If my Blog was called "Why Marx was Right" it would have many more visitors. And many more comments, since there is a large world-wide community of postgraduates who want to engage in exegetical dispute. As People of the Book, we could fight like fraternal ferrets in a sack. It could be great fun, if you are into that sort of fun.
How much fun was indicated by my previous post: Google returns over a million results for the phrase "Why Marx Was Right" and only a measly sixteen thousand for "Why Jesus Was Right".
Terry Eagleton is onto a winner.
The book itself is all right and good in parts, especially once you get past the first three chapters and into the philosophical anthropology which takes its inspiration from Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. It is the work of someone who has been a stout trouper for a humanist and fairly ecumenical Marxism over fifty years.
This fact does make the opening sentence look like rhetorical false naivety:
"This book had its origin in a single striking thought: What if all the most familiar objections to Marx's work are mistaken? Or at least, if not totally wrongheaded, mostly so?" (p. ix)
That made me imagine the Pope starting a sermon, "I woke up this morning with a single striking thought: What if all the most familiar objections to Roman Catholicism are mistaken? Or at least ..."
I find it difficult to engage with People of the Book. It's an odd kind of intellectual life to poke around in the textual remains of a dead man, pulling out bits which you can flourish with a "See, he was right!"
In the case of Marx, there is an awful lot of text and it would be remarkable if you could find nothing to flourish. As a literary theorist, Eagleton knows that, just as he knows that the secret of a good interpretation is to keep it pretty general: "The End of the World is Nigh" not "The World will end on 20 January 2012".
I can understand the attraction of a Book which has an Answer to all Questions, especially when it allows you to skip class. That attracted me when I was eighteen. Then I realised that if you want to know anything you just have to study history, economics and all the rest and that it's never-ending. Of course, it's not theory-free but the object of science is not to preserve the theory ( to "save the appearances") but to advance understanding.
Terry Eagleton is a very, very well-read man but there are occasionally points where it's clear he has skipped a class - thus at page 180: "Surprisingly little blood was spilt in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In fact, the actual takeover of key points in Moscow was accomplished without a shot being fired".
Er, Petrograd?*
_________________________
* The Bolsheviks seized power in the capital, Petrograd, on the night of 24 - 25 October (Old Style) 1917. This was bloodless. The subsequent seizure of power in Moscow was not bloodless. Moscow became the capital of Russia in 1918.
_____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Saturday 9 June 2012
Review: Federico Varese, Mafias on the Move
This is a very academic study (Princeton University Press 2011) of a very non-academic subject and the overall effect is a bit like Brechtian estrangement (Verfremdung): instead of portraits of godfathers who are, at the same time, chilling and charismatic, Varese offers correlations and statistical significance.
He works with a narrow definition of mafias as criminal organisations which offer protection (often willingly sought) backed up with the threat of violence. This makes mafias alternatives to the state - the organisation which in a given territory is able to claim a legitimate monopoly over the use of force to secure, when needed, life and property.
This contrast between private and public enforcement makes less surprising Varese's conclusion that mafias emerge and achieve success where there is a deficit of state power - where state organs are unable to protect markets and enforce debts and private groups step in to do so.
State organs may themselves operate like mafias providing "protection umbrellas" in return for bribes and retainers. This is what happens in contemporary China and once happened in "Tammany Hall" New York, making it hard for private mafias to break into the market.
On Varese's definition, the involvement of mafias in illegal rackets - alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitution - is secondary to their main activity.
All mafia activities, if even half-way successful, generate large amounts of money and the most serious internal mafia disputes, often fatal for participants, seem to arise from free-lancing with community funds or even outright embezzlement. Varese documents this in his studies of Russian mafias.
As the title of his book indicates, his specific focus is on mafia mobility. He concludes that mafias are very much linked to a territory (just like ordinary state authorities) where they know everyone who matters, who can be trusted and who can't. They do not migrate voluntarily, only to escape state authorities or rival mobs. And when they do migrate, they are not always successful in establishing themselves in a new territory. The sub-title of the book is a bit misleading: "How Organised Crime Conquers New Territories". Varese's conclusion is that quite often, they don't - which is less sensational than the sub-title implies.
If you can bear the prose, Varese's book is interesting and his field research demonstrates personal courage.
But Varese does rather confirm a feeling I have that, nowadays, much of the best research we have is done not by academics but by serious investigative journalists. In my own recent reading, I would single out Barbara Demick's, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea (Granta 2010) as a book which provides a mass of data in the context of a narrative at once sophisticated and compelling. It ought to be possible to write many books about the world's many mafias which achive that combination.
_______________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
He works with a narrow definition of mafias as criminal organisations which offer protection (often willingly sought) backed up with the threat of violence. This makes mafias alternatives to the state - the organisation which in a given territory is able to claim a legitimate monopoly over the use of force to secure, when needed, life and property.
This contrast between private and public enforcement makes less surprising Varese's conclusion that mafias emerge and achieve success where there is a deficit of state power - where state organs are unable to protect markets and enforce debts and private groups step in to do so.
State organs may themselves operate like mafias providing "protection umbrellas" in return for bribes and retainers. This is what happens in contemporary China and once happened in "Tammany Hall" New York, making it hard for private mafias to break into the market.
On Varese's definition, the involvement of mafias in illegal rackets - alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitution - is secondary to their main activity.
All mafia activities, if even half-way successful, generate large amounts of money and the most serious internal mafia disputes, often fatal for participants, seem to arise from free-lancing with community funds or even outright embezzlement. Varese documents this in his studies of Russian mafias.
As the title of his book indicates, his specific focus is on mafia mobility. He concludes that mafias are very much linked to a territory (just like ordinary state authorities) where they know everyone who matters, who can be trusted and who can't. They do not migrate voluntarily, only to escape state authorities or rival mobs. And when they do migrate, they are not always successful in establishing themselves in a new territory. The sub-title of the book is a bit misleading: "How Organised Crime Conquers New Territories". Varese's conclusion is that quite often, they don't - which is less sensational than the sub-title implies.
If you can bear the prose, Varese's book is interesting and his field research demonstrates personal courage.
But Varese does rather confirm a feeling I have that, nowadays, much of the best research we have is done not by academics but by serious investigative journalists. In my own recent reading, I would single out Barbara Demick's, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea (Granta 2010) as a book which provides a mass of data in the context of a narrative at once sophisticated and compelling. It ought to be possible to write many books about the world's many mafias which achive that combination.
_______________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Frank Furedi, On Tolerance
Frank Furedi is a Professor of Sociology but this is a work of social criticsm rather than sociological analysis.
Furedi thinks that "tolerance" has been redefined in (fairly recent)social practice to mean uncritical acceptance of diversity rather than recognition of the right to speak freely about things that matter (and even things that don't).
The intolerant person is now the person who does not accept (let alone welcome) diversity, who criticises other people's beliefs and lifestyles. Such people must, at the very least, be stigmatised and ostracised; in some cases, they should be prosecuted and silenced. Tolerance of diversity should be upheld by means of intolerance towards critics.
As part of the shift, the old John Stuart Mill-inspired notions - that the state should only act to prevent physical or material harms to others and that the (psychological) harm of being offended does not count - have been reworked so that the harm of offence is elevated to the same rank as other harms.
Furedi regards this shift and reworking as inherently paternalistic: individuals and groups are seen as psychologically vulnerable and in need of protection from both the careless and the careful words of others. They are not thought to be strong enough to have the thought that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
"Free Speech" once meant that you could not only criticise but do it with gusto: Marx once wrote that you treat the ridiculous seriously when you treat it as ridiculous - and proceeded to do so. Woe betide anyone nowadays who thinks that such freedom remains.
Furedi does not work up his examples very satisfactorily and this may be because he too is inhibited by his academic milieu from saying what he thinks. Universities are now places where the route to success is the path defined by whatever currently counts as inclusive, responsible and politically correct. No one is interested in unpleasant truths, especially if they are truths.
Furedi misses a major element of classical liberalism, that its theory of liberty was the twin of a theory of authority. John Stuart Mill probably wrote more about authority and spent more time thinking about it than he did about liberty. His theory of liberty emerges in the context of developing an account of the kinds of authority (centrally, political authority) to which we should freely and rationally consent. The starting point for this account is an understanding of how authority in science is established. (See my essay, "Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J.S.Mill" on my www.selectedworks.co.uk website).
Taking a look at this 19th century preoccupation with scientific authority would allow Furedi to improve on his briefly-expressed scepticism about peer review (pp.188-90).
This is a readable polemic which will be disliked by the Sunday School tendency among ecologists, feminists, postmodernists and those ridiculous people who call themselves relativists only to become very agitated by anyone who disagrees.
_____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Furedi thinks that "tolerance" has been redefined in (fairly recent)social practice to mean uncritical acceptance of diversity rather than recognition of the right to speak freely about things that matter (and even things that don't).
The intolerant person is now the person who does not accept (let alone welcome) diversity, who criticises other people's beliefs and lifestyles. Such people must, at the very least, be stigmatised and ostracised; in some cases, they should be prosecuted and silenced. Tolerance of diversity should be upheld by means of intolerance towards critics.
As part of the shift, the old John Stuart Mill-inspired notions - that the state should only act to prevent physical or material harms to others and that the (psychological) harm of being offended does not count - have been reworked so that the harm of offence is elevated to the same rank as other harms.
Furedi regards this shift and reworking as inherently paternalistic: individuals and groups are seen as psychologically vulnerable and in need of protection from both the careless and the careful words of others. They are not thought to be strong enough to have the thought that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
"Free Speech" once meant that you could not only criticise but do it with gusto: Marx once wrote that you treat the ridiculous seriously when you treat it as ridiculous - and proceeded to do so. Woe betide anyone nowadays who thinks that such freedom remains.
Furedi does not work up his examples very satisfactorily and this may be because he too is inhibited by his academic milieu from saying what he thinks. Universities are now places where the route to success is the path defined by whatever currently counts as inclusive, responsible and politically correct. No one is interested in unpleasant truths, especially if they are truths.
Furedi misses a major element of classical liberalism, that its theory of liberty was the twin of a theory of authority. John Stuart Mill probably wrote more about authority and spent more time thinking about it than he did about liberty. His theory of liberty emerges in the context of developing an account of the kinds of authority (centrally, political authority) to which we should freely and rationally consent. The starting point for this account is an understanding of how authority in science is established. (See my essay, "Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J.S.Mill" on my www.selectedworks.co.uk website).
Taking a look at this 19th century preoccupation with scientific authority would allow Furedi to improve on his briefly-expressed scepticism about peer review (pp.188-90).
This is a readable polemic which will be disliked by the Sunday School tendency among ecologists, feminists, postmodernists and those ridiculous people who call themselves relativists only to become very agitated by anyone who disagrees.
_____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Abdul Salaam Zaeff, My Life with The Taliban
Recently I reviewed here the Memoirs of the UKs former Ambassador in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles (Cables from Kabul) who came to the conclusion that the only way forward (read: out of the mess)in Afghanistan would involve engaging in a political dialogue with the Taliban, whose Islamic Emirate government the Americans overthrew in the aftermath of 9 / 11.
This position is based on Cowper-Coles' "close to conclusive" belief that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were and are quite different orgnisations, with different aspirations and goals. The Taliban want Afghanistan for the (Islamic) Afghans. Al Qaeda wanted global jihad and simply used Afghanistan as a base for its global adventures.
Abdul Salam Zaeff was a senior member of the 'old' Taliban who was the Islamic Emirate's Ambasador to Pakistan at 9 / 11. He became the international face of the Taliban as it resisted demands to hand over Osama bin Laden to the USA.
Now he is living back in Kabul after several years as a prisoner of the Americans in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo - a protracted experience which he recounts in harrowing detail. The detail suggests to me that he is telling the truth and more than fully explains his current desire to be left alone in Kabul and not drawn into the "dialogue" now being proposed. The US would like to see him as "Moderate Taliban", a label he resists strenuously: "The thought of dividing them into moderates and hardliners is a useless and reckless aim" (p 153)
He comes across as a man who has experienced too much: born in 1968, orphaned as a young boy, exiled in Pakistani refugee camps, a fifteen-year old jihadi against the Russian Occupation, a founder member of the Taliban opposition to the war lords and mobsters who moved into the vacuum left by the retreating Russians, a minister in the Taliban government, a much-abused prisoner of the Americans.
I have a sense of someone brave and defiant but also as someone struggling with depression, seeking support in religion and wanting nothing more than to pursue his Islamic studies. He comes across as both humane and flawed. He gives very little ground.
For example, on the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamyan, he observes "While I agreed that the destruction was within the boundaries of shari'a law, I considered the issue of the statues to be more than just a religious matter, and that the destruction was unnecessary and a case of bad timing" (p. 128). That is the sum total effect on him of entreaties [he was Ambassador in Pakistan at the time]from China, Iran and Japan.
Again, when he has to deal with US demands for the extradition of Osama bin Laden, he takes the diplomatic high-ground - we don't have an extradition treaty with you, if he is guilty of any offence then we will try him if you give us the evidence or even allow an Islamic tribunal in another country to do so, and so on - when probably he could have said, we don't know where he is and we cannot control him.
At the same time, Zaeff cries when he is summoned by a neighbour to watch on TV the destruction of the Twin Towers since he immediately realises that it is a disaster for Afghanistan (pp 141 - 143). That did not lead him to conclude that maybe Afghan hospitality extended to bin Laden was at an end.
There are surprising themes in this book, notably his hatred of the Pakistani authorities who he sees as tools of the Americans, and nasty ones at that. He also sees the British presence as motivated by a desire to revenge ninety year old defeats - not so laughable when you realise that we back it up by seeing Afghanistan as a suitable theatre of war for our spare princes.
There are also big ommisions - next to nothing about drugs, no attempt to defend the Taliban's exclusion of women from education and public life, or its taste for public executions (though the USA has never made Saudi Arabia justify those). Nor does he confront the fact that some Afghans may want a different future to the one he imagines for them, though it is true the Taliban did try to come to some agreement with the Northern Alliance before assasinating its leader (Massoud).
Zaeff often comes across as a likeable man, but at other moments I am not sure if I am dealing with religous conviction or just with priggishness and narrow-mindedness - the same kind of feeling I might well have reading Catholic theologians. There is a general problem with those who come at the world from a theologically-schooled world-view, that they cannot always see the wood for the trees. They don't prioritise. Zaeff's remarks on the Bamyan statues is as close as he gets to doing so.
This is a very readable book, once you realise that you do not have to remember the names of the Tolstoyanly long list of characters. A great deal of credit is undoubtedly due to Zaeff's editors, Alix Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
_______________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
This position is based on Cowper-Coles' "close to conclusive" belief that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were and are quite different orgnisations, with different aspirations and goals. The Taliban want Afghanistan for the (Islamic) Afghans. Al Qaeda wanted global jihad and simply used Afghanistan as a base for its global adventures.
Abdul Salam Zaeff was a senior member of the 'old' Taliban who was the Islamic Emirate's Ambasador to Pakistan at 9 / 11. He became the international face of the Taliban as it resisted demands to hand over Osama bin Laden to the USA.
Now he is living back in Kabul after several years as a prisoner of the Americans in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo - a protracted experience which he recounts in harrowing detail. The detail suggests to me that he is telling the truth and more than fully explains his current desire to be left alone in Kabul and not drawn into the "dialogue" now being proposed. The US would like to see him as "Moderate Taliban", a label he resists strenuously: "The thought of dividing them into moderates and hardliners is a useless and reckless aim" (p 153)
He comes across as a man who has experienced too much: born in 1968, orphaned as a young boy, exiled in Pakistani refugee camps, a fifteen-year old jihadi against the Russian Occupation, a founder member of the Taliban opposition to the war lords and mobsters who moved into the vacuum left by the retreating Russians, a minister in the Taliban government, a much-abused prisoner of the Americans.
I have a sense of someone brave and defiant but also as someone struggling with depression, seeking support in religion and wanting nothing more than to pursue his Islamic studies. He comes across as both humane and flawed. He gives very little ground.
For example, on the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamyan, he observes "While I agreed that the destruction was within the boundaries of shari'a law, I considered the issue of the statues to be more than just a religious matter, and that the destruction was unnecessary and a case of bad timing" (p. 128). That is the sum total effect on him of entreaties [he was Ambassador in Pakistan at the time]from China, Iran and Japan.
Again, when he has to deal with US demands for the extradition of Osama bin Laden, he takes the diplomatic high-ground - we don't have an extradition treaty with you, if he is guilty of any offence then we will try him if you give us the evidence or even allow an Islamic tribunal in another country to do so, and so on - when probably he could have said, we don't know where he is and we cannot control him.
At the same time, Zaeff cries when he is summoned by a neighbour to watch on TV the destruction of the Twin Towers since he immediately realises that it is a disaster for Afghanistan (pp 141 - 143). That did not lead him to conclude that maybe Afghan hospitality extended to bin Laden was at an end.
There are surprising themes in this book, notably his hatred of the Pakistani authorities who he sees as tools of the Americans, and nasty ones at that. He also sees the British presence as motivated by a desire to revenge ninety year old defeats - not so laughable when you realise that we back it up by seeing Afghanistan as a suitable theatre of war for our spare princes.
There are also big ommisions - next to nothing about drugs, no attempt to defend the Taliban's exclusion of women from education and public life, or its taste for public executions (though the USA has never made Saudi Arabia justify those). Nor does he confront the fact that some Afghans may want a different future to the one he imagines for them, though it is true the Taliban did try to come to some agreement with the Northern Alliance before assasinating its leader (Massoud).
Zaeff often comes across as a likeable man, but at other moments I am not sure if I am dealing with religous conviction or just with priggishness and narrow-mindedness - the same kind of feeling I might well have reading Catholic theologians. There is a general problem with those who come at the world from a theologically-schooled world-view, that they cannot always see the wood for the trees. They don't prioritise. Zaeff's remarks on the Bamyan statues is as close as he gets to doing so.
This is a very readable book, once you realise that you do not have to remember the names of the Tolstoyanly long list of characters. A great deal of credit is undoubtedly due to Zaeff's editors, Alix Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
_______________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance
In the UK, the department of Business, Innovation and Skills (Proprietor: Vince Cable) issues a list of dates on which it advises employers to lock out their workers. These are what are commonly known as Bank Holidays and are designed nowadays to boost imports (people go abroad) and kill off any "green shoots" of growth in GDP.
It felt appropriate to read Liaquat Ahamed's splendid book over the long August Bank Holiday weekend. It's another of those books by someone who isn't an academic which makes one wonder why we bother with academics. It's true that he has degrees from Harvard and Cambridge; but he has written this beautifully crafted and researched 500 page book in his spare time away from being a "professional investment manager".
Though the cover blurb makes you think it is going to be about the Great Crash and the Great Depression, it is actually a much bigger study of central banking between 1914 and the mid-1930s focussing on the relations between four key players - Benjmain Strong at the New York Fed, Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, Hjalmar Scacht at the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau at La Banque de France. These institutions were still, for all or much of this period, privately owned and foolishly organised but responsibility devolved upon them to maintain financial stability at both domestic and international levels - the four main characters spend much of their time travelling, by train and boat, to meet each other.
They deal with bank reserves, international loans, interest rate setting, money supply, price inflation (or deflation), employment levels, war debts, war reparations and exchange rates. For much of the time, they are committed to mantaining the Gold Standard. Some of them do and some of them don't know what they are doing and the same is true of the politicians with whom they are uneasily involved. Britain's Labour Party comes out of the story as clueless and deferential to every orthodoxy around.
Some of the most interesting cameos in the book concern the moments when the politicians and the bankers collide: for example, Winston Churchill fatefully returning the UK to the Gold Standard in 1925 - a decision he later acknowledged as the worst in his life. Or, more importantly, Franklin Roosevelt tearing up the rule book, taking America off gold, encouraging price inflation, and thus in a very short period, turning around the US economy. This narative comes at the tail end of Ahamed's book and feels less than generous towards Roosevelt's huge achievement. In contrast, Keynes gets full credit for the perspicacity of the running critique he offers for the entire period and mostly from the sidelines.
Many other episodes have - and are designed to have - a contemporary resonance, right down to the rogue trader who busts an investment bank. And when in 1928 a British treasury official snootily remarks that "The French have always had a sure instinct for investing in bankrupt countries" it is impossible not to think of BNP Paribas' current exposure to Greek debt.
The really sobering thing about this very readable book is that though it gestures to the post-war achievements of the IMF, the World Bank and Keynesian economics in avoiding anything like the turmoils of the 1920s and 1930s it still leaves me with the thought that plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It also leaves a clear message that big players never pay their debts.
_________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
It felt appropriate to read Liaquat Ahamed's splendid book over the long August Bank Holiday weekend. It's another of those books by someone who isn't an academic which makes one wonder why we bother with academics. It's true that he has degrees from Harvard and Cambridge; but he has written this beautifully crafted and researched 500 page book in his spare time away from being a "professional investment manager".
Though the cover blurb makes you think it is going to be about the Great Crash and the Great Depression, it is actually a much bigger study of central banking between 1914 and the mid-1930s focussing on the relations between four key players - Benjmain Strong at the New York Fed, Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, Hjalmar Scacht at the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau at La Banque de France. These institutions were still, for all or much of this period, privately owned and foolishly organised but responsibility devolved upon them to maintain financial stability at both domestic and international levels - the four main characters spend much of their time travelling, by train and boat, to meet each other.
They deal with bank reserves, international loans, interest rate setting, money supply, price inflation (or deflation), employment levels, war debts, war reparations and exchange rates. For much of the time, they are committed to mantaining the Gold Standard. Some of them do and some of them don't know what they are doing and the same is true of the politicians with whom they are uneasily involved. Britain's Labour Party comes out of the story as clueless and deferential to every orthodoxy around.
Some of the most interesting cameos in the book concern the moments when the politicians and the bankers collide: for example, Winston Churchill fatefully returning the UK to the Gold Standard in 1925 - a decision he later acknowledged as the worst in his life. Or, more importantly, Franklin Roosevelt tearing up the rule book, taking America off gold, encouraging price inflation, and thus in a very short period, turning around the US economy. This narative comes at the tail end of Ahamed's book and feels less than generous towards Roosevelt's huge achievement. In contrast, Keynes gets full credit for the perspicacity of the running critique he offers for the entire period and mostly from the sidelines.
Many other episodes have - and are designed to have - a contemporary resonance, right down to the rogue trader who busts an investment bank. And when in 1928 a British treasury official snootily remarks that "The French have always had a sure instinct for investing in bankrupt countries" it is impossible not to think of BNP Paribas' current exposure to Greek debt.
The really sobering thing about this very readable book is that though it gestures to the post-war achievements of the IMF, the World Bank and Keynesian economics in avoiding anything like the turmoils of the 1920s and 1930s it still leaves me with the thought that plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It also leaves a clear message that big players never pay their debts.
_________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Matthew Sweet, The West End Front
London is the whole world in one city - if it chose to become a country, it would be a rich and powerful one. Within its boundaries, a thousand and one narratives of great political, economic, cultural and social significance are constantly played out.
Matthew Sweet's The West End Front (Faber and Faber 2011) picks up some World War Two narratives the threads of which pass through London's grand hotels - the Savoy, The Ritz, the Dorchester, Claridge's. Each thread provides a chapter heading: Sweet has ten stories about - among others - spies, homosexuals, agitators, con men and women, abortionists and exiles.
It is thoroughly researched, carefully crafted and often moving. Sweet is not an academic, which appears to me increasingly a condition of writing a good book - I kept comparing Sweet favourably with an academic work in the same genre but without a heart: Frank Mort's deadly Capital Affairs which I tried to read a while back.
There is a moving chapter which details the death of just one young woman, Mary Pickwoad, following a botched abortion in a London hotel, the Mount Royal. Sweet has gone after every document which might still exist and every person still alive who might have something to tell about the story. It is a beautiful Memorial.
More shocking and often surprising are the details which show England's class system functioning at all levels, in government, in the military, the police and among the spooks who were denizens of all the big hotels. In the early stages of the war, at least, Hitler was not unambiguously everyone's enemy; Jews and Communists were more menacing enemies for some of Sweet's upper-class and institutionally powerful characters. In my previous Blog, I noted the extraordinary way in which at the beginning of the War, whilst the big hotels had deep bomb-proof shelters, the London Underground was initially closed as a place of refuge from the Blitz. How many of us knew that before, I wonder?
If you like reading about World War Two or about London, this is a very good book to go after
__________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Matthew Sweet's The West End Front (Faber and Faber 2011) picks up some World War Two narratives the threads of which pass through London's grand hotels - the Savoy, The Ritz, the Dorchester, Claridge's. Each thread provides a chapter heading: Sweet has ten stories about - among others - spies, homosexuals, agitators, con men and women, abortionists and exiles.
It is thoroughly researched, carefully crafted and often moving. Sweet is not an academic, which appears to me increasingly a condition of writing a good book - I kept comparing Sweet favourably with an academic work in the same genre but without a heart: Frank Mort's deadly Capital Affairs which I tried to read a while back.
There is a moving chapter which details the death of just one young woman, Mary Pickwoad, following a botched abortion in a London hotel, the Mount Royal. Sweet has gone after every document which might still exist and every person still alive who might have something to tell about the story. It is a beautiful Memorial.
More shocking and often surprising are the details which show England's class system functioning at all levels, in government, in the military, the police and among the spooks who were denizens of all the big hotels. In the early stages of the war, at least, Hitler was not unambiguously everyone's enemy; Jews and Communists were more menacing enemies for some of Sweet's upper-class and institutionally powerful characters. In my previous Blog, I noted the extraordinary way in which at the beginning of the War, whilst the big hotels had deep bomb-proof shelters, the London Underground was initially closed as a place of refuge from the Blitz. How many of us knew that before, I wonder?
If you like reading about World War Two or about London, this is a very good book to go after
__________________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Stephen Gundle, Death and the Dolce Vita
If you wondered how Berlusconi survived for so long, this well-written book will provide many clues.
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In the 1950s, Rome was a major film production centre for both Italian and American films. Producers like Fellini, Rossellini and da Sica had international reputations. Italian actors and American actors who worked in Rome were front page material for movie magazines and popular newspapers. Think of Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani just for the Italian side.
But rather than write a straightforward history of Italian cinema in the 1950s, Gundle has come at the story from another angle. He structures his book around the never-explained death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, in April 1953 and provides a crime-detective narrative which, as it unfolds, provides a social history of post-war Rome.
Wilma Montesi was a lower middle-class girl from Rome whose family home was just a short walk from the bright lights of the city. Looking for a life less dull than that favoured by her family and her wooden fiancé, she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and within months died in mysterious circumstances.
The wrong crowd included a career criminal, Ugo Montagna, a man who did not file tax-returns and who had navigated his way to a success which grew through successive regimes - Fascist, American Occupation, Christian Democracy - and the wayward son, Piero Piccioni, of a top Christian Democrat politician. They had a taste for drugs and for sex. Wilma Montesi probably worked as a local drugs courier within Rome and she may have been groomed for sex. One night, something went wrong and she ended up dead on a beach near Rome.
Together Montagna and Piccioni could call in favours and call on connections. Montagna was buddy with the national commissioner for police and the elderly police commissioner for Rome was not going to argue with his boss. The investigation into Wilma Montesi's death was very rapidly closed after a perfunctory autopsy. It was an accident, a verdict her family were happy to embrace since it left their daughter's public reputation - and their own - intact.
The case was only re-opened because Italy's newly-free press would not let go of it. It had all ingredients of a circulation-boosting story: the mysterious death of a pretty young woman, the debauched lives of the rich and powerful (or sons of the powerful) and - not least - cover-up and corruption in high places continuing as if democracy had not yet come to Italy. Silvano Muto, on the journalistic right, led the way and the left followed.
The Vatican also had its own interests. Anything that served to weaken the strength of the Communists in post-war Italy was Good, anything which weakened the strength of the Christian Democrats was Bad. Here the Vatican and the USA, still heavily involved in Italian affairs, shared identical positions.
Gundle develops all this in a carefully-crafted, readable book. He avoids heavy-handed theoretical analysis, but there is an underlying structure: the opposition of high and low life and their proximity to each other in capital cities; the role of mass circulation magazines and newspapers in both sustaining a public sphere of debate but also in structuring the aspirations of young women; the hostility of the Vatican to anything which threatened sexual repression or the subordination of women; the spill-over of film culture into everyday life and the reverse.
If you want to understand the context out of which came Fellini's La Dolce Vita , then read this book. If you want to understand the long-term context in which a regime as corrupt and bacchanalian as Berlusconi's was possible, then this book also provides a remarkable amount of insight.
____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In the 1950s, Rome was a major film production centre for both Italian and American films. Producers like Fellini, Rossellini and da Sica had international reputations. Italian actors and American actors who worked in Rome were front page material for movie magazines and popular newspapers. Think of Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani just for the Italian side.
But rather than write a straightforward history of Italian cinema in the 1950s, Gundle has come at the story from another angle. He structures his book around the never-explained death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, in April 1953 and provides a crime-detective narrative which, as it unfolds, provides a social history of post-war Rome.
Wilma Montesi was a lower middle-class girl from Rome whose family home was just a short walk from the bright lights of the city. Looking for a life less dull than that favoured by her family and her wooden fiancé, she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and within months died in mysterious circumstances.
The wrong crowd included a career criminal, Ugo Montagna, a man who did not file tax-returns and who had navigated his way to a success which grew through successive regimes - Fascist, American Occupation, Christian Democracy - and the wayward son, Piero Piccioni, of a top Christian Democrat politician. They had a taste for drugs and for sex. Wilma Montesi probably worked as a local drugs courier within Rome and she may have been groomed for sex. One night, something went wrong and she ended up dead on a beach near Rome.
Together Montagna and Piccioni could call in favours and call on connections. Montagna was buddy with the national commissioner for police and the elderly police commissioner for Rome was not going to argue with his boss. The investigation into Wilma Montesi's death was very rapidly closed after a perfunctory autopsy. It was an accident, a verdict her family were happy to embrace since it left their daughter's public reputation - and their own - intact.
The case was only re-opened because Italy's newly-free press would not let go of it. It had all ingredients of a circulation-boosting story: the mysterious death of a pretty young woman, the debauched lives of the rich and powerful (or sons of the powerful) and - not least - cover-up and corruption in high places continuing as if democracy had not yet come to Italy. Silvano Muto, on the journalistic right, led the way and the left followed.
The Vatican also had its own interests. Anything that served to weaken the strength of the Communists in post-war Italy was Good, anything which weakened the strength of the Christian Democrats was Bad. Here the Vatican and the USA, still heavily involved in Italian affairs, shared identical positions.
Gundle develops all this in a carefully-crafted, readable book. He avoids heavy-handed theoretical analysis, but there is an underlying structure: the opposition of high and low life and their proximity to each other in capital cities; the role of mass circulation magazines and newspapers in both sustaining a public sphere of debate but also in structuring the aspirations of young women; the hostility of the Vatican to anything which threatened sexual repression or the subordination of women; the spill-over of film culture into everyday life and the reverse.
If you want to understand the context out of which came Fellini's La Dolce Vita , then read this book. If you want to understand the long-term context in which a regime as corrupt and bacchanalian as Berlusconi's was possible, then this book also provides a remarkable amount of insight.
____________________
Originally published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)