corrigan1

Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.
GK Chesterton, Heretics.



Most of us with any knowledge of history are aware that in both Britain and America - and, indeed, in the rest of the western world - a strong eugenics movement existed in the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Today, when we think of these people, we tend to think of them (particularly the British incarnation) as cranky and somewhat liverish individuals, irascible and very much of their time, but now a colourful memory of a more distinctive age. If Dennis Sewell is correct (and he makes a very strong and disturbing case) then we would be wrong on both counts: in the day, they were not simply an endearing piece of local vividness like your eccentric maiden aunt, but dangerous racialists and vicious class warriors; nor (much more disturbingly) have they not gone away. Eugenics was just one product of something that is still very much alive to trouble us today: the use of Darwinian theory for political motives and as a fuel for social engineering.

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A Highly Articulate Primal Scream


Quentin Letts is a diarist and political sketch writer for a British newspaper, the Daily Mail. Some would regard that as an odd combination, since political journalists tend to take themselves tremendously seriously, notwithstanding the fact that most of them are so far up the crevices of the politicians they cover that nobody knows where one ends and the other begins. You get the impression that Letts thinks as much of his fellow scribes, although he does not say it explicitly: that’s not really what this book is about, though certain journalists - most notably, those on the Mail’s rival, the Guardian - do come in for a kicking. Rather, the core of Letts' primal scream it the ever encroaching blanket of egalitarianism which is covering Britain in particular, and the West generally.

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Stiff Upper Lips And Chota Pegs All Around


You may, if you’re old enough, remember those hoary old British TV adventure shows from the 1960s like The Avengers or The Saint.  If you are, you’ll know that one of the recurring types who appeared in them was the Old Colonial Hand, the retired planter or army officer, spare of body but stout of heart, with a brisling moustache and a boyish sense of adventure tucked behind a weather beaten face and an alert pair of eyes used to scanning the hills for signs of  Pathan insurgency.  Such stock characters were a common sight in reality in the England of the time, flotsam of empire beached by imperial retreat, taking their daily constitutional along the front at quick march pace and addressing each other, public school style, with clipped accents and by surnames only.   Despite the revolutions - social and political - of the day, and the comprehensive rejection of the England they had stood for, one gets the impression that the only regret the OCH had was that he couldn’t do it all again.  It really must have been tremendous fun kicking some dhobi wallah up the backside if he put too much starch in your shorts or roaring at the punkah boy if he fell asleep on the veranda, and despite the archetypical image of elderly energy which has seeped into the public unconscious, these people must have been young once.  If they were (and of course they were) and were very lucky, they may have had the kind of adventurous youth Barbara Cleverly describes in her Joe Sandilands books.  

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Phase Space And The Rossmeister General


You know those Star Trek episodes where Kirk or Sisko cross over to an alternative universe in which everything looks like it should but you just know it’s not quite right?  I guess they’re popular because everybody has days when the world feels like that.  In my case, it’s weekdays.  Saturdays and Sundays too.  That’s the trouble with life; just when you’ve organized the world exactly the way it should be (sometimes referred to as ‘the way you want it’) somebody comes along and kicks the props out from under you.  It's said that the way one handles these little setbacks is the mark of a man, and most of us swallow it down and act with the maturity and wisdom of adults.  But I’d bet you’d prefer to freak out, spit back and throw your toys out of the pram, wouldn’t you?

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Good Meal, If Not Haute Cuisine

One man’s meat, so they say, is another’s poison; if it is, Somerset Maugham got rich off something that choked a lot of critics.  It is, therefore, ironic that what brought me to this book were the almost verbatim opinions of two critics - separately voiced some twenty years apart - that Maugham was ‘a good, but not a great’ writer.  The somewhat sniffy qualification pushed my buttons, kind of like when you were at school and had to be careful not to copy your homework too closely from the class smart kid: if you were any way clever yourself, you put in a few mistakes to make it look good.  Not that I’m suggesting that there’s a classroom full of trainee critics out there somewhere learning who they’re supposed to adore and who they should abhor, but the very existence of a canon of ‘great’ literature presupposes an evaluation committee of some sort, however informal.  

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Well, It's Different...


A lot of people are of the opinion that the greatest mistake the Roman Catholic church ever made was to do away with the old Latin mass. It didn’t matter that the congregation hadn’t a sufficient command of the language to closely follow the intonations of the priest; what mattered were the intonations themselves, the ritual observed by millions of Catholics in exactly the same way in thousands of churches all over the world. Much like the Muslims who kneel to Mecca five times a day, they were part of something greater than themselves and were proud because of it. If David Peace is to be believed, it’s a bit like being Japanese.

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White founts falling in the courts of the sun
and the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run...
GK Chesterton, Lepanto



History has become rather a sexy subject over the last decade or two.  Where previously it was sometimes considered the fusty bachelor uncle of academe, it has more lately come to be regarded with a certain rakish regard by undergraduates, the chattering classes and, indeed, even by serious people.   Partly, this is due to the efforts of those like Tom Holland and James J. O’Donnell, to whom I have previously referred, and even, to a (very much) lesser extent, to populist pipsqueaks like Andrew Roberts.  Between the sociological histories of Holland and O’Donnell, and  whatever it is that Roberts does, old style date-and-battle historians seem to have fallen through the cracks.  In a way, that’s because of the very success the subject has recently enjoyed commercially and educationally: we know the facts in more intimate detail today than probably any generation in the past.  Now what we want is some intellectual depth.  Enter Holland and O’Donnell.

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...And Quickly Forgotten

Jonathan Kellerman, or Kellerman Père as I have previously referred to him, has been cranking out the Alex Delaware novels since 1985.  A long time ago (it seems) I used to be an avid fan of the series, but, as is the way with these things, I drifted away and only came back when I ran across a rather battered copy of this 2006 effort which somebody had left behind them on the bus.  Reading it, I can see why that was an easy thing to do.  It’s not that it’s a badly written or unfit for the purpose; rather, it’s a by-the-book thriller that reads like it was written the way most of us do our daily work - with one eye on the clock and half our minds elsewhere.  Hardly surprising, since this is the twentieth in the franchise.  It’s adequate, but he’s phoned it in.

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It's Got A Je Ne Sais Quoi - But I Don't Know What It Is

There is a theory, most recently espoused by the British expatriate writer Lucy Wadham, that the key to understanding France is through understanding the historical, or rather the anthropological, influence of a form of civic Catholicism which is unique to that country: thus, we have the educational system, notionally secular, but actually modelled along Jesuit lines; the sense of communality which causes the French to desendez dans la rue when they don’t like the new cheese tax; the massive respect for learning and culture, but the complete incomprehension of the protestant work ethic, and, it goes without saying, the almost religious love of beauty (almost, but not quite)

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Why They're All The Same

It was by coincidence that I happened to pick up this book, following on from Theodore Dalrymple’s effort, previously reviewed.  The two books, taken together, make a good fit, covering as they do the sociological decline of the British state, but whereas Dalrymple’s view is that the rot is coming up from the bottom, Oborn describes a country essentially taken over by something that amounts to a junta.  His thesis is that a group of professional politicians, ‘bred like racehorses’ for no other function but the exercise of state power, has ascended to authority in Britain and, in detailed and excoriating prose, he explains how they are not only destroying the country from the top down, but actually have no anthropological choice but to do so, for in order to perpetuate themselves (the ultimate biological goal of any species) they must systematically destroy those organs of the state which they cannot control.

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Leading The Charge

When the French Army mutinied in 1917, the curious point to was the location of the uprising: not in the trenches, where one might expect men to crack fastest, but in the rear areas, among the soldiers who had rotated out of the line and had time on their hands to think.  There was no mutiny in the British army, because, paradoxically, the British officer corps was not a meritocracy; the British officers had a sense of entitlement that only a certain type of upbringing can imbue and consequently had not the slightest compunction about overseeing the lives of their men when supposedly resting, just as they would have done in the trenches.  They organized sporting fixtures, lectures, concert parties, ‘voluntary’ activities amongst civilians and anything else they could think of to pass the men’s time.  By contrast, the French officers would allow their men to lounge around the various estaminets, no doubt discussing Kant and Hume and Rousseau over a glass of wine in that inimitable French manner until they decided (in that inimitable French manner) to shot their officers and refuse their orders.  The French officers, who were often promoted from the ranks, reasoned that the men had earned their rest and were entitled to spend it any way they liked; the British officers reasoned that the Devil makes work for idle hands and there were no hands more dangerous than those of idle soldiers.  The French officers were right in justice; the British officers were right in practice.  

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A Ripping Yarn

Way back during the 1930s, in the last flush of British imperial grandeur, when mass unemployment and social upheaval was the new black, (a colour which remains strangely topical) a few hardy souls like novelist AEW Mason and film producer Alexander Korda were still doing their bit by king and empire with dashing stories of plucky derring-do in the colonies, the heroes of which tended to be rather spiffing types calculated to re-inspire the flagging imperial ethos and give a new direction to an increasingly uncertain hoi-polloi.  In stories like The Four Feathers, the Empire was used as a kind of British variation on the Wild West, with stout hearted public schoolboys and chirpy, uncomplaining cockneys taking on the Mahdi’s hordes with clean fighting, manly bonding rituals and rapid firing machine guns.  The genre - at least in its cinematic variation -  did not last long, being eclipsed by the much more serious considerations of the Second World War; as much as anything else, the reality of modern warfare being brought home to the British masses, together with the absolute necessity of deciding exactly what it was they were fighting for, is what brought the Empire to a close, and for years afterwards, it was considered bad form (old boy) to revisit the scene.

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Four Old Devils On The Lash


Robert Sellers is best known as a journalist and chronicler of film, as a contributor to many movie magazines including Empire and Total Film, and as a biographer of several show business personalities such as Sting, Sigourney Weaver and Sean Connery.  In this one, he attempts a kind of four way, chronological biography of some of the biggest shit stirring drunkards in cinematic history.  One would, consequently, imagine the ‘rollicking read’ which is emblazoned across the front cover; well, it is, kind of, but you come away at the end thinking there was a great opportunity missed here.  The book is an interesting read in a tabloid kind of way, but it’s really more or a piss artist’s almanac than any kind of inquiry into the minds and souls of four men who, whatever else they were, were good actors.  It’s hagiography more than history, and while you get a whiff of the legend, ultimately it’s little more than ‘Richard got hammered, then Richard fell down’.

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A Late Night Movie Standard


Winston Graham is perhaps best known as the author of the Poldark novels, set in eighteenth century Cornwall and filmed by the BBC back in the 1970s, and also for the film of this one, a novel from 1961.  Unlike The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, the movie version, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, differs a good deal from the novel, possibly because Marnie is considerably longer and the constraints of the movies make it impossible to film in two hours what it took Graham almost 400 pages to tell.

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A Prime Cut Of Literature - Could Use Some Salt


It’s often said that the tragedy of growing older is that you still feel inside at 45 the same way you did when you were 15.  Trust me, you don’t.  You think you do, and you’ll tell everybody you know you do, but you don’t, not really.  Not unless you were a small minded, reactionary little sod when you were 15.  When I was 15, I saw the movie version of this novel (actually, it’s more of a novella, barely 125 pages long and first published in the New Yorker magazine) starring Maggie Smith, and at the end of it, I remember thinking what a cow that Sandy one was for getting poor Miss Brodie what my father would have called the Arklowman’s Hoosh from her employment.  I mean, why did she do such a rotten thing, and her such an inspirational teacher and all?  The tragedy of my growing older, is that when I recently saw the movie again, for the first time in thirty years, I understood why.  That’s when I realized you don’t feel the same inside, not really.

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Wrong Way, Says Corrigan


Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will be aware of my partiality to the lecherous and somewhat narcissistic adventures of the eponymous hero: his awesome attraction for the ladies, his ‘carpe diem’ enthusiasm for life, the fact that he never had time enough on his hands to bother with language like ‘narcissistic’, ‘eponymous’ and ‘carpe diem’.  Women want him, dude, and men just want to be him (and believe it or not, the books are so well written that this is actually true).  For the last decade, he has been the totemic figure of the Irish economic revolution, the very embodiment of the Celtic Tiger, the strut-walking, strangulated-talking, anything-that-menstruates-shagging personification of obnoxiousness and too-much-money-far-too-soon vulgarity of a country that went to sleep in a convent on Monday, inherited a massive fortune on Tuesday, woke up in a pool of vomit and urine on Thursday and had no memory of Wednesday and no wallet or credit cards in its pocket.  Along the way we’ve met his appalling mother, his monumentally irritating father, his equally vulgar trust fund mates, his dreadfully right-on, hard-faced fluffy bunny of a wife plus all the cartoons and stereotypes that have actually made up Irish society for the last ten years or so.  

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The New Rome?


Cullen Murphy, according to the blurb, is the editor at large (huh?) of Vanity Fair and the author of a collection of essays entitled Just Curious.  That’s interesting, because this book reads like an essay, rather than a scholarly work of the order of my previous Roman foray, The Ruin Of The Roman Empire.  It is unfortunate that the essay as a literary form doesn’t seem to have retained the same cachet as the novel or even the short story.  When I was at school (and perhaps I’m becoming curmudgeonly; maybe the modern educational system still appreciates the value of the form) the essay was studied alongside the novel and the short story as an equal member of the literary trinity, maybe one which grew from a slightly different root within the human psyche, but an equal nonetheless.

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Not Particularly Brutal, But Quite Arty


Jesse Kellerman is the son of novelists Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, and to date, this is his biggest hit.  Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot of Kellerman Senior’s oeuvre (mainly the Alex Delaware novels) and was somewhat curious regarding the efforts of Fils.  He’s certainly different in style to his old lad. Jonathan’s work is more in line with standard detective norms, notwithstanding the protagonist, Dr Alex Delaware, is a psychologist who sometimes works with the police, rather than a hardnosed detective.  Despite that, Kellerman Père tends to deal in black and white, good guys and bad guys, and as a result his stories tend to be more plot driven than his son’s.  Jesse, on the other hand, seems to go more for the psychological approach (rather ironically, I suppose, considering the respective protagonists) and the result is a deeper, more characterful novel.

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What Might Have Been

In recent years there has been an evolution in the writing of history, away from dates and battles and the 'great man' school, instead substituting the techniques of the novelist for the dry chronology of the university quad.  Tom Holland has been the most notable of these new historians, and books such as Rubicon and Persian Fire have sold massively and been awaited – at least among history buffs – with the same enthusiasm as the latest Harry Potter tome is by eight year old children and by the kind of right-on adult that you strive to avoid at social functions.  Opinion tends to be split on this kind of novelistic approach to the subject, since, on the one hand, zeroing in on the daily lives of lesser and secondary historical characters to demonstrate the world as it existed renders your story much more immanent, but on the other hand, it also demands a certain amount of artistic licence in what is, supposedly, an academic subject.  Therefore, if you’re going to do it, you’d better be able to write; Tom Holland can write, and so can James O’Donnell.

 

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