The Polly Bolton Band: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I wrote this in 2008 about a memory that was already more than a dozen years old:

Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.

Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.

That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A.E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.

Now, at last, I have found a recording by the Polly Bolton Band on YouTube. It's a setting, not of Kipling or Housman, but of a poem by their contemporary W.B. Yeats.

Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP

This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the  Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Work, play and creativity

An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:

It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.

 That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life. 

And another devoted to resources for creativity says:

We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.

Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.

The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?

There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.

And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:

“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.

“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”

*****

W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.

There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:

I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.

He was faced with just such a choice between machines:

One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.

The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.” 

"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.

******

So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.

The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.

Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups. 

I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.

The Joy of Six 1574

Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

The Joy of Six 1534

Keir Starmer should set a timetable for his departure from Number 10 and give his successor the opportunity to prepare for becoming prime minister, argue Hannah White and Alex Thomas.

"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.

Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."

John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.

"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.

David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."

Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

Grace Dieu: A railway, a canal and a priory in ruins

This video takes us to Thringstone in west Leicestershire to walk the disused Charnwood Forest Railway, which once terminated at Loughborough Derby Road station. It's a walk I've thought of doing myself.

There are glimpses of the short-lived Charnwood Forest Canal, which also ran towards Loughborough,  though not quite far enough to reach the River Soar, so it was connected the wider canal system by a wagonway.

And then we reach the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory. The Friends of Grace Dieu will tell you all about them.

The poet Wordsworth writes:

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,

Rugged and high, of Charnwood’s forest ground,

Stand yet, but, Stranger, hidden from thy view

The ivied ruins of forlorn Grace Dieu,

Erst a religious House, which day and night

With hymns resounded and the chanted rite.

The Joy of Six 1515

"We need to have the courage and vision to support the Jewish community without destroying a fundamental and necessary right. It is Jews who will ultimately be harmed too, as members of the UK population, if the right to protest is further eroded." Jo Glanville argues that banning pro-Palestine protest in the UK is no solution to antisemitism.

Glen O'Hara on the government's stealthy culling of Britain's universities: "This way, they get to make the whole sector smaller with little political pain on their part. They can dump responsibility on bad managers, risk-taking, too much borrowing. The dark side of Higher Education’s pain and toxicity will dribble out on the local and regional news, all the better for voters not to join the dots. The rundown will look piecemeal, disorganised, random."

Helen Currie, Irene Gregory-Eaves and Steven Cooke are our guides to research on how to build cities for wildlife, not just people.

"The film interviews landowners such as Francis Fulford, who has long been the media’s favourite outspoken reactionary toff, a sort of posh version of Viz’s Farmer Palmer, snarling “Get off my land”. There are other, more thoughtful landowners, including Hugh Inge-Innes-Lillingston, who cheerfully admits how silly his name is, and is open to developing new ideas about managed access." Peter Bradshaw has been to see Our Land (2026).

"Just one thing remained to be done before the 1923 FA Cup Final could take place on 28 April. The structure of the stadium had to be tested, to make sure that it was safe for spectators to use. All 1,200 workmen on the site had to march round the stadium as a group, visiting all parts of the terraces and stands. Following instructions and in unison, they had to stamp their feet, lean against the safety rails, and sit down then up on the seats, to recreate the effect of the crowds at an actual event." Philip Grant looks back to the construction of Wembley Stadium.

Matthew Lyons reviews Peter Ackroyd's biography of W.H. Auden.

W.H. Auden wrote a sonnet about Richard Jefferies

I was reading Nicholas Jenkins's The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness – or scanning for a column I'm writing, if I'm honest – when I came across a reference to a sonnet by Auden on Richard Jefferies.

It turns out to have been written when the poet was 18 years old and to be included in the collection W. H. Auden. Juvenilia: Poems 1922–28. It also seems that the young Auden's chief acquaintance with Jefferies' work came via the biography of him by Edward Thomas.

I can't find the whole sonnet online, but here is an extract:

What more? When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn.

Lord Harborough's Curve and Oscar Wilde's first biographer

Lord Harborough's Curve: photo by John Sutton

Many railway enthusiasts will know the story of the Battle of Saxby and Lord Harborough's Curve, told here by the Leicestershire Museum Collections site:

In mid-November 1844, railway surveyors were making their way slowly through the Leicestershire countryside. George Stephenson had sketched out his preferred route for the Syston & Peterborough Railway and now they were taking the levels. 

Four miles east of Melton, near the village of Saxby, they reached the estate of Lord Harborough, whose ancestral home of Stapleford Hall stood nearby. His Lordship hated the very idea of railways and had put up signs warning the surveyors to keep off his land. 

The railway men attempted to avoid causing offence by following the towpath of the Oakham Canal, but this added insult to injury, as Lord Harborough was a shareholder in the canal, which faced ruin if the railway was built. His servants and estate workers set about removing the surveyors by force, leading to four days of fighting between the two sides.

Sidetracked adds some colour:

Pistols were allegedly drawn by surveyors, clubs and iron pointed staves carried and bare fists used.  Artillery was even mentioned! The estate Fire Engine was deployed as a primitive water cannon and the railway company was threatened by letter that:

"We have barricaded the towing  path and have in readiness a few cannons from Lord Harborough’s yacht. If you force us to use them, as a last resort, the blood will be upon your hands."

Lord Harborough won his dispute with the railway company, so its engineers were forced to construct a tight curve in order to avoid his land. "Lord Harborough's Curve", as it was known, remained in use until 1892, when a route through Stapleford Park was finally built. You can see the wooded embankment of Lord Harborough's Curve in the photograph above. But the title died with him, as he did not father any legitimate children.

In another part of the forest, I have noticed that whenever I search for pictures of Market Harborough in photo libraries, portraits of a writer called Robert Harborough Sherard come up. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde and his first biographer.

Sherard's father was the Revd Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy, who turns out to have been one of three illegitimate children that our Lord Harborough had with an actress called Emma Love. Through his mother, Sherard was also a great grandson of the poet William Wordsworth.

Sadly, he is not an attractive figure. His books on the poor of England generally lay the blame for their sufferings at the door of Jewish landlords.

Still, we have our Trivial Fact of the Day: Lord Harborough who won the Battle of Saxby was the grandfather of Oscar Wilde's first biographer.

GUEST POST Lord Summerisle obviously took the Liberal whip

Summerisle Young Liberals, 1973

Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury find that The Wicker Man is steeped in the debates of 1970s Liberalism.

A great deal has been written about The Wicker Man (1973). Often heralded as Britain's greatest horror film, its shocking climax has obscured other salient features – most notably, the political alignment of Lord Summerisle (portrayed by Christopher Lee) and the impact of that on the socioeconomic construction of the island.

For those unfamiliar with the setting, Summerisle lies off the west coast of Scotland – in the 'Celtic Fringe' that constituted the post-war Liberal electoral bastions. In 1868, the grandfather of the present lord (at the time of filming) purchased the island and established it as a spot for the cultivation of new strains of apple he had developed. (There are some parallels – although not in every particular – with the purchase of Eigg by the wealthy Liberal Runciman family in the 1920s.) 

The first Lord Summerisle was a characteristic Liberal of his generation: a scientist, a religious nonconformist, a freethinker, and an entrepreneur. Surely his grandson continued to take the Liberal Whip in the House of Lords. 

On Summerisle, he reintroduced a form of paganism, which flourished alongside his orchards; although not openly acknowledged, the age and style of the architecture of the island's public infrastructure, such as the school and the library, also imply they were the work of this Victorian innovator. 

A century later, Summerisle is renowned for its apples, remains pagan, and offers audiences a model of an integrated community that has overcome many of the issues being addressed by contemporary Liberal politics; through the narrative of the film, however, Summerisle acquires other connotations.

Although never before acknowledged, The Wicker Man has a great deal of connection to 1970s Liberal politics (setting aside a charismatic leader allegedly involved in a conspiracy to murder). First, community politics lies at the heart of the film. The entire island works together, setting aside questions of class to achieve common goals – a horizontal rather than vertical organisation of society.

This is the antithesis of the class confrontation that characterised the era’s political imagination, and the Conservative/Labour duopoly. Community politics was adopted by the party at the 1970 Liberal Assembly, although its antecedents include New Liberalism and Distributionism.

While there are questions about the authenticity of the (re)introduction of 'the old ways' in 1868, the society built on these foundations seems authentic, perhaps more so than elsewhere given the open acknowledgement of its invented traditions. 

While heathen, Summerisle is hopefully not unenlightened. In contrast to the islanders, who are harmonious, it is the visiting Sergeant Howie who adopts an adversarial and intolerant tone – a representation of the adversarial politics 1970s liberals sought to move beyond.

Summerisle, like so many places, could not escape the discourse of apocalyptic 'declinism' that pervaded much of 1970s politics. The failure of the apple harvest resonates through the film. However, Lord Summerisle once again aligns himself with Liberal politics by adopting a solution-based approach informed by the best evidence to hand. 

Summerisle’s attitude might not be as technocratic as that offered on the mainland, but equally, the skill in constructing the narrative that ensnares Howie cannot be dismissed. The establishment of a research facility to address issues with the apple trees might have yielded better results, perhaps, but certainly not a better cinematic spectacle.

Given the nature of Summerisle life, it must also be seen as part of the 'permissive society' approach championed by Liberals. This certainly originates with Lord Summerisle, who presides over (directly and indirectly) a lifestyle that is remarkably sexually uninhibited in both word and deed. This is underlined by Summerisle's cosmopolitan (mis)quotation of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, a poem generally seen as indicative of sexual experimentation and egalitarianism. 

That egalitarianism on Summerisle extends beyond sexuality to a degree of pro-immigration sentiment, again engaging with 1970s Liberal politics: Ingrid Pitt's obviously Polish accent marks her as an outsider on the remote Scottish island, yet her character is the island’s librarian and key to the ritual's conclusion. The alliance of an intense local network with a metropolitan (even cosmopolitan) leadership encapsulates much of the post-war Liberal Party.

The Wicker Man, then, is steeped in the debates of 1970s Liberalism. Lord Summerisle presides over a society that has overcome some of the challenges of contemporary life, particularly around issues of social unity balanced with the need for local autonomy. Rather than a backward-looking, isolated, paganism, Summerisle is integrated into the local and national economy, showing how tradition can be incorporated with the demands of modern life: the old ways performed in Levis. 

Summerisle's socially and economically liberal order works for the benefit of the whole community – audiences see no poverty or antagonism between different classes on the island, largely because there are no different groups. 

It would be inaccurate to say that challenges do not remain, and it is impossible to know whether the remedies attempted in the film were successful – though a brief cameo by Christopher Lee as a mentor to a more modern pagan Scottish lord in Robin Hardy’s 2011 sequel, The Wicker Tree, suggest that, just perhaps…

Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury are both members of the Liberal Democrats.

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for Faber & Faber

Stefan Collini has reviewed the latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters for the London Review of Books. It covers the years 1942-4, and the most striking thing about the review is the revelation of how little time Eliot spent writing poetry and how much he devoted to his duties for the publishers Faber & Faber.

One advantage that firm had over other publishers was that it was based in Russel Square rather than the traditional book-trade quarter of Pasternoster Row, which stood in the shadow of St Paul's and was heavily bombed in the London Blitz.

Collini also writes about Eliot's most famous business decision: his rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. 

Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot "see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for", but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript "have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time". 

Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book "was a great mistake on our part". Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. 

The rejection letter suggests that the book's "positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing", but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. 

With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted. 

Collini, incidentally, quotes some of Eliot's verdicts on his contemporaries – Orwell is "a very queer bird".

The Joy of Six 1489

Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.

The effect on children when a parent loses a parliamentary election

Matthew Spender's book A House in St John's Wood is a portrait of his father, the poet Stephen Spender.

Stephen's father was Harold Spender and the Michael mentioned below is Stephen's brother Michael Spender. The third brother was Humphrey Spender – they were very much a family of Wikipedia entries.

Early in his book, Matthew Spender writes:

When Stephen was twelve, Harold stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. My father remembered being hauled around Bath in a pony-carriage with his two brothers, each with a placard round his neck saying "Vote for Daddy". Harold lost and the effect on Michael and Stephen was traumatic.

Michael said: "When they are very young, the children of a public man worship their father for being famous – a kind of god: but it's extraordinary how soon they get to realise if he's a public failure." Michael developed a stammer. He decided that his father was "inefficient", which in eyes was the worst thing a man could be. 

Stephen, instead, just couldn't stop crying. It confirmed his suspicion that his father was a windbag whose exhortations of "on and ever on" were meaningless.

Not Gramsci but Matthew Arnold

Embed from Getty Images

Professor Hugh Macmillan had a letter published in yesterday's Guardian:

Patrick Wintour begins his excellent article (Into the void: how Trump killed international law, 25 December) with a quotation from Antonio Gramsci: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born." 

This idea is frequently attributed to Gramsci but surely, as a critical sociologist, he must have been aware of Matthew Arnold’s lines: "Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born…"

In 19th century Britain, cultural criticism was a recognised literary form and practically a profession. And Matthew Arnold was one of the more attractive of the Victorian sages who practised it.

I'm still grateful for Roland Hall's 19th century English thought option when I did my philosophy degree at York and for its wonderfully comprehensive reading list in particular. ("You are not expected to read all or none of these books.")

Merry Christmas to all our readers

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I'll tell thee;
Little lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee! 

                             William Blake

The Joy of Six 1451

"Almost a quarter of pupils say they 'never' feel safe or 'only on some days'. ... Half of all secondary school pupils say they 'only sometimes' or 'never' enjoy school, and parents aren’t always aware – they underestimate this figure by a factor of three." Cara Cinnamon on the Department for Education’s newly published pupil experience data.

Prem Sikka states the bleeding obvious – to tackle child poverty the government must deal with parental poverty – but isn't it rare to see it stated?

Is your car journey suspicious? Police forces are trialling AI technology that enables them to identify and track “suspicious” journeys by drivers on Britain’s road network. Mark Wilding and Charles Hymas have the story.

Kathryn Rix explains the legislation that bound MPs suffering with prolonged periods of mental illness from 1886 until legislative reform in 2013.

Starr Charles reports that the Twentieth Century Society has selected 10 UK buildings as part of its annual list highlighting 30-year-old buildings it says deserve to be nationally listed. The society says: "Given that around 30 years after construction is often the point at which buildings are likely to require their first major refurbishment, any listing designation at this point would provide a timely opportunity to ensure that such works recognise and respond to what makes a building significant." 

"Reading the poems now, it is the lyricism that stands out and still surprises. Sometimes it seems as though the subjects Larkin writes about are merely placeholders for the poet’s deeper fascination with poetry, and its relationship with the passing of time." Jeremy Wikeley looks at Philip Larkin's early collection of poems, The Less Deceived.

John Carey and The Intellectuals and the Masses

The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.

Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:

The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed. 

Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.

Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.

Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. 

All of this Auden rejected.

I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.

Flann O'Brien makes the case for banning poetry

Today I visited Heyford Books in Northampton, which maintains a good general secondhand stock and sells most volumes for £2.

One of the books I came away with was The Best of Myles, an anthology of the writings of Flann O'Brien.

If you're puzzled by the title... Flann O'Brien's real name was Brian O'Nolan. As he was a pillar of the Irish civil service as well as a satirical columnist and novelist, he generally wrote under a pen name, and Myles na Gopaleen.

Here he making the case for banning poetry:

Having considered the matter in – of course – all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the wasted space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. 

But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.

Furthermore poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. 

The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting or sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.

I think Flann O'Brien and I are going to get on very well.

Jonathan Meades talks to Mark Lawson

Recorded in 2006:

"It's as much music hall as it is lecture hall, the stuff I do, I think. I might want to be Geoffrey Hill, but part of me also wants to be Benny Hill. And it's not a question of pushing the Geoffrey out or pushing the Benny out, but of finding a way of combining them."

What I value in Meades is not any organised body of opinion, but his attitude.