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In 1928, modest young blue-collar English lecturer Mildred Fish arrives in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature.

In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere at the ‘crossroads of Europe’, some papers are still mocking Adolf Hitler; few take him seriously. Mildred sees (up close) the brokenness of American and German capitalism, and (distantly) the apparently level playing-fields of Communist Russia. As the Nazi Party gets its claws into the body politic, she teaches an overtly socialist syllabus: Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, et al. Halfway through her dissertation, the university fires her. She promptly starts work at a free night-school for working class students. “Should Hitler be Chancellor?” she asks them, in her ‘English’ class.

But within six months he turns the country into a dictatorship. Newspapers are closed, political opponents taken into ‘protective custody’, camps built. ‘The situation grows steadily worse,’ Mildred writes to her uncomprehending mother back in Wisconsin. ‘We must change this situation as soon as possible.‘ She and her friends convene a regular ‘discussion circle’ (or Kreis) in her apartment, made up of students, aristocrats, bohemians – even a former member of the Hitler Youth.

She marries the equally-earnest Arvid Harnack (they honeymoon on a picket line in Colorado), a German economist with a fondness for the Soviet model. Arvid is a cousin of the Bonhoeffers, one of whom gets him a job at Lufthansa, then at the Ministry of Economics, where he reports directly to Hjalmar Schacht. He begins urgently leaking evidence of Germany’s war preparations.

Mildred, meanwhile, leverages her friendship with the US ambassador’s giddy daughter Martha Dodd for access to sympathetic American officials, their drinks parties and high-ranking guests. Working as a literary scout, she is able to travel surprisingly freely. In London, once, she tries to recruit Rebecca West.

The Kreis steal documents, print and distribute leaflets, helps Jews escape through consular contacts, translate and smuggle foreign speeches into German factories and government departments (incl. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry!), expose war-profiteering and German atrocities in uniform, and attempt to give crucial economic and military intelligence to the soon-to-be Allies.

The tragedy of Harnack’s life is that it was all for nothing. The British and French having bailed on them (and the nascent Oster conspiracy) at Munich, the Western allies continued to dismiss the idea of any German resistance movement throughout the war. Despite countless warnings, Stalin continued to stare into the funfair mirror of his paranoia until the morning after Barbarossa.

But at the time of her arrest in December 1942, Mildred Harnack was simultaneously teaching English to the SS and at the centre of one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany – a chaotic Venn diagram of diplomats, ministry officials, military officers, broadcasters, engineers, socialist literati, socialites, actual spies, an American 11-year-old, and a journalist turned ‘fortune-teller’ who used her sessions with German soldiers to extract strategic information. Thanks to Arvid’s formal (if reluctant) conversion to paid espionage, she was also very actually in bed with Soviet interests.

It was the Russian connection which ultimately did for them, a callow NKVD chief sending a telegram including Mildred’s name and address undisguised in it: ‘one of the most significant espionage blunders of the Second World War’. The Abwehr dropped the net, and one of the fish (not to say Fish) gave up most of the others.

Arvid received the death sentence. Mildred, extraordinarily, was given only six years’ hard labour – until Hitler personally intervened. She spent her final days in solitary confinement, translating Goethe (whence Donner’s title). On February 16 1943, Mildred Harnack was executed, age 40, in Plötzensee Prison, under the guillotine.

The job of bringing this surprising and courageous woman back to life has fallen to her great-great niece, the Canadian-American essayist and novelist Rebecca Donner.

Donner acknowledges the difficulty of biographing someone whose aim, by definition of her work, ‘was self-erasure.’ Frankly, what Harnack even did from day to day is fairly unclear. I’m not convinced the book quite lands its stated ‘heart of the resistance movement’ claim. And the material does feel a little stretched between Harnack’s arrest and even legitimately related events – like Operation Walkyrie – towards the war’s end.

But Donner’s pacey present-tense narrative – assembled from testimonials, memoirs, diaries, etc. – astutely papers over most of these unfortunate lacunae, while the short chapters and numbered subdivisions combine with clippings, photos, handwriting and so on, to reapply the human touches, add salt for international flavour (English, German and Russian), and illustrate the nightmarish job of tracking Harnack through the often-literally fragmented documentary evidence.

And out of necessity, virtue. From the Chatwinesque details – like the Moscow import-export front called ‘Foreign Excellent Trench Coats’, or the hideously creepy questionnaire the day she died: ‘Do you have especially strong passions? (Drinking, smoking, sexual excess?)’ – to the group’s mugshots, terrible in their banal officialdom, it’s an impressive and compelling excavation.

‘The archives tell us a great deal,’ writes Donner, but ‘much is missing from them.’ Now, at least, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days stands as a memorial for Mildred Harnack. As one of her interrogators once said: “It would make a wonderful novel, if it weren’t so sad.”

—
For The Spectator, in a different edit

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Friday, January 18 1907
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Ethiopia has exported its first avocados by train.

The Communist Party banned photocopiers.

More geese than swans now live.

In Brazil there is a butterfly that uses its legs for running.

All Pakistani things are under one roof.

Cecil Court is never dull.

Alastair Cook took just one wicket in his entire test career.

The Saracens taught us how to preserve our dead.

‘Sealioning’ is a type of trolling or harassment in the form of incessant bad-faith invitations to engage in debate.

William Huskisson MP was the first person to die as the result of a railway accident.

Lots of proletarians wear overcoats nowadays.

Zulu IPA is brewed in Great Britain.

Beatles fans pray facing towards Macca.

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My great-great-great-aunt, Sarah Purser, portraitist, landscape artist, and leading light (no pun) in the Irish stained glass industry revival, once made a well-known painting of these sisters.

According to John O’Grady’s monograph, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser, this double portrait was commissioned by ‘enlightened resident landlord [and] amateur Arctic explorer’ Sir Henry and his wife Lady Georgina Gore-Booth, of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, in about 1882, when the sisters were roughly 14 (Constance) and 12 (Eva). It is approximately life size, and in its style and setting (a beech grove, apparently) it is thought ‘boldly unconventional’ for the Ireland of the time – and it is credited, writes Elizabeth Coxhead in Daughters of Erin, with being ‘one of the two pictures which put [Purser] on the road to success’.

The original ‘Constance and Eva Gore-Booth’ is displayed at Lissadell House to this day, where it’s available to members of the public in the summer. I must admit I’m not in love with it; if anything, I’d say it’s most remarkable for the fact that it betrays – and fair enough – nothing at all of the hard-line, gun-toting political activist that Constance Gore-Booth/Markievicz was to become. That said, a few years later Constance went to study painting with a friend of Purser’s, and progressed, from there, to the French Académie Julian, where – fatefully? – she met Count Casimir…

No inconsiderable lady in her own right, Sarah Purser (1848-1943) was born into a financially-unstable offshoot of the Guinness-brewing Purser clan. Taking her future in her own hands, she set off to train in Paris (on ‘a pound a week’), and was exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts by the age of 23. Three years later the Royal Dublin Society awarded her a certificate for still lifes, and before long she was elected an Honorary Academician of the RHA, whose first female full member she eventually became in 1924.

She founded the An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) stained glass cooperative in 1903, which she then ran for almost 40 years. She helped establish Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and develop the National Gallery of Ireland, where various of her portraits (and much stained glass produced under her sponsorship) now, quite properly, reside.

Often referred to in the same breath as Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, and other notable women of the era (and indeed Eire), Purser moved in very much the same cultural circles – minus the Catholicism part; she being of Huguenot descent – and went on to paint all of the aforementioned (including Constance several times again), as well as luminaries like WB Yeats, Roger Casement, Douglas Hyde and Brendan Behan’s mother, Kathleen Kearney (‘The blue hat’. (It was Behan’s grandmother, NB, who famously took her bath ‘every year, whether she was dirty or not’)). Her continued friendship with the Gore-Booths was particularly helpful, work-wise. She once remarked that she “went through the British aristocracy like the measles.”

Now and then, the increasingly ‘indomitable’ Purser was herself sketched and painted, among others by John Butler Yeats, WB and Jack’s father. JB’s somewhat beaky portrait especially seems to reflect not some head-in-the-clouds romantic artiste but a professional arts-and-crafts intellectual whose income, for the most part, came through her quite astute investments – in particular, in Guinness. Her large home, Mespil House, on Dublin’s Grand Canal, became, in John O’Grady’s words, ‘a salon frequented by writers, politicians, visionaries and revolutionaries.’

One contemporary describes this scene as ‘full of bubbling gaiety’, and Coxhead claims that Purser’s later portraits were ‘not done for money, but for love of good talk and good company.’ This may be true; but the family remembers her as something of a fierce old stick (‘not notoriously a cuddly creature’ was, I think, my father’s summary), who once threw out a burglar just by talking at him, and who, aged 89, demanded to be taken up by Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) in his private plane, to inspect the house roof, then wrote complaining to her landlord – to be informed, rather politely, that her lease had actually expired a decade previous.

Artistically, though, she’d become most definitely someone to be reckoned with. She was wont to give her sitters ‘a few scoldings and home-truths’ along with their likenesses; she objected strongly to Catholic bishops having their official portraits done in Rome, not locally; she once gave Yeats an earful for suggesting one of her artists’ windows was derived from an old German print; and in the last week of her life she wrote in fury to the President of Ireland (a former sitter) to excoriate him for the ‘bad art’ on a recent postage stamp.

With her caustic wit and enthusiasm for ‘discussion’ to the fore, and her personal network of poets, painters, politicians, and the occasional heavyweight boxing champion all around her, on the second Tuesday of every month, regular, she hosted, presided over, held forth, and generally tried to bend all aspects of the Irish national culture to her will. For thirty years her soirées were widely considered to be unmissable – if only in the sense that half the guests came primarily out of fear of what might well be said about them in their absence. It was not for nothing these ‘at homes’ became known to Dublin wags as Sarah Purser’s ‘dies irae’.

Still fuming at the business of the ugly stamp, she died on August 7th, 1943. Her funeral, her friends were not too grieved to note, was on the second Tuesday of the month.

—
For Queen Mob’s Tea House

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 6 1909
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In LA there is a chess set designed for the East India Company, featuring Sikh soldiers vs Afghans.

Among a certain kind of people, being ‘passionate about Israel/Palestine’ is usually a substitute for having any actual political thought.

During WWII, in Germany, a Django Reinhardt record was worth 2kgs of butter on the black market.

A sailor has a tattoo of a swallow for every 5,000 nautical miles he has travelled.

Sam Lewis Craft has been named the Rain Men Player of the Year.

Alfred the Great of England believed that a thorough grounding in the liberal arts was essential for those called to exercise judgement and authority.

A South Benfleet millionaire has revealed how she earns £1,472/hr.

A town in Iceland has painted 3D zebra crossings in an attempt to slow down speeding cars.

Bobby Kennedy had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, then had her killed by Communists.

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more.

Brett Dean’s new opera, Hamlet, contains precisely zero tunes.

The Fuegian word ‘mamihlapintafoi’ means ‘(two people) looking at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do’.

In 2017 over half the people living in absolute poverty work for a living.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 22 1907

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The erection of a verandah is a useful way to extend one’s living quarters.

Seven American states observe Abraham Lincoln’s birthday as a public holiday.

There is only one Tunumiisut-French grammar.

Anne Watson has just moved to university here, and right now really needs money to live. She is willing to go on a date – and has massive breasts.

There is a shark that can live for 400 years.

In 1945 the Soviet Union took the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese communists.

What in Britain is called the Special Relationship, in Germany is called treason.

Working-class people swear a lot.

At birth, a baby’s focal distance is not much more than 20cm.

In a recent survey, atheists and agnostics knew the most about religion. In second place were Mormons; third Jews; and then all other forms of Christianity.

Barack Obama is Irish.

The revolution will not be printed in Comic Sans.

The word ‘acrylic’ does not benefit from repetitive translation.
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From Call for the Dead (in ’61) to the classic ‘Karla trilogy’, and on til (almost) the collapse of Communism, he battled foe and, sometimes, friend, quite often in the streets of central London.

He’s not been seen since 1991. But in proper Oldie style (for Smiley would now be well over a hundred…), it seems he is about to make a re-appearance. 

The details of A Legacy of Spies are locked down tighter than a nuclear facility (the publishing trade could teach those spies a thing or two!). But to help you get back into that redoubtable, unglamorous le Carré spirit, Penguin have released a ‘Smiley’s London’ map, identifying a handful of old favourite locations, like his Chelsea home and the (Cambridge) Circus HQ, and one new one: a safe house which has languished undetected to this day (it’s 14 Disraeli St, in Bloomsbury).

Mapped and illustrated by Mike Hall, you can print it out or just download it to your phone. And sportingly, you’ll note, it includes each branch of Waterstone’s alone the route, enabling you to stop off for that lost le Carré paperback you’d hoped to reference.

The Old Un reckons you could do it in a gentle Sunday, with a stop for lunch. Watch out for ‘pavement artists’.

—

For The Oldie

1997? Not a bit of it. This is 1988 – at least, in author (and former Labour MP) Chris Mullin’s imagination – and leftist radical Harry Perkins sweeps into No.10 with his agenda of rampant socialism and public accountability. The honourable member from Sheffield (natch), wants to nationalise all the goodies, and isn’t shy about taking financial aid from Russian banks. He doesn’t quite change “Cabinet” to “Politburo”, but it’s close. And it probably doesn’t help that – as played by the late Ray McAnally with a bootblack ‘tache – Perkins bears more than a passing resemblance to Josef Stalin.

MI5 hit the roof, the stock market goes through the floor, and we’re off to the races in a conspiracy between the right-wing security services (tautology?), the Americans, A Very Powerful Newspaper Baron, and even – gasp! – the BBC, to unseat Perkins at all costs. Will there be blood? Of course not: this isn’t West Africa! No, this will be A Very British Coup.

The politics of this three-part Channel 4 production tend towards the cartoonish, but Perkins is a highly sympathetic character (he’d have to be, viewed from this political distance) and his genuine humanity and humour – and the dastardly ways of his enemies – sustain the tension in a relatively predictable Westminster-thriller plot. McAnally is aided and abetted in this endeavour by Jim Carter as his Home Secretary and political right hand, and a young Keith Allen as his savaloys-and-Carling ex-con press secretary (remember when they were in jail first, and Downing Street second? Happy times).

The significant face of the enemy is an even-younger-looking Tim McInnerney, a mid-ranking MI5 stooge. Unfortunately for him, the politics of his role require that his visage is also that of a post-op tranny – and a recurring irritation is that every scene involving civil servants or spies ends with a close-up on their lips as they moue in a manner significantly more gay than sinister. Still, this provides countless opportunities for chaps in Northern accents and donkey jackets to refer to the establishment as “these bastards”. It’s like a little bit of Sharpe, in Whitehall.

Not that this is supposed to be comedy, mind. Mullin’s 1982 novel is a full-scale far-left fantasia, with borrowed spice from the Wilson-government controversies of the previous decade.

On the one hand, looking back over 20 years, it’s all rather alien and unlikely. Not just because Perkins installs a dartboard in No.10 and goes to see the Queen clutching his Sheffield Wednesday nylon holdall (can you imagine Blair doing that?), but because he does these things without the assistance of Alastair Campbell (Allen’s character, Freddie Thompson, is practically an anti-spin-doctor). This is, at heart, an optimistic work. When Perkins has to roll over on the unions to break an energy strike, for instance, it’s not because they are unions, per se, but because one of the bosses has been got at by the CIA.

On the other, politics is politics, and we shouldn’t be too surprised that much of this storyline eventually played itself out, for real, when Labour’s turn came. Some of the overlaps are freaky, though. The leadership tussles between PM and Chancellor; the unregulated might of the media barons (who was first in the door at No.10?); the mingers in the cabinet. The government’s chief weapons expert is even bumped off in the woods, for heaven’s sake!

Mullin’s apparent clairvoyance notwithstanding, though, A Very British Coup stands now as a cultural-historical curiosity: a little time-capsule of frustrated Old Labour ambition. Mullin writes in terms of outrages against the very nature of democracy, perpetrated by behind-the-scenes, father-to-son elites who, as Perkins points out, have run the country, un-elected, for centuries. On its screening in 1988, A Very British Coup took four BAFTAs (including Best Actor, for McAnally, and Best Drama) and an International Emmy (for Best Drama) – and continued not to represent political reality in any way.

Two things stick in the mind (if not the craw):

First, great and noble drama as it may be, if you’re not a fully paid-up Communist the politics of Harry Perkins’ government are insane. Ideal for running a student union, perhaps (in, say, Aberdeen). But a country? No chance. (For fictional purposes, of course, extremes and contrasts are required. But that’s fiction.)

Second, this was written at a time when it looked like Tony Benn might end up as leader of the Labour party, and that party might actually get elected. In Mullin’s worldview, c.1982, socialism and democracy were one and the same – and it’s easy to forget that the British left actually were courting the Kremlin. If Harry Perkins is what core Labourites were expecting after all those years in the wilderness – and they waited another decade – then, boy, no wonder they were gutted.

For all that, and for all that we know it bears little resemblance to what actually unfolded (in ’88 or ‘97), A Very British Coup is very good viewing. The DVD has missed a trick with regard to extras, but if you want good background on how Labour went from Tony Benn to Tony Blair – or even just an alternative ending – get hold of Mullin’s original novel, or his latest volume of diaries.

—
For theartsdesk (published in edited form)