Professor Joad sees his play at the Theatre Royal, Northampton

I braved the heat today, went into town and called at the market. I came a way with a book called Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92. As you would hope, there's plenty about this blog's heroine Freda Jackson, but this post is about C.E.M. Joad.

Joad was once a substantial public figure, chiefly as a member of the panel of the wildly popular radio programme The Brain's Trust. There he allowed himself to be called "Professor Joad" when he was no such thing, which riled his fellow philosophers. They also, whether from jealousy of his fame or impartial study, regarded his writing as either eccentric or plagiarised.

According to hero of the blog Bryan Magee:

He was an engaging but essentially fraudulent character. His popular books on philosophy thick-skinnedly recycled Russell’s work without acknowledgement; asked once to write a recommendation of a book by Joad, Russell replied: 'Modesty forbids.'"

While Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, in a meeting where Joad had delivered a paper criticising the form of analytical philosophy popular at Cambridge, that "naturally a slum landlord would object to slum clearance". In other words new thinking was clearing away the sort of stuff that Joad still came out with. 

The Magee quote is from an article by Richard Symonds that tries to rescue Joad's reputation as a philosopher, while the Wittgenstein quote is from Wikipedia entry on him.

Reading that Wikipedia article on Joad, you get the impression that he embraced just about every nutty theory going in the first half of the 20th century. He was a thumping sexist, though some of his braver views on social issues are now widely accepted. You may think the law of averages means he was bound to be prescient sometimes.

Anyway here's the story about Joad from my book on the Theatre Royal, Northampton. There it is credited to a manuscript in the county record office written by a theatre manager called Stephen Sylvester – presumably this Stephen Sylvester – and Alex Reeve was also on the management side of the theatre.

Northampton stuck to its commitment to new plays. In March 1946 Crackling of Thorns by C.E.M. Joad the philosopher and radio Brains Trust personality attracted widespread interest for its first professional production.

The substantive scenes, for which locations included a youth hostel and a national school, advanced the author's ideas on the reduction of the nation's population. These were interspersed with duologues between Mr .Playwrite and The Critic (Mr James Aggravate – alias for James Agate) discussing the craft of play writing.

Joad attended the first night, but although he had lent Alex Reeve, making one of his rare stage appearances as Mr. Playwrite, one of his suits he was less than enthusiastic about the identification of the character with himself:

Being the same size as Joad he [Reeve] was able to make himself up to resemble him, beard and all, and when he imitated Joe's squeaky voice the impersonation was very funny. Jude was a famous public figure ... and the audience quickly recognised the character and fell about. 

When Joad came to see the show his lack of amusement was positively Queen Victorian. In the bar afterwards he told Reeve, "I'm sure I don't speak in that squeaky voice." He said this in such a squeaky voice that we thought he was being funny, and laughed. But he wasn't, and in his subsequent radio broadcasts it was noticeable that his voice had gone down quite a few semitones.

You can hear Joad in the video clip above. If you watch the whole thing on YouTube you may form the opinion that he was a bit of a poseur. And an article on Herestical will give you the reason for the sudden end to his radio career,

Still, such was him fame that he got a mention in Shirley Bassey's first recording, which was banned by the BBC for being too sexy. Do watch it if you've not seen it before: she's wonderful. 

Why non-fiction books need their indexes

I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.

Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.

I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.

Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.

Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.

The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.

My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:

The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.

But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil;
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris.

Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein and a wicked reggae beat

I know what we need: a reggae song about the famous clash between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1946.

The words are by Tudor Rickards and the music and production are by the chess grandmaster Jonathan Levitt. I suspect there is some AI involved too.

Incidentally, Charles Masterman's daughter Margaret Masterman, an unjustly overlooked philosopher, was in the room when Popper and Wittgenstein met too.

The Joy of Six 1437

Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."

"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.

Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.

"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.

Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."

"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.

"Liberalism" doesn't need an essence to be a meaningful concept

When I was reviewing Liberalism by Jonathan Parry for the latest issue of Liberator, I thought of saying that he argues that Liberalism doesn't have a single essence but is rather a collection of family resemblances.

Here John Searle and Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's later theory of meaning and his concept of a family resemblance in particular. I think they make it wonderfully clear.

You can download that issue of Liberator (no. 431) for free from the magazine's website.

Happy birthday Ludwig Wittgenstein: An introduction to his ideas

The two most influential philosophers who worked in Britain in the last century were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Russell, thanks to his pronouncements on everything from sexual morality to geopolitics, was a public figure. Wittgenstein, by contrast, was a slightly mysterious figure even to his fellow philosophers.

Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 and died in 1951. When I took my first degree in Philosophy (1978-81) he was still a dominating figure in the discipline - many papers began with one of his aphorisms. So I was rather proud that my report on our Philosophy of Mind option said I was "not dazzled by Wittgenstein".

Here John Searle and this blog's hero Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's ideas. This is an episode from Magee's 1987 series The Great Philosophers, and proof that there are nothing wrong with talking heads if they have something interesting to say.

What is it that make some names of places or people funny?

 

"He didn't get those in Berlin" just wouldn't be as funny. Partly it's the extra syllable in Heidelberg and partly it's the sound of "Heidel" to English ears.

And Accrington? It's wonderfully specific while being wholly irrelevant. So "My brother lives in Lancashire" wouldn't be as funny either.

Yes. I've been thinking about names and humour. 

In the last Lord Bonkers I had him and the Duke of Rutland falling out over "the ownership of certain Stilton mines outside Cropwell Bishop". Why Cropwell Bishop? Because it was the funniest name available.

You see, there are six commercial Stilton creameries: Long Clawson, Tuxford & Tebbut, Hartington Dairy, Websters, Colston Bassett and Cropwell Bishop. And there's not much comic potential in the first four names.

To me, Colston Bassett is a serious name that's trying to sound funny, and Cropwell Bishop is a funny name that's trying to sound serious. So Cropwell Bishop it was.

Just as a place name can be funny in the right context, so can a surname.

My first job after university was with a chess retailer and magazine publisher. The head of the packing department there was a working class man, without much education but with great intelligence. And he loved Fawlty Towers, and in particular Basil's despair at being unable to make Manuel understand him:

"It's not a proposition from Wittgenstein."

My colleague had no idea who Wittgenstein was, but that didn't matter because the name sounds so much like that of a gnomic Austrian philosopher. If Wittgenstein didn't exist we should have to invent him. 

And to finish, you can change the name of a thing or person to comic or subversive effect.

The owner of the company had written a book he called Easy Guide to Chess, but the packing department had another name for it. If one of them wanted a copy of the book to make up an order, he would call out to his oppo:

"Hardback Mein Kampf."

Remembering Don Cupitt and his television series The Sea of Faith

The philosopher, theologian and Anglican priest Don Cupitt died yesterday.

I first came across him through his 1984 BBC television series The Sea of Faith. As that Wikipedia entry says, it dealt with 

the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on how Christianity has responded to challenges such as scientific advances, political atheism and secularisation in general.

The series had six parts, and this one dealing with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein is the one I remember best. 

I also remember it being discussed on Ludovic Kennedy's programme about television Did You See? One of the panelists was Bob Monkhouse, and I was impressed by his suggestion that the austere beauty of the house Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna helps you understand his philosophy.

Certainly,  a good part of the appeal of Wittgenstein, who was the dominant figure in academic philosophy in Britain for much of the 20th century, was aesthetic, whether it was the rigour and numbered paragraphs of his early work or the endlessly interpretable aphorisms of his later.

So thank you to Don Cupitt, and I have to end by observing that we really don't get television like this any more.

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Movie

Not many books about philosophers become bestsellers, but one that did was David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker, which came out in 2002. Now there are plans to produce a short animated film inspired by it.

The book tells the story of a famous encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper:

On 25 October 1946, Sir Karl Popper (at the London School of Economics), was invited to present a paper entitled "Are There Philosophical Problems?" at a meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, which was chaired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein. In Popper's, and the popular account, Wittgenstein used a fireplace poker to emphasize his points, gesturing with it as the argument grew more heated. 

Eventually, Wittgenstein claimed that philosophical problems were non-existent, in response, Popper claimed there were many issues in philosophy, such as setting a basis for moral guidelines. Wittgenstein then thrust the poker at Popper, challenging him to give any example of a moral rule, Popper (later) claimed to have said:

Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers

upon which (according to Popper) Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out. 

Wittgenstein's Poker collects and characterizes the accounts of the argument, as well as establishing the context of the careers of Popper, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. This meeting was the only time the three were in the same room together.

The story grew with its telling over the years, particularly when Popper told it, and I don't suppose it was as violent as the video above suggests.

Nevertheless, I am delighted by news of the plan to make an animated film of the encounter. You can read all about it and support it on the film's Kickstarter page.

If you want to know more about the background to the encounter between Popper and Wittgenstein, which the book uses to open up the history of philosophy in the 20th century, then I recommend a video of David Edmonds speaking at a book event in the US.

At the start, he talks about tracking down the other people who were present at that meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club.

One of them was the philosopher Margaret Masterman, who was one of Wittgenstein's inner circle of students. I must have come across a paper of hers when I was at York, because I can remember reading the book in which it was included: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave.

Later Masterman worked on the problem of teaching computers to understand everyday human language. Her work here has been influential and she deserves to be better known than she is.

And, wonderfully, she was the daughter of my favourite Edwardian Liberal, Charles Masterman.

Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.

Archive on 4: Bryan Magee - Man of Ideas

I've just been listening to a radio programme about the broadcaster and philosopher Bryan Magee.

He's been blogged about here several times, and I collected most of what I had to say in a post I wrote after he died in 2019. Most notably, he introduced me to the work of Karl Popper and was evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war.

Magee's television series Men of Ideas, in which he interviewed contemporary philosophers about the ideas of the subject's great figures, was broadcast in 1978. (I suspect Angie Hobbs, who made the programme, is younger then I am and watched his later series The Great Philosophers.)

If I remember correctly, I had already applied to study philosophy at university when Men of Ideas began, but was still going for interviews. Whatever the exact chronology, the programmes served as a wonderful introduction to the subject.

Though I went to a comprehensive and received free school meals, I can't say that their patrician tone put me off. In fact it attracted me, because I didn't want university to be just like school.

I can appreciate that others will have thought philosophy wasn't for them after seeing the programmes. And the title Men of Ideas makes me cringe today.

But then 1978 was a different world in philosophy as it was in everything else. In particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein still exerted a powerful influence on many academics. If their papers didn't explicate a remark of his, they certainly began with an epigraph taken from his work.

And Roland Hall, the man who interviewed me for a place at York and gave me a generous offer, had been supervised by J.L. Austin and, during his Army service, served as the clerk to the  the President of the Court during the war crimes trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who was regarded as Hitler’s greatest general.

From which we conclude that 1978 was a long time ago.

The Joy of Six 1154

"Both ideologies involve a shocking indifference to evidence and data. They reflect a bulldog belief that Britain will always be better off pursuing its own path, rather than engaging with supranational negotiations and institutions. They share a distaste for 'experts' - economists in the case of Brexit, the world’s scientists in the case of climate change. In many instances, Brexiteers and ecosceptics express the same paranoid suspicion of 'global elites' and 'globalist conspiracies'." Tory Eurosceptics are becoming ecosceptics, says Matthew d'Ancona.

Peter Wrigley thinks delusions about Britain's standing in the world mean we aren't tackling the many political and economic problems we face.

"A first-time reader of the Investigations may be struck by the frequency of the appearance of children. It is possible to read the Investigations as a reflection on how time spent in the hustle and bustle of a working schoolroom transformed his conception of what language really is - and therein what we really are. And even, then, as a kind of confession." Calum Jacobs sees Wittgenstein's experience of teaching in schools and at Cambridge as central to the development of his later philosophy. (Margaret Masterman, mentioned as one of his favourite pupils,was the daughter of this blog's hero Charles Masterman.)

Linda Flanagan looks at what young people gain from studying ethics in school.

Herbie Russell uncovers Southwark residents' memories of the lost Grand Surrey Canal: "Children would salvage debris from the blitzed ruins of houses and warehouses and make rafts to sail up and down the canal: 'Where the bombed houses were, we used to take the doors off and put them on the canal and use a bit of wood for a paddle and away we went… we had quite a good time in there!'"

Kenneth More's best work was seen in the theatre and on television rather than his films, argues Stephen Vagg.

The Joy of Six 1146

Matthew Pennell expects the Conservatives to look to the US Republicans when devising their strategy for the next general election. The good news is he doesn't think it will work.

"For mandatory reporting to work effectively, a law needs to ensure reporting of reasonable suspicions. But the lack of any criminal penalty for non-reporting undermines both the impetus to do so, and the cover for those who want to report." Richard Scorer fears the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse may not be enough to protect children from abuse in religious settings.

"Thirteen months after first making the allegations in front of the committee, Rafiq says: “All that’s changed really is my family have been driven out of the country.” Incredibly, Lord Patel, who was hired to help Yorkshire recover from the scandal, faced so much abuse that it contributed to him leaving the UK, too." Leila Latif on the reaction to the Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report.

John Read reveals that research shows UK patients are not being told about the serious risks and limited benefits of electroconvulsive therapy.

"These books are deliberately, self-consciously challenging, in content and in form. They are also hard, beautiful, powerful, and brilliant. That account of their greatness and difficulty, especially of the way their greatness and difficulty are entwined - they are great because they are difficult, and difficult because they are great - is a story that was itself invented." Johanna Winant reminds us that last year saw the centenary of The Waste Land, Ulysses and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. 

Nicola Chester debates the pros and cons of a rural childhood.

The Joy of Six 1071

"I want to know how the government is going to help Britain through the winter. If it doesn’t, whoever wins the Conservative leadership will find themselves in the cold in 2024." Sam Ashworth-Hayes says Britain is not prepared for winter blackouts.

Nadeine Asbali warns that today’s boys are easy targets for Andrew Tate: "When the state fails to provide support, when adults are so absorbed in trying to live hand to mouth, when opportunities for social mobility are shattered, Tate offers a dangerous hand for them to cling on to. It’s time for schools, community leaders and families to step in and get there before he does." 

It's 10 years to the day since archaeologists from the University of Leicester found what proved to the the skeleton of Richard III under that Leicester car park. BBC News asks the people involved what has happened since.

Sara Papic offers a concise introduction to the work of the most infuential 20th-century philosopher: "Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential and multi-faceted thinkers of the 20th century. The Viennese philosopher went through several career-changes, fought in the First World War, and radically changed his own philosophical perspective mid-way through his life."

"There’ll be a public 'light well' at Sheffield station later this year so passengers can look down into the River Sheaf from platform five, and sections of the Porter are already being opened up on pathways near Decathlon and Matilda Street."  David Bocking on how Sheffield reclaimed its rivers.

Mark Bridge argues that Star Wars is bleak critique of democracy and US policy.

Hayek and Wittgenstein were distant cousins

Kai Weiss at the Austrian Economics Center writes on the relationship between the economist Friedrich Hayek and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Hayek’s great grandfather and Wittgenstein’s grandmother were siblings, and thus, the two were remote cousins.

It wins our Trivial Connection of the Day Award.

The $65 million question about a king, a princess and a Shropshire country house

You have to admit that's a racy headline - even for the Shropshire Star. Naturally, it has walked away with our Headline of the Day Award.

And the story beneath does not disappoint:

According to villagers, you couldn’t want a better person to live near to you.

But Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein, the ex-wife of a German prince, has placed the village of Claverley at the centre of a story that has fascinated people across Europe.

It involves secret agents, mysterious offshore companies and the small matter of a $65 million gift from her ex-lover, the former King of Spain.

And the report then sets out the story in almost bewildering detail.

Claverley is a village near Bridgnorth. Unusually for a Shropshire village, it has not been visited by me, so the photograph above comes from the invaluable Geograph site.

And I hear you asking whether there is a connection between the Sayn-Wittgenstein family and the philosopher.

Looking at the Wikipedia for Ludwig Wittgenstein, the answer is yes and no:

According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after World War II, Wittgenstein's paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia.

In July 1808, Napoleon issued a decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname, so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein.

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Iain Dale has collated a collection of Liberal Party and Liberal Democrat party political broadcasts. It begins in 1955 with John Arlott, Frank Byers and Herbert Samuel.

Cheryl Misak looks at the influence of Frank Ramsey on Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work he translated into English. The older brother of Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frank made many important contributions in philosophy, mathematics and economics before his death aged 26.

London was once a city of horses, says Alex Cochrane : "Humans lived cheek by jowl with the 300,000 horses of cabmen, traders, laundrymen, grocers and rag-and-bone men. You can see the traces of that time everywhere: old stone drinking troughs, hidden cobbled mews, mounting blocks, slips and ramps."

Nicolas Roeg was not a born filmmaker argues Brad Gullickson, but put in the work.

Franki Berry catches up with The Zombies.

Adric is not warmly remembered by many Doctor Who fans, but Nicholas Whyte enjoyed Matthew Waterhouse's book Blue Box Boy.

The philosopher J.L. Austin and the success of D-Day

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J.L. Austin (1911-60) - John Langshaw Austin - was an academic philosopher. He did not publish much (that would never do today), but his teaching at Oxford was hugely influential.

Like Ludwig Wittgenstein later in his career, he believed that many traditional philosophical problems arose because philosophers misused the language. If only we attended to the proper use of ordinary language, and to the many subtle distinctions it contains, those problems would disappear.

You can read about this 'ordinary language philosophy' here.

The reason for this post is that I recently discovered Austin's role in the second world war.

Guy Longworth wrote of Austin in the TLS earlier this month:

His philosophical career was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he undertook intelligence work. He was honoured for this work with an Order of the British Empire, the French Croix de Guerre, and the US Officer of the Legion of Merit. It has been said that “he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence”. 

He returned to academic philosophy with the hope that philosophers might work together on the collection and analysis of common-sense judgements and that, in so doing, they would make the sorts of progress that had been made by collective wartime intelligence operations.

Longworth also give a good introduction to Austin's philosophy. For more on his wartime career, read this extract from a memoir of him.

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"We ought to recognise that all three parties have collaborated in the myth that decent public services could be provided without higher and more progressive taxation." William Wallace tells us it's time to talk about tax.

Amy Zimmerman on how Roseanne Barr abandoned reason and embraced the alt-right.

Peter Walker explains why forcing cyclists to wear helmets will not save lives.

"As Dostoyevsky implored through his novels and reporting, it is not only our task to support the innocent or wrongly convicted but also to recognise the humanity of the guilty and the shared sense of responsibility that we have for one another." Jennifer Wilson says the great Russian novelist predicted the ‘true crime’ craze.

"The perception is that he is difficult, obscure and intense, severe and mystical, charismatic and strange, driven and tragic, with his charisma and difficulty bound up with his character and his life." Ian Ground considers the legacy of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Mr Barlow listens to a Michael Nyman lecture: 'Music which has influenced me, but which I have never heard.'