—
For The Critic

Really.

Truly: je t’adore.

But when I make our lunch,
I still put more cheese in my sandwich
than in yours.

—
For Roar Media

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When JS Mill was born, his father, James, challenged a friend to ‘race with you in the education of… the most accomplished and virtuous young man.’ That other child has not gone down in history – but he may well have dodged a serious bullet.

Learning Greek at 3, writing a history of Rome at 6, and tutoring his own siblings from the age of 8, Mill’s childhood became synonymous with intellectual hothouse upbringings.

Groomed to be the strict Utilitarian offspring of his father and Jeremy ‘greatest happiness’ Bentham (Mill’s mother, Harriet, goes resoundingly unmentioned in his Autobiography), he was prevented from associating with kids his own age, permanently off-games, and woken up at 5am to work unpaid on James’s History of British India. If mistakes were made, he got no lunch.

Some of his father’s peers expressed concern – while those merely impressed were kept away from him in case he got a big head. Mill was occasionally allowed such treats as Don Quixote, or Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues; but reading poetry was banned, despite the fact the family had once lived in John Milton’s cottage.

At 14 he took a gap year (as well one might), which he spent hobnobbing with French politicians, and taking university courses in chemistry, zoology, and higher maths. (It was noted, though, he could not comb his hair or tie a tie.) Back in England, he was arrested for distributing frank family-planning literature in poorer areas, and by the age of 20 he had nothing left to do but have his mid-life crisis.

In the circumstances, it is amazing that Mill turned out not merely functional but, in the assessment of one recent biographer, ‘the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain – and perhaps even the world.’

With the help of Wordsworth’s poetry (indeed), he began to distance himself from the Utilitarians, deciding he should worry less about ‘the greatest happiness’ in the doctrinal sense and more about his – and others’ – personal freedom and bog-standard contentment.

Already educated beyond university, and almost employability, Mill purposely took an untaxing clerical job with the East India Company (he finished work round 1pm), and embarked on the enormous side-career of earnest political journalism that would make his name: or, in Edward ‘Clerihew’ Bentley’s wry summary, ‘By a mighty effort of will, / Overcame his natural bonhomie / And wrote Principles of Political Economy‘.

A unembarrassed ‘elitist democrat’, Mill believed that people could and should govern themselves, in the interests both of personal choice and broader social improvement, free from the tyrannies of law or majoritarian social attitudes – but that The People needed education and constraint. His faith in parliamentary democracy was not unqualified.

Individuals should be free to act as they wished, unless it would cause harm to others. ‘Offence’, NB, did not count as ‘harm’. In fact free speech was critical, for airing of minority opinions and for bringing questionable views into contact with better ones.

As an indication of the currency of these and other high-minded attitudes, when he was 31 The Spectator included Mill in a fantasy (sic) radical cabinet, though he was not even a politician.

Politically and personally, he was probably a hard man to be friends with. He viewed Coleridge as a poetic hero, but also an ‘arrant driveller’ on economic matters. Macaulay he called a ‘dwarf’, and Carlyle a ‘true voice for the Devil’ – an amity not defrosted by his maid using the only copy of Carlyle’s French Rev vol.1 to light the fire (cf. Blackadder).

He found eccentricity preferable to uniformity and stagnation, and his fallings out with former allies were almost always over their perceived political inflexibility. He had a marked penchant for killing heroes, including, famously, Bentham himself.

Pensioned off after the East India Company’s disbandment, Mill was finally at liberty to put his money where his professional mouth had been for over 40 years. In 1865 the titanic philosopher became a Liberal MP, by the unusual expedient of admitting at the hustings that he had called his working class would-be constituents ‘habitual liars’ (much cheering).

In a typically idiosyncratic and principled career, he prophesied the environmental dangers of unchecked economic development, but referred to the abolition of the death penalty as ‘effeminacy’; he continued to argue against the ‘tyranny of the majority’ in domestic politics, but was at peace with ‘despotism’ (his word) when it came to British rule in, e.g., India; he suggested learned folks should have more votes than the uneducated, but was the first man to bring a parliamentary vote on women’s suffrage.

He was, perhaps surprisingly, willing to compromise in the name of practical governance; but interested neither in party politics nor in ministerial advancement, he used the Commons as a pulpit to speak on as-yet-hopelessly-unpopular progressive issues. Having wound up Conservatives and Liberals alike, he lost his seat just three years later.

In 1851 he’d married Harriet (NB) Taylor, with whom he had been spending considerable time – ‘platonically’ – for decades, notwithstanding, and sometimes in, the presence of her husband (alive and, well, unstimulating). Alas for Mill, she died in 1858, but such was the impact, both morally and intellectually, of ‘the most admirable person I had ever known,’ that he dedicated much of the final phase of his life to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, recruiting Florence Nightingale (originally sceptical) and being hailed by Millicent Fawcett as the ‘principal originator of the women’s movement.’

And so, while Bentham sat in state in his ‘auto-icon’ pickle-jar at UCL, Mill died an outsider, thrown out of one last club just months before his death, for his outspoken views on land redistribution.

Despite Monty Python‘s slanderous assertion that Mill became particularly ill on half a pint of shandy, it was actually a skin disorder what got him: erysipelas, or ‘holy fire’ (fittingly or otherwise, for an avowed agnostic in the former papal state of Avignon). He went to his grave believing his life had been ‘uneventful’, leaving one stepdaughter, Helen, and one godson (surely not the mot juste), Bertrand Russell.

—
For (the prototype edition of) Smith magazine

I had invited an old friend, a raven-haired young lady (named in Debrett’s) of impossibly romantic tendency, who first exposed me to the film in, I’d say, about 1998 or ’99. It took a bit of selling, even then (and back then I thought I was Byron); but after not much more than a couple of minutes of the multi-Oscar-winner – about, to take just Michael Ondaatje’s main character, Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a pilot of dubious origin who is shot down in the Egyptian desert during the Second World War, knows the lines to every song he’s ever heard but not his own name, and may or may not have betrayed his colleagues to ze Chermans for the sake of love (we have no time for the true biography of László Almásy) – I was, of course, completely hooked.

Alexandra, alas, is unavailable (she works in theatre, natch), so I’ll be going with Harry – and as Harry’s guest, in fact. Harry and I were in Afghanistan together, in 2013, and, as he likes to say, I’ll never come to Dorset. (Don’t tell him: I’ve been several times, just not to visit him. He lives in Fulham, anyway.) But that film that Alex showed me has been with me for the better part of 20 years, now.

I applied to study Egyptology almost entirely on the strength of it, a fact I carefully concealed from cagey academic overseers at school and university. During my gap year in South Africa – just to be even more abysmally pretentious – I didn’t tuck things in a copy of Herodotus (‘the book he brought with him through the fire’), but in a Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford I would walk around listening to the movie’s famously aching – nay, plangent – Gabriel Yared soundtrack on a loop (like all Ondaatje books, the original itself is in any case full of music and singing). In Canada I bought a black leather blazer-style jacket from Banana Republic, although I drew the line at knee-length khaki shorts.

In the libraries of the Oriental Institute I found odd books on modern Egypt (gasp!), or at least more-recent explorations of the desert, and began to make my own trips – though actually seeing Egypt, perhaps predictably, was not really a course requirement. And when I fell out with my college it was the lonely-hero movies like The English Patient I returned to in the bitter evenings. I became well-versed in the admissions criteria for the Foreign Legion. And then – under the signature of my professor – I joined the Royal Geographical Society, as found, thinly disguised, in the EP novel:

‘In the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis…’

The RGS – right next door to the RAH – has some nice old copies of Almásy things (not all in English), as well as material on the Long Range Desert Group (cf. the famous picture of bearded, hard-eyed SOE types in duffel coats, that used to do the rounds of my regimental HQ) and more scholarly desert-exploration articles by the likes of Bagnold, Bermann, Ball and Hassanein Bey, which Ondaatje sought out in back numbers of the Journal.

And in my then mood, the romantic, antisocial, somewhere-on-the-spectrum explorer and lover of the desert’s solitude, whose happiest memory, as he tells his (supposedly) illicit inamorata, Katharine Clifton, is the time he travelled all day with a guide who said nothing until he pointed at the horizon and said “Faya”… well, it struck a loud, if none-too-subtle, chord.

After a meeting once with Ranulph Fiennes (I followed him round the bookshops of Oxford, between signings, until he told me that in Oman he would have killed me by now), he put me in touch with John Hare, who had just completed a long camel-backed Saharan crossing, and whose brain I wanted to pick about doing one through the long crescent of oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. I never made that journey (yet). But a flame had obviously been kindled.

My first copy of the novel, came, entirely fittingly, from the American University in Cairo bookshop: a well-annotated, typo-strewn Picador paperback reprint, with the price (I think) on the title page in blue biro, bought on my first trip, in 2003, in the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq – an interesting time to be a tall, blond, white man in an Arab capital. (The receipt is still inside: it cost 45 Egyptian pounds.) I later gave in and bought myself a first edition, on Charing Cross Road, which I’ve not opened. No doubt I have a clingfilmed ‘deluxe’ version of the movie somewhere, also.

The book, of course, is total poetry (if there were ever any grounds for criticism it would be that there’s too much ‘poetry’). In a wonderful deleted scene, available on YouTube, an old bedou tells Almásy something, which he translates to Katharine: “He thinks he’s been there – but the route he’s describing, well, he couldn’t survive the journey now; but he’s a poet, so his map is poetry.”

I’ve ever since been an enthusiastic reader of Saul Kelly, Justin Marozzi, and other writers on Herodotus, the lost oasis of Zerzura, and the ‘real’ Almásy, all of which led to a friendship with the freewheeling, polymathic writer Robert Twigger, to interview whom I ‘crossed the Sinai’ (I was on a bus) in 2009. Rob now lives in Dorset (ssshhhh…!), and his most recent travel book – on the Himalayas, following on from one on the Nile – was Book of the Month in Geographical magazine, the magazine of the RGS. In a nicely complementary kind of way, I’ve just this week been asked to write my first piece for that magazine.

Eventually, the chance arose to go to my own desert war, and so I leapt at it. But that was years ago now, and unexciting – and I survived, unharmed, unlike (the fictional) Almásy.

I remain ‘a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it.’ I still keep things I need in books (which means that I can never find them). I know both names for what that place is called, at the base of a woman’s neck. Beyond a weekend or two with HM Forces, I haven’t yet got round to learning Arabic, let alone Hungarian, or several of the other languages that Almásy spoke (my two brothers speak a little, though I bet they can’t describe a mountain that looks like the shape of a woman’s back); but I can name some of the winds Almásy/Ondaatje describes, and tell their stories. I often listen to the Yared soundtrack. In fact, Benny Goodman’s ‘Wang Wang Blues’ was one of the first things that I played my child when she was born. Nor can I give her (or anyone else) a bit of plum without informing them that it’s a ‘very plum… plum.’ We were in Brighton, the other week, at the aquarium, to celebrate her turning one, and I found myself humming Lorenz Hart’s original words to ‘Manhattan’, ‘before they were cleaned up.’

I’ve watched the film at least a dozen times, now, and read the novel maybe half a dozen. I’ve given copies of both DVD and book as gifts, and indeed the movie-script on one occasion. And despite the fact that I own several copies, it’s one of a number of books – among those by a small number of literary favourites, like Chatwin, Coetzee, Golding, Dyer, Sebald, Hitchens – that, if I see it in a charity shop, I feel I ought to rescue, simply because it’s wrong that it should be there.

A few years and/or rewatches back, I realised that the day the ‘ENGLISH(?)’ patient is introduced to us is, by the notebook of the interrogating officer, my birthday.

In July, The English Patient won the Mother of all Bookers (or whatever this go round was called). We all know books mean many things to many people, and can have major real-world repercussions, on personal and even national levels. But amid all the renewed plaudits for Ondaatje’s classic novel, and the obvious, widespread awareness that it’s a tale packed full of questionable characters, traumatised and very literally scarred by conflict, it suddenly occurred to me that, given a long-enough trajectory, and alongside several other factors, it seems entirely plausible The English Patient is the reason that I went to war.

What would Ondaatje think of that, I wonder? My guess is he’d probably be horrified.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 8 1908
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Benedict Cumberbatch reads Oryx magazine.

A piece of pasta (dry) weighs essentially one gram.

A man can only care about so many things.

Labels are for clothes.

In Bosnian there are no words for fiction and non-fiction.

The eating of grapes has killed several Englishmen by throwing them into fluxes and fevers.

Allah does not like hearing the word ‘Allah’.

The shooting schedules in pornography are quite brisk.

Darryl Gerrity loves people, perhaps too much.

Washing machines live longer with cows on.

It’s all kicking off in Jamestown. 

Russian composer Dmitri Kabalevsky died on this day in 1987.

Two childhood friends in Honolulu have recently found out that they are brothers.
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—
For The Oldie

Subtitled Notes from the Underdog, the book chronicles a year in the life of West Hampstead’s shambolic would-be flâneur, by way of library mishaps, bad packed lunches, and hypochondria – taken from and/or inspired by McGowan’s social media output: a stream of semi-sane, self-lacerating anecdotes that over the past few years have established him as a sort of Stewart Lee of Facebook.

As befits a man no longer in the prime of life, there is a lot on matters sexual. His concern that his chlamydia levels might be low, his first kiss with a woman, or the vermin that may or may not swarm all over his soiled loins. Do animals get VD? His fear of women’s pubic hair. His desire to have used fifties shoved down his bra. And – quote – ‘the wrong transsexual’ at the paint shop.

Then there’s his preposterous claim that sometimes people find him quite attractive.

Like as the hart desireth the water-brook, so Our Tone is pretty much guaranteed to make a mess of things. So obviously those attending – bestsellers such as Sebastian Faulks and Tom Holland among them – hoped the gig would be a total train-wreck. But no: he couldn’t even get that right.

McGowan’s agent, Charlie Campbell, tried valiantly to steer proceedings in the right direction, calling The Art of Failing “the worst idea for a book I’ve ever heard” (McGowan’s previous agent having told him the book would ruin his career).

But our anti-hero rallied, and in a clattering, one-handed speech (a ‘cricket injury’…), he gave the people what they wanted: a brief, amusing reading, and a glass of free wine.

He threw in one Top Tip for amorists: “The key to writing about people that you know is just to say that they’re terrifically sexually attractive, and then get on with it.” And then he paused, astutely, to bestow a paean of uxoriousness upon his wife – who, he said, is “less of a monster” than he’s made her seem among these pages. “I’ve always written first of all to make her laugh.”

No doubt the book will be a huge success.

—
For The Amorist

‘Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica is famous for taking a thousand pages to prove that 1+1=2.’
— Mark Dominus

‘To say shortly why one values love is not easy.’
— Bertrand Russell

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I know what life and love may be.

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If alpha and beta are in the set of all sets with exactly one element, then

Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed, as is that of plants by rain after drought.

alpha and beta’s intersection is disjoint if and only if

Love is to be valued in itself as a source of delight – and its absence as a source of pain.

alpha and beta’s union is the set of all sets with exactly two elements.

People when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world.

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If alpha equals the set containing x and beta equals the set containing y

Love can only flourish as long as it is free and spontaneous

then alpha and beta’s union is in the set of all sets with exactly two elements

which makes a serious love the most fructifying of all human experiences.

if and only if x is not equal to y.

I do not pretend that love in its highest form is common.

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This is true if and only if

I want love to be like a beacon fire lighting up the darkness.

the intersection of the set containing x

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal to true happiness.

and the set containing y

The kind of love I can believe in is adventurous and open-eyed.

is disjoint.

It does not pretend to be sanctified or holy.

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This is true if and only if

A man may consider himself such a dreadful person that no one could possibly love him.

the intersection of alpha and beta is disjoint.

And in old days women were driven into marriage by the intolerable conditions of life for the spinster.

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If Assertion One is true then if it is true that there exist x and y

Our emotions in regard to love and marriage are becoming standardised according to Hollywood’s recipe.

such that alpha is the set containing x

The traditional moralist will say that love should be unselfish

and beta is the set containing y

but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one’s happiness is bound up in its success.

then alpha and beta’s union is in the set of all sets

Love increases in value in proportion as more of the personalities of the people concerned enter into the relationship.

with exactly two elements

He should not rule in her province.

if and only if

Still less should she rule in his.

alpha and beta’s intersection is disjoint.

Love should be an equal relation.

.
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If Assertion Two is true, then the present proposition is true.

Salvation can only come through love.

.
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From this proposition it will follow

The philosopher should marry.

that 1+1=2.
.
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Lucretius sees no harm in sexual intercourse.

The above proposition is occasionally useful.

It seemed the quickest way to hurt her. And to spare her sorrow.