The Royal Oak (with apologies to George Orwell)

Shortly after the Second World War, George Orwell wrote a paean to his ideal London pub, in an essay called The Moon Under Water. The titular tavern did not exist - it was a composite, a fantasy, a dream. But Orwell described it beautifully and memorably all the same. 

I rather fancied trying my own hand at a similar exercise, focusing on a rural inn, especially in these strange days of shuttered pubs and social distancing. So here it is - The Royal Oak...

The Royal Oak is a little outside the centre of the village, within walking distance of any house in the parish. It sits just beyond a small but picturesque area of woodland that screens out most of the traffic noise from the annoyingly busy main street. It is set back from a quiet and little-frequented road, a few steps up, with a tidily-kept lawn at the front. In spring and summer this lawn is set with wooden picnic benches.

Books read Q4 2019

The Golden Age Of Murder

Martin Edwards

This is an absolute delight. Edwards is not always the most reliable judge of quality in Golden Age fiction – or perhaps it would be better to say that our tastes don’t coincide, or even that he goes out of his way to be charitable in his assessments – but his knowledge of the genre and its practitioners is outstanding. This book is loosely based around a chronological account of the heyday of the Detection Club, from its genesis in the late twenties through to the post-war decades, and biographical information about many of the key members – not just the well-known names like Christie and GKC but the Coles, Anthony Berkeley, ER Punshon and so on. As with his previous book, The Story Of Classic Crime In 100 Books, he takes the reader on a tour of the genre, its nooks and crannies, its fashions and trends, its development and decline. Some of the biographical speculation is a little fanciful, especially when it comes to his theories about how authors’ personal lives affected their storytelling (he is very keen on the notion that the difficult or unusual love lives of people like the Coles, Sayers and Anthony Berkeley were clearly reflected in their books).   

Books read Q3 2019

Vets Might Fly

James Herriot

There is a particularly wonderful Granville Bennett story in this one, where they fail to go out for an Indian meal and Jim ends up getting absolutely steaming in Bennett’s home pub.

The Lord God Made Them All

James Herriot

This is the seventh in the series and perhaps a little of the sparkle of the earlier books has gone – there is only minimal Tristan here, and no Granville Bennett, and even Siegfried is mostly out of sight –  but it's still very entertaining. The long sea voyage to Klaipeda in Lithuania (East Prussian Memel as was), escorting a cargo of Romney Marsh sheep, and the more risky flight to Istanbul with a planeload of cattle, add an international flavour. One wonders if those parts are based on real events. As with many of Herriot’s tales, one has a sense of an incident that is grounded in reality and in his experience with real people, but which has been embellished and embroidered.

Panning for gold in the past: Downton Abbey and the uses of nostalgia

I

Have you ever actually seen an old maid hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning? I have. If you grow up in semi-rural Kent, and your father is a parson, you do occasionally see such things, not least if – like me – you rather enjoyed hiking to Holy Communion through the early morning mist yourself. 

It was Orwell who invoked that image as an icon of the eternal England. Nowadays it is usually mentioned jokingly or derisively; when John Major cited it in the 1990s he was roundly mocked. As is well known, Good Things in Britain began in 1948 with the foundation of the NHS, before which all was darkness and misery, so to mention Orwell’s vision In The Current Year without a eyeroll and a knowing wink is to invite the charge of “harking back to a non-existent golden age". 

Books read Q2 2019

Smallbone Deceased

Michael Gilbert

Gilbert, who also wrote Death In Captivity, is a good find. This is yet another hit for the BLCC stable. I rather fancy the editors might be getting more discerning. A classic Golden Age closed circle set-up, with a murder in a firm of solicitors, which gives it a faint resemblance to Murder Must Advertise. The firm, and its varied inmates, are amusingly and convincingly portrayed, and the story itself is well-constructed, drily funny, and smartly clued. Our point-of-view character, Henry Bohun, is as a very attractive amateur sleuth, and one might wish he had featured in further novels. A slight weakness, perhaps, in the murderer's motive. But in real life people do apparently kill for very odd reasons.

The Loss of The Jane Vosper

Freeman Wills Crofts

Crofts was not, in my view, one of the greats. He could be a ponderous storyteller, and he often ends his stories with a leaden and moralistic tying up of loose ends, presenting a solution with a dutiful but rather dull third-person account of who did what and when and why. His books are also not really fair-play mysteries in any sense. Nevertheless, they generally remain worth reading. They are well-constructed and engrossing, and his focus on the realistic mechanics of detection makes for a good read. This is a pretty solid Crofts. Through patient and dogged police work, Chief Inspector French runs to earth a nasty gang of thieves and murderers, who have conceived a daring but ruthless scheme. The opening chapter, set on board the eponymous Jane Vosper, is genuinely tense, and the climax is pretty exciting too.  

Books read Q1 2019

(Decided to do this by quarter rather than for the whole year to make it a bit more manageable.)

Murder For Christmas

Francis Duncan

I don’t know whether I’m feeling indulgent because of the time of year, or possibly even feeling defensive of the Golden Age genre after this Christmas’ dreadful Christie TV adaptation, but I thought this was really good fun, an entertaining slice of escapism even if not very original or brilliant. A Christmas house party is interrupted by murder, and amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine – quite an attractive character – resolves the crime. The solution is rather good, if a little far-fetched in some particulars, and is decently clued, but the denouement is the weakest part of the book.

Published pieces - for Niall completists

I had a few pieces published in the Catholic Herald last year:

"Belgium's euthanasia nightmare", 03/08/18

- Why assisted suicide is a dark road to travel.

"Cashing in on the politics of grievance", 27/09/18

- A review of Ben Cobley's book The Tribe

"Ignore the critics. It's A Wonderful Life is a wise tribute to everyday heroism", 20/12/18

- A defence of Capra's classic against its detractors

In May, I also wrote a longish piece for the Excvbitor website replying to Peter Hitchens' defence of Elizabethan religious policy.

Somewhere, Anywhere, Leave, Remain: Thoughts between two stools

I could probably pass for a member of the Metropolitan Liberal Elite, if I had to spend an evening undercover at Tate Modern for a Gilbert & George retrospective, or attend one of those famous Islington dinner parties (although I must say that the one and only time I have ever been to a dinner party in Islington, almost everyone there was ferociously right-wing and made me feel like a hand-wringing wet). I went to a pretty good university, I work in the public sector in London, I read and write poetry for pleasure, I like ballet. I favour a redistributive welfare state. I am strongly supportive of public transport, cycle superhighways, car-free cities and renewable energy. I would even call myself an environmentalist, albeit one who owes more to Roger Scruton than to George Monbiot. And of course, at about 9.30am on Thursday June 23^rd 2016, in a now-demolished Croydon youth centre, I put a cross next to a box containing the words “Remain a member of the European Union”.

"The ABC Murders" Murder

NB This post contains spoilers for several Agatha Christie books. 

The defining scene of the new BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders, written by Sarah Phelps, came quite early on in Episode 1. Poirot was talking to Japp on the latter’s allotment. It was just about the only moment in the whole adaptation that felt like it had any connection at all to the spirit of the original novel, not least because it involved two likeable characters, bearing at least some resemblance to their literary counterparts, having an amicable conversation (this made it practically unique among any of the scenes in the entire three hours).

It didn’t last. In what was clearly intended to be a giant middle finger to dreary bourgeois squares who actually enjoy Agatha Christie novels, Japp promptly dropped dead from a heart attack. In the books, he is still going strong in 1948, fifteen years after the setting of this adaptation, when he receives his last mention in that year’s Taken At The Flood. Of course only suburban pedants like me actually care about such trivial matters, and who are we to question the Great Artiste?  

Books that make my worldview: Intro to an occasional series

I liked the idea of writing about a series of posts about some of the books that have shaped the way I understand the world, with a short explanation of how and why. Originally I was going to just do one post but I soon realized that it would be extremely long.

It's worth noting at this point that astute readers will notice a distinct lack of books on economics. This is because, by nature, I am most keenly interested in social-cultural-religious questions, rather than political-economic ones, albeit the line between the two categories is not always clear.

Thoughts on "Brideshead Revisited"

It is hard to know what to say about a work already so admired, so praised, so well-known, and one which is such an utterly conventional choice of favourite reading for an English Catholic conservative Oxonian. But I’ll try. It is undoubtedly, as Waugh intended, a superb literary exploration of the operation of divine grace: Father Brown’s “twitch upon the thread” brings home first Sebastian, then Lord Marchmain, Cara (seemingly), Julia and Charles, and even some of the soldiers whom Charles’ brother officer is surprised to see in the re-opened chapel. It is rich with metaphor and emotional depth.

Detective stories read 2017

I read too many detective stories.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

1

The 12.30 From Croydon

Freeman Wills Crofts

Very good inverted whodunit (I’m on a short break from War And Peace, taking advantage of a Kindle Unlimited offer to fill my boots with Golden Age classics). Like other works in the sub-genre, it follows a man who is, at least initially, weak and foolish and desperate rather than wicked. There is something pitiful and very human in Charles Swinburn’s attachment to the obviously unworthy and unpleasant Una Mellor and his determination to hang on to his upper middle-class respectability, at any cost. That’s not to say that Crofts – who was a fairly stern moralist – ever suggests that the murders committed are justified, only that he paints a plausible picture of the kind of thought processes by which a murderer might justify his actions to himself. There is a tantalising ambiguity in whether we are meant to take seriously the purportedly selfless aspects of Swinburn’s rationalisation of the first murder, i.e. his worries that if he does not get the money to save the works from his uncle, his workers’ lives will be ruined.

One thing the book does very well is show, without laying it on with a trowel, how irreparably and inevitably the act of murder separates a person from their fellow humans, and how the demands of conscience are inescapable even for a man who thinks he is beyond the mere bourgeois morality that values each life equally above and beyond utilitarian concerns (I think we might infer Crofts’ low view of utilitarianism from this book). I was reminded when reading of this of how much the spectre of the gallows mattered in creating the dramatic and moral force of the Golden Age mystery. The stakes are very high, and take on a near-religious dimension, when the price of detection for a murderer might very well be an appointment with Pierrepoint – to be followed, perhaps, by an encounter with another Judge, even more fearsome than those found on the bench of the Old Bailey. 

My published articles 2017 - a roundup

For Niall completists...

"Seeking God in the Lord of the Rings" in the Scottish Catholic Observer, 10/03/17

- Why Catholics continue to be inspired by Tolkien's epic trilogy

"Escape from the madding crowd", also in the SCO, 28/04/17

- Do we need a theology of the moment?

"Why modern Christians need cathedrals" in the Catholic Herald, 18/05/17 (£)

- Christian architecture still matters.

"Illiberal Democracy" in the SCO, 23/06/17

- What the resignation of Tim Farron tells us about the prospects for Christians in politics

"How modern architects ripped society apart" in the Herald, 20/07/17

- Post-war town planning has been a spiritual disaster but recovery may be coming.

"Adapting well-loved books to the screen is a minefield, but we should expect better" in The Irish Catholic, 09/11/17

- Why were the Hobbit films so utterly terrible?

"The triumph of the non-apology" in the Herald, 29/11/17 (£)

- Can Christians rescue the proper apology?

Jeremy Corbyn's Dangerous Idea

(This post was originally published as an article in 2015 on another website, now defunct. It now seems relevant yet again.)

Unlike many conservatives, I wasn’t that bothered by Jeremy Corbyn not singing the national anthem. As the columnist Peter Hitchens noted: “The world’s full of countries where you have to salute the leader and sing the party song in public. This isn’t one of them.”

Much more troubling than Mr Corbyn’s aversion to ‘God Save The Queen’ are the remarks he made after the killing of Osama Bin Laden by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. Interviewed by the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, he said:

“There was no attempt whatsoever that I could see to arrest him and put him on trial, to go through that process…this was an assassination attempt, and is yet another tragedy, upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. The World Trade Center was a tragedy, the attack on Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in Iraq was a tragedy. Tens of thousands of people have died.”

There are several problems here.

Books read 2016

SPOILERS AHEAD. MANY, MANY SPOILERS.

(1) Friday 1^st January

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

Apparently the best-selling novel of all time. I revisited it after watching the BBC adaptation, about which I had quite a few reservations, and I’m still in two minds. As a story it is creepy and gripping and entertaining, and based on a great and psychologically interesting premise, although I definitely differ with Christie about the levels of culpability ascribed to each of the unpunished killers. But where others see the book as perfectly plotted, like a well-oiled machine, I cannot help but wonder about the logistics of the murderer’s scheme.

It’s A Wonderful Film

Attaboy, Clarence

'Tis the season of Christmas iconoclasm. One of the staples of this festive contrarianism – alongside “Scrooge was just a smart businessman doing the best for his clients!” – is the negative take on that Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life.

For those who haven’t seen it, the film follows the life of George Bailey, a native of the small town of Bedford Falls. Bailey is clever and ambitious, and has big dreams of moving to New York, travelling widely and forging a career in architecture. But after his father’s sudden death, he reluctantly takes over the family business, a rackety building society called the Building & Loan, realising that if he does not do so it will be subsumed into the empire of the grasping slum lord Mr Potter. Later George sacrifices his honeymoon savings to keep the B&L solvent during a run on the banks. Later still he turns down a well-paid job with Potter that would have fulfilled his dreams of travel.

Five interesting arguments against my views

This has turned out to be a bit of a weird list, partly I think because I don't have a very strong opinion about quite a lot of big political issues, e.g. economics. Also I don't read enough non-fiction, and what I do read tends to be non-polemical, and in any case I tend to be preoccupied with cultural and social issues rather than strictly political ones.

Anyway...

Practical Ethics, Peter Singer

The moral status of the foetus/unborn child is the central philosophical question in the abortion debate, but it is rare to encounter serious discussion of the issue. Most pro-abortion argument is long on hand-waving about irrelevancies and short on engagement with this central problem – largely, I suspect, because pro-abortion folk know that the premises on which the pro-abortion argument depends lead down some difficult conceptual roads. Singer, by contrast, cuts to the quick. He has a coherent and plausible (though in my view false) idea of which categories of human being have the right to life – and which don’t – and is happy to embrace all the logical outworkings of that idea, most famously perhaps in his argument that since there do not seem to be good reasons to regard birth as a morally significant boundary, young children also lack the right to life. Singer gives the abortion-sceptic a genuine argument to engage with, and is an honest interlocutor.

See also: another book arguing for a liberal position on abortion (and euthanasia) which I think makes a solid and well-argued if ultimately unconvincing case, Ronald Dworkin’s Life’s Dominion.

Is it just ideology all the way down?

A while back, an astute Twitter friend raised a good question. I had criticised a successful campaign by some faculty and students at Cambridge to have Dr David Starkey removed from a publicity campaign for the university. They found some of Dr Starkey’s expressed views about criminal justice and the 2011 riots uncongenial and so believed that the university should not be publicly associated with him, despite his longstanding links with the place – he won a scholarship to Fitzwilliam, took a PhD there, and remains a Fellow of the college, albeit an honorary one who has not taught full-time at England's second-best university since the 1970s. I objected to this as an example of politicisation and characterised the attacks on Starkey as ideological: the friend countered that supporting Starkey and giving him prominence was equally ideological, that what looks like an absence of ideology is often nothing of the sort, and that conservatives often ignore the ideologies embedded in established or existing practices and norms.

What Should Have Happened in the Star Wars prequels

Like most Star Wars fans on the planet over the age of about twelve, I was disappointed by the prequels. 

George Lucas had to answer two key questions. How and why did Anakin Skywalker – “the best star pilot in the galaxy”, best friend of Obi-Wan Kenobi, respected Jedi Knight – turn to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader, taking part in the destruction of the Jedi? How did a democratic Galactic Republic that had endured for 1000 years become an Empire ruled by fear and violence? 

I’ll say this for Lucas; at a very basic level, he had the right idea about the answer to these two questions. Anakin is undone by his own anger and fear, which is exploited by Palpatine/Darth Sidious, and the Republic comes apart because unscrupulous and power-hungry people are able to exploit impatience with the inevitable sclerosis, compromise, chaos and uncertainty of democratic federations. But the way in which he shaped a story around these basic insights was deeply inadequate, cluttered with pointless characters and inane dialogue. The character development of Anakin - the central story of the whole damn trilogy! - was wildly uneven. You never see him as a respected, clever, accomplished, mature Jedi, the "cunning warrior" described by Obi-Wan in Episode IV, but only as a boy and then as a whiny, lovesick, vaguely arrogant teenager/early twentysomething, so his eventual turn to the dark side, and the reasons for that turn, have limited dramatic resonance. 

A note on the “New Atheists”

In recent years, we have started to hear a lot about the New Atheism. This is a term used by a lot of people involved in the debate about religion, atheism, secularism etc. Generally it’s used to describe the more aggressive atheist polemics that began to appear in significant numbers in the middle of the last decade, books like Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.

Some non-believers take objection to the phrase. This cartoon, for example, does the rounds on social media from time to time...

If I have understood the implied argument correctly, the suggestion is that religious believers use the term New Atheist to disparage confident, knowledgeable, courageous atheists whom they can no longer compel to keep silent and whose arguments they otherwise have trouble rebutting.

No doubt there is a grain of truth to this charge. Perhaps there are religious believers who use the term to shut down debate or change the subject. There are undoubtedly religious believers who are too quick to complain of “persecution” or “silencing”, or mistake strong opposition for oppression.

However, I do think that New Atheism is a useful term. I personally use it in quite a specific way. To me, it refers not to atheism in general, but to a particular, sadly common, style of atheist polemic: belligerent, ignorant, snarky, dismissive, and imbued with an unshakeable and unearned sense of moral superiority. It need hardly be said that this is not the only form of atheist polemic in existence. Thomas Nagel is an example of an atheist writer who eschews easy sniping against religion in favour of clear-eyed and mature reflection on how to make sense of a godless universe.

I appreciate atheism. I enjoy (if that is the right word) reading and hearing intelligent, well-informed, morally serious criticism of religious belief. Scepticism of religious claims is an immensely important current in Western intellectual culture, not least because religious obscurantism, like ideological dogmatism of all kinds, has often stood in opposition to important scientific and social advances.

My problem with modern atheism is not that I feel intellectually insecure in the face of its “fearless” barbs, or that I regret the loss of the Church’s ability to counter its foes with violence, social pressure or various kinds of state coercion. Rather, my objection to most modern atheist polemic is that is really, really bad; neither interesting, nor thoughtful, nor serious-minded. Books like The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrously overpraised God Is Not Great are riddled not only with errors of fact, but with tendentious and incoherent arguments made in bad faith.

Intellectual sins abound. Straw men are knocked down with gay abandon. The focus is generally on the weakest possible version of arguments for theism, made by their least articulate and credible adherents. There is no charity in interpretation of ambiguity and uncertainty. The wickedness or stupidity of opponents is assumed. The rightness of modern received wisdom about sexuality, society and the individual is taken for granted in an immensely complacent and self-righteous way. 

  

It is noticeable that the New Atheists tend, with exceptions, to be dismissive of philosophy and to cling to an outmoded logical positivism which believes that the only real truths are material facts. This is a shame, as a humble reading of some philosophy might lead them to write better books.

This is not really a polemical blog, so I will draw these brief thoughts to a close with a suggestion for some points that atheists might wish to bear in mind to keep their writing free of the faults mentioned above:

1. An atheist worldview raises serious moral, epistemic and metaphysical problems, in the same way as adherence to most religious creeds does.
2. There are good reasons for belief in God, and strong arguments for certain Christian truth claims.
3. Modern attitudes to sexuality, gender and other issues are not so self-evidently correct, coherent and conducive to happiness and flourishing that it is outrageously wrong even to question them.
4. The Christian with whom you’re arguing has probably thought about these issues just as deeply as you have, and perhaps even more deeply.
5. Whatever your objection to Christianity, it has almost certainly been considered, reflected upon, written about and examined by people cleverer and more perceptive than you. Look at what such people wrote.
6. Consider, from time to time, the possibility that you are wrong, and/or that you don’t fully understand something.