The Joy of Six 1493

"Australian politics is beautifully, exquisitely, delightfully boring. It is boring in the way it used to be back home - sane, predictable, restrained, broadly rational, and consisting mostly of retail offers to voters rather than screeching rhetoric about identity and culture war." Ian Dunt says Australia can teach Britain how to kill populism.

Rose Runswick fears the Liberal Democrats have accidentally voted for a surveillance state: "Let us be clear, the tech lobby wants this ban to happen so they can have more data to push their agendas. We have seen this with Peter Thiel, an American plutocrat who claimed, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and the use of medical data to help create the ICE raids we see now in America."

"She traces the rise in entrepreneurship to changes in working patterns since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when large numbers of people realised their jobs could be done from anywhere with a laptop. Across the UK, coastal towns saw a surge in interest." Zoe Crowther asks if digital nomads can breathe new life into failing resorts.

George Palmer-Soady warns against complacency about the regeneration of Nottingham's Broad Marsh: "Not only would any 12-storey building of its kind block the sunlight from shining over the beautiful Green Heart park, but it would serve as a grim reminder of everything the Broad Marsh had set out not to become."

George Scialabba salutes the moral beauty of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

"A couple of weeks ago I was asked on Times Radio whether I believe in fairies, and I suspect it is a question I will get asked a lot more now that Fairies: A History is published." Francis Young introduces his new book.

A report from the expedition to Ed Davey's hinterland

Ed Davey has chosen his favourite books for This Week. I don't know what the precise brief was, but he came up with a list of six novels.

• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
• Waterland by Graham Swift
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Tony Blair would have had a team working on his choices for weeks to make sure he didn't sound too posh or display any biases, but this looks like an honest list for a man of Ed's generation. I've read three of them myself.

The Joy of Six 1228

"AI skeptics - who are legion, and not necessarily part of the fringe tin foil hat crowd - are begging Silicon Valley to take a beat before unleashing AI to the world. But tech companies, faced with the most powerful computing innovation in a generation, are running around like kids who just found their dad’s gun." Allison Morrow reveals Silicon Valley's determination to produce an AI dystopia that no one has asked for.

Matthew Pennell reviews the Liberal Democrat performance in the London mayoral election: "A few activists have asked the Lib Dem leadership to be bolder in the context of Conservative implosion and Labour timidity. We saw exactly that in the London Lib Dem campaign - a manifesto focused on reforming the blue light services - the Met Police and London Fire Brigade. It was unprecedented to see a politician from a mainstream party run on a platform of police reform and it set us apart from the other parties."

Justin Garson looks to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to help him understand the nature of depression.

"When Germany began to reconstruct its modern history after 1945, angels were needed to replace the recent legions of devils. The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by it." Charles Darwent finds the truth is less comforting.

"One of the most startling things about the enigmatic man who became the architect of the new Houses of Parliament was that he was born and brought up in Westminster itself and knew the area inside out even before the competition which changed his life." Caroline Shenton on Charles Barry.

Francesca Wade says George Eliot made her life, as well as her fiction and art, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.

Two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors

I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.

It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.

Since you ask, here are the books I studied:

O level

• The Merchant of Venice
• An anthology of 20th-century British poets
• Lord of the Flies

You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.

A level

• Hamlet
  
• The Tempest
• Dr Faustus
• Wordsworth's Prelude (Book 1)
• John Donne
• T.S. Eliot (Selected Poems)
• The Rainbow
• The Grapes of Wrath

I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.

When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.

And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.

So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.

You can download the full report from the campaign's website.

Six of the Best 951

John Harris says the Tories are creating a cookie-cutter Britain: "Anyone who has watched what has happened to British housing will know what is surely coming: more and more Unplaces, in which community and collective purpose are beyond people’s grasp because the physical means to create and sustain them simply do not exist."

Polio terrified Americans, and in 1955, when Jonas Salk’s vaccine became available, they snapped it up like candy. Sixty-five years later, reports Arthur Allen, this is a different story.

Casting envious eyes on Canada, Adam Gopnik asks if the American Revolution was really a good idea.

"Eliot’s own consideration of the name she should be known by is as complicated a psychological and moral question as any depicted in her novels. However, her wish to be known professionally as George Eliot is resolute and clearly articulated." Eleanor Dumbill argues that it is not empowering to abandon the male pseudonyms used by female writers.

"He remembers a game where the other team had a player from Barbados. 'I didn’t get any runs, but he did. And when I went out to field their team was shouting: "Our one is better than yours," and you’ve got 20 people laughing, do I laugh? Or do I look like the angry black man?'" Andy Bull talks to black British cricketers whose careers were cut short by racist stereotyping,

James Collingwood on Robin Redbreast, a piece of folk horror broadcast in the BBC's Play for Today slot in 1970.

Six of the Best 940

"In a move that suggests its back to business as usual punishing people on benefits, a three-month suspension of sanctions introduced in response to the Coronavirus pandemic is coming to an abrupt halt." Mary O'Hara on the swift return of the blame and shame narrative to the benefits system.

Writing in the New York Times, Alex Marshall has noticed the British government's unwillingness to help the arts sector survive lockdown.

Anita Sethi says the joys of nature can seem out of reach if your class, ethnicity or access to transport make the countryside a no-go zone.

"On the brink of adulthood - not knowing where I would study, where I might live, what men I would love, whether I would have children - I felt that everything I might need to know about marriage, about love, about life itself, was encompassed in the novel’s eight hundred and fifty pages." Rebecca Mead has a lifelong love for George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Carl Reiner died this week. Earlier this year Hadley Freeman spoke to him and Mel Brooks about their 70-year friendship.

Ka Bradley reviews the cats in her garden: "A muscular, convincing performer brimming with debonair, Blinky's feints at songbirds and his occasional brawls with the foxes are heralded by the tinkle of his collar – which he has been given, my plus one assures me, for being 'extra naughty'."

Six of the Best 894

Alan Rice finds Black American troops were welcome in Britain during the second world war, but Jim Crow wasn't: "The pub was a place of sanctuary for black troops where they mingled with, mainly friendly, locals, and where the segregation many had to endure in the American South was thankfully absent."

Schoolgirl debating societies gave girls a political education in the years before women's suffrage, argues Helen Sunderland.

"A young miner who was a member of the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society in Northumberland, and who was killed by a fall of coal in 1899, died with a translation of Thucydides in his pocket, the page turned down at Pericles’ funeral speech." Edith Hall shows that a classical education was never just for the elite.

George Eliot's 'provincial' novels have much to teach today’s divided Britain, says Kathryn Hughes.

Fifty years on, Michael Hann celebrates the Fairport Convention album Liege & Leaf.

Dan Roberts explores the short Football League career of Middlesbrough Ironopolis.

In Our Time on Middlemarch

There was a cracking In Our Time on George Eliot's Middlemarch this morning. (An edited version will be broadcast this evening at 9.30, but I would listen to it via the BBC website.)

I read Middlemarch before starting my Masters in Victorian Studies out of duty, but thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

When the BBC adaptation (filmed in Stamford) was screened in 1994 I had great kudos at work because I knew how things would turn out.

I was interested to hear this morning that many of Eliot's contemporary readers, like my colleagues in 1994, hoped and expected that Dorothea would marry Lydgate.

And I was pleased to hear that I am not alone in finding Ladislaw an unconvincing character.

There was always something unreal about him to me, though this impression may owe something to the fact that he came into the novel as I was reading at twilight beside the Wye in Hay.

The Stains: Bored

I came across a tweet the other day that suggested the actor David Hemmings had lived briefly in Shrewsbury High Street. That is hard to reconcile with what I know of his life, but it did lead me to this record.

The Stains were a Shrewsbury punk band whose original vocalist was Dom Estos. And Dom Estos was Dominic Hemmings, the adopted son of David Hemmings.

His mother was Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes. Dominic had already been born when Hemmings met her during  a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960 and they fell in love. They married shortly afterwards and Hemmings adopted Dominic, but the marriage did not last.

A few more snippets...

The band turn up in a letter to the Guardian by Mark Webb in 2010:

I was amazed to read of Kevin ­Rowland's antipathy towards ironed creases in jeans ... In the 70s, playing drums in Dom Estos And The Stains, we got a gig supporting Dexys ­Midnight Runners at Shrewsbury Music Hall. Dexys got the bigger dressing room, but we had the electric socket. A knock on the door and Mr Rowland appears: "Hello, lads. Can I plug in my iron to do my trousers?"

Dom Estos appears still to be making music, under the name Dominic Ouvry, as part of Liquid Vision.

And a little googling suggests Genista Ouvry used the name Jenny Lewes because Lewes was her mother's maiden name.

Not only that: it suggests she was a direct descendant of George Henry Lewes, Victorian man of letters and partner of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans).

Six of the Best 414

Karen Wilkinson on Liberal Democrat Voice updates us on the campaign against the government's enthusiasm for fining or jailing parents who take their children on holiday in term time.

Moderate Labourite Hopi Sen is bemused by the way his party's high command has suddenly become keen on cooperation with the Lib Dems: "Labour moderates, already suspect due to their liberal deviations, would face ... agonies in any Lib-Lab coalition.  Centrist ministers would be tarred at PLP meetings,  be accused of a lack of backbone at policy commissions, be berated at conference for secretly agreeing with Nick Clegg."

Why did Friedrich Hayek support a basic income? Matt Zwolinski explains on Libertarianism.org.

"Eliot wrote to a bereaved friend. 'I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of ­impersonal life to attain great intensity,—possible for us to gain much more ­independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of acts that make our own personality.'" Kathryn Schulz writes for Vulture on the greatness of Middlemarch and the goodness of George Eliot.

Unmitigated England discovers the monuments in the church at Warkton, just outside Kettering.

StyleIte has 23 vintage advertisements that remind of the days when, for women, 'skinny' meant unattractive.

Liberal England book quiz: Twenty opening sentences

A little fun for the Christmas season. Below are the opening sentences of 20 works of fiction (a handful of them written for children). Please leave the title and author in the comments below. I shall fill the answers in as they are guessed.

The winner gets tea at Bonkers Hall (terms and conditions apply).

The opening sentences

1. Marley was dead: to begin with.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.
The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White
3. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
5. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Middlemarch by George Eliot

6. They changed trains at Shrewsbury.
Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville
7. Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

8. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
9. A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
10. As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
11. There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

12. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking Thirteen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
13. The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
14. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

15. One morning a large wooden case was brought to the farmhouse, and Bevis, impatient to see what was in it, ran for the hard chisel and the hammer, and would not consent to put off the work of undoing it for a moment.
Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies
16. Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
17. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
18. The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.
The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

19. He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling

20. The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged: and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Harriet Smith remembered

The Liberal Democrat Conference has just opened with Duncan Brack paying tribute to Harriet Smith, who died recently. He quoted the closing passage of George Eliot's Middlemarch:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.