“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond — including Roddy Doyle, Frank Skinner and Alan Titchmarsh — Jeeves Again, is the new anthology that reimagines Jeeves and Wooster through fresh eyes,” burbled the press release. “Jeeves Again is the statement publication for this 50th anniversary year, showcasing Wodehouse’s enduring legacy as a much-beloved and perennially relevant British Literary icon.” (Punctuation and capitalization all sic.)

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond…” I marveled. “And beyond!” I exclaimed. “Statement publication?” I thought. The only statement that this makes, as far as I can see, is that we imagine that what made Wodehouse work was the Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster brand, and the reason that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t P.G. Wodehouse is that he hasn’t been allowed to write the characters — rather than the fact that nobody before or since has written comic prose like that, and the reason they haven’t is because it’s bloody hard.

Would we, on Mozart’s birthday, invite a cash-in tribute album where someone who used to be on EastEnders produced a piece for the harpsichord? I wondered aloud. “No, we would not,” I said to myself. “Jesus bicycling Christ,” I muttered. What a shitshow. So. I am in an awkward position. Many of the contributors to this book are people I admire. One or two I count as friends. I therefore say this, as Dame Edna would have put it, in a loving way: this is one of those projects that should have been strangled in its cot.

Some of the more acute of these writers have picked up on Wodehouse’s stylistic tics — the definite article where a possessive is expected, or the surprising verb of motion (“I trickled home”; we “biffed off”) — and the less acute have contented themselves with sprinkling the text with epithets such as “spiffing” and “dashed”, or populating the scene with “chaps” and “blighters”. We get, across these stories, a good number of aunts, hangover cures, bathetic classical allusions, over-elaborate metaphors and unsuitable fiancées. Wodehouse isn’t, to thwart the cliche, inimitable; but what makes him sublime is.

To be fair — and I detest being fair like sin, but critical self-respect demands it — this collection isn’t all bad. Nearly half the authors are in the “more acute” camp. Frank Skinner, John Finnemore, Andrew Hunter-Murray and Jasper Fforde just about get away with it, and sometimes even sparkle. Dominic Sandbrook cleverly dodges the challenge of the prose by presenting a series of spoof historical documents about the later career of Roderick Spode; Roddy Doyle yoinks the Jeeves-and-Wooster set up into his Irish comfort-zone (“Ah Jaysis, Jeeves”) with some elan. The rest are pretty much duds.

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

Yes, Jean Rhys set Wide Sargasso Sea in what would now probably get called “the Bronteverse”: but she was doing her own, very different thing. She wasn’t the contributor to a project lashed up by the Charlotte Brontë estate to squeeze a bit more dough out of the wind-lashed moor genre. Nobody would create a franchise extension of Lolita — “from the world of Vladimir Nabokov!” — by asking a collection of that book’s admirers to produce some new stories featuring Humbert and Lo, with cameos from that adorable rascal Clare Quilty. Without Nabokov’s prose, the world of Lolita is nothing, and without Wodehouse’s prose, Jeeves and Wooster are nothing.

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A common mistake — betrayed in the fact that nobody sane would think of doing this with Nabokov — is to assume that because something is popular fiction, or genre fiction, or comic fiction, the prose doesn’t matter. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Harlan Coben and Dan Brown are very limited stylists, but their thrillers work excellently. But often, it does. As witness, for instance, the disappointing results of Lee Child passing the Jack Reacher franchise to his brother. Lee Child makes what Lee Child does look easy, but it very much is not. And when it comes to comic fiction, even more than the literary type, prose is everything. Comic fiction is super difficult, and Wodehouse’s is at the absolute pinnacle of what has been achieved there.

Corporate interests will tend to see everything that makes money as reducible to IP: because, right enough, that is how the biggest entertainment products of our time do work. The special sauce of the Marvel, DC and Star Wars universes *is* the IP in the characters and worldbuilding. They’ve always been the products of diverse hands — many thousands of journeyman writers and artists, some sublimely talented and some much less so, have worked on comics, novels, films and whatnot based on these properties since the middle of the last century. Fans, and I include myself among them, will tend to read an X-Men comic very happily because we can be pretty sure at some point Wolvie will call someone “bub” and pop his claws (“snikt!”), or a ninja will show up, and this will tickle a small childish part of our soul in an agreeable way.

But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetizable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

Since, as far as Big Tech is concerned, no crap idea is so crap that it can’t be tried again, and learning from your mistakes is for losers, Clippy is back. He’s now called Copilot. And not only is he just as repulsively irritating as his predecessor, he’s also costing you a lot of money without you, probably, even realizing. But, of course, this time he’s better. He’s not just a shit algorithm: he’s a shit algorithm with the magic fairy dust of AI.

There will be many genuinely transformative uses of AI. I yield to nobody in my excitement at what AI will be able to do when it comes to protein-folding. But the need among credulous and overexposed venture capitalists to make money out of it at a retail level — because they’ve bet the farm on something they thought sounded like the future after a three-martini lunch — means that this wasteful and unreliable and basically useless technology is being forced into any number of situations where there’s no need for it and it’s actively annoying or, sometimes, dangerous.

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There’s a good meme about it, which shows a small girl pinned against the wall of a school corridor by a tuba jammed into her face. The victim is labelled “Me”; the tuba is labelled “Unwanted AI”; and the person holding the tuba is labelled “Every Company”.

I subscribe, as very many hundreds of thousands, probably even millions, of people around the world do, to a software package called Microsoft 365. That gives me access to online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other programs that let me get on with my work. It’s a fair deal. They’re good programs. I don’t mind a bit paying £80 a year or so for family access to Microsoft’s suite of stuff. It’s a lot less fiddly than buying a boxed package of Word every couple of years and downloading it onto your computer from CDs.

About a week ago, when I opened a new document, I was presented not with a nice blank page but with a hovering header asking me — Jesus wept — whether I wanted to “draft an itinerary for a college reunion in London” or “write a bedtime story for an eight-year-old about dinosaurs”. I spent the traditional 45 minutes Googling “how do I kill Copilot?”, and similar, to no avail (a friend who asked Copilot how you turn Copilot off was told politely that — fancy! — this was something Copilot couldn’t help with). Even as I write these words, a little blue and magenta icon follows my cursor down the page in the left-hand margin suggesting “Draft with Copilot: (Alt+I)”.

It was only when I grumbled about this on social media that I discovered that this wasn’t just an annoyance, but a grift. I had a nice response from someone seeming to be a Microsoft employee reassuring me that, no, Copilot wasn’t stealing my data and that turning it off was just a matter of finding the right checkbox in this or that options menu. But I also had a response from someone saying, and I think it’s only fair to credit him by quoting his unimprovable explanation in full: “Microsoft is going to price gouge you by adding their genAI to your subscription without your consent, and they are not transparent about how to avoid this bullshit.”

He explained that any and all subscribers to Office 365 have been quietly moved, on an increased annual rate, to the AI-enhanced version of the product. The only way to change it is to log in to your Microsoft account, cancel your subscription altogether, and resubscribe to the “classic” version. You must be joking, I thought. And then I followed his instructions, and not a word of it was a lie. In case anyone’s interested, here’s the link he sent me.

I have been, all of us have been, without so much as asking me, “upgraded” (aka, in the excellent formulation of the tech writer Cory Doctorow, “enshittified”) to a version of a program I paid for which contains features I neither need nor want. Those features, if what we’re told about the resource greediness of AI is correct, are colossally wasteful of computing power and damaging to the environment. They are (given AI’s extreme unreliability when it comes to real-world outcomes), at the very best experimental or unpredictable. And the functioning of the features is dependent (though that’s a semi-separate story) on stealing copyright material from artists and writers without asking them. And I’m being charged $25 or so more a year for the privilege. Even my email is now getting vomit-making Copilot spam. Every day brings new questions — challenges big and small. We could all use a little help. A nudge to get started or a reliable partner to get you to the finish line. No matter the moment, Copilot is your companion for every day, just because, in attempting to turn it off, I’ve interacted with Copilot.

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No doubt this inertia selling is in some way legal. There’ll be something buried in the Terms and Conditions that allows them to “upgrade” you, and charge you, for this useless crap. But it shows utter contempt both for Microsoft’s customers and for the spirit of contract law. As someone who has already been charged for their supposedly enhanced subscription, and whose every interaction with his computer is now fouled by Copilot, I’d be interested to know where I apply for my refund.

This is where I suspect that Microsoft’s sharp practice is a window into a wider problem. Those venture capitalists I mentioned, they don’t work on the principle that there’s a point you could reach where there’s “enough tech”: the whole house of cards collapses if there isn’t a new big thing. Gen AI is the latest in a long series of hopeless — or limitedly applicable — ideas that are supposed to be the future (Blockchain, Web3, VR, NFTs) but into which far more investment money has been poured than is likely to be made back. So it’s being forced on us, by hype and by sleight of hand. The same issue applies to the idea, endorsed by our idiot Government, that unless writers and artists specifically object, Big Tech should be allowed to train their models on our work for free.

To hell with that. If the only way you can sell something is by hoping people won’t notice or won’t bother to object or won’t take the trouble to find out how to get rid of it, what you have isn’t a product: it’s a parasite.

Even before Chapter One, the dedication of the first book, A Bad Beginning, sets the tone: “To Beatrice — darling, dearest, dead.” In these books, to say nothing of the dedicatee, villains (and not just villains) are burned to ash or poisoned, devoured by swarms of leeches and eviscerated with circular saws. Handler’s protagonists, the three orphaned Baudelaire children, are pursued through the novels by the evil monobrowed Count Olaf, who is determined to get his hands on the vast fortune which will be settled on them when 14-year-old Violet reaches the age of majority.

Each novel — each of the first seven, at least; it gets more complicated after that — sees the children taken into the care of a new guardian. Count Olaf turns up in a hopeless disguise that the children see through instantly but that inexplicably fools all the adults (shades, here, of Peter Sellers in Lolita). He hatches a plot, is thwarted and — when at last the dozy adults tumble to his disguise — escapes to scheme another day.

And Count Olaf — who physically punches a child in book one — is nasty. One of the glorious things about Lemony is the way in which, contra a whole history of fluffy bunnies, kindly bears and amiable ducks, his books tap into the appetite for the gruesome, violent and macabre which — much as adults who fetishise childhood innocence would prefer otherwise — are absolutely a feature of the childish imagination.

In doing so, he plays with the very traditions of children’s literature itself. The established tropes, in Handler’s work, are knowingly burlesqued — not least the orphan protagonists. Lots of children in children’s stories are orphans (it’s a convenient way to get the parents out of the way so adventures can be had; Roald Dahl, outstandingly, had James, of Giant Peach fame, orphaned when his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros), but Handler makes their orphanhood the centre of the story.

The very first line of his first book tips the hat to a narrative convention, too: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” Throughout the work this narrator (of whose ill-starred personal life hints are from time to time dropped) makes forlorn attempts to dissuade his readers from continuing. Here, of course, Lemony Snicket exploits the fact that, as Mrs Bluebeard knew all too well, warning someone off something makes it twice as attractive.

We’re still working, as Handler recognises, through the legacy of a series of dramatic, centuries-long swerves in how children were understood, and how that understanding was expressed in writing for and about them. It’s a swerve between insisting children are “innocent” or encouraging them to be so — and recognising that they are nothing of the sort. Look at your sweet little 10-year-old, face in his phone… are you entirely confident that he’s not Googling “100 most gruesome funny deaths”?

Children are drawn to the dark, the sadistic and the cruel. Nothing makes a child laugh harder than a cartoon character being hit in the face with a frying pan or flattened by an anvil. We know, proverbially, what wanton boys do to flies; and children have always been a large part of the appetite for gruesome and prurient sensation literature. Who can forget that lovely joke in Tom Stoppard’s script for Shakespeare in Love, when we encounter a boy (the young John Webster), who says how much he loved Titus Andronicus: “I loved it when they cut heads off, and the daughter mutilated with knives…”?

The improving, inspiring, cosseting mainstream of children’s writing tends inadvertently to affirm that side of childhood — even as, anxiously, it seeks to occlude it. The Puritans, who took the lead in the 17th century, may have been onto something when they saw children as, if not uniquely evil, at least uniquely in danger of damnation. The doctrine of original sin meant that you started life with red on the ledger, so children’s stories had work to be getting on with. One notorious example was the nonconformist preacher James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives, and joyful deaths of several young children. The idea, here, was to scare children into repenting their sins before it was too late.

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The funny thing is that A Token for Children has, these days, a faint Lemony Snicket vibe. Read at this distance it’s a riot, with pre-teen after pre-teen going tearfully and gratefully to his or her maker, warning parents and schoolmates with their dying breath to repent: “O make use of time to get Christ for your souls; spend no time in running up and down in playing.” Janeway was deadly serious. But Handler and his like exorcise that religious pathology as arch laughter — history repeating itself as farce.

What makes such campery possible is that between then and now we had a long period, which really takes off with the Romantics, in which the pendulum swung the other way. As Wordsworth put it, “heaven lay about me in my infancy”. Rather than being tainted with sin, children were now moral superheroes, paragons, holy innocents: a rebuke to the fallen grown-up world. That, too, was an adult projection — and, if anything, more fanciful a one than that idea that they’re damned from the get-go.

To this day, we can’t quite make up our minds about children, and out of the cognitive dissonance emerges anxiety — and laughter. It’s a knowing double-standard that the likes of Handler cheerfully skip back and forth on.

As has always been the case, for instance, the most fervently didactic children’s literature captivates its audience with exactly the things that it ostensibly encourages them to disapprove of. The fate of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory may be a caution against the sin of gluttony: but a fat kid getting sucked through a chocolate pipe to an unknown fate is fun to contemplate. It’s the punishment, rather than the moral, which the reader enjoys. Think, too, of the glee in Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (Roald Dahl claimed to have the latter memorised as a child); or the macabre and surreal works of Edward Gorey — not written for children but riffing on the conventions of children’s stories, and an acknowledged influence on Handler.

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That’s the tradition to which Lemony Snicket belongs — and it’s rather older than the amiable duck one, too. Folktales and fairytales are violent and strange, and they are the wellspring from which subsequent children’s literature springs. Handler himself describes being entranced as a child by the tales of the Brothers Grimm; and the turning point in his literary life was when, aged 12, he discovered a copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil in the local library: “I knew what it was at once. The title of the book made it perfectly clear: it was a horror novel.”

Roald Dahl’s stellar success wasn’t, or wasn’t just, a reaction against the wholesomeness of Enid Blyton. Child readers lapped up the surreal grotesquerie and gleeful cruelty of those books. It’s a macabre tradition that goes right back to the start of the modern children’s canon: it’s striking how violent as well as how strange are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and how bloodthirsty is J. M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan. The Princess and the Goblin — often cited as the first children’s fantasy novel — is terrifying at the same time as it’s funny.

In his memoir, Handler writes that he is often told by strangers that he’s “a child at heart”. He doesn’t disagree. He remembers, after all, his mother telling him that if ever their house caught fire he was to jump out of his bedroom window on the grounds that a broken leg would be better than perishing in a fire. The infant Handler’s thoughts filled at once with burned houses, broken legs (“I moved my legs in bed, twisting them best I could into broken positions I had learned from cartoons”), and to the possibility that in falling he’d accidentally eat the poisonous berries from the neighbour’s shrubbery.

“This is what I think of, when people say I am still a child,” he writes: “moving my legs around, thinking about poisoning people and houses burning down.”

“Please, gentlemen, we will lower our voices,” she said at one point like a primary school teacher enjoining a rabble of five-year-olds to “use our indoor voices”. Again and again, she interrupted the babble of one or other to insist they answered the question asked, or shut up and give the other one the chance to speak. “Gentlemen, please!”

Not that her interventions were always, or even often, successful. Noting that the IFS thought that both men were in a “conspiracy of silence” about having to either raise taxes or cut services, she asked something to the effect of “are you levelling with us about the public finances — one-word answer, yes or no”. And, of course, both men embarked on long dreary meaningless sentences neither of which contained the word yes, or no.

There was a nice bit around then — it’s a format that could be developed in the second debate — when she made them stop answering out loud altogether. Raise your hand if I’m wrong, she said, and reeled off a list of the unpopular taxes that they both absolutely definitely scout’s honour weren’t going to raise. Both men kept their hands clamped to their sides and hoped their noses weren’t visibly lengthening. Then she asked how they were proposing to pay for everything and, alas, they went back to talking.

This was a wretched, wretched debate — in both its format and in its performers. Who was its intended audience, given it was neither informative nor entertaining? The quickfire format — 45 seconds an answer — meant, even before you factored in the endless interruptions, that nothing remotely substantial stood a chance of being said. Which left rhetorical dash, style and personality: something neither of these earnest technocrats could summon if their political careers depended on it. Sir Keir comes across like the teacher that nobody else in the staffroom wants to include in after-work drinks; and Rishi comes across like the sixth-former who should by rights be head boy but missed out because the teachers found him too annoying.

Of the two men, the debate marginally favoured Sir Keir — if only because he was on easier ground politically, not having been involved in causing the omnishambles the next PM will have to try to clear up. Rishi suffered groans and derisive laughter from the audience a bit more often — blaming Covid and industrial action for the state of the NHS; muttering weakly that the record number of small boats landing was “because it’s a challenge”, and scoring the biggest laugh of the evening when he told a Gen Z that national service was going to be “transformational”.

But stylistically, they were much of a muchness — and it wasn’t a muchness to write home about. Both did the thing of infallibly answering their questioners by name because a manual somewhere says it helps you sound like a human being: “Well, Claire”; “Well, Stephen”, “Like you, Myles, I think…” Both fell over themselves to burnish their ethos appeals with reference to their families. Climate crisis? It’s all Rishi’s girls ever talk to him about so, y’know, he cares. NHS? And did Sir Keir mention that his dad was a humble toolmaker and that he, too, knew what it was like to have your phone cut off because you’d failed to pay the bill?

Watching Sunak, you could see the stiff and nervous result of hours of intensive debate prep from the Tory party’s rhetorical turd-polishing department. Having determined that their candidate was hard to relate to, struggled with spontaneity, and couldn’t help looking slappably smug, they did the best they could to drill him. He had been told to look down the camera, and repeat a small handful of phrases and lines in the hopes that they stuck in people’s heads after the sight of his ghastly comportment at the podium had, hopefully, faded.

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Someone, at the very beginning of this campaign, decided that the two phrases he needs to get across to the electorate are “clear plan” and “bold action”. Work them in as often as you can, Rishi. And so he did. Those were the lines he repeated in that bizarre, soggy speech outside Downing Street that fired the starting gun for the election. And those were the lines he repeated every chance he got in the debate.

Cost of living crisis? Why, the Conservatives had “bold action” for that. And, what’s more, a “clear plan”. Immigration? “Bold action” was very much the thing. Oh, and “sticking to our plan”. On foreign policy? I’ve made a “bold” decision. Young people? Making you do national service is “an example of the bold action I’m prepared to take”.

How is running a country like running a football team (another point in Etchingham’s favour is that though she was clearly ordered to ask this “tongue in cheek” question at the end, she didn’t conceal her contempt for its idiocy)? You need, wait for it, “A clear plan and bold action.”

He had been given two other lines of attack and one of defence. The line of defence was, simply, that the last 14 years had been nothing to do with him, and that “this election is about the future”. As you’d imagine, Sir Keir made a certain amount of hay with this because, well, why wouldn’t you?

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The attack lines were that Sir Keir was proposing what he variously called “Keir Starmer’s pension tax” and “Keir Starmer’s retirement tax” (they should have settled on one epithet in debate training) because they wouldn’t sign up to his triple-lock-double-plus-ultra or whatever their offer to their core vote is. “For the first time in the history of this country, pensioners will pay tax… Why do you want to do that to pensioners?” he asked in his best Leave-Britney-Alone voice.

But the main one was his claim that every working family would be £2,000 poorer under Labour. My goodness he said that a lot; even more than he said, “bold action”. And to be fair, it did get under Sir Keir’s skin. He tried, with some indignation, to rebut it — even going so far as to deny it in answer to a question about something completely different — but it’s a fool’s game to try to unpick a shonky financial statistic in 45 seconds and Rishi knows it.

Sir Keir, too, had been drilled. He uttered variations on the phrase “turning the page” and “fourteen years” every chance he got. But he did manage moments of genuine, or genuine-seeming, indignation. “Shocking… shocking…” he muttered, really seeming to be shocked as Mr Sunak claimed that the Tories could be trusted on national defence and that Labour couldn’t.

It seemed an odd thing to be the one to really get ventilated about — until you realised that he had momentarily mistaken himself for John McClane in Die Hard, so was taking this personally. He was Director of Public Prosecutions, he said indignantly, when they’d taken down seven aeroplanes that were about to be blown up (and where was Rishi then, eh? Betting against the country in his bank!). He’d been DPP, too, when they’d smashed criminal terrorist gangs — so people smugglers wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

The way he spoke about it, you’d think the DPP was the tip of the spear, personally kicking in doors and wrestling the controls of jetliners from jihadists rather than, say, organising the paperwork for their court appearances in an air-conditioned office in Petty France.

If he turns up for the final debate in an oil-stained vest and sees the PM off with the words “Yippee-ki-ay, motherfucker”, it will be a very welcome development. But the real pop-cultural parallel here is the Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman meme. We’re presented with a choice between two men who have rather more in common than divides them.

The infantile politics of the day, and the infantile format of the debate, means that they can talk about “tough decisions” but they can’t talk about tough decisions. Neither of them can admit that one way or another they’ll have to spend less, or tax more, than anyone wants to hear — and that they will both be at the mercy of events rather than otherwise. The rest is showbiz.

The screens show a livestreamed video, 24/7, of what’s going on at the other end. You walk down a drizzly Dublin street in the afternoon and there, shimmering ahead of you on the pavement, is an eight-foot slice of New York in the morning sun. You can wave through this portal to a stranger, going about his or her day, 3,000 miles away. And he or she can wave back.

Imagine the possibilities. A kiss across the ocean. A connection between the new world and the old one. Think of it as a Colm Tóibín novel without all the boring old words. There’d be curiosity and laughter, glinting interactions between strangers amid the play of happenstance and the quotidian events of an ordinary day. We’d all revel in new possibilities of human connection.

Except, no, that wasn’t what happened; or, at least, it wasn’t all of what happened. “Portal to hell,” was what the New York Post called it: “Live Dublin-NYC video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays.” It reported with a mixture of feigned dismay and barely repressed glee that “middle-finger exchanges and other lewd gestures are a common means of communication on both sides of the portal”.

The portal had only been open for a few hours when the Gardai had to forcibly remove a young woman who was “grinding her bum” on the screen on the Irish end of the connection. Drunken Dubliners have taken to waving swastikas or images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center at their American counterparts. In response, an American TikTokker flashed her breasts, claiming she wanted to show Dubliners her “two New York home-grown potatoes”.

Those of us for whom capitalising the word “Portal” immediately conjures the brilliant videogame about a laboratory experiment run by an insane computer will have sniffed trouble from the off. Likewise, those of us who have ever found ourselves in Dublin at pub kicking-out time. But even those who don’t have either of those reference points should have been able to see it coming. 

For isn’t the fate of the portals just a microcosm of the internet itself? The wired world seemed to promise a new era of global human connection, that would allow us to share the fruits of our knowledge, expand our communities, banish misunderstanding and widen our spheres of empathy. Instead, we turned 90% of it over to showing each-other our furry bits and used the rest of it to insult people we’d never even met, ambush innocent passers-by with Goatse or blue waffle, and ensure that death threats, rape threats and the music of Rick Astley spread at scale. And, yes, share a few cute pictures of cats. Thank heavens, at least, for those. Humanity is a many-splendoured thing.

These portals, on the other hand, can’t in any obvious way be used to siphon our personal information into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg, derail democracy, hound people to death or reshape the world irrevocably in the interests of soulless capital. They can be regarded as a more benign and lower-stakes metonym for what the internet gave us; and, accordingly, the behaviours they brought out aren’t really going to do much harm.  

One can disapprove of much of the rowdiness — nobody’s going to defend the trolls waving swastikas — but doesn’t something in you respond, sneakingly, with a little leap of old-world pride that, home-grown potatoes aside, Dubliners are apparently proving so much ruder than New Yorkers? Here is a response that would be recognisable to Chaucer, Rabelais or the traditions of Commedia dell’Arte.

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It is also a teachable moment. Whenever we are tempted to imagine that some technological gizmo will transform human behaviour and usher in a new Age of Aquarius, we are brought rapidly down to earth. Technologies don’t change human behaviour: they simply amplify it. Pace the New York Post, “bringing out the worst in people” is just what technologies are going to do. We’re all still apes, with ape brains and ape instincts. When we see someone peering at us, our instincts may tell us to smile and wave — but more often, as with chimpanzees at the zoo, they tell us to fling something at the bars. 

We’d like to see the whole world as one big family, but Dunbar’s Number — saying we’re not neurologically equipped to handle a personal network of more than 150 people — means we struggle a little with the principle. We look through a magic portal, see some wazzock in cycle shorts in Manhattan, and instead of greeting him as a brother in humanity, there’s some part of us that thinks: “That’s a stranger, and a foreigner, and therefore funny, and what’s more he can’t get me from there: I should pull down my trousers and wave my bum at him.”

Here, then, is (mostly) amiable misrule. It’s lols. It’s craic. It manifests the unruliness, the corporeality, the boisterousness that’s the best of us as well as the most annoying of us. It’s just that boisterousness that derails utopian projects and reminds the self-serious and vainglorious that they belong in the mud with the rest of us. So here’s to grindy-bum girl.

Good old Lionel, hitting on the sort of woke nonsense you couldn’t make up. But, hold up, what’s this? The real world has decided to compete. It has just been announced in the Bookseller that a female academic is publishing a book calling for the emancipation of the last class of people it’s still okay to oppress: children.

Allen Lane — one of our most prestigious publishers, by the way — boasts of acquiring a book by the philosopher Lorna Finlayson called Child Liberation: The Oppression of Children and the Case for Change. But this isn’t a put-on. In the words of its acquiring editor, it “reminds us that children are subject to legal and social discrimination, denied basic freedoms of movement and speech, and disproportionately likely to be in poverty and subjected to violence”.

But, but, but (you may think) aren’t some of those restrictions intended to reduce their chance of being subjected to violence? Aren’t things like, say, requiring children to go to school intended to reduce their chance of poverty? Apparently that’s not how the author sees it.

Dr Finlayson complains that nobody takes the idea of child lib seriously. “I think we have a bit of a collective mental block about childhood […] even within politically radical circles. If the idea of child liberation comes up at all, it’s reduced to caricature and summarily dismissed.”

Well there’s a tempting invitation if even I heard one: reducing the idea to caricature and summarily dismissing it is exactly what seems appropriate, not least because the book’s ahead-of-publication hype machine is reducing it to caricature already.

We can recognise that our ideas about what constitutes the span of childhood are culturally contingent and historically determined. We can recognise that there’s no natural or immutable law that tells us how we should police and protect children, or that tells us at what age they should be allowed to smoke, drink, take international flights and make whoopee. But to argue categorically — as the puffery for this book unequivocally seems to — that we should “break the consensus that children’s lives are not their own” is eye-catching but bananas.

I don’t know if Dr Finlayson has any children, or has even met any children, but if she has, they are clearly out of the usual line. Children, in my experience as the parent of a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, are not to be trusted with implements any sharper than a butter knife — let alone a vote, bodily autonomy or the decision as to whether they should go to school.

“Basic freedoms of movement and speech”? Any radical progressive in favour of giving children more freedom of speech than they already have will get a nasty surprise if they check out what teenagers say to each-other on their class WhatsApp groups. The last time I gave my 12-year-old freedom of movement, he left his guitar lesson, climbed on the W3 bus instead of the 144 and my co-oppressor, his mum, had to miss her Thursday football game to go and rescue him from the far side of Alexandra Palace.

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Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes

By Sam Leith

Children are maniacs. Left in charge of their own lives, they will subsist entirely on Lotus Biscoff Spread eaten from the jar with a dessert spoon. They are excellently good at losing things, breaking things, and setting things on fire. Given a free choice as to how to spend their days, they would play Rocket League on the PS5 or browse early Nineties indie songs on Spotify until their eyeballs fell out. Were we to take seriously the notion that children should be put in charge of their own destinies, I feel confident we could reverse the goods of western civilisation, patiently accumulated over millennia, in a generation or two.

An “oppressed group”? Sure, my 14-year-old will regularly make clear that she feels oppressed by the way that the boss-class, ie me, occasionally asks her to do her homework, stop looking at her phone, go to bed on time, leave for school before midday, empty the dishwasher or wave even a cursory hello to members of her extended family when they come to visit. By the orthodoxies of identity politics — in which her “lived experience” is sovereign and it is your task to listen humbly and “educate yourself” — you could construct the case that she is indeed oppressed. But it is not oppression as the medieval Russian serf, the plantation slave or the employee in a Chinese iPhone factory will tend to recognise the term.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the feral delinquency of my own children and all the children I have ever met may be a symptom of living under the normative yoke of late capitalism. Let us suppose that, were they only freed from the crypto-fascist structure of the nuclear family, the little brutes would at once become public-spirited, communistic, outward-looking, self-directed and responsible: pint-sized versions of the “organic intellectuals” mid-century Marxists dreamed of springing up in the proletariat like mushrooms after rain.

Nevertheless, it bears noting that the state of childhood autonomy for which Dr Finlayson appears to campaign — a state in which age discrimination is cast off, and children enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of adults — isn’t a glorious and untried future. It’s an inglorious and well-tried past.

Childhood itself — at least as we conceive it now, of a period between toddlerhood and early adolescence associated with play and education and (thank you, the Romantics) “innocence” — is an invention of the early modern period. Until relatively recently, in historical terms, children were to all intents and purposes treated as tallness-challenged apprentice grown-ups. The strong version of this case — the historian Philippe Aries’s flamboyant declaration in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” — has been largely discredited. But the weak version is unarguable.

Daniel Defoe, touring the UK in the early 18th century, reported approvingly from Norfolk that “the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread”.  It was only after decades of campaigning through that century and right up towards the end of the 19th century in this country that laws were passed to protect — sorry, oppress — such children.

Writing in 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took aim at the “free labour” of children (the term given to those child workers who still lived with their parents rather than being formally apprenticed), pointing out sourly that “If the labour were indeed free, the contract would approach, on the one side, too near to suicide, on the other to manslaughter.” Coleridge’s view, gradually, won out. Children were oppressed first by an 1819 Act which prevented children under the age of nine from being employed in cotton mills, and limited working hours for those over nine. They were oppressed again by the 1908 Children Act, which removed their right to the death penalty, their right to visit brothels, their right to buy tobacco and — unkindest cut of all — raised the legal drinking age to five. There’s a whole two-century long, hard-fought history of campaigning to remove rights from children, and personally I’m all for it.

And to state what will perhaps be obvious: no matter how high-minded the philosophical case for Child Liberation, we should be uneasy that there are people who will cheer such a case to the echo for non-philosophical reasons — specifically, those who will find distinctly appealing the idea that a liberated child will be capable of consenting to sex with adults. Nambla (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) and the UK’s now-happily-defunct Paedophile Information Exchange — both of which surfed the wave of contemporaneous late-20th-century liberation movements — were very keen on respecting the rights of children to express their sexuality freely.

I don’t for a second suggest that this is the agenda that Dr Finlayson is pushing, but it should give us — and in my view should have given her publishers — serious pause. Not all radicalism is a good idea just because it’s radical, and it’s possible to construct a theoretical position that’s very clever but doesn’t have a lick of sense. Perhaps the book itself will prove more sensible and more subtle than its hype, but from this far off it sounds just a tiny bit s-word.

It would be nice to think that Byron’s legacy to the world had been his poetry. But though Keats, Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth all have anthology pieces that the reasonably educated man in the street can quote, Byron does not. I have a very soft spot for his epigram on the death of Castlereagh (“Posterity shall ne’er survey a nobler grave than this;/ here lie the bones of Castlereagh. Stop, traveller, and piss.”), but few would place it at the centre of his literary achievement. Don Juan’s title has passed into common parlance (pronounce it like a retirement home for ruminants, rather than the waiter who banged your mum on that Spanish holiday in the Eighties) but the poem is now little read outside the academy, and that goes double for his breakthrough autofiction Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. As for (checks notes) Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, ‘nuff said.

Admittedly, Suede pinched the first line of “She walks in beauty” for an album track on Dog Man Star (Brett absolutely thinks of himself as Byronic), but it’s not exactly what Byron will have envisioned when he lay awake dreaming of literary immortality. Nerdy old Robert Browning, whom Byron would absolutely have bullied had the chronology allowed, is a hundred times cooler and more quotable these days. Byron did, admittedly, give us the phrase “stranger than fiction”, but the quote most associated with his name — “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” — was said of him rather than by him.

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ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius

By Sam Leith

There’s the nub of it. Nobody wants to read Lord Byron, in other words, but they absolutely want to read about him. They are interested in his foxy way with women, but not in the least interested in what was interesting about him, which was his foxy way with a feminine rhyme. The biographies continue to pour off the presses even though — as one of the authors of those biographies, Alexander Larman, recently had the good grace to observe — there’s no great likelihood any of them will improve on Fiona MacCarthy’s definitive 2002 Byron: Life and Legend.

MacCarthy wouldn’t have been so vulgar as to use it in that sense, but “legend” has become ever more le mot juste. Byron is now “a legend” in the way drunk lads use the term of even drunker lads in the pub. He kept a pet bear as an undergraduate! He swam the Hellespont! He went on the lam in Europe! He committed a ton of adultery and may or may not have done the nasty with his cousins and his half-sister! He fought (or was, at least, fighting-adjacent) in the Greek War of Independence! He died young and left a good-looking corpse! What a ledge!

The most enduring legacy of Byron, which I don’t imagine he’d have much minded, being a raging egomaniac, is the idea of Byron, as incarnated above all in the adjective “Byronic”. Google Ngrams, which tracks the frequency of a keyword’s usage in Google’s vast corpus of digitised books, tells us that epithet is still going strong and getting stronger. The graph is a mountain range — rising dramatically in popularity through the 20th century and at a historic peak in the last decade. The examples usually given of Byronic heroes — those who aspire to Byronism, and those who have Byronism thrust upon them — are characters such as Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, Mr De Winter or Johnny Depp. Pete Doherty was a Byronic hero before he dried out, got chubby and stopped being such an arsehole.

But “Byronic”, be it noted, is a term that is never used anything other than positively. It goes with “hero” like “horse” goes with “carriage”. To be Byronic is to be willful, ardent, brooding, superhumanly attractive, and to have a thrilling disregard for bourgeois convention. It is to be an existential hero. It is, admittedly, usually to have a flaw — but the flaw is of the ennobling, Tragic Flaw sort, like being too tempestuous and passionate. The flaw in a Byronic hero is the sort of humblebraggy flaw that makes him (it’s always him) more interesting. You’ll never catch a Byronic hero having the sort of flaws the rest of us deal with, such as being a bit thick or suffering from athlete’s foot. Byronic heroes may be cruel and self-involved, but chicks dig them.

Archetypal Byronic heroes are super-heterosexual, which Byron wasn’t, and super sexually aggressive. You don’t catch a Byronic hero sitting patiently through a consent workshop or learning to be emotionally intelligent and hold space for women’s voices. It’s bizarre that “Byronic”, as a praise-word, has survived #MeToo — which might be #problematic when you consider that, as Ben Markovits, who wrote a trilogy of novels about him, put it, he was “by our own modern standards […] probably a paedophile and certainly a rapist, at least of the statutory kind”.

In the plus column, the real-life Byron’s flamboyant bisexuality could be seen as a pioneering queering of the Romantic hero figure; but it should be added onto the other side of the ledger that when he popped his clogs in Greece it wasn’t just the noble cause of Hellenic independence he was pursuing, but Hellenic jailbait. He spent the last months of his life ardently chasing a 15-year-old Greek lad who wasn’t interested in him in the slightest.

Sex aside, it’s odder still that what the word Byronic never seems to connote — which is a bit odd given Byron is above all a comic poet — is humour. The one thing Mr Rochester and Heathcliff did not do — not now, not never, not once — was make a funny joke. Byronic heroes are pompous old souls, even though the man himself made his very reputation through his wit. The fizz and paradox in Byron’s verse is absent from his eponym. If you’re “Wildean”, you’re witty. If you’re “Byronic”, you’re just a shagger who really, really needs to get over himself.

Before he did so, he said: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all.” He live-streamed his self-immolation on the gaming platform Twitch.

Here is a chilling collision of the digital and the analogue, the 21st century and the medieval. A US national (a member of the armed services, no less) felt he was digitally complicit in a war being fought on the other side of the world; and streamed his protest in the nowhere of cyberspace. Yet the form of his protest, which fits into a centuries-old tradition, could not have been more primal and embodied.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “luxury beliefs” — political positions or radical ideas that the privileged adopt as a mark of status, and whose trickle-down effects tend to be borne by the less privileged. There are lots of reasons — ulterior motives, if you like — to hold a political position or go on a march. You might hope to impress girls with your keffiyeh and combat trousers. You might hope to acquire radical chic, to fit in with your peers, to épater la bourgeoisie. You might like the thrill of a bit of mild crowd violence, in a safely policed environment, as you holler your demands to defund the police. There are any number of peripheral reasons you might wave a banner or put a brick through a window.

What you don’t do for a luxury belief is set yourself on fire. If you set yourself on fire, there isn’t the slightest chance that your act of protest is a pose. There’s an ungainsayable level of commitment there. The Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, stung by music-press sneers that the band were wannabe punk-rock posers, once took the opportunity of an interview with the NME to carve “4 REAL” into his arm with a razorblade. Self-immolation is that gesture squared, that gesture cubed. It literalises the declaration made by Nelson Mandela on his commitment to jail in a Pretoria courtroom: “It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

It is a uniquely spectacular and paradoxical form of protest, though. It is not instrumental in any obvious way. The suicide bomber is prepared to give his life to destroy his enemies. The soldier in war is prepared to risk his life to attack or defend a territory or a flag. But the self-immolator makes a gesture whose only feature is the demonstration that his cause is more important to him than his life: a suicide-bomber without victims.

Self-immolation doesn’t seek to build networks of resistance (unless, and improbably, by social contagion). It doesn’t threaten or cajole. It doesn’t negotiate or even imply negotiation. It’s at once flagrantly egotistical and self-annihilating. We could think of it as the symptom of a diseased or distressed mind — as something essentially nihilistic. But the systematic way in which it has been used as a form of protest century in, century out — and that it still holds an appeal in the modern age — makes that hard to sustain. If anything, it’s idealistic — inasmuch as it holds as an article of faith that self-destruction can carry a meaning beyond itself. It’s a ritual.

But what is that ritual doing? Every form of protest is, one way or another, a rhetorical appeal: it seeks to persuade. And most forms of rhetoric seek to gather the communicator and the audience into some sort of coalition: to make a “we” from a collection of disparate individuals. But sitting on a pavement in flames makes no appeal for solidarity or fraternity: it marks you out as a person absolutely isolated from his or her fellow man. It’s a communication that extinguishes the communicator in the process. It bids for martyrdom, sainthood, Buddha-nature.

It’s not an accident, then, that self-immolation as a form of protest is or has been primarily associated with religious traditions. (It comes, among other things, with the Dalai Lama’s qualified seal of approval as a “practice of non-violence”.) The most famous act of self-immolation in living memory is that of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức — who set himself on fire in the summer of 1963 at a busy road junction in Saigon in protest at the regime’s persecution of his co-religionists. The press photographs of his burning went round the world. (Whether the monk would have approved his death being used on the cover of a multi-platinum album by Rage Against the Machine is a question for debate.)

And fire itself, as the medium, comes with religious overtones built in in any number of traditions: it’s a symbol of the divine. Fire is what humans stole from the gods. It’s the elemental symbol of our mastery and our hubris; it’s the basic human technology; and it’s the thing that the animal in us fears, that we flinch from by instinct. It’s the “red flower” in Kipling; Eliot’s “intolerable shirt of flame”. To embrace it as a manner of death has an intuitive symbolism that garnishes the sheer extremity of the act in a way that no other form of suicide can.

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There’s an awful sublimity to it: an unspeakable impulse to violence, extravagantly articulated, but turned inwards. The 1963 image of that burning monk is powerful not just because it’s so shocking, but because the image is so beautiful. The semi-translucent curls and billows of the flame wrap the perfectly composed human figure at the centre of them: Quảng Đức sat unmoving, in the lotus position, as he burned. His death was a conscious and ostentatious act of self-possession in the face of (we can safely assume) unbelievable physical agony. The paradox, again: an act that appears to be an extreme response to powerlessness; an act that seeks to demonstrate superhuman control.

Is Quảng Đức the inspirer of Airman Bushnell’s extraordinary and terrible death? We can’t know, because the act consumes the only person who could tell us why they are doing it or what they hope to achieve. But we do know that self-immolation has been a feature of protests among even apparently secular Westerners for decades now. There were periodic self-immolations in the US in protest at the Vietnam war. It was the self-immolation of a Tunisian stallholder, Muhammad Bouazizi, that sparked the Tunisian revolution, and self-immolation was a feature of the wider Arab Spring.

Perhaps the enduring attraction of this terrifying, self-destructive gesture of resistance implies that it has become something dangerously fitted to the digital age. That it has, in fact, become a meme.

At once, a Japanese prize barely heard of in the Anglosphere was making headlines around the world. Has the worst nightmare of the gatekeepers of high literary culture come true? Do the judges of the prize have faces dripping with egg, like a Master of Wine who picked the Blue Nun in a blind tasting? And is Rie Kudan, for her part, cheating? Well, no… and no.

To the latter question, we could counter that she was using AI-generated language precisely to make a point about AI-generated language: that is, that she wanted (as she puts it) to test the way “soft and fuzzy words” can obscure our ethical clarity. We could counter, further, that ChatGPT didn’t decide which 5% of the novel was going to be by ChatGPT, nor which bits of ChatGPT’s language were going in there.

And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that. If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was. Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?

The idea of the single, inspired author originating a text of near-sacred originality is itself a hangover from the Romantics. It’s a two-century blip. Before then, fiction-writers often did their damnedest to pretend they were copying from someone else, even when they were making it up. Chaucer was forever talking about “myn auctor”, and a text that came adapted from a precedent was seen as more trustworthy and high-status than one that didn’t. Milton reworked the Bible, Shakespeare reworked Holinshed, and so on and so forth.

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In more recent times, experimental and modernist authors have been using randomness, or the home-made equivalent of algorithms, to generate their texts for 100 years or more. In 1920, the Dadaist eminence Tristan Tzara announced that poetry could be written by taking a newspaper article of the length you wanted your poem to be, cutting it into its constituent words with a pair of scissors, shaking them about in a bag and then transcribing them in the random order in which they emerged. There’s a funny bit about it in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties.

That was only the starting gun for all manner of literary jiggery-pokery. William S. Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin picked up Tzara’s baton in the Sixties, experimenting with “cut-ups” (much like Dada poetry) and “fold-ins” (where you would fold two pages of an existing book together so the edges met, and read across the fold to make a new text). The fantasy writer Jeff Noon’s 2001 book, Cobralingus, presented a set of algorithmic instructions for transforming a text through what Noon called “filter gates”, something analogous to a DJ remixing a record. The children’s writer Andy Stanton recently published Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT, a serious/silly account of his experiments getting ChatGPT to write a novel about a blue whale with a micropenis.

Arbitrary literary constraints or outright randomness, then — which is to say, things outside the author’s control which help determine the final text — have a very honourable place in literary history. You could even see the sonnet form or the villanelle as a species of algorithm. The mid-century Oulipoians sought out baroque formal constraints (most famously, Georges Perec’s managing to write a novel without the letter E) by way of liberating their creativity rather than stifling it. Italo Calvino wrote a novel — The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) — around a tarot pack. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) presented the reader with loose pages in a box and invited you to read the novel in any order you liked.

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None of which is to say that Ms Kudan is necessarily an avant-gardist, or needs to be. Only that it’s a very narrow and regressive view of literature to see handing over control of some of your text to chance or to an algorithm as “cheating”. It’s what you do with the result that counts, and what Ms Kudan did was apparently, well, flawless.

There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress. You could even make the case, perhaps, that 5% of Ms Kudan’s prize money should rightfully be distributed to every Japanese language author on whose copyright work the algorithm was trained. But that question is a business and intellectual property issue: to one side of the purely literary question of its part in the creation of The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy.

Indeed, if you were of a literary-theoretical cast of mind you could point out what Tzara and his successors were gesturing to in an oblique way anyway: intertextuality. Every text, in the end, is made of other texts. Every word in a novel or poem is a borrowing: it depends for its meaning on the vast constellation of other contexts in which it has appeared, and through which its reader will understand it. Every author, in his or her individual way, is a meat-brained ChatGPT, “trained” on a lifetime’s reading of classics and copyright works.

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That’s really where the case of Ms Kudan really does probe an anxiety in the culture. What if the writer is (in the phrase Martin Amis used of V.S. Pritchett) a mirror, not a lamp? The Romantic model of the artist is underscored, after all, by a reassuring idea about humanity: that we are creators not creations, that what makes us distinctive isn’t simply a neurological compost of our inputs but some ineffable inner essence that can only be captured in the act of expression.

Is it possible, then, that we so fiercely police the distinction between what Large Language Models can do and human creativity because we’re… touchy about it? That we’re worried it may be a temporary distinction of degree rather than a fundamental difference of category; which is to say, no distinction at all?

No longer. When my wife recently accidentally left one of our two new cats outside overnight — she found it mewing pitiably at the kitchen door in the morning — she was racked with guilt. I hunt the house to make sure they are safely indoors before turning in of an evening. My mind roams to images of my cats being torn to bits by the urban foxes that slink along the fence, of their being scragged after accidentally invading the territory of a local tom (that happened to my old cat, and the vet’s bills were horrendous), or… of worse.

Our digital culture is saturated with cat adoration — the small portion of the internet not devoted to pornography or political hate-speech is mostly taken up with pictures of cats. But it’s also blooming, like squid-ink, with a related anxiety — that of cats as the objects of malice and cruelty. Rather than being independent creatures, cats now occupy a peculiar position in our minds: we think of them as (God help us) “floofs” and “fur-babies”, cuddly creatures utterly dependent on us for protection; but also as being hard to protect because, well, they’re cats. Unlike dogs, they go where they like and do what they like. It’s a recipe for paranoia.

And where there’s paranoia, there’s a buck to be made feeding it. ITV’s recent How To Catch A Cat Killer told the story — an easy heartstring-tugger for the likes of me — of a spate of cats being stabbed in a quiet close in Brighton, and of the Facebook group of local cat-lovers which was set up to warn other owners of the danger, and even ended up helping to track down the culprit. Where vigilantes, in the traditional Hollywood account of it, tend to be flint-faced, damaged, solitary men with gravelly voices and an unsmiling sense of purpose (think Charles Bronson, Jack Reacher, Batman, Rorschach or The Punisher), the acceptable real-life face of them is now a mildly out-of-shape middle-aged cat lover in a sensible jumper, specs illuminated by the glow of a last-generation laptop.

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Audiences eat this stuff up. This show was very obviously a low-stakes UK reprise of 2019’s surprise Netflix hit Don’t F*** With Cats, which followed an ad hoc group of Facebook friends tracking down a sicko who posted a video of himself suffocating a pair of kittens to death. Their collective digital sleuthing — every pixel was combed for clues as to the killer’s location, from soft furnishings to plug sockets — closed in on a Walter Mitty character called Luka Magnotta, a Canadian porn actor and wannabe model who had created an online persona for himself as fabulous as it was fictitious. Far from being a harmless weirdo, though, Magnotta showed all the signs of psychopathy — and went on to kill a human being before the police caught up with him.

The villain of ITV’s show had a bit less of Tom Ripley about him. He was a nightclub bouncer known to his colleagues as “Creepy Steve”, and though he stolidly denied the cat-killings in the face of all the evidence, he didn’t show any great flair as a master-criminal. He was clearly caught on CCTV, pretty early on, stabbing a cat. He had a knife in his flat contaminated with cat hair and blood. His mobile phone placed him at the location of 14 of the attacks. And his internet search history was full of things like “Dog killing cat”, which in the context is the sort of thing that tends to raise the long eyebrow of the law. Moriarty, at least, would have known how to use Safesearch Mode while planning his next heist.

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Still, a happy ending in both cases for the cat-loving forces of good. The online vigilantes in both these documentaries showed every sign of being responsible and cautious about what they did: they did everything they could to get the police involved. And their discoveries were in some cases genuinely helpful. It took a Brighton cat-lover to obtain the CCTV footage of Creepy Steve by following a trail of blood back to the scene of the killing; something that hadn’t apparently occurred to the police (busy as they no doubt were solving “proper” crimes). Funny, though, that we’re more inclined to give vigilantes a free pass when it comes to cats. Going after cat-killers online, fine: going after child-molesters, not so much (let’s not forget the innocent paediatrician hounded out of his house by concerned parents a few years back).

Pet cruelty seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s at once deeply emotive and, for the most part, below the level of the sort of thing that the police take an urgent interest in. Cats are low-level crime — in the Brighton case, the cat-killer had to be prosecuted for offences against property rather than cruelty to animals because there’s a far higher possible custodial sentence for the former than the latter. The law, literally, cares more about cats qua property than qua living beings. So why not get citizen detectives involved?

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Humans are born to hunt

By John Lewis-Stempel

The grisly history of serial killers might be one reason why not. Many if not most of them start out by torturing animals. Luka Magnotta was a classic example: like Ed Gein, he started on cats and moved on to people. Magnotta identified and threatened one of his principal pursuers, Deanna Thompson: he posted taunting videos of the casino where she worked. That is a bit yikes, as they say online. Creating fresh crimes, and making more work for your overstretched local bobby, by getting yourself killed is not anyone’s vigilante dream.

And there, again, we return to what documentaries like these say about our collective anxiety about cats. The stakes are at once low, and high. We infantilise them, much against their own nature. We pour into them — into their free-roaming nature and their vulnerability — our fears of an outside world that is more dangerous than our keyboard-tethered selves would quite like to look at face-on. And we fantasise, too, about being able to reach out and right wrongs in that outside world from the safety of our laptops. Prevention is better than cure, and documentaries be damned. Let’s lock the doors at night, and make sure the cats are in.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

Rooney has written another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love-lives. The Israeli state would welcome an edition, but she is withholding it from Israeli readers as a political gesture. Had she written a novel about the suffering of young Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Israeli state sought to ban it, I imagine she would join all right-minded folk in pressing for a Hebrew edition to be produced.

Sally Rooney has not decided to boycott an entire language. Her decision to refuse the Israeli publisher Modan to publish a Hebrew edition of her latest novel is the refusal of a specific Israeli publisher rather than the refusal of a Jewish language. You may argue the two will add up to the same thing – which non-Israeli publisher is likely to want to produce a Hebrew edition? — but the distinction in principle is not meaningless, and it’s the distinction that she herself makes.

In a statement she said she refused to work with a publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, adding: “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”

I think this is a silly move, but it’s not so obviously silly and/or malign as to be slam-dunked in 280 characters. We need to keep this a manageable length, though, so rather than start from 1967, or 1948, or 19th-century pogroms and the birth of Zionism, let’s start from Rooney’s position — which is that Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population, and its illegal settlements, are illegitimate and deplorable. Let’s take that as a given, whether or not we agree with it. And let’s shelve, too, the argument that you’re only allowed to boycott Israel if you also boycott Russia, Saudi, China and any other countries whose human rights records bear similar challenge. It’s not necessarily a trivial objection — a key part of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is holding Israel to a double standard by “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” — but it would be, if we’re to approach this issue (as I’m trying to) on Rooney’s terms, to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Let’s take Rooney’s decision on its own terms. She sees Israel as a baddy. She supports the BDS movement, which holds it legitimate to punish Israel for its badness by economic sanctions and cultural boycotts – on an analogy with the isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. (Is Israel an “apartheid state”? Let’s shelve that one also.) So she won’t let Israel have Beautiful World, Where Are You? because, essentially, they are a baddy and so they Can’t Have Nice Things.

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I’m trying to get to the nub of this, which is the question of what her decision achieves — or hopes to. Sanctions and boycotts are intended to strike a blow against a regime, not against its people. (I can’t speak for Rooney, but I’m presuming she deplores the Israeli state rather than its Jewish inhabitants.) The most powerful arguments against them have always been that in seeking to do the former, they achieve the latter. And, indeed, you can argue that thanks to the backfire effect, they sometimes help the regime by uniting its people in being pissed off about the sanctions.

Still, in economic terms, a successful boycott will seek to hurt a country’s GDP; it will discourage international investment; it may specifically prevent it buying weapons, energy and the other things that a regime needs to thrive. And in cultural terms, it will seek to damage its soft power, and the regime’s internal claim to legitimacy, by signalling its isolation from the international community.

So to take the example of apartheid South Africa, you could make a case for refusing to play international cricket there, or disapproving when major rock stars played Sun City. There’s propaganda value to hosting an international sporting tournament — those who blether on about sport being “above politics” haven’t been paying attention — or having Dolly Parton play your national stadium. It signals, soft-power-wise, that your country, and by extension its government, is a legitimate member of the great family of nations. Bad luck on innocent cricket fans of all ethnic and political stripes; but more infuriating, you’d hope, to the cricket-loving white supremacists in charge of the country who felt humiliated by the snub.

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But books, I submit, are a totally different type of good from weapons, financial instruments, petroleum, sporting events or Dolly Parton concerts. They are no use to a regime; and they can sometimes be a nuisance to it. Reading is a private, rather than a communal event. Governments, as a rule, couldn’t give two hoots about what its citizens are reading at bedtime. You can’t hoist the flag over a scattered population of readers losing half an hour here or there, on a timetable of their own devising, in an imaginary world.

The reason that when states do take an interest in books it’s to ban them is precisely that they don’t fit into an authoritarian order (Israel, I should add, is not in that sense anything like an authoritarian regime). The widespread liberal enthusiasm for the free circulation of books links to this — as well as to the idea, though we shouldn’t push it too far, that fiction is in some way a moral agent. Here we get to George Eliot’s old line that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. Books can change minds, spread ideas and, yes, enlarge sympathies.

So, to repeat, what does Rooney intend to achieve? She’s a bestseller, sure; but not to the extent, I imagine, that missing out on her new paperback will damage the Israeli economy. The publishing house is a private rather than a state concern. There’s no soft-power blow that withdrawing her book strikes to the prestige of the Israeli regime, either. As I say, they couldn’t give a toss which of their citizens get to read about the tangled love-lives and troubled consciences of Rooney’s protagonists.

And in deciding that ordinary Israeli citizens should not get to read her book (my guess, for what it’s worth, is that most of her Israeli readers will be of a liberal internationalist bent in any case) Rooney seems to sell her own work short by indicating that there’s nothing in it that might do the private and disaggregated good of enlarging sympathies, changing minds, expanding sensibilities. That it’s just product, like the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream that you also can’t buy in Israeli occupied territories.

Perhaps, as with Ben & Jerry’s, an Israeli boycott will be good branding for that product in the liberal west. But it’s hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians.

“Let no damn Tory index my history!” Such, it’s said, was the declaration of the historian Thomas Macaulay on his deathbed. It may surprise some to learn that the innocuous piece of apparatus that you barely notice in the back of a book could inspire such vehemence. But in the 18th century, when the “index wars” raged, it was a political weapon. Whig and Tory partisans took to circulating home-made indexes to their opponents’ works; and, as a hilarious chapter in Dennis Duncan’s new history of the index makes clear, they didn’t even pretend to objectivity.

Here, for instance, is a flavour of “A Short Account Of Dr Bentley, By Way Of Index,” written by one of the theologian Richard Bentley’s opponents:   

The index is also a way of solving the problem of Big Data. As soon as you accumulate even a moderately large collection of written material, the important question becomes not what it contains, but how you make it navigable. That’s where the interpretation comes in: indexers make a body of data useful to its reader. This problem is not new: Duncan’s book draws a historical line that connects Google to the Great Library of Alexandria.

His white whale is the modern subject index. Nowadays, it’s done — or should be — by skilled professionals. I have the honour to serve as honorary president of the Society of Indexers, which trains and accredits the people who do this vital work. Many people — among them, alas, some publishers — seem to think any fool or, ideally, a computer, can do the job. They are wrong. As the words Macaulay uttered on his deathbed make clear, indexes are always — at least if they’re any good — the product of a human hand and a human mind.

Indexers will know as no computer can when “Number Ten” is a metonym for the Prime Minister and when it refers to a building, or that the “Charles” on page 36 refers to the Holy Roman Emperor and that the “Charles” on page 37 refers to the river in Boston. They will have thought about what’s important in the text — what the reader might need to find — and what is not. And indexers specialise: you need to know a bit about physics to index a book on physics, just as knowing a mirepoix from a mirabelle is handy if you’re indexing a cookbook.

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The English scholar and preacher Robert Grosseteste, who was said to have “got his surname from the greatness of his head, having large stowage to receive, and store of brains to fill it” created a Tabula distinctiones — a list of 440 concepts or subjects with locators (there being no page numbers, he had to use his own set of symbols) identifying where they were to be found in his library. Here was an index not to a single book, but to a lifetime’s reading — and the prototype of the modern subject index.

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That distinction, in one story Duncan tells, saved a man’s life — a 16th-century scholar working on a Biblical concordance escaped execution for heresy only when he could demonstrate that he was doing the mechanical work of reordering the Bible text rather than in any way adding, altering or retranslating it.

The distinction between these two types of index continues to this day. Google, for instance, is not indexing the web in quite the sense that an indexer indexes a book. Rather, it’s compiling a sort of global concordance. No coincidence that its parent company is called Alphabet. Yet, as Duncan observes, the now ubiquitous hashtag on social media is a sort of subject-indexing tool. We still need technologies to make vast data collections navigable — and digital or analogue, those technologies haven’t changed in their underlying nature.

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Harry, the Prince of PR

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For a long time, anyone who’d written a business or self-help book based on their Ted Talk was described by their publicists as a “thought leader”. Briefly, “influencer” was the thing to be if you’d written a book of lifestyle tips: essentially a way of indicating to booksellers that this pustular teenager had a gazillion followers on Instagram so probably merited the front table treatment even if — being the wrong side of 25 — you’d never heard of them. 

Now, though, we live in a more caring and politically conscious age. Hashtags are no longer for selling #swag, but for organising progressive political movements; which can, in turn, be used to sell swag. The way this manifests is in what I am coming to think of as the activist tricolon. 

On Monday one publicist wanted to alert me to a “poet, writer and activist”. Last Thursday it was a “veteran, [comma sic] politician and activist“. The day before it was an “Olympic boxer, model and activist”. I’ve had, just in recent weeks, “award-winning actress, model and activist”, “activist, researcher and policy maker”, “bestselling author and women’s empowerment activist”, “former publisher, community advocate, and activist”.

But what is an “activist”? It’s a pretty broad term these days. So broad, I worry, that it is starting to verge on the meaningless. For instance, a recent Guardian headline quoted “Composer-pianist Max Richter” to the effect that “Creativity is activism”, which seems to set the bar pretty low. I was reminded a bit of the wacky social theorist Michel de Certeau, who maintained that having illegible handwriting or walking down the street in a wonky zig-zag path constituted resistance to the ineffable structures of power.

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Once, it was clear what “activist” meant. It meant: “smelly hippy” (or, if you preferred, “dedicated leafleter, marcher and supergluer of self to solid objects in inconvenient places”). You knew where you were with an activist. Depending on your temperament and geographical location, you either arrested them and dropped them out of a helicopter, or you bailed them out of prison, circulated their samizdat writings and cheered in support of their brave direct action. 

The one thing that you tended not to do, whichever side of the divide you were on, was buy their books in any great numbers. In the second half of the last century, stalwarts like Jonathon Porritt would issue earnest books about the politics of ecology, and they would slide out of print. Polemical texts on feminism, Marxism and race consciousness sold in specialist outlets and to politics departments, but with the odd exception — Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch being a notable one — did not trouble the bestseller lists.  

Now, they are a positive publishing trend. Movements came with reading lists, and civilians read them. Black Lives Matter was accompanied by a slew of hugely successful books from the likes of Ibrahim X Kendi, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Ta-Nehisi Coates (while a new generation rediscovered bell hooks and James Baldwin).

Similarly, #MeToo and an associated revival of interest in feminism helped propel any number of books to bestsellerdom — Caroline Criado-Perez, Roxane Gay, Ronan Farrow, Rebecca Solnit, Laura Bates… Not since turtlenecked café-dwellers in the 50s flaunted their Camus and Sartre have dead-tree books been such a conspicuous badge of a particular sort of identity.  

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But that does, it seems to me, two things; one good, one less good. The good thing is that books are being sold, and presumably read — which gives a sort of intellectual ballast to progressive movements.

The less good thing is that — capitalism being the brilliant monster that it is — resistance to capitalism has become just another way of selling things. This is what used to be called “co-optation”. Here is, perhaps, the publishing industry’s equivalent of (though I don’t like the phrase) what sometimes gets called “woke-washing” — where Nike or Coca-Cola surf the social justice movement of the week with a fusillade of glossy Instagram posts. An athlete’s memoir or a model’s cookbook looks just that bit more saleable if you can also call them an activist because they’ve been saying right-on things on social media.   

“Activist” is a label so freely applied that it has become a brand rather than an activity, a general-purpose kicker to any other two things you can boast of in your career. That’s why it always comes as the final term in a tricolon: it’s a side-gig as part of a portfolio of self-fashioning, a lapel-pin more than a protest flag. I am not suggesting that many of the individuals so described are not doers of good works. Perhaps alongside their busy careers as authors, pop stars, writers, athletes, actors and so on, they spend their leisure hours organising demonstrations and petitioning for judicial reviews. But these days, what it takes to qualify as an “activist” is a bit more hashtag than black flag. As Danny the drug dealer ruefully remarks in Withnail & I: “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” 

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One old friend who works as a literary agent rightly reproached me for claiming that three in four authors are now billed as an activist. I copped to the hyperbole, but said I bet she had the odd “X, Y and activist” on her own list — and she conceded that, yes, there was the odd one. Which, I think, slightly bore out my point. She’s a jolly good literary agent and if she’s signing up activists you can bet that they sell books. 

Perhaps the distinctly pre-#metoo saying that if you need to say you’re a lady, you aren’t one applies here. After all, if you call yourself a “troublemaker”, “dissident”, “maverick”, “cynic”, “disruptor”, “rebel” or “speaker-of-truth-to-power” in your social media bio, almost everyone who reads it will think you are a colossal wally. “Activist” isn’t quite there yet — but it’s on the way. And the ones who really put in the hard yards — you couldn’t accuse Marcus Rashford of being a lifestyle clicktivist, for instance — aren’t done any favours by sharing the label with lifestyle clicktivists who glibly chirrup, as it were, “me too!”

What is it, you might wonder, that makes Mr Osborne the best qualified person to do this job? Does he spend his idle hours thinking about the best way to facilitate the curation of valuable collections and the ethics of repatriating plundered antiquities? Is he a scholar of archaeology and an expert on the way museums are run around the world? Does he have outstanding contacts in the arts world? Or is he, rather, The Right Sort Of Chap?

This appointment reminds us that the economy in this country is essentially divided in two. There’s a very big bit of it, involving most people, where you are expected to develop skills in a particular job. You train as a doctor or a lawyer, or you apprentice as a stacker of shelves or a maker of widgets. If things go well, you steadily ascend the ladder of your chosen career, becoming more senior and better paid. If things go badly — say, they invent a robot that can do the same job more cheaply, or people cease to want coal dug out of the ground — you are stuffed. You have to “retrain”, to move into another sector.

Then there’s this small other part of the economy — which is, incidentally, the part in charge — where you need no specific skills at all. It is about being, like George, The Right Sort Of Chap. You have ascended to a level of seniority by sucking up to the right people and getting in the right gang — and once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Being The Right Sort Of Chap trumps any domain-specific knowledge or experience. You will swan into one board-level job or consulting gig after another. What they want is your contacts in the corridors of power and your name on the letterhead.

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The Right Sort of Chap is a part of the nepotistic, private-school-dominated establishment, in which your path is eased by knowing the right people and projecting the right front (as a public-school educated brat myself I check my privilege in that department); but they’re what you might think of as the god-tier version. Public school chutzpah can help get you to the top of a profession; Right Sort Of Chapness, once you’ve got there, renders your specific profession irrelevant. You can run companies, newspapers, universities, cultural institutions or countries with equal confidence.

Sometimes people make it to this stage by toiling up through the first section of the economy and reaching escape velocity: they are at board level in their chosen industry and find themselves, in the silver back end of their career, accumulating seats in the Lords, directorships and chairs here there and everywhere. There’s the assumption, perhaps not always wrong, that corporate governance is a transferable skill. And there’s the agreeable sense that if you sit on each other’s remuneration committees everyone can be accommodated in a civilised way.

But some, like our George, get there with no very concrete sign of prior achievement at all. Having struggled to get anywhere in journalism (turned down for this trainee scheme; turned down for that job; reduced to freelance shifts on the Telegraph diary — and some of us know what that’s like) he plunged into Conservative Central Office as a young thing and ended up scooting up the political ladder with the Notting Hill Tory chumocracy. Right place, right time, right pals. He was now The Right Sort Of Chap.

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He had a golden few years in Cabinet and then, having bished up the Brexit campaign and seen his main patron throw in the towel, he started rampaging through the private sector, where former Chancellors of the Exchequer command a premium. Adviser to a handful of venture capital outfits; chair of a think-tank; honorary professor here; visiting fellow there. Why wouldn’t he end up editing the Evening Standard or chairing the BM as a sideline?

Propriety requires me to make a declaration of interest here: George fired me as a columnist from the Evening Standard. I don’t spend a lot of time plotting his downfall, but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t smirk if I read that he’d fallen down an open manhole. Still, the evidence that he was a poor editor of that paper is abundant even if, in firing me, he showed he was capable of making the odd sensible decision.

Having never been a proper journalist, he didn’t seem to get the idea that you’re not supposed to compromise editorial independence to suck up to friends, political allies and other employers of the editor. The coverage of Uber and Google and various other concerns was, we can say, suboptimal. But the Standard’s editorship, for George, was not so much a job as an influence-peddling sideline in any case; the main gig was a £650,000, three-day a week consultancy for the fund manager BlackRock, along with a by then uncountable number of other jobs whose highish salaries and lowish actual-work requirements were the main thing they had in common. And in this, he was not an outlier but a representative.

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The Right Sort Of Chap principle runs through British public life like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock. It starts early: once you’ve finagled your way into one of the great universities, you can often make a quick change of course. I remember watching contemporaries do so with something like awe. You got into Oxford to do, say, Theology against less than stiff competition — but now you’ve decided you’d prefer to study PPE, so you switch. Tough luck on the suckers who applied to that vastly oversubscribed course in the first place and didn’t get in.

At the end of it you get a milk-round job in a big five consultancy where — nice suit, middling degree from a good university — you’re sent out to advise professional businesspeople on how to run businesses. Consultancy, as a burgeoning profession in public and business life, more or less enshrines the principle that Right-Sort-Of-Chapness trumps actual knowledge or experience. By then, you’re on your way — set up for a sideways jump into politics.

After all, the principle continues at the most senior levels of governance — and is, on the face of it, an extremely odd one. Once you’re in the cabinet (and don’t let’s get started on the track records that gave us the likes of Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock and Priti Patel in their current seniority), you can be reshuffled to any portfolio at all. The quite absurd assumption is that the skills that outfit you to get in with the right gang in politics will outfit you to take any role in government. There will be first-year undergraduates who have a better grasp of economics than you — but the PM owes you one and you didn’t shit the bed as minister for fun, so boom: you’re Chancellor of the Exchequer.

These moves are not made on the basis of the candidate’s suitability for a given role but for reasons of Prime Ministerial patronage (it was a happy accident that when he became Chancellor, Gordon Brown was the sort of fellow who read books about post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory). And it’s for the same reasons that, rather than keep cabinet ministers in one department for many years so they actually learn something, they’re often as not bounced into a new one after a couple of years. That’s why we get Welsh Secretaries who don’t know the Welsh national anthem, trade ministers who haven’t grasped the importance of the Dover to Calais route and Northern Ireland ministers who haven’t quite got round to reading the Good Friday Agreement.

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This government has been even keener than most on the Right Sort Of Chap principle, even extending it to the awarding of public contracts during the pandemic. Companies with no experience of making PPE, or in some cases no experience of making anything at all, were awarded multi-million pound contracts to have a bash at it on the apparent basis that they drank in the same pub as a cabinet minister, or were mates with Dominic Cummings, or had the PM’s mobile number. And failure — as everyone from Serco or G4S to Matt (“totally fucking hopeless”) Hancock knows — is no obstacle to continuing in post.

Dido Harding is perhaps the outstanding example of the Right Sort Of Chap. She, too, made the right friends at university. She did her apprenticeship in consultancy, and there followed a merry-go-round of board-level appointments at which she was, mostly, heroically useless (notoriously presiding over the TalkTalk data loss fiasco). She failed upwards to become a Tory peer and, again with no domain-specific experience, was put in charge of Test and Trace — which had the distinction of being one of the most spectacular failures in the long catalogue of governmental failures during the pandemic. Not, apparently, troubled by self-reflection, she’s now campaigning to be put in charge of the whole NHS. She’ll probably get the job. And if she doesn’t, perhaps George will see her right with a senior role at the British Museum.

After all, he is part of an establishment that operates on the blithe assumption that all skills are transferable, that an aptitude for political schmoozing magically confers any number of lesser competences on its owner — and that the Right Sort of Chap is the right person for the job, even if they’ve proved otherwise, time and again.

“My Lords and members of the House of Commons,” Her Majesty the Queen said at the State Opening of Parliament yesterday morning, “My government’s priority is to deliver a national recovery from the pandemic that makes the United Kingdom stronger, healthier and more prosperous than before. To achieve this my government will level up opportunities across all parts of the United Kingdom, supporting jobs, businesses and economic growth, and addressing the impact of the pandemic on public services.”  

She did her duty, as she always does. But Her Maj, to put it as forthrightly as possible, looked mightily fed up. No attempt was made to conceal that this is a speech written for her, read by her as a matter of constitutional form, and that any enthusiasm she may or may not have for the material is quite irrelevant. This was signalled in the very opening words, which she read glumly from a pamphlet with a brief upward glance at her audience but not even the hint of a twinkle. 

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It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

That she ends up with such unwieldy political buzzphrases in her mouth is not just the fault of a careless or inept speechwriter; nor even of the unavoidable juxtaposition between a monarch born in the age of the wireless and a government in the age of WiFi. It is a symptom of the widening gap between what the monarch is intended to stand for, and the language in which politics is now conducted. To put it in Bagehot’s terms, as the “efficient” part of the constitutional settlement becomes more technocratic, so the “dignified” part becomes less dignified.    

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Harry, the Prince of PR

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On that occasion she projected respectful sincerity as she said: “I know what a rare privilege it is to address a joint meeting of your two houses. Thank you for inviting me.” She offered a strong and resonant affirmation of national fraternity (gently finessing the constitutional differences) when she said: “The concept so simply described by Abraham Lincoln as ‘government by the people, of the people, for the people’ is fundamental to our two nations. Your congress and our parliament are the twin pillars of our civilisations and the chief among the many treasures we have inherited from our predecessors. We, like you, are staunch believers in the freedom of the individual and the rule of a fair and just law.” 

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How the Queen brings us hope

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But the first body — the royal body — must go imperturbably on despite everything. If Elizabeth Windsor could sit down with Oprah and “speak her truth” I suspect she would have some very salty things to say indeed. But she never could, and she never would. This monarch is determined, for as long as she can, and whatever the cost to her soul and peace of mind, to keep the show on the road. It would befit the government to show a bit of respect for that devotion to duty. Sheesh: “Level up.” Give the poor old doll a break.  

Perhaps Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous apopthegm is his brisk declaration that “there is no second act in American lives”. It’s a brilliant line, but if we take it at face value (and assume he’s talking about a two-act rather than a three- or five-act play) it’s not only off-beam; it ignores that the second acts of American lives are in most cases more fascinating than the first ones.  

This is a physical image of Trump’s ego: it was inflated and distended by his tenure as one of the most important men in the world, but it was punctured by the 2020 election. His importance wheezed out of him and continues to do so, and the great vast balloon of his ego now hangs deflated in folds and swags. What is he to do with all that baggy drapery?

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What will the New York Times do when Trump goes?

By Sam Leith

The thing that I suspect will have pierced him is that the initial, rancorous version was greeted not with outrage and front-page coverage so much as the odd wry little smirk. “Jesus couldn’t have said it any better,” was the response of a writer for the New York Times. The libs are no longer triggered, still less owned. Trump is in the process of sliding gently from the news pages back to the diary columns or the “And finally…” section. 

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Older leaders are not always wiser

By Daniel Kalder

But a noble aspiration is one thing. The emerging reality looks worryingly like one of those “How It Started/How It’s Going” memes. Take, for instance, his latest gig. He’s to be “Commissioner on Information Disorder” at the nonprofit Aspen Foundation, sitting on a panel holding a six-month inquiry into the spread of misinformation online.

And this is how he announced it:

“As I’ve said, the experience of today’s digital world has us inundated with an avalanche of misinformation, affecting our ability as individuals as well as societies to think clearly and truly understand the world we live in. It’s my belief that this is a humanitarian issue and as such, it demands a multi-stakeholder response from advocacy voices, members of the media, academic researchers, and both government and civil society leaders. I’m eager to join this new Aspen commission and look forward to working on a solution-oriented approach to the information disorder crisis.”

Just cherish every word of that: “multi-stakeholder response”, “advocacy voices”, “civil society leaders”, “solution-oriented approach”. Leaving aside the questionable metaphor in that clunking first sentence (can you be inundated by an avalanche?), here is a full card of Bullshit Bingo. These are expressions that no ordinary English-speaking human being has ever uttered spontaneously aloud or written without irony; they are the zombie catchphrases of a corporate PR department.

I have no way of knowing for sure that this is not how Prince Harry naturally expresses himself. But I hope it won’t be considered lèse-majesté to say, I hae ma doots. And in a way it doesn’t matter. It is a sign of how far in the shit we are that many, if not most, people will assume it was written for him, and won’t think anything much of it.

Not only do we consume misinformation but we expect to, and correct for it, and blithely wave through what looks like misinformation even when it’s contained in the announcement of someone “eager” to embark on a new job waging war on misinformation.

Corporate, comms-style bullshit presented as personal from-the-heart statements is so normalised that it looks like nitpicking to even raise the question. Of course you’re not actually supposed to think that Prince Harry thinks anything of the sort, or that if he did, this is how he’d tell you about it. Don’t be so naive!

You could compare the idiom of Prince Harry’s statement, as quoted last week in the announcement of his last new gig — as Chief Impact Officer (whatever that is) for a billionaire wellbeing startup called BetterUp:

“As BetterUp’s first Chief Impact Officer, my goal is to lift up critical dialogues around mental health, build supportive and compassionate communities, and foster an environment for honest and vulnerable conversations. And my hope is to help people develop their inner strength, resilience, and confidence.”

Italics – my hope; my goal — thus. The statement goes on for ages, so I won’t quote it all, but in addition to “lift up critical dialogues around”, we can tick off “driving advocacy”, “peak performance”, “thought leadership”, “outreach and strategic planning”, “self-optimisation” and many more on the bingo card.

More buzzphrases — but tailored in this case to mental wellbeing corporate nonsense rather than tech-bro civil-society corporate nonsense. This statement was introduced, incidentally, by one from BetterUp’s CEO which ended: “I could go on, but I think he can say it better himself.” It seems to me quite possible that the same person drafted both those statements. But let’s suppose it was not, and that Prince Harry not only spoke from the heart about the Aspen Foundation, but that he spoke likewise from the heart about BetterUp, and that he deftly altered his style on each occasion. In some ways, that would be worse: it would suggest that, rather than just letting these organisations put words in his mouth, he has allowed their empty idioms to soak into his very soul.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Some years ago, I was hosting a series of book events sponsored by a hotel chain. When they were being announced, the very nice and amiable PR for the hotel let me have a look at the press release. It contained a substantial quote from me, which he had invented (and which sounded not unlike the sort of thing attributed here to the Prince). He was genuinely surprised, and seemed not a little put out, when I insisted that anything I was quoted as saying or writing should be stuff I myself said or wrote. It was, he said, standard practice to do things the way he did them.

Perhaps it is. But look: the Duke of Sussex is a person who has staked his career and the second half of his life on being his own man. He has made authenticity — “speaking your truth”, as Oprah puts it — his big thing. He and his wife have spoken eloquently of refusing to be part of a system where the image of the Firm trumps the authentic needs and feelings of individuals. And yet here he is, within months, meekly offering himself as a human meatpuppet: his name and image, his personal beliefs and feelings, are available to be presented to the world in the hackneyed corporate cliches of a press release.

Even if you haven’t made a performance of how important it is to you to be your own man, parroting the sort of balderdash that comms departments churn out isn’t a trivial thing. It sells the pass.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

Of course Prince Harry would say — and no doubt truthfully — that he’s only taking jobs that align with his existing beliefs and support the causes he cares about. And perhaps he really does believe that he has a unique set of skills that make his executive role in these organisations worth every penny — that he’s a mental health professional and a shrewd analyst of the information ecosystem. Perhaps he believes that he can meaningfully do multiple senior executive jobs at once, and that his name on the masthead is no more than the cherry on the Bakewell tart.

But the application of Occam’s razor here suggests that it’s the right to have their language issue from Prince Harry’s mouth and have him glad-hand donors or shareholders that these companies are really paying for. They’re using him as… how would you put it? A figurehead. Imagine finding yourself in a job where your only role was to sprinkle celebrity fairy-dust on good causes and mouth strings of empty formal phrases. It sounds pretty soul-destroying to me. It sounds, in fact, a bit like being a member of the Royal Family.

We will have the hours between 9:15am and 3:15pm entirely undisturbed. Rather than prep, cook, and wash up three family meals a day — or sometimes more if one of your brood is fussy or vegetarian — we will once again be able to get away with a lunchtime cheese sandwich. We will be replying to urgent emails in silence and on a proper keyboard; not by jabbing crossly at a mobile phone in between shouting at our children that, no, fifty-six take away eighteen is not sixty frigging four. And when, at nine or half nine of an evening the children are finally pacified, we will be settling down with a beer to watch WandaVision rather than angrily starting our working day.

It has become a cliché to say that homeschooling has given parents new respect for teachers. But it’s the truth. Since schools shut, my wife has been squirrelled away in what was once my home office, working full-time, and I’ve been homeschooling a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old. I’m fit to break. Children are a giant pain in the teeth. Imagine trying to command the attention of 30 of these creatures at once, all day every day, and educate them to boot.

Yes, of course lockdown has brought unexpected bonuses. We eat together around the same table every day. We are — makes pious face — closer as a family. We have shared a staggering number of beany curries (vegetarian 11-year-old) and vegetable stir-fries. We have baked together, gardened together and explored the Marvel Cinematic Universe together. We have treated Joe Wicks as a household God. And we have trudged, day after day as the sun grew low in the winter sky, to play listlessly on the swings at the park near our house — noticing how, as the weeks have passed, the discs of ice in the churned mud have given way to the faint warmth of spring.

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I’ve been more aware of my children’s progress at school than I ever would normally be. I can tell you, for instance, that my seven-year-old can’t punctuate for toffee; or, at least, that he knows where capital letters and full stops need to be but that he absolutely can’t be arsed to use them. That he’s capable of spelling the word “which” wrongly two different ways in two consecutive paragraphs. And that at least once a day, usually when his blood sugar is on the low side, he will throw a violent tantrum, declare that he’s quitting home school and have to be physically dissuaded from sending his teachers disrespectful private messages on Google Classroom.

I know that, left unsupervised for more than three minutes, the boys will start looking up superhero Lego sets on the internet, exchanging scholarly information about Minecraft or exploring YouTube’s unimaginable wealth of videos of fart noises. And I also know that, when the mood takes them and their powers of concentration come on stream, they are capable of wonders. We have built Tudor houses out of cereal packets, designed supervillains, made Arcimboldo collages out of old editions of The Week Junior, written long illustrated stories, and wept at the WiFi as we try for the fifth time to upload a piece of work that needs turning in. That yellow exercise book, years from now, will be a treasure-house of memories.

Look, I don’t like to moan (that’s a lie: I love to moan; moaning is the only thing that keeps me going). I’m aware that I’m one of the lucky ones. We can afford lockdown. I have a job that can be done, just about, in discontinuous bursts at random times of day. I have (relatively) biddable children. I am not struggling with bereavement, single parenthood, sudden joblessness, a child with special education needs, marital breakdown or any of the other issues that have made homeschooling, for many parents, more than a series of affectionate jokes.

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But there’s something serious here about what comes after. What will it mean for the generation that will have had their education disrupted for nearly a year and a half? I’ve done my best — but I know that even with all their advantages, my kids aren’t as far ahead as they would have been had a professional been in charge. What of those with a parent unable to dedicate even the attention I have, struggling to feed their children properly or unable to access home learning?

We rejoice, as adults, at the return to school — as will most of our children. But the effects of this disruption will be felt for many years to come. It will be a little demographic ripple, another slight widening of the inequality gap — and like all ripples it will likely grow steadily wider as it travels forwards from the source. What, too, will it mean psychologically? Children are not just little bundles of economic potential to be groomed as efficiently as possible for deployment on the job market when they turn into adults.

Those children without siblings, or whose relationship with their siblings is uneasy: how have they coped without seeing their friends? Where do they get the affirmation of their individuality, the sense that they fit into a diverse patchwork of social hierarchies, when the only social hierarchy they have known since last spring has been the one in the four walls of their home? A year, when you’re under ten, is a hugely long time.

Even in my own home, where we all get along, it worries me. It haunts me that my daughter — 11 going on 15 — spends all day by herself, working away at her Zoom classrooms (if that is what she’s doing: a lot of those open tabs seem to be Depop and Billie Eilish videos). She sees a local friend, perhaps, once a week for an hour’s walk. Her brothers play constantly with each other but she’s isolated, too old or proud to join in their childish play. “I’m fine,” she says. But is she?

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

Is it coincidence that for weeks now my seven-year-old and my 11-year-old have refused to sleep through the night? That they appear at our bedroom door, infallibly, between one and three in the morning, complaining that they’re scared — and won’t go back to sleep until they’re in our bed and one of the adults is rehoused in a child’s bed? Perhaps it is. In the scheme of things, it’s no biggie. But I think that a little extra anxiety, a little extra loneliness, a little extra sense of disconnection from the world now comes as standard in households everywhere.

Beneath the laughs, beneath the showy competitive moaning and the great yelps of relief on Friday night Zoom drinks, then, there’s a real breath of sadness. Many of our children will barely remember this Covid year — but it’ll be with them, one way and another, for the rest of their lives.

God help all of us, Rule 34 has been working its magic on recent Washington politics. I’m not talking about the way the real-life dating history of the sort-of-historian, Trump cheerleader and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza — who is on record as having courted both Laura Ingraham and Anne Coulter at one time or another — resembles a discontinued experiment in alt-Right “slash” fanfiction. Nor the grisly real-life sexual behaviour of the beltway hanger-on Jason Miller. Nor, indeed, those indelible images of Rudy Giuliani adjusting his trousers on a motel bed in the new Borat movie.

No, I’m talking about the equally grim but at least victimless proliferation of Trump-era erotica available at knockdown prices in Amazon’s Kindle store. There’s really quite a lot of it, and some of it is very eccentric indeed. Of course, as much as you can put it down to Rule 34, it seems likely that a handful of PhDs are going to be spawned by this stuff. For my recent survey of the canon suggests that most of the authors are not aiming to arouse a sexual response in the reader so much as to make the reader gag — with laughter or revulsion.

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That makes sense, anthropologically. After all, lewd sexual depictions have long been a primary recourse of political satire. Think of the filthy late-medieval flytings of Skelton, the restoration rumpty tumpty of the foul-mouthed Second Earl of Rochester, the earthy vulgarity of a Hogarth or a Gillray; or in our own age the early work of Gerald Scarfe or the Spitting Image material that was too rude to put on TV. The high-quality stuff survives — Rochester was a first-rate poet — but you can be pretty sure that in each age any number of talentless poetasters and loo-wall scribblers were likewise aiming their political commentary below the belt.

Take “Chuck Tingle” (I suspect this of being a pseudonym; apologies to Ma and Pa Tingle if I’m wrong). One of the most prolific pornographers on the Kindle Store, Mr Tingle makes up in productivity what he lacks in literary — and he certainly seems to have taken an interest in the day-to-day beltway news cycle, as well as being jolly keen on bottoms. One of the many titles available at the time of writing was Domald Tromp’s Ass Is Haunted By The Handsome Ghost Of His Incriminating Tax Returns.  Or: Lindsey Ram’s Ass Is Haunted By The Physical Manifestation Of His Hypocritical Words About Not Filling A Vacant Supreme Court Seat During An Election Year Which He Specifically Ask To Haunt Him.  

One of the things you’ll notice about Mr Tingle’s work is characteristic of much of this subgenre of erotica. Its authors are far more cautious about libel lawyers than they are about family values campaigners. So “Lindsey Ram” is in no way to be mistaken for the senior senator from South Carolina with a similar sounding name, and likewise any resemblance between “Domald Tromp” and Donald Trump is entirely a trick of the reader’s imagination. In Dirty Debate: When the Masks Come Off, by “Byron Buffoon” (again, apologies to Ma and Pa Buffoon), the elderly but Viagra-toting protagonist is a presidential candidate called “Hoe Bi-man”. Attending a masked Hallowe’en party at the White House, he finds himself snatching a moment of sordid passion with “President Hump”. “Will you shut up, man?” he exclaims at one point. “I can’t stand your voice but goddamn this ass feels amazing.”

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We should at least consider the possibility that real sexual feeling is involved, of course. Could all this be a sign that the ferocity of the culture wars, like Beatrice and Benedick’s “merry war” of courtship in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the proxy for something else? After all, it’s a law not just of the internet but of the human libido that the more taboo something is the more arousing some people are going to find it. As Woody Allen (don’t @ me) said: “Is sex dirty? Only when it’s being done right.”  Does it, perhaps, account for the flowering of fantasies in which  political passions are channelled into baser enthusiasms? Is there a love-across-the-barricades, opposites-attract thing going on, in which milquetoast liberals secretly dream of being given a good seeing to by a hairy QAnon Shaman or a redneck in a Maga hat?

Honestly? I doubt it. Most of these stories show signs of having been written at some speed, and with drink taken. Donald Feels the Bern, by Cliff Fuxtable, has a bash at dramatising the psychosexual tensions between Left and Right. It opens with an “ageing Marxist” on a bar stool, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, fulminating against the Koch Brothers and wondering if the struggle to which he has devoted his life was worth it: “Just once, thought Bernie, I’d like to give the 1% a taste of their own medicine. Give it to ‘em nice and hard.” Happily, he gets the chance when a billionaire called Donald walks into the bar, and soon they’re in the toilets, reaching across the aisle. “Bernie had to admit that cavorting with a chivalrous billionaire was more arousing than he expected. Perhaps he could spend less time railing on the 1%,” it occurs to our hero, “and actually start railing the 1%.” The scenes that follow would give Lou Dobbs himself nightmares.

Charlie Dirk’s Ins-erection At the Capitol sees a Maga-hatted Capitol invader coming upon a wizened turtle-man (actually a turtle, for some reason, but let’s pass over that): “one of the traitors he hunted — a sitting US senator”. But rage turns to passion and “within seconds the two star-crossed antonyms were deeply intertwined…”. The old senator’s “papery old skin” is said to slap against the young stallion “like take-out crepe – pliant, somewhat warm, but still enjoyable”. 

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Why can't the Left let go of Trump?

By Kat Rosenfield

The protagonist of Babs Fluffmore’s I Pr0ned the GOP Platform is a liberal-minded seductress whose “almighty magic hooha” is carving a bisexual trail of havoc through a Republican convention in the romantic city of Cleveland. The story takes a strange turn halfway through when she steals a printed copy of the GOP Platform and uses her magic hooha to bring it to life. “It had transformed from a multi-strategic manuscript to a strong, attractive man… his body was composed of pages fluttering with excitement… ‘Shadows of Schafly!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s so big!’”

We are in the realm, here, not so much of proper erotica as of home-made satirical invective. From this point of view, then, T-Rex Pounds Presidential Butt by Buster Fritz is part of a distinguished literary and philosophical tradition that includes Aristophanes and Juvenal. But there again, it’s also about a President Tramp (the name thing again) and his successor President Byeden taking turns to be goosed in the caboose by a priapic dinosaur.

I’m afraid that though I have tried hard to find a sample of this story suitable for quotation on a respectable website such as this one, the project defeated me. Suffice to say it involves a lot of dinosaur dingus, and that if that’s your bag you’ll find it free to read with KindleUnlimited, and it may one day be a set text for your grandchildren’s GCSE History.

You say that you aim to unite the nation. You pay humble tribute to the voters and to the living presidents in the audience — in which respect, Donald Trump did Biden a favour by skipping the show. You say stirring things about the “American story” and the long tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. And above all you make the maneouvre that Lincoln pinched from Pericles for the Gettysburg Address: you say that you intend to honour the struggles and losses of the past by striving to create a better future.

You sprinkle the speech liberally with well-worn metaphors — crucibles and battles, cries for justice, storms and shadows, light and darkness, foundations shaken, chapters in history written, precious things hanging in balances, beacons beaconing to the world — and high-sounding epithets. Biden pulled “hallowed ground”, “sacred oath”, “soul”, “sacrifice”. “historic moment”, “dignity”, “humbled”, “eternal peace” and many more like them out of the presidential epithet generator. We might sneer, but cliché has its uses: it is reassuring to draw from a common stock of metaphor.

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The President's speech was scarily good

By Sam Leith

It’s not really possible to be too cheesy or too pious on such occasions (President Biden tested this proposition robustly), and it’s not really a great idea to depart from the script for the form of novelty. Especially not now. Biden’s job — amid a pandemic and with five people dead in a riot against the election result — was to play the reassuring mood music of an imperturbable flow of American history. This he did. The trick was to make it sound sincere.

Joe Biden doesn’t share Barack Obama’s lavish oratorical gifts, nor Donald Trump’s unpredictable and combustible energy. But he projected decency and sincerity, and he allowed the odd moment of folksy directness (“Look…” “I get you.” “Here’s the thing about life”) to cut through the flannel. And there was no mistaking his central message. The word “unity” and its cognates appeared more than a dozen times in the speech.

He used the bog-standard toolkit of the formal orator in the grand style. He piled on the anaphora (repeating phrases) and the tricolons (groups of three) and even whacked in the odd chiasmus, such as “we’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but the power of our example”, which would have been even niftier had he not said it before, and Bill Clinton said it before him.

He yoked pairs of words together (syntheton) and gussied it all up with alliteration. He opened the speech by declaring that this was “democracy’s day, a day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve”, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place in an Anglo-Saxon poem — though he borrowed the second phrase, again, from himself borrowing it from Seamus Heaney.

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By Patrick Lawrence

His strongest move was a more modest one: the emphatic repetition. “I know the strength – the strength – of our nation.” “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America […] requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy – unity. Unity.” “We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we’ve acted together.” “We will get through this together. Together.”

In one callback to Lincoln, he recalled how in “another January” (effective way of linking past and present) in 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Biden quoted Lincoln’s words as he signed the paper: “If my name ever goes down into history, it’ll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” Here’s a little electric thrill of connection, not just to a historical moment but to a moment of human feeling. Biden repeated: “My whole soul is in it.”

In using that as the springboard for his next passage — declaring that “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause,” — Biden not only placed himself in Lincoln’s line of descent, but he channeled the emotional appeal of his predecessor for himself. He also, of course, implied that he too might go down in history and reminded his audience, in a time of intense racial argument, that Lincoln himself thought the freeing of the slaves his most important act.

That was deft, and rather moving. Deft, too, was the passage in which he quoted St Augustine.

“Many centuries ago, St Augustine — the saint of my church — wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honour, and yes, the truth.”

Again, that emphatic repetition of the key phrase. And also a pivot: a sort of showy gestalt switch in the way that he would like the American community to see itself. Not as defined by its opposition to a threatening series of out-groups, but by a common set of objects of devotion. He’s making a point, in an age of identity politics, about how identities can be defined — not against things, but for them. It’s not an accident, either, that “truth” capped off that list.

He did not mention the other guy by name. But he was a presence. “Lies told for power and profit” was certainly a jab. The past that this speech needed to look back on was not a single one. It sought to establish the usual connection with the deep past, but also to repudiate the recent past — and put both those things in service of his exhortations for the future. You could see those purposes knit when he said: “We can see each other, not as adversaries, but as neighbors.” Here was one of many feelingly delivered calls for a reset of the ferociously adversarial politics of the last four years; but also a gentle echo of Lincoln’s inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

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All that said, this speech could and should have been half or two thirds of the length. A really great peroration — the stirring closing passage of a speech — will linger whole in the mind. Biden’s peroration went on for most of the second half of his rather extensive running time, and the grand-sounding epithets started to blur into each-other. Just when you thought he was going to wrap it up and take a load off, he embarked on another paragraph of unfolding stories, great chapters, debts to forebears and legacies to children’s children’s children. Lord knows, many of us were pleased to see him — but the trick would have been to leave us wanting more.

And so, at the heart of these pressure points in public life is the BBC. It remains — however much that may irk its detractors — the pulmonary artery in our media circulatory system. That means that the discussion of its current and future health could not be more deeply involved, wherever you stand on it, in the state we’re in. And you can see by the ferocity with which it’s attacked — all those #biasedbbc and #defundbbc hashtags; Laura Kuenssberg needing a bodyguard — that its detractors of all political stripes don’t like it up ‘em.

Even its entertainment output — which has sustained so many of us during the pandemic — gets dragged into the culture wars. Its rivalry with commercial channels enrages the Murdochs. Its output is combed by Right-wing TV critics for “wokeism”, and incel science-fiction fans are still recovering from Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. If The Crown had been on the Beeb you can only imagine how much more ferocious the fuss over its liberties with history would have been.

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So if a recent book could be said to speak to the hot-button issue of our times it is The War Against the BBC: How an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain’s greatest cultural institution… And why you should care. Like its subject, the unkind might say, that title is bloated, unwieldy and tinged with a self-righteous complacency. But give it a chance and dig deeper.

That is very much the approach that this book’s authors recommend taking towards the BBC. Peter York and Patrick Barwise (the latter an emeritus professor of marketing at the London Business School; the former a multimedia gadfly remembered inter alia for minting the epithet “Sloane Ranger”) want to make the case for Auntie.

They address the three main lines of attack, which map the ideological fault lines of the age; these lines are as follows. It is bloated and bureaucratic, squandering the license fee on overpaid managers and overpaid stars; it does too much, competing unfairly in areas of broadcasting that are more than adequately supplied by the private sector; and it is suffused with liberal metropolitan bias and out of touch with the Plain People of Britain.

Some of these complaints are now so well established that we reach for them as instinctive truths. We picture Gary Lineker’s dressing room drowned in white lilies and Liberace fur coats, and whole fleets of black taxis idling all day outside Broadcasting House with the meters running, just in case.

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In mounting their defence of the corporation, Barwise and York do a good job of unpicking these cliches and, where apt, busting myths. On efficiency, for instance, they produce a brisk demolition of the wilful innumeracy behind the claim that the BBC “spends less than half its cash on programmes”. In fact, they argue, the figure is more like 93% — and they show their workings. They add that an independent review by Ernst & Young found that the BBC’s efficiency (percentage of overheads, indirect costs) put it very near the top of a league table of media and telecommunications companies — most of them private-sector.

On the question of “unfair competition”, they note that the BBC is in a vicious double-bind. If it continues to pump out drama and light entertainment, it’s accused of eating the private sector’s lunch. Were it to strip down, as many demand, to just do the unpopular stuff — then that would become in course the basis for an argument that the many are now subsidising the few therefore Auntie should be abolished. And this is to ignore not only the soft power of the BBC overseas, and the “gross value added” (one study they quote has it that the BBC generates two quid of economic activity for every pound of the licence fee), but also the extent to which these commercial successes help to fund the uncommercial bit.

But do people want all this stuff? It seems they do. 99% of Britons use at least one BBC service every week. And, ticklingly, they quote the 2015 “BBC Deprivation Study”. Researchers struck a deal with 48 households who had answered a survey saying they thought the licence fee was poor value for money. They gave them each a cash payment of £3.60 — nine days’ worth of the licence fee — and cut their Beeb off for that long. Guess what? 33 of those 48 households changed their minds after nine days without the Corporation.

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Barwise and York argue, on the question of bias, that large-scale surveys tend to show that — whatever we at home may think we know — the BBC is not systematically biased: at least, inasmuch as these things can be quantified. Its charter commitments mean that it falls over itself not to be. And though the public is divided over the BBC’s perceived impartiality (60% think it’s neutral), the accuracy of its reporting is widely credited. For 51% of the population it’s the most trusted news source, its nearest competitor at 9% being ITV. The newspapers that consistently attack it for bias and inaccuracy sit at, er, 1% in that survey.

The authors discover some murky stuff, too, in the opaquely funded think-tanks and pressure groups who monitor the corporation’s output for impartiality. It’s true, they say, that Left and Right alike moan about BBC bias — but it’s only on the Right that complaining about the BBC qualifies as a properly paid day job.

Another line of attack, perhaps a deadlier one, is starving the corporation of funds. The dirtiest trick in this department was George Osborne’s making the corporation summarily responsible for the over-75s’ licence fee. Here was a promise — or bribe, you could say — made to the electorate by politicians without any consultation with the BBC. Dropping the promise would be a vote-loser; but keeping it on the DWP’s books would get more and more expensive as the population ages. So he made it the BBC’s problem — which in turn gave government a further stick with which to beat the corporation. That’s like promising every voter a free pair of Nike trainers — and then sticking Nike with the bill.

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Harry Potter fans need to grow up

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It’s easy to see why so many big media companies — the Mail and the Murdoch titles, especially — have not only a cultural but a direct commercial interest in attacking the BBC. And it’s easy to see, too, why government will tend to want to collude in those attacks — especially a government that would prefer a little less scrutiny. A media outlet with tremendous reach, a charter commitment to facticity and a considerable budget for reporting is not, shall we say, a natural ally. Dominic Cummings didn’t have his ministers boycott the BBC on a whim.

You may not agree with the authors’ conclusions. Indeed, you may disagree with their premises: making the case for the BBC in practice may be easier than making the case for it in principle. But the value of this book is to remind us that arguments against the BBC are often dishonest or partial, often strongly motivated by vested interests — and often hope for its destruction while affecting to hope for its reform. It may make you, as it did me, think that in this accursed year there’s something to be said for keeping a-hold of nurse in fear of finding something worse.

One of the most brilliant of many brilliant things about J. K. Rowling’s books was the way in which they grew up alongside their readers. In the first novel, Harry turned 11, and he grew older with each one; an 11-year-old reader of that first book would have crested young adulthood at the same time Harry did. The stories grew darker, more complex, more challenging. The adventures spilled out from the classroom into the wider adult world. The dangers were greater, the reverses and losses more permanent and more grave.

But then, of course, they stopped and their readers carried on into the trackless wastes of maturity without him. That will have been a loss.

It’s worth taking this opportunity to say what artful books they are, and how thoroughly imagined was their world: Rowling seeded future developments and plot strands so early in the first book; she dropped her trail of breadcrumbs. She knew where she was going, and she went there at just the right pace, and (admirably) she stopped when she got there, her story told. The writing may not have been showy, but it did its work. She picked out evocative details — Ollivander’s moonlike eyes, say, or the light through the high windows striping the stone corridors of Hogwarts. She employed the whole sensorium to make her world immediate. And there was a warm gleam of humour on every page.

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When they first came out, some early reviewers — including this one — groused a little that Rowling was a magpie. The novels seemed to be a collage of influences: this from T. H. White or Tolkien, that from Roald Dahl, this from The Worst Witch; that from any number of old-fashioned boarding-school stories; this – blimey — from Kafka. But of course, looking back, to indict her for a lack of originality was to miss the point. Rowling knew just what she was doing. She was in the business of building a myth. And all myths steal and repurpose previous stories: they draw their power from them. The Torah was a straight remix of Babylonian creation myths and all the better for it.

And if a myth does its job, it offers — however fantastical — a way of thinking about the world. Like many children’s books, the Harry Potter books set out to affirm a set of moral principles for the generation that grew up with them; and given the almost 100% saturation of the market it’s fair to assume they will have had an influence. These principles are, we can say, pretty uncontroversial. They affirm the value of courage, honesty, loyalty and the importance of friendship. They say that bullying is to be deplored, kindness valued; that might doesn’t make right and that love is stronger than hate.

They go in to bat, too, for some easy liberal values. Slavery is a bad thing. Eugenics and racial profiling are no-nos. Torture and random sadistic murder are definitely frowned on. Hey kids, these books say full-throatedly: don’t be a Nazi, ‘mkay?

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In so doing, and in the very reasonable line of being children’s books, and bloody good ones — and exciting stories at that — they present the world as an all-or-nothing heroic struggle between unmitigated good and unfathomable evil. You have lovely, wise, kind and selfless Dumbledore in one corner and you have that utter rotten egg Voldemort in the other. Pick a team.

Institutions are to be trusted only inasmuch as they are run by goodies (the Ministry of Magic is eminently corruptible but Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is not, at least while the old man remains in charge), and rules are to be broken ad lib as long as it’s the goodies doing it. Normative authority is creepy old Filch, skulking the corridors with Mrs Norris in search of fun to spoil and miscreants to snitch on. The mainstream media is the prurient and unctuous scratching of Rita Skeeter. Suburban normies — incarnated in the Dursleys of Privet Drive — are the pits.

In their fine texture, the books are subtler than that — Snape’s story arc, for instance, has a level of real moral complexity; and the psychology of the protagonists’ day-to-day friendships is not simplistic — but the basic shape of the main story is goodies vs baddies to the death. And that is, as I say, quite proper. They’re children’s books.

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Revolutions eat their children. Critics of the series have since argued that there are subtextual or framing issues: that they’re kind of heteronormative (Dumbledore was, Rowling told us later, gay — but there’s scant evidence for it in the text); or that they’re kind of white (Rowling welcomed the casting of a black Hermione in the stage show, and Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote interestingly about how a black Hermione would have enriched the story in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, but, again, the text tends not to support the idea).

You may agree with these criticisms or you may scoff at them — but it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team.

Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that.

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That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus.

These are, as I’ve said before, children’s books. Harry Potter, somewhere in the multiverse, grew up. So must his audience.

That was the really weird thing: almost everybody had predicted that this speech, or a version of it, would come. Pretty much everyone, too, would have predicted an incidental violation of the Hatch act, a non-existent attitude to masks and social distancing in the audience, and the presumptuous use of “Hail to the Chief” as walking-on music. All that stuff is what betting pundits would call “priced in”.

But the Trump who took the podium was not what we’d expected. He seemed relaxed. He even opened with a joke: “This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had,” he said. He sounded wry — a tone not hitherto identifiable in his register. “We love you!” someone shouted out, and he looked a little bashful. He had said many times the day before that he hadn’t prepared a speech. That is itself is a rhetorical strategy; to seem spontaneous is to seem authentic.

He modestly thanked “the American people” for “their tremendous support” and said in a downbeat way that “millions and millions of people voted for us tonight — and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.” That was the payload — or, at least, the foreshadowing of it. Good rhetorical tactic: say what you’re going to say, then say it, then say that you’ve said it.

He was, in effect, teasing the theme of his speech. So far, though, the velvet glove. He sounded a little sad, a little thoughtful. As he repeated the phrase “we won’t stand for it” he unpacked the contraction in his auxiliary verb: “We will not stand for it.” That “not”, standing alone, gets a bit more emphasis; puts a bit more steel and determination into the phrase. But still, it was downbeat: regret rather than anger. Here is the tone of the teacher in the old joke about the inflatable school, telling off the little boy with the pin: “You’ve let me down, you’ve let your classmates down… You’ve let the whole school down.”

All this was an effective approach at the level of tone. The basic argument of his speech — the logos of it — was to make a baseless claim that the election was being stolen, and to protest before the results were even in that it was unfair and that he wouldn’t accept its legitimacy. But had he come out thundering – had he looked personally aggrieved, flushed of face and bombastic – he’d have looked weaker than he did. He’d have made it nakedly about his own ego and his own interests.

He framed his remarks, instead, in such a way as to cast himself as the father-protector, speaking up for the little people. The wannabe autocrat is never a wannabe autocrat: always a humble servant of the “will of the people”. Instead of petulance, he made an affectation of regret and bewilderment: “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything… and all of a sudden it was just… all gone. We were literally just getting ready to get outside and celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”

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On came the slathering of superlatives: “such a vote… such a success… record numbers… this is a record… there’s never been anything like it… incredible movement”. Even as he started to ramble through the progress of the election, he still maintained that tone of humble surprise. You seldom hear Trump admitting weakness or doubt at all, but here he said: “We won states that we weren’t expected to win – Florida.” Given that no Republican in living memory has won the Presidency without winning Florida, that’s on the face of it quite the admission. But it’s a tactic, the better to offset the claim that “We didn’t win it — we won it by a lot.”

But ramble he then did – offering a bewildering stew of facts and conjectures and partial figures as he hopped from state to state. The middle of this speech was simply a mess – not coherent enough even to convey, as I guess it was supposed to, a big-picture grasp of figures.

Not that the figures really mattered in the end. Because the burden of the speech, the key passage, came after all that and it essentially negated all that came before. One moment he was talking about the prospects of a famous victory in the great state of North Carolina, the next, mimetically enough, he declared: “And all of a sudden everything just stopped.”

And then, there it was: the F-word. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country.” Here was isocolon, two balanced phrases of about the same length in parallel, reinforced by the repeated opener “this is”. He followed it up with the figure of metanoia, correcting himself and making a statement stronger, to build a head of rhetorical steam: “We were getting ready to win this election… Frankly, we did win this election.”

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And then the meat of it: “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity, for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment. And we will win this. As far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”

It doesn’t need me to parse the illogicality of all this — that he moved from complaining that “everything just stopped”, to demanding that everything stop; that he made a dishonest elision between “voting” and the counting of votes that had already been cast; that he boasted about votes still being counted in states he expected to win, while railing against votes still being counted in states he didn’t; that he has moved from complaining that treacherous Democrats would use the Supreme Court to decide the election to demanding the Supreme Court decide the election…

The people who see that clearly aren’t the people he’s really talking to. And for the people he’s really talking to, he will have done a scarily effective job. They will have heard “integrity… good of the nation… law used in a proper manner” associated with one side of the argument, and insinuations about shady ballots turning up at 4am on the other. They’ll have heard a leader expressing regret and sadness at having to take a step he never wanted to take to defend them.

And they’ll have heard in the confidence of his unusually quiet voice the indicative incarnation of their hopes: “We will win this. As far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.” The irony is that had he actually believed that, he’d never have stood up to make this speech.

Many years ago, the late Alan Coren observed that three categories of books seemed to be surefire bestsellers: books about Nazis, books about golf and books about cats. In 1975, therefore, he published a book called Golfing for Cats, and put a swastika on its cover. It was a huge success. It’s with similar thoughts in mind, I suspect, that John Gray’s perspicacious editor at Allen Lane, Simon Winder, will have encouraged the great philosopher to produce his new little book, Feline Philosophy. 

It is, in its way, a more whimsical and till-point friendly companion-piece to Gray’s 2013 The Silence of Animals. And with it John Gray — for whom the idea of progress is a myth, morality a vain imagining, reason an ignis fatuus and the search for truth a fool’s errand — even dips his gnarled toe into the listicle-infested waters of self-help, supplying in his final chapter “Ten Feline Hints On How To Live Well”. Actually, it’s very charming. And, despite his gloomy worldview, he clearly loves cats, the big softy.

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Gray has one central idea, around which he circles like a cat preparing to settle in a laundry basket. It is that what marks humans out from other species is our reflexive thinking and our abstract awareness of our own mortality. Humans are miserable because we try to find meaning in something larger than ourselves – be that systems of philosophy, religious devotion or abstract ideas about the thriving of our species. All of these are, one way or another, unsatisfactory displacement activities: we are, in the cat-loving T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “distracted from distraction by distraction”, constantly trying to push down the terror of the meaningless and inevitable extinction that awaits us.

Cats don’t worry about that stuff, Gray says. They don’t tell stories to themselves about themselves. They accept their own natures, rather than seeking to change or understand them. They live in their bodies and in their sense-worlds, moment to moment. “Unless they are confined within environments that are unnatural for them, cats are never bored. Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.”

The whole project of philosophy, Gray says in the first few pages, is essentially misconceived: “posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disease it pretends to remedy”. We are made miserable by our faculty for thinking, in other words, and we try to make ourselves happy with… more thinking. As the title of Boethius’s most influential work expresses it, we look for “consolations” in philosophy, and we look in vain. “Throughout much of its history, philosophy has been a search for truths that are proof against mortality,” Gray writes — from the idea of an eternal realm of Platonic forms onwards — but as Freud was to show, the repressed tends to return.

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The three main schools of ancient philosophy — Stoics, Sceptics and Epicureans — all promised to bring their followers to the tranquil condition of ataraxia. Epicureans said you could achieve inner peace by adjusting your circumstances; Stoics by adjusting your reactions to the world; Sceptics by ceasing to try to make sense of it altogether. But even if you get a measure of relief through one of these approaches, asks Gray, is the life you end up with one much worth living? Gray dismisses Marcus Aurelius’s thinking as “not an affirmation of life but a pose of indifference to life”.

Rather, he says, there’s a sideways jump to be made: out of language and away from thinking altogether. Though he deplores the ruinous anthropocentrism of Aristotle and the Western tradition, Gray has a certain amount of time for the Taoist notion of tao and te — that is, the key to existence is for each creature to obey its own nature. The nearest parallel he finds in Western philosophy is Spinoza’s idea of conatus — which he glosses as “the tendency of living things to preserve and enhance their activity in the world”. Just be yourself, you could say.

Cats, having no choice but to be themselves and nursing no illusions that they do have a choice, find this quite unproblematic. They are, as Gray puts it, “selfless egoists”. Indeed, they even escape the charge of cruelty, which Gray calls “negative empathy”, because empathy itself is alien to them.

All of this is set out not just through vignettes of Schopenhauer, Montaigne and Descartes (dreadful cat-torturer, that last one: chucked them out of windows in a spirit of philosophical inquiry) but through a number of anecdotes and encounters with cats in history and literature. My to-read list now includes lesser-known short works by Colette, Junichirō Tanizaki, Mary Gaitskill and Patricia Highsmith (in the last of which a cat does a murder).

The standout is a real-life cat, the excellently named Mèo, rescued as a kitten from the Vietnamese city of Hué ahead of the Tet Offensive by the American journalist Jack Laurence. As this whisky-drinking feline refugee moved to Connecticut, Manhattan and later the UK with his traumatised rescuer, his adventures seem to present an example of feline virtue. He passes through horrors without internalising them. Taking pleasure in a sunny windowsill even as the bombs fall, he “flourished wherever he found himself”. And he offered comfort and companionship to humans not by saying or by doing, but simply by being.

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Where Gray makes a bit of a leap, of course, is in his confident assertion that cats think, or rather don’t, in the way he supposes. In truth, we have no idea what goes on in a cat’s furry little head, and that alterity is what makes them so attractive. When my cat sat on the end of the bed, perfectly still, staring at nothing, how am I to know that she wasn’t wondering intently about whether existence precedes essence? Indeed, in insisting that it’s vain of philosophers to see humans as different from the rest of the animal world, and at the same time insisting that we are uniquely cursed with self-consciousness, Gray seems to me slightly to be having his Whiskas and eating it.

And what of their ethics and affections? Gray concedes that cats show affection to humans, but he says — probably rightly — that it’s a fleeting and essentially self-interested thing. A cat won’t spend much time mourning you if you die. He concedes that a mother cat will risk death to protect her kittens, but that perhaps falls under his rubric of a beast following its nature. And he doesn’t develop what seems to me an interesting point — which is that the adult cat’s meow is an inter-species communication. They don’t meow at each other: only at us. That bears exploring, I think.

You finish reading Feline Philosophy with much to chew on — and a firm sense that no self-respecting cat would have felt the need to write such a book.

Let’s say he doesn’t fight the whole way to the Supreme Court, doesn’t try to start a civil war, doesn’t throw two arms around a stout leg of the Resolute Desk and have to be dragged crying and blubbering in a most undignified way from the Oval Office. Let’s say that. What happens next? Who are the winners and the losers?

Well, there’s the big man himself, for a start. There’s no question that Trump wouldn’t much like losing office. Defeat in the election would hurt his ego in ways that many of us will find it exquisitely sweet to imagine. Also, a return to civilian life would pose him two big problems. One is that he would be liable for criminal prosecution and civil litigation in so many departments you wouldn’t quite know where to begin. No doubt he’ll have a go at issuing a blanket pardon to himself, on all counts, before he leaves office.

That may help with all the Mueller stuff, the emoluments clause and so on; but it wouldn’t be of much use with civil cases over his various sexual and financial shenanigans. Also, if the leaks of his tax returns are to be believed, he’s soon about to have to find half a billion dollars or so to pay back his various creditors — and he’s no longer going to have the griftable assets of the Presidency to help pay them off. I know: your heart pumps jelly-babies, right?

But spare a thought for the real victims in all this. It will be all the people on my side: all those handwringing liberals whose dearest wish is the removal of the kandy-koloured tangerine-flake lie-machine from the White House. An entire industry has been built on the Trump outrage machine, and it has been as profitable and exhilarating an enterprise for his opponents as it has been for his family members. No longer.

Where does The Resistance go if it doesn’t have anything to resist? As Sleepy Joe ambles into the White House in his Wee Willy Winky nightcap, promising an era of sensible things done quietly, of technocratic solutions to tricky problems, of bipartisan fence-mending and all that sort of boring stuff, all the energy will go out of politics. The great glorious mad balloon-economy of Politics Under Trump will sort of… deflate.

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The ideologues, conmen and chancers who rode Trump’s slipstream will slope back off to obscure internet talk radio stations, and it’s nice to have a giggle imagining Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D’Souza resuming their academic careers. But so, too, will the characters whose public profiles were created, revived or energised on the back of Trump: Eric “Time for some Game Theory” Garland, Rick Wilson, David Frum, Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor, Sarah Kendzior and so on. No more inventive Never Trump button badges or amusing helium balloons. No more 98-tweet threads explaining why THIS. We will no longer be on the brink of a Philip Roth dystopia. Even Devin Nunes’s Cow, alas, will return to pasture.

And the comedians: people like Trevor Noah, Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Sarah Cooper and Piers Morgan. Like the alternative comics who flourished in the UK in Thatcher’s 1980s, these characters have drawn their energy from the aggression of the White House. They’ll have to find new ways to be funny – and if you ask me, it’s going to feel just a bit of a let-down sending up the Biden administration. John Major’s aertex underpants were never quite a substitute for the Iron Lady’s handbag.

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By Sam Leith

Twitter’s share price will likely halve in value the day after Trump leaves the White House. Of course Trump himself will continue to send out ever more forlorn and irrelevant all-caps tweets, but those tweets will just be the sort of tweets any bitter ex-president could send. Millions of people are not going to log on every morning, as they once did, asking: did he start a war yet? He said what about who? He cratered which industry in 140 characters? This will be sad for ex-president Trump, but sad too for all the people who made Twitter careers out of being rude about him.

And even Fox News will slump. Nobody in power will now need to pay it the blindest bit of attention. And if — as seems quite likely — Trump’s post-presidential moneyspinner is establishing Trump TV, he’ll end up splitting its audience. Poor old Fox will most likely be left with the intellectuals, while the fun, salt-of-the-earth people who bulked out its viewing figures — the white supremacists, the survivalists and the toothless gun-freaks — will defect to Trump TV.

All those liberal organs of “resistance” have boomed in the age of Trump. I remember the New York Times’s CEO Mark Thompson telling me what brilliant things Trump’s denunciations of the “failing New York Times” had done for its circulation. The New Yorker, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post… watch their audiences taper off, their paginations thin down, as they are forced into a grim and dreary return to the status quo ante in an age of declining advertising spend and a moribund industry. “Democracy Dies In Darkness” sounds pretty cool. “Liberal Newspapers Ail In The Gloaming” not so much so.

Suggested reading

Covid is Trump's last chance

By Freddie Sayers

Think, too, of the nice, liberal publishing industry. It has — especially in the US — become more or less a Trump publishing industry. A fresh blockbusting, zillion-selling Trump expose seems to come out every week. Woodward, Wolff, Mattis, Cohen, Michael Lewis, Mary Trump, Comey, Bolton, The Mooch etc; not to mention the smattering of supportive works from Fox News personalities, and administration stooges. Dear little Donald Trump Jr somehow persuaded the Republican National Convention to buy enough copies of his Triggered to make it a bestseller.

The critic Carlos Lozada claims to have read 150 such books by way of reasearch for his What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. At the beginning of next year, all that will change. Like the first green shoots of some tentative rewilding project, airport bookshops will start to grow over once again with John Grisham novels, leadership manuals, and books about how to give a successful Ted Talk.

Politics, publishing and the media, in other words, will start to return to normal. And though, God knows, nobody sensible will be sorry to see Trump go, don’t let’s pretend that even the most fervent of his opponents won’t, after they stop punching the air, feel just that tiny little bit let down. As Julian Barnes wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure … the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?”

But Joe Biden is no street-fighter. He’s a well-mannered, decent, slightly absent-minded old thing whose strongest registers of aggression are dismay and irritation. When he wheeled out that line he sounded like a pensioner complaining crossly that someone had spilled his Sanatogen. And that, regrettably, was the story of last night’s debate: a man who brought a sponge to a knife-fight.

Trump didn’t sound presidential — of course he didn’t — but he sounded fully himself. Everything that his opponents hate and his supporters adore was abundantly in evidence. Trump gonna Trump, right? He’s a known quantity in all this.

suggested reading

Joe Biden is no radical

By Michael Tracey

Oratorically, one of his strengths is the fact that you don’t know what’s going to come out of his mouth, and nor does he, and when it does it’s frequently either fascinatingly incoherent, dismally mendacious or jaw-droppingly obnoxious. That commands the attention. There are animal spirits to Trump.

And, God knows, there were some things there to stretch the eyes. There was the chilling moment in which, invited to demand the Proud Boys desist from violence, he told them to “stand back and stand by” — as if temporarily benching a football B-team rather than condemning a gang of neo-fascists. There was his categorical claim to have spent “millions” in federal income tax when the record shows he paid $750. This sort of thing could and should have been pressed — with passion and articulacy — by a strong opponent.

But Joe Biden’s ethos appeal — that sense of himself that he projected to the audience — flickered wanly. He was at a loss to make his prepared remarks land. He frequently forgot himself and misspoke. He ambled around issues and weakened his better soundbites by mumbling or affixing long kite-tails of qualifying clauses to the ends of them.

And he was fatally easily derailed by Trump’s constant interruptions. Every time, he’d take the bait and leave what he was saying. “Tell that to Nancy Pelosi,” Trump sneered at one point, and Biden at once hopped off his train of thought to argue crossly about Nancy Pelosi. You know what they say about wrestling with pigs.

From time to time he’d remember one of those lines they cooked up in the basement and he’d have a bash at delivering it – or he’d make a stagy attempt to laugh condescendingly at his opponent. Most stagy of all was his use of apostrophe. Every now and again he’d make a point of looking right down the camera and speaking direct to the voters at home. “You! The American people! You!” he’d say. He’d even reach out with his hands towards them. “How many of you at home have an empty chair because you’ve lost somebody to Covid?” You could see, in those moments, the tatters of that plan of action which, famously, never survives the first contact with the enemy.

Suggested reading

How Trump could refuse to go

By Daniel Baer

And even when he experienced a spontaneous flare of emotion, his good manners undermined the strength of the outburst. “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” he said. Signs of life! But then he remembered himself: “Excuse me, this person.” And when he was talking with real passion about his late son Beau— “He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And I resent…” his crescendo was cut off as Trump derailed the conversation with a sneering reference to Biden’s other son Hunter’s former cocaine habit.

Trump, I’m afraid, got to him. A matador was needed, here — or at least a picador— but our guy got flattened by the bull. Trump demanded: “Name one law enforcement group that supported you. We’ve got time.” Biden, blindsided: “We don’t have time.” Later, in a segment on the environment, Trump started inveighing against the “10 trillion dollar” cost of the Green New Deal. Biden protested that the Green New Deal was “not my plan”. Then he found himself saying: “The Green New Deal will pay for itself going forward.” Hang on, Chris Wallace said: I thought you didn’t support the Green New Deal. “I don’t support the Green New Deal,” Biden corrected himself. “I support the Biden plan.”

And sometimes he got to himself. He started a run of anaphora at one point, beginning successive sentences with “This is a guy that… this is a guy that…” and then simply lost his thread, mumbling into his chest, “Anyway, it’s all true.” This is not a problem that frequently afflicted Barack Obama.

Suggested reading

Of course Trump can win

By Sam Leith

Rhetorically speaking, the whole event was what Joe Biden would have been too well mannered to call a shitshow. Ostensibly a highly artificial, highly structured debate — six 15-minute segments, with two minutes each at the top of each one — it collapsed into chaos moments after it started. The moderator, Chris Wallace, asked wordy and ill-focused questions, and proved quite incapable of controlling the conversation. The only way to get Donald Trump to let an opponent speak unheckled for 120 seconds — and we can see with hindsight — would have been to encase him in a soundproof box and cut the mic when it wasn’t his turn to speak. Or, we might fantasise, fix him with one of those electric collars they use on dogs.

Like I say: chaos. And chaos is Mr Trump’s natural habitat. A debate like this — even at the best of times is not one in which you expect reasoned arguments and carefully marshalled statistics to carry the day. When they descended into the weeds of the difference between “solicited ballots” and “unsolicited ballots”, or the stats on voter registration, it was deadly. The lines that cut through most effectively in these circumstances are the emptiest slogans. Trump had: “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen!” Biden had: “Go to iwillvote.com.” It didn’t work when Hillary read out weblinks in a presidential debate — remember her directing the audience to her real-time factchecking site? — and it didn’t work here.

It’s about the vibe. Who seems authentic? Who seems in command? And here — bullying the squawking compere, rattling his opponent, ignoring anything he heard he didn’t like and getting away with it — the person who seemed in command here was, woe to the world, the incumbent President.

Social media praise for the article seemed to suggest she had. “Rigorous critique and affirmative feminism,” said one tweet. “Magisterial,” said another. “Thoughtful, reflective, theoretically and historically rich,” said another. “If you’re confused about trans people and trans rights, I can’t recommend this interview with Judith Butler enough,” said Owen Jones.

I think Prof Butler deserves our attention. I don’t share the reflex sniggering at the opacity of some of her prose — sometimes complex ideas need a complex expression — and in this interview she was for the most part perfectly clear and conversational. But “magisterial”? “Theoretically and historically rich?” Not on the strength of this interview. What she had to offer was intellectually threadbare. Rather than bringing some analytical clarity, she did no more than cloak crude rhetorical strategies in academic grandiloquence.

By way of a disclaimer, I don’t say this because I’m a member of some terf-cult, and I don’t mean it as a motivated intervention in the trans wars. It seems to me that this is an area that admits of good faith disagreement, that there’s a noticeable lack of that in the public discourse, and that — even from so revered a figure as Judith Butler — we should call that lack out when we see it.

The interview began with her being asked about “how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics”. She responded:

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.”

This preoccupation with what’s mainstream and what’s marginal is just eccentric — especially coming from a theorist who has spent a lot of time, quite rightly, considering the stifling effects of normativity. Leaving aside the uninterrogated and question-begging use of loaded terms such as “transphobia” and “trans rights”, the arguments at issue should stand or fall on their merits, not on their relation to the mainstream. Liberation movements of the type Prof Butler might approve have, after all, been founded on “marginal” positions. To appeal to the mainstream is to fall into the fallacy called “argumentum ad populum”, and it’s something philosophers usually try not to do.

She’s then asked about JK Rowling’s stated concern that Self-ID could “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman’, potentially putting women at risk of violence”:

“If we look closely at the example that you characterise as ‘mainstream’ we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.”

Prof Butler might legitimately argue that these concerns are theoretical and/or exaggerated, as many advocates for self-ID do. One writer I respect recently tweeted: “Honestly the best ‘argument’ I have in this is nothing to do with theoretical stances on the definition of gender (which we’re never going to all agree on anyway), it’s: ‘Ireland brought in gender self-ID in 2015 and the things you are afraid of have not happened’”.

But instead there are two things going on here rhetorically, neither of which redound to Prof Butler’s credit. She is pathologising or gaslighting those on the other side of the argument (using “fantasy” or its cognates four times in a paragraph). And she is straw-manning their position.

A fairer representation of the case would have been to say: “The feminist who holds such a view presumes […] that someone with a penis could identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.”

This would be a good-faith representation of the gender-critical position on single-sex spaces. But it would require the hard work of arguing against it on material evidence, rather than dismissing it as hysteria or fantasy.

When challenged on the idea that “terf” might be understood as a slur, she responds with a high-handed run of rhetorical questions, or what sometimes gets called epiplexis.

“I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?”

Here is something close to the etymological fallacy. As Prof Butler will surely know, given her famously subtle engagement with the eddies and currents of power in discourse, you can’t reliably nail the connotations of a term by appeal to its literal meaning. Here is an argument not much more grown-up than the person who tells you that you misuse antisemitism because “Arabs are semites too, actually”, or rejoice in having noticed that the Nazis claimed to be socialists, or who might think that because something is derived from the Latin word for black it’s no more than a neutral descriptor.

If Prof Butler is interested in attending to what we now like to call “lived experience”, she might attend to the lived experience of those who — being on the receiving end of it — very much consider “terf” to be a slur. To say words to the effect of “well, they’re trying to exclude trans women from their toilets so why not call them exclusionary? If the cap fits, wear it” will not do. If she wonders what they’d prefer to be called, why not ask them? Most, as I understand it, are happy with the term “gender-critical feminists”.

When encouraged to comment on the online trolling that the novelist JK Rowling has faced in response to her public remarks on the issue, Prof Butler responded:

“I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.”

This seems to me to be nothing more sophisticated than garden-variety whataboutery. It’s practically a snowclone of the formulation Jeremy Corbyn used to use when asked to make a full-throated condemnation of antisemitism: namely that he condemns all kinds of racism. Immediately Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

Gaslighting ad-hominems, wilful obtuseness, straw-manning, deflection and whataboutery: this is quite the catalogue of intellectual shabbiness coming from a philosopher of Prof Butler’s standing. If the supposed grown-ups in the room are debating like this, no wonder the discussion is in such a state.

“I think we are living in anti-intellectual times,” Butler remarks later in the interview. You said it, sister.

Well, happy birthday Civ. Mind you, Civilization is, by some metrics, older than civilisation. In the preface to Sid Meier’s new book Sid Meier’s Memoir!, the game’s creator notes that player data from the online gaming platform Steam shows that between 2010 and 2016 gamers spent a billion hours playing Civilization V (only one game in a series that spans 12 editions). A billion hours ago, he notes by way of giving the figure some perspective, neanderthals were making spearheads in the Stone Age. Or, as it would appear in the game, unlocking a new technology.

In Civ terms, 29 years is a blip, but — call me sentimental — I think its birthday deserves celebrating. One of the great things about Civ was that, rather than fannying around with barrel-throwing apes or bleeping space-aliens, it asked its players to contemplate human life itself. It asked us — in however schematic a way — to think about us: that is, about politics, economics, science, ideology, war, and about the way in which these things interact and mingle through history.

Suggested reading

What Dungeons and Dragons taught me about politics

By James Kirkup

Here was a game that, starting round 4000BC, plonked a handful of nomadic hunter-gatherer types in the middle of a map. All around them was fog and mystery. And you, the player, in loco dei, told them what to do. They’d found a city. They’d tentatively explore the surrounding terrain. They’d raise armies, develop primitive and then more sophisticated technologies, build ports and cultivate crops, and encounter neighbouring tribes with whom they’d negotiate, trade and sometimes go to war.

It was the full package. You won the game, finally, by taking over the world or escaping it — but there were many different routes to those ends. Perhaps you developed the tech to send colonists to Alpha Centauri. Perhaps you established a global free-trading network and dominated through soft power and diplomacy in the United Nations. Or perhaps you went full Alexander the Great and wiped out all the rival civilisations on the map, weeping, finally, because there were no more worlds to conquer — at least until the release of the next expansion pack.

And that, I think, is the key to its appeal. It offers the idea that there are parameters and trade-offs in the way civilisations develop; that you can establish vicious and virtuous circles as you manage limited resources. It lets you tinker with those parameters — just as governments tinker with those parameters in the real world. Will state aid to tech firms help you “level up” the regions? Is it better to be bound to your neighbours by treaties and trade, or to go your own way? These are the sorts of questions that Civ asks you to consider. (And in Civ, you don’t condemn hundreds of thousands of real people to destitution if you fuck it up.)

By the same author

Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

To those who think videogames have nothing to teach us, Civ and games like it are a standing reproach. There is a moment in Steven Johnson’s influential book about pop culture, Everything Bad Is Good For You, for example, where the author describes watching his seven-year-old nephew playing SimCity. The boy says offhandedly: “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” Here, God help us, is a budding Chicago School economist not yet out of short trousers.

The game proved irresistibly addictive. We could measure its success not only in hours played but in starker and more dismaying statistics such as the number of PhDs deferred or grades slipped at A-level, the number of marriages soured and hours of sleep lost to people playing just a few more turns until, say, they’d seen off Genghis Khan or got the Pyramids built.

Of course, the model of history in Civ is very far from precise. The basic architecture of the original game was, as Meier puts it, “a reasonably clear progression through anarchy, despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, and finally democracy”. Anthropologists and historians would tend to have quibbled with that even back in the early 90s with Fukuyama in his pomp; let alone amid our current global trolley-dash towards despotism and autarchy. And religion as a mechanism of social control (and its opposite) didn’t make its debut until Civ IV — a couple of years after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The need for it to be an enjoyable videogame also required certain other, sometimes drastic, simplifications. As Meyer says in his memoir, they toyed with undermining the set-up’s basically Whiggish teleology by including a mechanic that modelled the cyclical rise and fall of empires, but “the moment the Krakatoa volcano blew up, or the bubonic plague came marching through, all anyone wanted to do was reload from a saved game”. So it goes.

But the point was that Civ wasn’t claiming to model the history that actually happened — it was inviting you to create your own, and in the process to think about the sorts of thing that determine how  history goes. As Meyer writes: “It didn’t matter […] that gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes in China — what mattered is that you, as a civilization, could have discovered it any time after the perfection of iron smelting. You were rewriting history, not reliving it.”

By the same author

Want to make sense of our chaotic world?

By Sam Leith

And sometimes, the history it modelled was exquisitely resonant. The average game of Civ II, for instance, was supposed to last about 10 hours — but one player called James Moore, his game having arrived at a three-way state of aggressive equilibrium between the Celts, the Vikings and the Americans, kept playing for 10 years.

In the game, as Meier describes it, the three civilisations were “continuously pelting each-other with nuclear warheads while never losing or gaining substantial ground”…”centuries of conflict killed 90% of the population, and nuclear fallout melted the polar ice-caps more than twenty times […] After 1,700 years of nonstop thermonuclear bombing, the rising oceans in James’s world had covered all but the highest mountain regions with swamps.”

So not only does Civ encourage us to think about the way the world really wags — and, gently, to suggest that relations between sister nations need not be a zero-sum game. It also tells us, or warns us, that things could be an awful lot worse. Here’s to it.