LRB 15th December 2022

Making notes on my reading of the issue as I go along: work in progress.

Letters

Mike Dodds, Howard Medwell, Sue Lieberman, Dennis Lack, Irene Makaryk, Ed McNally, Allen Schill, C.J. Woods, Dan Stowell, Rob Wills

Text

Colin Burrow

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography by Matthew Dennison

"The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) of 1982 is by some distance his best book.

"But beneath the crowd-pleasing surface the mythmaking of The BFG comes from areas of Dahl’s experience that he would never have wanted to acknowledge. The BFG himself suffers from a creative dysphasia which biographers including Dennison have connected with Neal’s [his wife] struggle to recover the ability to speak after her stroke: ‘Please understand that I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly ... Words,’ the BFG says, ‘is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.’ 

"In 1960 their baby son Theo was taken out for a walk in New York by his nurse, and the pram was hit by a speeding taxi. Theo suffered serious head injuries. Dahl’s scientism kicked in, as it often did at times of disaster. He spent time and money helping to design a shunt which could relieve the cerebrospinal fluid pressing on Theo’s brain (before it was superseded, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used to treat three thousand children). Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for his daughter, though he kept a notebook in his desk drawer headed ‘Olivia’, which wasn’t discovered until after his death.

Jeremy Harding

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose

After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose

"Latour’s first resounding success, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, was Laboratory Life (1979), a close-up study of applied science.

"...Actor Network Theory (ANT), an open-ended way of thinking that redistributes agency to all the players in the drama of the sciences. As well as the people conducting the study, this includes the disciplines involved (e.g. sociology, biology, ethnology) and the more or less complex technologies to hand (from scribbled field notes to intricate laboratory equipment). All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings. Crucially, the objects of study themselves must be seen as actors. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ‘critters’, as Haraway calls them – were on something like an equal footing.

"But in the ANT model there are so many feet for a dialectic to stand on that it could easily trip over itself. Or run amok. I think next of the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where ‘things’, animated by the science of magic, rapidly get out of control.

Andrew O’Hagan

Short Cuts: I Think We’re Alone Now

Text

Laleh Khalili

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe

"Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation."

McKinsey and Company, KPMG, Deloitte, Andersen Consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton. They're all on the make and toxic!

Michael Hofmann

Poem: ‘For Adam Zagajewski’

Text

Brigid von Preussen

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain by Tristram Hunt

Wedgwood was 38 years old and had suffered decades of pain precipitated by a childhood smallpox infection. His leg was sawn off without anaesthetic [in 1768]. 

The book ... presents Wedgwood as a ‘radical potter’, not just in his ceramic innovations but also in his politics. It’s true that Wedgwood was a religious non-conformist, a Dissenter who supported the American and French Revolutions, was committed to the abolition of slavery, and believed in both parliamentary reform and the education of women.

David Trotter

‘The Last Samurai’ Reread by Lee Konstantinou

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt’s abiding interest in the practicalities of communication. She’s always been eager to explore the further reaches not just of well-established fields such as linguistics and classical scholarship, but of the digital-age specialism of ‘information theory’: the science of the organisation and retrieval of data. Her long-standing regard for the ‘beautiful, intransigent books’ published by the statistician and political scientist Edward Tufte. ‘Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information,’ Tufte writes in Envisioning Information (1990). 

Data is of no use unless it can be communicated. The origin of contemporary theories of information lies in Claude Shannon’s seminal ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, first published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. Shannon’s focus was on the signal-to-noise ratio that determines whether or not a particular message will get through. The message’s ‘semantic aspects’ were irrelevant, he thought, to the ‘engineering problem’ presented by the establishment and maintenance of a channel of communication. The engineering problem at issue has of course been around for a very long time. A solution often found to work in contexts which don’t make it easy to establish and maintain a channel of communication – battlefields, for instance – is terseness. Xenophon records in his Hellenica a dispatch sent by the second-in-command of the Spartan fleet after the disastrous sea battle of Cyzicus that roughly translates as ‘ships sunk, admiral dead, survivors starving, no idea what to do next’. Similarly, Red Devlin’s trademark ‘Oh go on’ and ‘Sure you can’ are utterances incorporating minimal semantic content, the main purpose of which is to establish and maintain a channel of communication someone else would very much prefer to close. DeWitt is the sort of writer to whom engineering – the right mark in the right place, getting the message through – matters as much as exposition.

Bee Wilson

The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Gregory Conti

Maria Montessori didn't approve of toys and playing. It should all be real for children - giving them proper respect. But she was dictatorial and offended lots of people. She was Roman Catholic and tried to the church on board, but with mixed success since they didn't like her opposition to punishment.

Neal Ascherson

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser

Flora had to be persuaded to help Bonny Prince Charlie in the famous escape from Benbecula to Skye.

Though she was captured and other conspirators executed, the public and authorities were sympathetic to the romantic story, and she was spared. Later in life she and her husband joined the exodus of Islanders to America, arriving at the wrong time in the war of independence. Despite their support for the Jacobites in Scotland they were willing to join the forces of the British (Hanovarians) in America.

Peter Howarth

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams

The chief obstacle to Chesterton’s canonisation, and to his reputation as a Christian was the antisemitism evident in his journalism. Despite his support for Zionism – in fact, thanks to it – Chesterton thought Jews would always be foreigners and honour-bound to have allegiances other than to Britain. 

GK was heavily influenced by his brother, Cecil ("Cecil was a stinker by all accounts") and by Hilaire Belloc who were antisemitic. It seems he should have paid more attention to H. G. Wells

Elisa Tamarkin

At the National Gallery: Winslow Homer

Text

Peter Phillips

The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) by Owen Rees

The fact that Victoria was a priest affects his composition. "Rees is .. is so keen to downplay the fact that Victoria was a priest (often made too much of in commentaries on his music) that he misse the special message that Victoria has embedded in the work. Throughout his setting the dominant force is light, and wherever ‘lux’ is mentioned the music takes on a new expression."

"Since the start of the new millennium, recordings of the Victoria Requiem have appeared at the rate of approximately one a year."

"As part of his recitation of the piece’s success as a concert item, he mentions that between 1986 and 2015, I [Peter Phillips] performed it 86 times, never liturgically though sometimes in a church. (That number now stands at 137.)"

Here's one of them: The Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips

Sharon Olds

Poem: ‘My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together’

Text

Helen Pfeifer

As Night Falls: 18th-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark by Avner Wishnitzer

For​ most of the Ottoman Empire’s existence, the crossing from day into night was unmistakeable, as it was in much of the world. ... Ottoman nights were dark. 

In the 1660s, starting with Paris, major Western European cities began installing street lighting. ... In the Ottoman Empire, street lighting wasn’t introduced until the 1840s ... Wishnitzer, for whom the Ottomans’ modernity is not on trial, is unperturbed. Although his book isn’t structured around the question ‘why not?’, it tentatively offers an answer: turning on the lights would have extinguished the productive ambiguity that night brought with it

Lili Owen Rowlands

The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Vol. 1: ‘In My Room’, ‘I’m Going Out Tonight’, ‘Stronger Than Me’ edited by Thomas Clerc, translated by Daniel Maroun

Text

Erin Maglaque

Dante’s Little Book

Text

Marina Warner

Diary: Carmen Callil’s Causes

Text

LRB 1st December 2022

London Review of Books 1st December 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

Adam Shatz

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

On the midterm elections which were not as bad as people feared 

[A] growing number of Republicans are running away from Trump, the biggest loser in the midterms. Since 2016, the Republicans have believed they can’t win without him, given his magnetic hold on their base. But now it seems they can’t win with him, either. A growing number of Republican politicians and donors now see Ron DeSantis as a safer bet than Trump in 2024. DeSantis isn’t a ‘moderate’ Republican. He boasts of having turned Florida into a ‘citadel of freedom’ against critical race theory, ‘Faucian dystopia’, ‘Soros-funded prosecutors’ and transgender athletes.

A second Biden campaign does not sit well with most progressives, and not only because of his age. Critics of his foreign policy cite a list of mistakes: the embarrassing fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman, who repaid him by cutting oil production; the messy evacuation of Afghanistan; the failure to hold the Israeli government accountable for the army’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, let alone its policy of apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He has replaced Trump’s abandonment of human rights with a highly selective application that favours Ukrainians over Palestinians, Egyptians and Yemenis; along with his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, he has revived the language of Cold War Atlanticism, an anachronistic idiom in an era of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.

Letters

Anthony King, Gabriel Egan, David Elstein, James Meek, Stephen Daker, Nicholas McDowell, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Raymond Rogers, Sheila Russell, Pratinav Anil, Andrew Dobson, Inigo Kilborn

Jonathan Parry

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe by Andrew Roberts

 Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail in 1896. Harmsworth’s principle was that ‘the three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things.’

For a while, he assumed that the newspaper industry would tend towards monopoly, and he intended to be the monopolist. By 1911, the Harmsworths owned the Mirror, the Observer and the Times, as well as the Mail; in 1914, they controlled 40 per cent of the morning and 45 per cent of the evening daily circulation.

[O]wnership of the Times strengthened his campaign in 1911 to persuade the Tories, in opposition, to give up the food taxes which supporters of full-scale imperial preference advocated but his poorer readers disliked. That year he sold the Observer rather than force it to adopt the same stance. For the rest of his career, he was more interested in using his papers to push whatever causes took his fancy than in building a monopoly for the sake of it. In 1915, the Mail’s circulation plummeted, albeit briefly, because of his relentless attacks on Lord Kitchener for the shortage of shells on the Western Front.

For​ Roberts, Northcliffe’s life is a balance sheet. He did Good Things and Bad Things (Roberts acknowledges his antisemitism), but the Good predominated.

As the historian Chandrika Kaul has shown, Northcliffe’s first tour of India coincided with the shocking famine of 1896-97. He made the paper publicise the suffering and attack the government’s relief effort, blaming its inadequacy largely on the domestic public’s ignorance of Indians’ living conditions. He continued to demand that Parliament pay more attention to Indian issues, in order to normalise civilian rather than military rule there.

Northcliffe’s lavish lifestyle – the hotel suites in Paris, Biarritz, Switzerland and the Riviera, the sponsorship of air travel, the twenty trips to the US – also made him an international celebrity.

Barbara Newman

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell

Albertus Magnus, the Dominican friar born sometime around 1200 and canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity.

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Living’

Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a version of the Kurosawa movie ikiru (which means ‘to live’), with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s set in the 1950s, which is when the original film was made. Starring Bill Nighy

Tessa Hadley

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

First published in 1951. The Daughter of Time has never been out of print, and in 1990 the UK Crime Writers Association voted it the ‘greatest crime novel of all time’

Amy Larocca

A Visible Man by Edward Enninful

The mid-career autobiography of Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue. But "What was a fashion magazine? I imagine my daughters asking me this when I tell them how I spent much of my working life."
Enninful took the top job at Vogue in 2017 and became the first black editor in the magazine’s history.

Hal Foster

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by T.J. Clark

‘The fundamental wordlessness of painting’ is precious to Clark

[L]ike all art historians, he is tasked with translating pictures into words, and he embraces, even exacerbates, this difficulty. For Clark ekphrastic description* is at once necessary and doomed to fail, a verdict he extends to his own poems,

*Definition of ekphrasis: A clear, intense, self-contained argument or pictorial description of an object, especially of an artwork.

[W]hy Clark uses the term ‘uncanny’ as often as he does. It is his way of signalling the many moments in Cézanne when his ‘strangeness of vision... refuses to take anything for granted.’

Of Landscape Near Pontoise (1872), for example, he writes:

Space is not distance, says Pissarro, not a journey to a horizon: it is here where we are, an immense proximity, a total intuition of place and extent. And Time is not becoming, not endless contingency: it is a Now that goes on being Now as we live it, a unique kind of permanence.

‘Every instant deserves to be monumentalised,’ Clark adds, dissolving in a sentence the old cliché about Impressionism

‘The apples of Cézanne are not fruit any longer, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they should fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.’

‘Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are,’ Clark writes of The Basket of Apples at the outset.

 

Stefan Collini

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study by John Guillory

Gazelle Mba

At the V&A: Africa Fashion

James Lasdun

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White

Stanford University was founded by Leland Sr. and Jane Stanford in honour of their late son, Leland Jr. Jane was an ardent Spiritualist and they believed Leland Jr was telling them to set up the university. Jane interfered with the running of the university, such as resisting the admission of women. She was eventually poisoned. But who did it and is was it connected to her interference with Stanford?

 

A.E. Stallings

Two Poems

Clare Bucknell

The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

Chris Power

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A novel, or fictionalised autobiography, set in Pinochet’s Chile.

Daniel Trilling

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey through the Refugee Underground by Matthieu Aikins

“In February 2020, Fuad Bedru spotted someone he recognised in the street. Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a people smuggler originally from Eritrea, was on an international wanted list, accused of holding thousands of people from various African countries captive in a ‘safe house’ in Libya, where they were starved, beaten and raped while Kidane and his fellow smugglers extorted money from their relatives. Fuad’s attempt to reach Europe had failed and he ended up back where he started, in Ethiopia. Recognising Kidane in Addis Ababa, he found a police patrol and told the officers that ‘the person standing by the electronics stall was one of the world’s most wanted human smugglers.’ Kidane offered the police officers a bribe, but they arrested him. He went on trial in October 2020.”

Sally Hayden attended the trial, but Western powers like the USA and the UK weren’t interested in this brave attempt to prosecute the people smugglers.

Laleh Khalili

Short Cuts: In Sharm El-Sheikh

COP27 "More than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, were registered as delegates"

Simone Haysom

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy

Militarising conservation may not be such a good idea

Brian Dillon

At the Photographers’ Gallery: Chris Killip

Helen Sullivan

Diary: A City of Islands

LRB 17 November 2022

 

London Review of Books 17 November 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

 

Letters

Claire Spencer, Victor Reus, Jim Carmichael, Tim Barker, Gareth Evans, James Parker, Andrew Lewis, J. Cohn

David Runciman

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman on the Tories. But he still feels the need to deprecate Corbyn. This:

"had it been Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who spooked the markets, Labour would have stuck with them out of a determination not to be pushed around by anyone"

is obvious nonsense given the repeated attempts of the PLP and the Party Staff to undermine and get rid of Corbyn. At least on this occasion the LRB did subsequently publish a letter (by Stephen Daker) making this point.

 

The LRB, including Runciman, demonstrated its blinkered establishment credentials by criticising, and mocking, Corbyn from the moment he became leader.

David Goldblatt

Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth by John McManus

Qatar and the 2022 Fifa World Cup: Politics, Controversy, Change by Paul Michael Brannagan and Danyel Reiche

Martha Barratt

At the Barbican: Carolee Schneemann

Rosemary Hill

Menu Design in Europe: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1800-2000 edited by Jim Heimann

Anthony Grafton

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

Patricia Lockwood

Liberation Day by George Saunders

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

Ailbhe Darcy

Poem: ‘Grand Guignol’

Michael Wood

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch

The longest and most bewildering language aphorism is this one:

"For everything outside the world of the senses, language can be used only by way of suggestion, but can never even come close to being used representationally because it is concerned only with possession and its associations, in accordance with the world of the senses."

Tom Stevenson

The Revolutionary Decade

Tom Stevenson in Tunisia. Until recently​ Tunisia was seen as the lone success story of the Arab Spring. But on 25 July last year, President Kais Saied summoned the prime minister to the presidential palace in Carthage and dismissed him, declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and sent the army to block the entrances to the building.

Tormod Johansen

Short Cuts: Lawless v. Ireland

Liam Shaw

Life on the Rocks by Juli Berwald

Joanne O’Leary

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis

The Uncollected Essays by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse

T.J. Clark

On Mike Davis

Clare Jackson

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

Madeleine Schwartz

Diary: Teaching in the Banlieue

LRB 1 December 2022

 

London Review of Books 1 December 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

Adam Shatz

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

On the midterm elections which were not as bad as people feared 

[A] growing number of Republicans are running away from Trump, the biggest loser in the midterms. Since 2016, the Republicans have believed they can’t win without him, given his magnetic hold on their base. But now it seems they can’t win with him, either. A growing number of Republican politicians and donors now see Ron DeSantis as a safer bet than Trump in 2024. DeSantis isn’t a ‘moderate’ Republican. He boasts of having turned Florida into a ‘citadel of freedom’ against critical race theory, ‘Faucian dystopia’, ‘Soros-funded prosecutors’ and transgender athletes.

A second Biden campaign does not sit well with most progressives, and not only because of his age. Critics of his foreign policy cite a list of mistakes: the embarrassing fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman, who repaid him by cutting oil production; the messy evacuation of Afghanistan; the failure to hold the Israeli government accountable for the army’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, let alone its policy of apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He has replaced Trump’s abandonment of human rights with a highly selective application that favours Ukrainians over Palestinians, Egyptians and Yemenis; along with his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, he has revived the language of Cold War Atlanticism, an anachronistic idiom in an era of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.

Letters

Anthony King, Gabriel Egan, David Elstein, James Meek, Stephen Daker, Nicholas McDowell, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Raymond Rogers, Sheila Russell, Pratinav Anil, Andrew Dobson, Inigo Kilborn

Jonathan Parry

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe by Andrew Roberts

 Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail in 1896. Harmsworth’s principle was that ‘the three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things.’

For a while, he assumed that the newspaper industry would tend towards monopoly, and he intended to be the monopolist. By 1911, the Harmsworths owned the Mirror, the Observer and the Times, as well as the Mail; in 1914, they controlled 40 per cent of the morning and 45 per cent of the evening daily circulation.

[O]wnership of the Times strengthened his campaign in 1911 to persuade the Tories, in opposition, to give up the food taxes which supporters of full-scale imperial preference advocated but his poorer readers disliked. That year he sold the Observer rather than force it to adopt the same stance. For the rest of his career, he was more interested in using his papers to push whatever causes took his fancy than in building a monopoly for the sake of it. In 1915, the Mail’s circulation plummeted, albeit briefly, because of his relentless attacks on Lord Kitchener for the shortage of shells on the Western Front.

For​ Roberts, Northcliffe’s life is a balance sheet. He did Good Things and Bad Things (Roberts acknowledges his antisemitism), but the Good predominated.

As the historian Chandrika Kaul has shown, Northcliffe’s first tour of India coincided with the shocking famine of 1896-97. He made the paper publicise the suffering and attack the government’s relief effort, blaming its inadequacy largely on the domestic public’s ignorance of Indians’ living conditions. He continued to demand that Parliament pay more attention to Indian issues, in order to normalise civilian rather than military rule there.

Northcliffe’s lavish lifestyle – the hotel suites in Paris, Biarritz, Switzerland and the Riviera, the sponsorship of air travel, the twenty trips to the US – also made him an international celebrity.

Barbara Newman

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Living’

Tessa Hadley

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Amy Larocca

A Visible Man by Edward Enninful

Hal Foster

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by T.J. Clark

Stefan Collini

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study by John Guillory

Gazelle Mba

At the V&A: Africa Fashion

James Lasdun

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White

A.E. Stallings

Two Poems

Clare Bucknell

The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

Chris Power

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A novel, or fictionalised autobiography, set in Pinochet’s Chile.

Daniel Trilling

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey through the Refugee Underground by Matthieu Aikins

“In February 2020, Fuad Bedru spotted someone he recognised in the street. Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a people smuggler originally from Eritrea, was on an international wanted list, accused of holding thousands of people from various African countries captive in a ‘safe house’ in Libya, where they were starved, beaten and raped while Kidane and his fellow smugglers extorted money from their relatives. Fuad’s attempt to reach Europe had failed and he ended up back where he started, in Ethiopia. Recognising Kidane in Addis Ababa, he found a police patrol and told the officers that ‘the person standing by the electronics stall was one of the world’s most wanted human smugglers.’ Kidane offered the police officers a bribe, but they arrested him. He went on trial in October 2020.”

Sally Hayden attended the trial, but Western powers like the USA and the UK weren’t interested in this brave attempt to prosecute the people smugglers.

Laleh Khalili

Short Cuts: In Sharm El-Sheikh

Simone Haysom

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy

Militarising conservation may not be such a good idea

Brian Dillon

At the Photographers’ Gallery: Chris Killip

Helen Sullivan

Diary: A City of Islands

A note on growing fruit and vegetables

Food from the garden comes from the leaves, from the seed/fruit, or from the plant storage organ (bulb/corm/root) of a plant.

The goal in life for most* plants is to produce seed (and maybe fruit to help spread the seed). To do this they need first to grow healthy roots, stems and leaves, and some of them also build up stores of food so that they can make a better job of producing seeds later.

*Some plants, such as mint, have discovered that they can manage pretty well by propagating vegetatively – sending out roots, underground stems or runners – and are not bothered about flowering and producing seeds.

Leaves. If we are eating the leaves – spinach, lettuce, parsley etc. – we want to encourage the plant to concentrate on growing lots of healthy leaves and not get distracted by producing seeds. To do this we make sure it has enough food and water so that it feels safe continuing to produce leaves. If we get it worried – if it thinks it could be heading for trouble – it might rush into producing seeds to make sure it gets that done before it dies. Once a plant has made that decision – it is ‘running to seed’ – it will no longer bother with growing leaves and our crop is coming to an end.

Some plants are biennials, meaning that they don’t plan to flower until the second year, so generally they won’t run to seen in the first year. Parsley is like that, so too are leeks. But even those, if they are badly stressed, will make a bolt for it and run to seed in the first year.

So if you are growing a plant for the leaves you need to keep it happy!

(I’ve never managed to keep cilantro – coriander – happy for very long. If anyone has any tips please let me know!)

Bulbs/corms/roots. With some biennials, such as onions and carrots, we are growing them for their storage organ. In general, the better fed and watered it is, the more it will be able to store and the bigger the crop.

Some plants, like potatoes, aren’t biennial bit still produce the storage organ which we crop.

As with plants that we grow for leaves, if we stress them too much they will run to seed – even some of the biennials – in which case they use up the store of food and our crop will be reduced or even lost entirely.

Fruit and seeds. In this case you want the plant to ‘run to seed’, but only after it has built up enough strength to produce a good crop of fruit or seeds.

Some of these plants know what they are doing and are single minded about it, so the better the life you give them the better the crop. Sweetcorn for example, and french and runner beans. Some others, however, can get distracted by growing leaves if they are too comfortable. This can happen with tomatoes, they will give you crop, but if you feed them with too much of a nitrogen rich fertiliser they will grow lots of leaves which are no use to you.

Nelson Mandela's speech to the 2000 Labour Party conference

Note: the transcript printed in The Guardian was incomplete against the speech on YouTube. This is my transcription (starting from the Guardian text).

Prime Minister Tony Blair, distinguished guests, I am intimidated. Tony you know as well as I do that the reason why there are so many people here at this moment is purely out of curiosity. They want to see what a pensioner from the colonies looks like. Well you know I am not an old man. Please take these glasses. 

One of the distinguishing features of the anti-apartheid struggle was the very broad support it enjoyed from most political persuasions in all parts of the world.

Apartheid was experienced as such a basic onslaught against human dignity that it demeaned all of us.

The political parties in the major western countries often had different approaches in their support for the freedom struggle in South Africa, but none could ever condone the racism of apartheid.

This universal abhorrence of apartheid contributed significantly to the ultimate victory of freedom, non-racialism and democracy in our country.

One therefore has an appreciation for the support received from people all over the world, irrespective of their party political affiliation.

There were however, political parties and organisations in the western democracies with which the liberation movement developed particularly strong solidarity relations.

These derived from a common approach to such social issues as poverty and the primary concern for the marginalised.

These relationships were built and consolidated in joint action and struggle with the solidarity forces in those countries.

The Labour party of Great Britain is one such organisation. It therefore gives us such great pleasure to join with you here today at your party congress in the year that the party celebrates its centenary.

Allow me in the first place to extend our hearty congratulations to the Labour party. I am certain that I can do so on behalf of all the freedom-loving people in our country, who appreciated the extent to which the attainment of democracy in South Africa was also due to our solidarity partners internationally.

I know that I can do it on behalf of the organisation that you supported so faithfully over many decades, the African National Congress.

Britain was in so many respects the second headquarters of our movement in exile. Your solidarity helped to make those years of exile bearable and contributed to them not turning out to be wasted years. With you we can look back to the proud beginnings of your organisation, rooted in the concern to give organisational voice to those without power.

To have sustained over a century such an organisation is a tribute not only to the Labour party, its leadership and members. It is testimony to the resilience of the spirit that continues to believe that the world can be made a better place for all.

It defies and gives the lie to the pervasive cynicism and loss of hope that characterised so much of political life in the latter part of the last century.

The centenary celebrations of such a political organisation serves to remind us, here at the start of a new millennium, of the continued need to persevere in the pursuit of those ideals.

The internationalism of which the Labour party was such a potent part, as we well know in South Africa, today faces new challenges.

At a time international solidarity was a triumph of the human spirit over the barriers of distance and isolation. We marvelled at that generosity of spirit capable of reaching out to take part in the struggles of those far removed and in distant corners of the world.

Today the world has become the global village of which we once spoke only in wishful metaphor. What happens in one part of the globe is immediately accessible to the entire world and affects others over great distances.

The danger is that globalisation can come to mean only the free flow of goods and finance, the open access to markets, the breaking down of barriers to trade and commerce.

The concern for the common good, which characterised the international solidarity we spoke of, is in danger of being lost in the current understanding of a global world.

We would argue that the shrinking of the globe through the advances in communications and information technology has made it even more incumbent upon us to become once more the keepers of our brothers and sisters wherever in the world they may be. This may very well be one of the major political and moral tasks of the Labour party in the 21st century.

Globalisation is extremely important, no country can avoid it. Those who are saying they are not going to prepare for this phenomenon are like saying I don’t recognise winter therefore I am not going to buy clothing for winter. We have our reservations about globalisation as I have indicated [?] and we must certainly not be afraid to condemn those aspects of globalisation which lead to more poverty in the world. We can no longer tolerate where few powers dominate the world and dictate to the world. All human beings are born equal. They must be treated equally. But one can help, right expectation in regard to this global expectations only of a party that domestically holds dear those values of solidarity with the poor and the vulnerable sectors of society, especially women, children, the disabled, the aged, those who suffer from terminal diseases like HIV aids, cancer and others. It is a sad fact of our times that in spite of the massive scientific, technological and economic advances humankind has made poverty and social inequality remain features of most societies in the world. Our historic relationship with the Labour party rests upon our common concern to centrally represent the voice and interests of those sectors traditionally excluded from power and privilege.

In our own country poverty remains the greatest social problem and its eradication our greatest political and societal challenge.

I told Prime Minister, Tony, about an hour or so ago, that apart from poverty, that I’ve spoken about we faced a crisis of a dimension which I can not put in words. In our country 10 teachers die every month of Aids, in one university a student dies every week and in one of the most prominent universities in the country more than 25% of the students are HIV positive, and in our of our neighbouring countries three cabinet ministers one of whom was a doctor, have died of aids. We look to our friends to assist us to stave off a crisis. I told the PM that President Bill Clinton has given me five million dollars to use specifically to fight the scourge. Bill Gates gave me ten million dollars and my wife five million dollars and the partner of Bill Gates gave each of 7 and a half million. There are times when I wish I had not got married. Because if I had not I would have got that 15 million. But what worries me even more is that my wife is becoming even more important than I am. There was an ambassador in SA who came to me and said I want to give your wife an honorary doctorate but if you accompany her you will also get a doctorate. You can see the wretched life I am spending but please don’t tell her that I made this remark.

In South Africa we have achieved a non-racial democracy based on one of the most progressive constitutions anywhere in the world. Our once divided society has come together in an act of national reconciliation that ensures that our political order is stable; we now live out our differences within the framework of our constitutional democracy. The management of our economy is widely acclaimed for the manner in which sound macro-economic fundamentals are maintained.

The people-centred growth of our economy, with new jobs and increasing prosperity for all our people, has however not occurred at the pace and volume we hoped for when we set out on this road of reconstruction and development.

The growth of an economy is no longer merely a national matter. Globalisation has exactly meant that a nation's best made plans can go awry due to international factors beyond its control.

We have seen that with the financial crisis in the Asian markets, even though our economy withstood that crisis better than most of the emergent economies. The effective growth of an economy like ours is crucially dependent upon direct foreign investment; yet one often witnesses how the political stability, social progressiveness and sound economic management in the country are ignored when investment decisions are made.

As we stood together to oppose apartheid in South Africa, we are today called upon to join forces for growth and development.

Democratic South Africa has no pretensions whatsoever to being a mini superpower in our region, on our continent or in the developing world. We do, however, realise that we have a responsibility to articulate common concerns of those regions when we do act on the international stage. In doing so, we turn once more to our traditional solidarity partners, like the Labour party, to add their voice to those clamouring and working for a better and more equitable life for all throughout the world.

One of the issues that gives me encouragement in all the turmoil that are taking place all over the work, the thing that makes me go to bed feeling strong and full of hope and feeling much younger than I am, is that in spite of all the problems, the world is full of good men and women who are prepared to serve not only their country but the entire world men and women who fight socio-economic evils wherever they are to be found in the world. Men and women whose theatre of operations is the entire world, who fight poverty, illiteracy, hunger, want. As I look at you here I can see men and women who are worthy candidates to immortality. When their last day comes we will be able to say here lies a man or women who has done his or her duty to country, and to people. They will be like Aristotle or Plato we will inter them into the earth but their names will live for eternity. That is how I conceive of the Labour Party, because of the way on which is has selected such economic issues like poverty, like hunger, to fight, wherever these are to be found in the world. We are the beneficiaries of that vision, of that sensitivity, to problems across the seas, and that is how the Labour Party has conducted itself up to today. And that is why I am confident that there are good men and women all over the world, those good men and women are to be found in the Labour Party of Britain.

I wish you well as you enter the second century of your organisational life.

The health of a democracy is ultimately dependent upon the vibrancy of its political parties and the active participation of the citizenry. It is our wish that the human solidarity that has inspired the Labour party for such a long time will be kept alive in action. May this century be one where the poor and marginalised come into their own and the gross social inequalities of the past at last are eradicated.

Tony, ladies and gentlemen, I may have told you the story in the past, but it is crucial that I should repeat it here, the day before my 75^th birthday my security told me that there was a young lady of about 4 at the gate that wanted to see me. I said let her come in. They said “sir she is very cheeky” I said precisely for that reason let her come in. They did. She was quite a lady. I was sitting in my lounge she did not knock she did not knock she did not wait she said ‘how old are you’. I said I can’t remember but I was born long, long ago. She said two years ago? I said no much longer than that. Then she said ‘why did you go to jail?’ I “no I did not go to jail before because I wanted to I was sent there by other people”. “Who sent you there” “people who don’t like me”. She said “how long were you there?” I said “again I can’t remember but I was there for a very long time”. “No” she insisted “you must tell me how long you were there”. I said “no I have already told you that I can’t remember”. She then said “you are a stupid old man aren’t you”.

Well ladies and gentlemen if you think my remarks have not lived up to your expectations please be a little more diplomatic than that young lady.

Saul Alinsky on radicals, contrasted with conservatives and liberals.

From Saul Alinsky “Reveille for Radicals” 2nd Edition, Vintage Books, New York 1969. pp 15-23. (First edition 1946)  Edited to remove of-the-time sexist and racially-offensive language.

What is the American Radical? Radicals are those unique people who actually believe what they say. They are those people to whom the common good is the greatest personal value. They are those people who genuinely and completely believe in mankind. Radicals so completely identified with mankind that they personally share the pain, the injustices, and the sufferings of all their fellows.

For Radicals the bell tolls unceasingly and everyone’s struggle is their fight.

Radicals are not fooled by shibboleths and façades. They face issues squarely and do not hide their cowardice behind the convenient cloak of rationalization. Radicals refuse to be diverted by superficial problems. They are completely concerned with fundamental causes rather than current manifestations. They concentrate their attack on the heart of the issue.

What do the radicals want? They want a world in which the worth of the individual is recognized. They want the creation of a kind of society where everyone’s potentialities could be realized; a world where people could live in dignity, security, happiness and peace—a world based on a morality of humanity.

To these ends radicals struggle to eradicate all those evils which anchor humanity in the mire of war, fears, misery, and demoralization. Radicals are concerned not only with the economic welfare of the bodies of people but also with the freedom of their minds. It is for this that they attack all those parts of any system that tends to make people robots. It is for this that they oppose all circumstances which destroy souls and make people fearful, petty, worried, dull sheep in human clothing. Radicals are dedicated to the destruction of the roots of all fears, frustrations, and insecurity, whether they be material or spiritual. Radicals want to see humanity truly free. Not just free economically and politically but also free socially. When radicals say complete freedom they means just that.

Radicals believe that all peoples should have a high standard of food, housing, and health. Radicals are impatient with talk of the “closing of frontiers” or the “end of the frontiers.” They think only in terms of human frontiers which are as limitless as the horizons. Radicals believe intensely in the possibilities of people and hope fervently for the future.

Radicals place human rights far above property rights. They are for universal, free public education and recognize this as fundamental to the democratic way of life. They will be for local control but will condemn local abuse of public education – whether it be discrimination or corruption – that denies equal education to anyone and will insist if necessary upon its correction by national laws and the use of government authority enforce those laws —but at the same time they will bitterly oppose complete Federal control of education. They will fight for individual rights and against centralized power. They will usually be found battling in defense of local rights against Federal usurpations of power, but they knows that ever since the Tories attacked the Continental Congress as an invasion of local rights, “local rights” – or, as the term has come to be known, “States’ rights” – have been the star-spangled Trojan horse of Tory reaction. It is for this reason that American radicals frequently shift their position on this issuer, in keeping with their fundamental beliefs in human rights.

Radical are deeply interested in social planning but just as deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to any idea of plans which work from the top down. Democracy to them is working from the bottom up.

Radicals are staunch defenders of minority rights but will combat any minority which tries to use the club of minority rights to bludgeon into unconsciousness the will of the majority.

In short, American radicals, by their individual actions, may appear to be the epitome of inconsistency, but when judged on the basis of his ideals, philosophy, and objectives, are a living definition of consistency.

Radicals believe completely in real equality of opportunity for all peoples regardless of race, color, or creed. They insist on full employment for economic security but are just as insistent that work should not only provide economic security but also be such as to satisfy the creative desires within us all. Radicals feel that the importance of a job is not only in its individual economic return but also in its general social significance. Radicals know that humans are not just economic animals. The complete person is one who is making a definite contribution to the general social welfare and who is a vital part of that community of interests, values, and purposes that makes life and people meaningful. Complete people need complete jobs – jobs for the heart as well as the hand – jobs where they can say to themselves, “What I do is important and has its place.”

American radicals will fight privilege and power whether it be inherited or acquired by any small group, whether it be political or financial or organized creed. They curse a caste system which they recognize despite all patriotic denials. They will fight conservatives whether they are business or labor leaders. They will fight any concentration of power hostile to a broad, popular democracy, whether they find it in financial circles or in politics.

Radicals recognize that constant dissension and conflict is and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy. They firmly believe in that brave saying of a brave people, "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!’ Radicals may resort to the sword but when they do they are not filled with hatred against those individuals whom they attack. They hate these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which they believe to be inimical to the welfare of the people. That is the reason why radicals, although frequently embarking upon revolutions, have rarely resorted to personal terrorism.

To the general public Radicals may appear to be persons of violence. But if Radicals are stormy and fighting on the outside, they possess an inner dignity. It is that dignity that can come only from consistency of conscience and conduct. The first part of the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi expresses to a large extent the radical’s hopes, aspirations, dreams, and philosophy:

Lord, make me. an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

But let no person or group who ruthlessly exploit their fellow men assume because of the nobility and spiritual quality of the radicals’ hopes that they will not stand up for the fulfillment of this prayer, for next to this prayer they carry within them the words of Jehovah :

When I whet my glittering sword, and my hand taketh hold on Judgment: I will render vengeance unto my enemies, and those that hate me will I requite.

I will make my arrows drunken with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; from the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the crushed head of the enemy.

There are many liberals who claim the same objectives in life which characterize the philosophy of the radical, but there are as many clear lines between radicals and liberals as there are between liberals and conservatives. There is a tremendous significance to that common saying that people radical at twenty-one, liberal at thirty-one, and conservative at forty. Youngsters of twenty-one still have certain burning ideals. They still have faith in life and hope in progress. They are still naive enough to take what they say literally. They are still young enough not to have acquired a vested material interest and the attendant suspicions of any social change which might jeopardize it. They still haven’t reached the point of believing that “all men are created equal” is nice in theory but taboo in practice. They have not become civilized to the point of assimilating all the prejudices and hate which permeate so large a portion of our lives. They still have some of the simplicity and decency of the child. They still like and actually expect to be liked in return. They still are not filled with the virus of driving personal ambition, with sophistication and its accompanying constellation of rationalizations, and with a cynicism which is a cover-up for the deep fear of the future. They brave young people whose life is not cluttered up with prejudices and fears. They are radicals. Radicals always remain young in spite of the passage of years. That is one of the differences between the radical and the liberal. There are others.

Liberals like people with their head, radicals like people with both their head and their hearts. Liberals talk passionately of the rights of minority groups; protest against the denial of political and voting rights, against segregation, against anti-Semitism, and against all other inhuman practices of humanity. However, when these same liberals emerge from their meetings, rallies, and passage of resolutions and find themselves seated next to a Black American in a public conveyance they instinctively shrink back slightly. They belong to professional organizations and social clubs whose membership is exclusive – exclusive of Jews, Blacks, and many other minorities. They tell you that they disapprove of the practice, but nevertheless continue their membership. Intellectually they subscribe to all of the principles of the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States, but in their hearts they do not. They are a strange breed of hybrids who have radical minds and conservative hearts. They really like people only with their head. The radical genuinely likes people and feels the same warmth and friendship in his actual relationships with all people that he expresses with his tongue.

Liberals regard themselves as well informed and well balanced. They refer to radicals as “cranks.” They forget, however, that the definition of a crank is an object which makes revolutions.

Liberals in common with many conservatives lay claim to the precious quality of impartiality, of cold objectivity, and to a sense of mystical impartial justice which enables them to view both sides of an issue. Since there are always at least two sides to every question and all justice on one side involves a certain degree of injustice to the other side, liberals are hesitant to act. Their opinions are studded with “but on the other hand.” Caught on the horns of this dilemma they are paralyzed into immobility. They become utterly incapable of action. They discuss and discuss and end in disgust.

Liberals charge radicals with passionate partisanship. To this accusation the radical’s jaw tightens as he snaps, “Guilty! We are partisan for the people. Furthermore, we know that all people are partisan. The only non-partisan people are those who are dead. You too are partisan—if not for the people, then for whom?"

Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement “which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.” They endlessly pass resolutions and endlessly do nothing. They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit. Radicals do not sit frozen by cold objectivity. They see injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. They are people of decision and action. There is a saying that the difference between a liberal and a radical is that the liberal is one who walks out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.

Liberals have distorted egotistical concepts of their self-importance in the general social scheme. They deliberate as ponderously and as timelessly as though their decisions would cause the world to shake and tremble. Theirs is truly a perfect case of the mountain laboring and bringing forth a mouse—a small, white, pink-eyed mouse. The fact is that outside of their own intimate associates few know of or give a hang what these liberal groups decide. They truly fit the old description that “A liberal is one who puts their foot down firmly on thin air.”

The support given by liberals to some radical measures is to be understood in the explanation a wealthy French farmer gave when he voted for Socialism. “I vote for Socialism always and steadily,” he said, “because there isn’t going to be any Socialism.”

A complacent society tolerantly views the turbulent atmospheric noise of liberal minds with the old childhood slogan of “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Let the liberal turn to the course of action, the course of all radicals, and the amused look vanishes from the face of society as it snarls, “That’s radical!” Society has good reason to fear radicals. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from radicals. They hit, they hurt, they are dangerous. Conservative interests know that while liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.

A fundamental difference between liberals and radicals is to be found in the issue of power. Liberals fear power or its application. They labor in confusion over the significance of power and fail to recognize that only through the achievement and constructive use of power can people better themselves. They talk glibly of a people lifting themselves by their own bootstraps but fail to realize that nothing can be lifted or moved except through power. This fear of popular use of power is reflected in what has become the motto of liberals, “We agree with your objectives but not with your tactics.” This has been the case throughout the history of America. Through every great crisis including the American Revolution there were thousands of well-meaning liberals who always cried out, “We agree with you that America should be free, but we disagree that it is necessary to have a bloody revolution.” “We agree that slavery should be eliminated but we disagree with the turmoil of civil war.” Every issue involving power and its use has always carried in its wake the Liberal backwash of agreeing with the objective ‘but disagreeing with the tactics.

Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action—by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires.

There are other differences between liberals and radicals. Liberals protest; radicals rebel. Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action. Liberals do not modify their personal life and what they give to a cause is a small part of their life; radicals give themselves to the cause. Liberals give and take oral arguments; radicals give and take the hard, dirty, bitter way of life. Liberals frequently achieve high places of respectability ranging from the Supreme Court to Congress; the names of radicals are rarely enscribed in marble but burn eternally in the hearts of man. Liberals have tender beliefs and are filled with repugnance at the grime, the sordidness, the pain, the persecution, and the heartbreak of battle; radicals have tough convictions which are calloused by the rough road of direct action. Liberals play the game of life with white and occasionally red chips; with the Radical it’s only blue chips, and all the chips are always down. Liberals dream dreams; radicals build the world of men’s dreams.