was the head of a collective entity composed of all subjects of the crown.

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It's make or break time for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

To modern ears, these concepts may have a faintly disgusting, Human Centipede quality. But they have persisted. They played their part in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and they continue to echo in our own times. Boris Johnson deployed them last November, when he characterised an uncooperative Parliament as “a blocked artery at the heart of the British body politic”. Last March, when he was best known as the head of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings argued that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his colleagues in the European Research Group “should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic”.

How archaic these exchanges now seem. Parliament is suspended. Cummings is ill. Rees-Mogg has vanished from public view, as if removed by some unseen scalpel. Did someone at Conservative Central Office diagnose him as something malignant? Or are such figures now simply too decadent and unserious for the present moment, as the wartime generation concluded of the Bright Young Things?

Susan Sontag wanted to purge our sick flesh of metaphor. She recognised the sometimes lethal danger of viewing the body as a moral space. But freedom from symbolism is a privilege that cannot always be extended to our leaders. It is one of the duties they discharge for us, and in this historical moment, it is one that the Prime Minister might be wise to embrace. The language of combat and character need not be invoked. They are inappropriate and absurd. But if he declares his body a site of crisis, it might prove one of the most valuable and public-spirited acts of his career.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

It would require the relinquishment of the power he has pursued with a sometimes unseemly hunger. It would require the acknowledgement of a disarray more genuine than the one he assumes when he messes up his hair before going on camera.

It would require a humility and seriousness that he has often lacked — particularly at the beginning of last month, when he was boasting about shaking hands in a Corona-struck hospital, and spreading the message of business as usual.

Does Boris Johnson possess the courage to be ill? We wait by his bedside for news.

Let me just come out and say it. Decadent proclivities brought me to The House of Ulloa. My initiation took place in New Cross, South London, at an academic conference where the souvenir tote bags depicted the Goat of Mendes cavorting with a tortoise. In rooms at the Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths College, guests of the Decadence Research Unit gave papers on the literature of auras, telepathy, astral projection and Satanism.

A South Korean Shakespeare professor talked about tantric philosophy and W. B. Yeats’s vasectomy. A dapper Swedish lecturer in religion spoke of Méphistophéla (1890), a French novel in which lesbian demon-worshippers offer baskets of severed penises to a female succubus. A Spanish researcher, Leire Barrera-Medrano, described the fiction of Emilio Pardo Bazán, decadent, feminist, theosophist, aristocrat and the author of The Black Siren (1908), the story of a devil-worshipping dandy with the power to compel people to commit suicide.

I was reeling. Suddenly, Proust’s mental time travel and Freud’s interest in telepathy made sense. Here was the lost, weird context of European modernism. Most of it, frustratingly, untranslated into English.

With one notable exception. Emilio Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa (1886). A novel from her early period, written long before she developed an interest in hypnotism and the Black Mass. Back in the 1880s, she considered herself a naturalist in the style of Flaubert. But she was also a state of the nation novelist. That nation was her native Spain, and its state was decay.

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Sex: a warning from history

By Matthew Sweet

The hero of The House of Ulloa is a mimsy young priest, Father Julián Alvarez, who is despatched to a crumbling estate in the Galician sticks to inject a little order and piety into the affairs of its resident marquis. Some hope.

As he arrives at the manor like a comic, clerical version of Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he sees a dirty four-year-old boy, the marquis’s illegitimate son, being bitten by a dog from whose bowl he has attempted to snatch a hunk of meat. The marquis consoles the lad by sluicing wine down his throat. The boy seems delighted to be drunk. “On certain feast-days,” stammers Father Julián, wondering if he is about to witness a sudden death, “I don’t dislike a little anisette with my coffee.”

Like many great novels, it’s possible to read The House of Ulloa for the food. Bazán doesn’t mind tarrying in the kitchen. Her flavours are strong and she gives us all the details. Chicken casseroled in an egg-yolk sauce. Cauliflower salad and quince jelly sent in from the local convent. Mataburrillo, a stew of goat’s tripe, liver and lungs. Bread soup, cooked slowly in fat with red sausage, chickpeas and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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How Spain could rule the Eurozone

By Peter Franklin

The political background, though, is just as piquant. We’re in a period of turmoil and uncertainty. The Glorious Revolution of 1868 has propelled Queen Isabella II from the Spanish throne. A Provisional Government has been formed. Its Prime Minister, Juan Prim, has been shot by an unknown assassin. Radicals have declared a republic, brought swiftly to an end by the installation of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, as constitutional monarch. Local politicians – as far as Bazán is concerned – are hopelessly self-interested. Spain is sinking into a post-imperial dream-state, while these men manoeuvre for power.

A pair of figures receive Bazán’s cool attention. Barbacana is a lawyerly bigwig who fights his battles from behind a desk, leaving the violent stuff to a wall-eyed henchman from Castrodorna. (Clearly bandit territory.)

The more dangerous of the two is Trampeta – “the Trickster” – a man so promiscuous in his deceptions that the electorate simply can’t keep track of them. (“Thanks to the extent of Trampeta’s machinations,” we’re told, “many of the things he did were winked at, or a blind eye was turned to them.”)

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There's no such thing as 'the good old days'

By John Lichfield

There is strong music in his name. When Bazán’s narrator declares that Trampeta “felt certain of impunity, even if he were to burn down half the town and beat up, sue or imprison the other half”, you wonder if this part of Galicia has a Fifth Avenue. You may also find yourself speculating about how to inhabit a culture like this, which seems not to know whether it is alive or dead.

Bazán was in in love with death. As time went on, her passion increased. She was one of those writers who greeted the fin de siècle by embracing the outré and the esoteric. Despite her devout Catholicism, she even defended the practice of Satanism. “To believe in the devil is to believe in God,” she wrote in 1911. On my day with the Decadence Research Unit, Leire Barrera-Medrano offered a way to interpret Bazán’s position. Her engagement with the occult, she suggested, “was a necessary spiritual expurgation”.

These, I suppose, are the seductions of decadence. To gaze upon the process of decay, feel a melancholy pleasure, and nurse the idea that at some point in the future, new life will flower.

“With that one word,” wrote Woolf, “all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation … It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.” Woolf, however, did not declaim her story about the death of Victorian restraint in 1908. She told it to a small group of friends in 1921. It remained unpublished until 1976, with the caveat, “I do not know if I invented it or not.”[1.  Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings by Woolf, Virginia ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 1976)]

The history of sexuality sometimes looks simple – a costume pageant in which roister-doistering Enlightenment libertines give way to Victorian evangelical killjoys, who, after sending Oscar Wilde to an early grave, are staked in theirs by the Freudians, the Bloomsbury group, and the 60s generation liberated by the Pill. That apparent simplicity is an illusion produced by our desire to make ourselves the heroes in a Whig history of sex – one that leads from tight-laced ancestor-figures to laid-back, sorted, liberated us.

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How come the misogynistic Frankie Boyle is so acceptable now?

By Jenny McCartney

Today, that confidence is harder to detect. The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme court has added energy to the backlash against #MeToo – music, doubtless, to the ears of the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The present American administration contains men whom Margaret Atwood might have sketched in one of her more pessimistic moods. Roe vs Wade is in their sights. So is legislation that will argue transgender identities out of existence. And in this area, the arc of easy progress seems particularly broken. Science has revealed that biological sex is not purely binary, but determined by a constellation of genetic, chromosomal and hormonal factors that culture has yet to decide how far it wants to reflect. This is a transitional moment for everyone.

The history of sexuality might give us the means to negotiate it – not least because our attempts to describe it over time are a good demonstration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that nothing with a history can ever be defined. Sex has no discoverable past: it resides in the body. Sexuality is very different. It moves in culture. It is contingent, provisional and mutable. It has been escaping from and reacting to classification since the mid 19th-century, when medical science first began reorienting ideas about sexual behaviour from a focus on human acts to a focus on human types, and generated new and exotic beings such as similsexuals, monosexuals, uranians, uraniads, inverts and urnings. (Heterosexuals didn’t turn up to the party until 1869, which makes them a more recent invention than roller skates, the vacuum cleaner, or Harrods.)

The subjects of this research could not avoid responding to this new lexicon of sex. Oscar Wilde and his circle looked for evidence of themselves in Psychopathia Sexualis (1887) Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s textbook of sexual categories. (The book was mentioned at Wilde’s trial.) The hero of EM Forster’s Maurice – begun in 1913 – describes himself as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. But his psychiatrist substitutes a more precise term – “homosexual” – introduced to the English language by the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebbing.

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Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

These taxonomic projects now offer a revealing snapshot of the cultures that produced them. In the same year that the Woolf and her friends had their spermy epiphany on Gordon Square, Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, an American sexologist who wrote under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, issued a psychometric questionnaire called “Am I at all an Uranian – Am I at all a Uraniad?” Responds were asked, “Do you whistle well, and naturally like to do so?” “Do you like rural solitude?” “Are you peculiarly fond of Wagner?” Easy to imagine readers of Henry James and Edith Wharton frowning over the questions and asking: is this me? 

We could ask it of ourselves. If we accept that our sexualities are subject to cultural and historical forces, the back catalogue of human experience might offer ways to question our own orthodoxies. In the 1880s, for instance, the writer Edward Carpenter lived in a ménage-a-trois with a Sheffield scythe-maker and his wife. They wore sandals, grew their own vegetables, and conducted a life that informed Carpenter’s book The Intermediate Sex (1908), which proposed mutually beneficial social alliances between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Doesn’t sound too dreadful.

And now those Rumpelstiltskins of the alt-right, the incels, have emerged into the light, might it not be worth looking back to the work that Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Reich published in the 1930s, which suggested that political extremism was fuelled by unexpressed sexual energy? (One of its few visible signs today is Shrek, whose creator, William Steig, was a follower of Reich and made the ogre an embodiment of his ideal type – a figure unswayed by authority and utterly at ease with his own effluvia.)

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Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murphy

But there are other, colder, less flattering lessons to be drawn from the corpus of sexual historiography. Unsympathetic readings of the sexual past always flourish, and tend to be broad and tenacious. The Victorians, despite some recent hot competition from the inhabitants of 1950s suburbia, remain our favourite embodiments of sexual hypocrisy.

We seem compelled to reheat those false but comforting stories of their ignorance and bad faith in order to feel the warm glow of moral superiority. The one about them covering up their piano legs for decency’s sake – a 19th-century joke about American prudery transmuted into a historical factoid in the 1920s – has been given new and undeserved life by Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories books. That one about Queen Victoria refusing to believe in the existence of lesbians – a myth that goes back no further than the 1970s – turned up this year in a book by the historian Lucy Worsley. The persistence of such fictions ought to act as a warning about how the story of our own times may be told.

We, actors in the culture that produced digital upskirting, the private browsing function and Ashley Madison, should beware the unsympathetic assessment of those who will come after us. The evidence against us is mounting. Judgement is waiting. It’s hard to look into the future and guess who in our present moment will be celebrated as we now celebrate Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, but I think we know those figures who will never make it to that as-yet-unwritten roll of honour.

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The world after Trump

By Douglas Murray

It won’t be self-identifying, non-rapist Brett Kavanaugh, using college football stats to certify his virtue. It won’t be Harvey Weinstein, accepting arrest while clutching a biography of the disgraced-but-somewhat-forgiven movie director Elia Kazan. It won’t be Sir Christopher Chope MP, who acted for whatever reason to preserve, temporarily, the right of British men to forage surreptitious snaps of women’s underwear, wherever it is worn on the Circle Line.

It won’t be the current occupant of the White House, crowing about how “they” – some faceless, undifferentiated stockpile of female adults – never resist the progress of his fun-size celebrity fingers. Nor, I suspect, will it be Julian Assange, who, rather than face the women who made charges against him in Sweden, has chosen to sue the people who bring takeaway up to his bedroom.

Men like this may make history, but they tend not to write it. They’re not sufficiently observant or reflective. Nonetheless the snail-trail of their actions and utterances will be all over the story of this period in human sexuality. Whatever we say, whatever we do, they besmirch us already. Even if we point a finger, and name the stain.