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 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.

Something amazing: A Shropshire businessman falling out of the sky and Mystery at Witchend

The latest Secret Shropshire programme on BBC Sounds is intriguing:

In 1937 Max Wenner fell to his death from a plane in one of aviation's greatest mysteries. Wenner was a wealthy landowner and pilot living at Batchcott Hall outside Picklescott in the foothills of the Long Mynd.

Wenner's frequent flights to Germany in the 1930s and visits from high profile Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop led to speculation that Wenner may be leading a double life. In January 1937 his body was found in woodland near Genk, in Belgium.

He had fallen out of a passenger plane but no could explain why. Almost ninety years later, the mystery continues to intrgue journalists in the UK, and on the continent.

Johnty O'Donnell visited Batchcott Hall to investigate the mysterious Max Wenner, the man who fell from the sky.

So there were rumours of a nest of Nazi spies in a big house in the shadow of the Long Mynd? Could this story have been an inspiration for Malcolm Saville's first Lone Pine book Mystery at Witchend? 

Wenner's death must still have been the talk of the district when Saville visited Shropshire during the war. Even the name Batchcott echoes the Hatchholt of his book, and I once drew parallels between Mystery at Witchend and the wartime propaganda film Went the Day Well?

While I was writing this the Trivia Desk phoned to point out that Max Wenner was the great uncle of the Blue Peter presenter Christopher Wenner, who later became a crusading documentary maker under the name Max Stahl.

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.

The Joy of Six 1492

"It’s a well-worn tactic: Say something obviously offensive and watch as the media debates whether you were right, actually. The result is that the state of general discourse moves further to the right, the ratchet effect in action." Don't fall into the Nick Timothy trap, warns Mic Wright.

Helen Maguire exposes planners' failure to consider women's safety: "Simple issues like lighting dictate who feels able to use public space after dark. Many women plan their routes based on lighting, avoiding dark shortcuts or taking longer paths home simply to stay on well-lit streets. Some pay for taxis to avoid walking along unlit roads altogether, a luxury that not everyone can afford."

"Quietly, our country is moving, state by state and executive order by executive order, towards policies that all but dismantle the rights of those deemed mentally ill. In the US, both Republican and Democratic legislators have applauded the trend toward seemingly humane policies that lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric commitment and assertive, non-consensual treatment in the community." Nancy Burke on mental health and the assault on autonomy in Trump's America.

Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland consider the long history of student finance: "It is hard to see successive campaigns against repayable loans or fee increases as anything other than a series of failures. But it is also clear that many of the support systems students today take for granted arose out of such activism, from student discounts to subsidised canteens to union shops and hardship funds."

Emily Temple tells how J.R.R. Tolkien stopped W.H. Auden writing a book about him.

A run of Japanese films released around the millennium, and bracketed together as 'J-Horror', gave new life to the ghost story. In 2026, says Ray Newman, they’re still exciting.

The abandoned lead mine in Crystal Palace Park

Photo by Jacqueline Banerjee

Like W.H. Auden, I have a thing about abandoned lead mines. So I was intrigued to learn that there is one in Crystal Palace Park.

Subterranea Briannica explains:

It is well known that Crystal Palace Park includes a number of Victorian dinosaur models, arranged in groups around the lower lake. Many of these species were recently discovered although not all the models are nowadays thought to be strictly accurate. Less well known is that alongside these animals there is a replica geological strata.

This was built at the same time as an educational feature and was constructed from the true strata it was based on from Ashover in Derbyshire. Coal measures, limestone and millstone grit are part of the reconstruction. In addition, a 3/4 scale lead mine was constructed behind the face in carboniferous limestone; in the 19th century visitors could tour the mine. Inside they would find stalactites and lead ore veins.

The mine, along with the geological strata, is now grade I listed alongside the dinosaurs. No access is possible at it is allegedly unsafe (although the local authority responsible for the site was initially unaware of its existence when enquiries were made).

The Victorian Web also has an article on this feature, from which I have taken the photograph above.

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.

The Joy of Six 1384

Ben de Pear and Ramita Navai tells the story of how the BBC repeatedly delayed and ultimately shelved a damning documentary on the destruction of Gaza's health service. Gaza: Under Attack was eventually screened by Channel 4.

“Resilience is critical to manage global heating: housing, food defences, water supplies, food supply, healthcare, finance and workplaces. Too often we are fighting last centuries’ wars by insulating homes from cold and failing to protect them from heat; hence, we install air to water heat pumps, where other countries are promoting air to air (which provides cooling in summer).” Simon Ferrigno asks if Britain is prepared for more heatwaves.

“The data doesn’t suggest that total demand on the criminal courts is unprecedentedly high. The number of cases coming into the system has increased in recent years, but remains below levels in the early 2010s. Indeed, the total amount of court time spent on jury trials has decreased by almost a quarter since 2016. The biggest problem facing the courts is the growing productivity gap – what we’re getting out compared to what we’re putting in.” Cassia Rowland is not convinced by Sir Brian Leveson's recommendation that we severely restrict the right to a tribal by jury.

Jacqui chooses 10 favourite London novels.

Susan McDonald discusses her love of the poetry of W.H. Auden: “In Tonight at Seven-Thirty, Auden says ‘the funniest mortals and the kindest are those who are most aware of the baffle of being’. I agree – that’s why I’ve read his poems for the past 30 years.”

“If horror film makers have nothing else they can always rely on a cheap mask to bring a sense of the uncanny, playing upon our deepest instinctive fear of The Other.” Ray Newman on the power of the mask.

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.

The Joy of Six 1222

"What they got was a journalist with access to the upper reaches of the Government, with a determination to get on air and tell everyone the whispers that she had heard from ministers, advisors and officials – before Sky or ITN. What the BBC needed was someone who could take a step back, away from the scrum, and tell audiences when they were being lied to." Laura Kuenssberg has been a catastrophic failure as the BBC's political editor, argues Patrick Howse.

Jonn Elledge asks if the Tories are deliberately posting terrible social media: "It's worth noting, though, that the most damning comment I heard from anyone while reporting this piece came from a Tory strategist: 'The conspiracy theory I’ve always liked the most is the one that presumes that behind something inexplicably dumb there must be some grand plan or deep rooted super secret scheme designed in these smokey backrooms of government. It’s terrifically flattering,' they explained. 'My god, I wish it were true. I mean, have you met us? We really are just this shit.'"

Andrew Kersley meets the parents of truant children hit by the single justice procedure: "Imagine receiving a letter through the post, informing you that you’re about to be prosecuted for a crime you did not commit. Your defence and plea of not guilty won’t be considered. Instead, you will be found guilty in a private ruling, with only a single judge present in the room. There’s no prosecution, no defendant, no press, and no witnesses. And after all that, you will be left with a criminal record that could cost you your job."

"In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe." Peter West on the neglected British philosopher Susan Stebbing.

Jessica Kiang celebrates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was released 50 years ago.

"The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), an undergraduate at Christ Church in the mid 1920s, would bring visitors here to show them what he considered to be the embodiment of 'The Waste Land' described in TS Eliot's poem of the same name, of which he was a great admirer." Local History in South Oxford takes us to St Ebbe's Gasworks.

Eric Thompson knew my father

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Long ago, my mother told me that my father had been a schoolfriend of Eric Thompson - the actor, director, narrator of The Magic Roundabout and father of Emma.

I wasn't able to ask my father about it - he walked out when I was 11 and I never saw him again - but eventually they invented the internet and it became possible to check such things.

It turned out that he had been to the same secondary school as Thompson, but was a year younger than him. This made me doubt the story, as a year means a lot at that age.

But while I was clearing my mother's house recently, I came across a piece of paper right at the back of a drawer.

Quite unexpectedly, it turned out to be my father's School Certificate - the qualification pupils took at 16 before 1951.

And, reading it carefully, I found that he had taken it at 15. He had been put up a year and could easily have been in the same class as Eric Thompson.

Then, the other day, I turned to the British Newspaper Archive to see if it could tell me anything more about my father at secondary school - I was taking more interest in his schooldays than he had in mine - and I struck gold.

Before reproducing the cutting, I must explain that his name was Peter Booth. I started using Calder as a surname at 13, not so much to cut him out of my life as to make what I hoped would be a new start after two thoroughly miserable years.

So this is what I found in the West Sussex County Times for Friday 27 December 1946: a review of the Collyer's School Drama Club production of The Ascent of F6 by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

It begins by saying the club could not be accused of a lack of ambition:

To have chosen a play as difficult in form as 'The Ascent of F6' for their Christmas production on Friday and Saturday showed a lot of courage.

That the production was so successful is high praise to the work of both the young actors and their producer, Miss Margery Lee.

And then, after praise for the portrayal of the lead character Michael Ransom by one John Hempstead, comes this paragraph:

Peter Booth was convincing as David Gunn, happy-go-lucky member of Michael's expedition, as were Eric Thompson (Ian Shawcross), Geoffrey Lesser (Edward Lamp) and Michael Williams (Dr. Potter).

The slightly eerie thing about this is that I discovered Auden's poetry when I was about 30 and developed a strong affection for another of the plays he wrote with Isherwood - The Dog Beneath the Skin. I had even tweeted a few lines of it shortly before I discovered this cutting.

But then, one of the books I've saved from my mother's house is a pocket edition of A Shropshire Lad. I'd always assumed it was hers, but when I studied it I found my father's name and 'Horsham, 1951' on the flyleaf.

Squirreling away in the BNA, I also found that, a month after the play, my father had been announced as the new youth columnist for the same newspaper. But as far as I can see, only one of his columns appeared and it's too dull to be worth quoting.

So there you have it: a discovery at the back of a drawer and an electronic newspaper cutting have made a family legend look a lot more likely to be true.

The importance of Auden to English literature

Today has been W.H. Auden's birthday. He was born in this house on Bootham in York on 21 February 1907.

Edward Mendelson's introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems (1979) captured his importance to English literature:

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.

Why I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf: Eugenics and modernist literature

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Stephen Unwin in Byline Times quotes Virginia Woolf's for Sunday 9 January 1915. She and her husband Leonard had been out for a "very good walk" along the Thames towpath from Richmond to Kingston, when they encountered "a long line of imbeciles":

"The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature with no forehead, or no chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

This is appalling, but not such a shock if you know how widespread support for eugenicist ideas was in the early 20th century.

I have blogged before about Keynes and Beveridge's support for this cause, and John Carey once published a book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, that looked at the repugnant political views of a host of renowned literary figures, including George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats.

Some of these were Fabian socialists - the Guardian obituary for Paul Johnson reveals that Leonard Woolf was a member of the New Statesman board as late as 1965.

But most were modernist literary figures and we should have learnt by now that there is no necessary connection between an innovative approach to literary forms and liberal politics.

As Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W.H. Auden: Selected Poems,

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.

So it should not be such a surprise that the literary figure of this era who was most securely opposed to eugenicist ideas, and saw most clearly where they might lead, was the wacky Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton.

Dominic Raab and the Tories' war on culture

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Dominic Raab's implication at prime minister's questions today that working-class people should not like opera is just part, not so much of the Conservatives' culture war, as their war on culture.

We are currently seeing a cull of arts courses in the post-1992 universities, which are the ones that students from poorer backgrounds are most likely to attend.

And this cull has received theoretical backing from David Goodhart, an Old Etonian whom I just missed seeing as one of the leading Trots on campus at York,* and my own MP Neil O'Brien, who went from a state education in Huddersfield to Oxford, but does not seem overkeen that others should follow his route.

Add to this the decline of subjects like music and drama in schools and there is a danger that a knowledge of the arts will once again become the preserve of the upper classes.

There was a good discussion of these issues in a Radio Four debate broadcast from a Leicester school in 2018. I am pleased to find you can still listen to it on the BBC website.

While we are talking about the arts, a word about Nadhim Zahawi and Philip Larkin.

After two years of Gavin Williamson, it's wonderful to have an education secretary who has his favourite poets and obviously cares about them deeply.

However, his reaction to Larkin and Wilfred Owen's omission from a GCSE poetry anthology - that it is "cultural vandalism" - turned it into one more salvo in the Tories' culture war.

Larkin and Owen have not been cancelled, it's just that there are many fine 20th-century poets and GCSE students cannot study them all every year.

I have a fondness for W.H.Auden and Edwin Muir. Is it cultural vandalism if they're not in this anthology?

Of course not.

* A few years before Goodhart, one of York's leading Trots was Peter Hitchens. These public school lefties are so predictable.

The Joy of Six 1026

Contrary to popular and academic belief, says Deborah Boucoyannis, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy: "The key principles of Smith’s system work against the concentration of wealth - they also speak to the top issues in economic policy today: profits, taxes, and the minimum wage."

Clio Chang argues that the past decade has seen all that was most fun about the internet destroyed by an increasingly unsustainable media ecosystem built for the wealthy.

Why are boys more likely than girls to be deemed to have special educational needs? James Redburn investigates.

In 1973 W.H. Auden was interviewed on Parkinson and David J. Collard has the transcript: "I was walking across a field at school with a friend of mine who later turned into a painter called Robert Medley, and he said 'Do you ever write poetry?' and I said 'No, I've never thought of it' and he said 'Why don’t you?' and at that moment I knew that was what I was going to do."

Emily Knight reviews a new biography of Joseph Wright of Derby, the "painter of light".

Roger French fails to reach Britain's most westerly bus stop.

Six of the Best 916

David Boyle looks to life after the coronavirus: "I'm not sure anyone will miss the airlines and airports (except the British, of course, who fly more than any nation on earth). The future of food looks set to be local with short supply lines after all. But if the economy was in such a dire situation before, then it may be that some government support for salaries will have to be semi-permanent."

From miraculous cures to paranoid conspiracies, misinformation about coronavirus is going viral at a disturbing rate say Ella Hollowood and Alexi Mostrous.

"Even nowadays, with parents the stunned and submissive onlookers at their children’s lives, a middle-aged man would think twice about meeting the family of the 17-year-old son he’s knocking off." Alan Bennett on W.H. Auden in love.

Film School Rejects chooses the 50 best coming of age movies ever.

"Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his unexpected access to even bruter force than the enemy can deliver." Mary Beard considers the most celebrated Gaul.

Patrick Mulkern looks at the career of Patrick Troughton, who was a hundred years ago today.

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"Joyce is remembered as being part of seven female Liberal Candidates (the others were Christina Baron, Sarah Curtis, Penny Jessel, Margaret Snow, Delia Venables and Nesta Wyn Ellis) who protested in 1976 outside the National Liberal Club about the fact that women were not until then admitted to full membership." Graham Colley pays tribute to Joyce Arram.

Nick Barlow looks back to 1969 and the Redcliff-Maud Report's recommendations for redrawing the boundaries of local authorities.

Ross Goldstone reviews Francis Green and David Kynaston's study of Britain’s private school problem.

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Jay Parini on a study of Auden's poem 'September 1, 1939': "The astonishing text at the heart of this book, after 9/11, acquired a prophetic as well as a diagnostic quality."

Rob Colling has recorded an album inspired by Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. Bob Fischer interviews him about it.

Three more poems by W.T. Nettlefold

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One of my favourite posts on this blog is the one about Bill Nettlefold. He was a minor poet of the 1930s whom I met as a teenager and later found quoted in the introduction of the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties.

The poem quoted in that introduction, an odd and angry denunciation of T.S. Eliot, was the only Bill Nettlefold poem I had ever found.

That was until a couple of days ago, when someone very kindly posted three more of his poems as a comment on my original post.

They are all derivative of the young W.H. Auden and thus very much to my taste.

Here is one of them, published in Left Review in December 1937.

A Lullaby for a Baby Born in 1937 

Oh hush thee my baby and sleep while you can,
The days that are flying will make you a man.
Sleep deeply my baby, 'tis I who should cry,
The Masters are planning the way you shall die. 

The mining and blasting, the coal that we hew,
The steel we are casting, are, baby, for you.
To mortgage your future, the brain blood and bone;
Your life an investment to cover their own. 

Oh stay as a baby, stay just where you are,
So tiny and helpless, yet bright as a star:
But buds break to blossom as brief moments fly,
And Masters are planning the way you shall die.

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"Rather than writing off rural America, Democrats have an opportunity to present a vision and policy agenda that have a real shot at reversing rural and small-town America’s declining living conditions. But this requires appreciating how and why those conditions plummeted in the first place, with few signs of improvement." Sarah Miller and Austin Frerick map a way forward for the Democrats.

Ignazio Cabras says new breweries could revive Britain's pubs.

"According to a publicity handout at the time, VOLE was in favour of 'canals, railways, shove ha’penny, old buildings, mushrooms, civil rights, cycling, recycling, allotments, blue-tits, wagtails, oak trees, voles, conservation, alternative technology, small businesses, village schools, yards, feet and inches, rights of way, local history, human welfare, Basil Brush and darts'." Andy Childs pays tribute to Richard Boston and his magazine.

Hannah Arendt remembers W.H. Auden.

"Seberg’s scenes are undoubtedly the film’s strongest, not least because of her subversion of the clichéd confident American in Paris. She flits between charismatic stability and wide-eyed chaos in ways that aren’t fully describable in words but are totally engrained there on the celluloid." Adam Scovell loves Jean Seberg’s performance in Breathless.

Bored by the Carlsen vs Caruana world chess championship match? Andrey Terekhov takes us back to 1954 and Botvinnik vs Smyslov, which went down to the wire and saw eight consecutive decisive games.