01-01-2022

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telegraph.co.uk/culture
Saturday 1 January 2022
The Daily Telegraph
INSIDE
Seven beavers, 50 parmesans and a moon
rock: history’s weirdest diplomatic gifts p.8
Roger LEWIS on Hollywood’s forgotten
Welsh hellraiser, Rachel ROBERTS p.10
plus
2022’s Hot 50: our critics pick the best new
television, books, music and films p.3
‘Modelling?
I stood
around
looking sad
and thought
about the
money’
Jamie DORNAN’s rise
from Fifty Shades of Grey
to Hollywood heavyweight
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
***
In this Issue
COVER STORY
P.6
POEM OF
THE WEEK
P.9
SIMON
HEFFER
P.11
BOOKS
P.12-17
TV & RADIO
P.19-39
3
Victoria Coren
Mitchell is
away
ON THE COVER
Jamie Dornan, photographed by
Andrew Crowley for The Daily Telegraph
50 reasons to be cheerful in 2022
Whether you want to settle on the sofa or get up and dance, our critics pick the best TV, film, books and music to see you into spring
Television
By Anita SINGH
THE TOURIST
Jamie Dornan (see interview, p6)
plays a British man who is run off
the road by a truck in the Australian
outback and wakes up with no
memory of who he is – only the
knowledge that someone is trying
to kill him. A twisty thriller from
the creators of The Missing.
BBC One, tonight
NO RETURN
Sheridan Smith stars as a mother
whose family holiday in Turkey
turns into a nightmare when her
teenage son is arrested following a
seemingly innocent invitation to a
beach party.
ITV, Jan
THE RESPONDER
With an ex-police officer (Tony
Schumacher) as writer, this drama
promises an authentic look at life
on the beat over six night shifts in
Liverpool. Martin Freeman stars.
BBC One, date TBC
CHLOE
The Crown star Erin Doherty steals
another woman’s identity in a psychological thriller from Alice
Seabright, a writer who cut her
ITV; HEYDAY PRODUCTIONS; HULU
THE GILDED AGE
Old and new money vie for power
in 1880s New York in this period
drama from Julian Fellowes. Not a
Downton Abbey prequel, but expect
something similarly sumptuous
and snobbish, with a cast that
includes Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski.
Sky Atlantic, Jan 25
 Spies like us:
Tom Hollander
in The Ipcress File
 Having a ball:
Julian Fellowes’s
latest period
drama, The
Gilded Age, is
set in 1880s
New York
teeth on Netflix’s Sex Education.
BBC One, date TBC
ANNE
Anne Williams spent more than 20
years pursuing justice for her teenage son, Kevin, and other victims of
the Hillsborough disaster. She is
played by Maxine Peake in this
four-part series filmed on location
in Liverpool.
ITV, date TBC
THIS IS GOING TO HURT
Based on the bestselling 2017 memoir by Adam Kay, this comic drama
stars Ben Whishaw as a junior doctor coping with gruelling hours and
terrifying responsibilities.
BBC One, Feb
STARSTRUCK
A second series of this romcom about
a goofy New Zealander navigating
millennial life – and an unlikely
relationship with a film star – in
London, starring Edinburgh Comedy Award-winner Rose Matafeo.
BBC Three, date TBC
THE IPCRESS FILE
Gangs of London star Joe Cole has
big shoes to fill as secret agent
Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, a
role last played by Michael
Caine on film in 1965, in
this six-part adaptation of
Len Deighton’s 1960s
spy thriller. Tom Hollander and Lucy Boynton
also star.
ITV, date TBC
TRIGGER POINT
If you’re having withdrawal symptoms over
Line of D uty, y o u
should try this police
drama that reunites
Jed Mercurio and
Vicky McClure, this
time set in the world
of bomb disposal and
counterterrorism.
ITV, date TBC
 Marriage à la mode:
Lily James stars in
Pam & Tommy
PAM & TOMMY
Lily James is transformed into
Pamela Anderson for this series
chronicling the turbulent marriage
of the Baywatch star to Mötley
Crüe’s Tommy Lee (Sebastian
Stan), from whirlwind
wedding to their infamous sex tape.
Star on Disney+,
date TBC
PISTOL
Thanks to John Lydon’s recent court
case, this story of
the Sex Pistols comes
with plenty of
advance publicity.
Based on the autobiography of guitarist Steve Jones
and directed by
Danny Boyle, it will
pinpoint a time when
“British society and culture changed forever”.
Star on Disney+,
date TBC
4
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
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Hot 50
 Getting into
the groove:
alt-pop princess
Charli XCX is set
to scale the
charts in March
death of main man Roland Orzabal’s
wife, Caroline, has now inspired
their first album in 17 years.
Concord, Feb 25
Music
By Neil McCORMICK
and Ivan HEWETT
THE BOY NAMED IF BY ELVIS
COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS
Costello channels his inner punk
By Robbie COLLIN
and Tim ROBEY
ANGEL IN REALTIME
BY GANG OF YOUTHS
A fantastic third album from this
passionate Australian rock quintet,
who are what you might get if you
crossed the anthemic power of U2
and Bruce Springsteen with the
introversions of the National.
Mosey/Sony, Feb 25
GETTY IMAGES FOR BFC
CPE BACH – SONATAS &
RONDOS BY MARC-ANDRÉ
HAMELIN
When CPE Bach, son of JS Bach,
performed his own piano music he
became so impassioned that “drops
of effervescence dripped from his
brow”. French-Canadian virtuoso
M a r c -A n d r é H a m e l i n w o n’ t
dampen the keyboard – he’s too
controlled – but he will surely catch
the bizarre intensity of the music.
Hyperion, Jan 7
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE –
CHAMBER WORKS
BY THE NASH ENSEMBLE
The Nash Ensemble showcase four
recent chamber pieces by the grand
old man of British musical modernism, including the Duet for Eight
Strings, which Birtwistle called “a
string quartet for two players”.
BIS, Jan 7
Film
to deliver his spikiest set since the
Attractions’ new wave glory days.
Capitol, Jan 14
ANAÏS MITCHELL BY ANAÏS
MITCHELL
There are shades of Paul Simon and
Joni Mitchell in the first solo album
in seven years from this outstanding American singer-songwriter,
who has been enjoying Broadway
success with her folk opera Hadestown.
BMG, Jan 28
THE DREAM BY ALT-J
A welcome return after four years
for the chart-topping, Mercury
Prize-winning oddball trio who
somehow marry the elaborate intricacy of progressive rock with the
quirky intimacy of indie pop.
Infectious/BMG, Feb 11
THE TIPPING POINT
BY TEARS FOR FEARS
The dysfunctional duo’s grandiose
pop was huge in the 1980s. The
emotional tumult caused by the
THE ELECTRICAL LIFE
OF LOUIS WAIN
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in this
bustling biopic of the eccentric Victorian artist whose whimsical cat
drawings made him a sensation in
the late 19th century. With Andrea
Riseborough and Claire Foy.
Today
SIBELIUS SYMPHONIES
BY OSLO PHILHARMONIC
ORCHESTRA
The 25-year-old rising star Klaus
Mäkelä conducts all seven of his
Finnish compatriot Sibelius’s symphonies, plus the fascinating
sketches for the never-completed
eighth.
Decca, March
LICORICE PIZZA
A fading child star and his 20-something girlfriend fall in and out of
love and mischief in Paul Thomas
Anderson’s sublime 1970s Los
Angeles picaresque.
Today
BOILING POINT
All in one take – no fakes, no cuts –
this ingenious and gripping British
indie has Stephen Graham as a flailing chef going through the worst
night of his life, while everyone else
in his kitchen tries to get a grip.
Jan 7
CRASH BY CHARLI XCX
Is it time for the UK’s quirkiest
alternative pop queen to crash the
mainstream? After last year ’s
acclaimed diaristic lockdown
album How I’m Feeling Now, Charli
XCX returns with a set of bold
bangers designed to do some chart
damage.
Atlantic, March 18
CYRANO
Joe Wright directs a splendorous
and cleverly recalibrated rockopera take on the classic Edmond
Rostand play, with Peter Dinklage
as the swordsman whose diminutive stature belies a towering wit.
Jan 14
Books
By Iona McL AREN
LOVE MARRIAGE
BY MONICA ALI
The Booker-shortlisted author of
Brick Lane delivers her first new
novel in a decade, about a young
British doctor, Yasmin, who has to
confront family secrets and a clash
of values as her wedding day nears.
Virago, Feb 3
AGAIN, RACHEL
BY MARIAN KEYES
After a 25-year wait, fans of Keyes’s
warm, witty, multi-million-copy
best-seller Rachel’s Holiday, about a
New York socialite’s stint in rehab,
finally get a sequel, in which Rachel
runs into an old flame.
Michael Joseph, Feb 17
YOU MATTER BY DELIA SMITH
You know her as the cook who
taught you how to boil an egg, then
bought a football club. Now the
mighty Delia has reinvented herself
as a philosopher.
Mensch, March 3
We always knew Dolly Parton was a
wit. (“It costs me a lot of money to
look this cheap.”) In Covid, funding
vaccine research, she became a
hero. For her next trick, she unveils
herself as a novelist, co-writing her
debut with prolific hit-machine
James Patterson.
Century, March 7
MOTHER’S BOY
BY HOWARD JACOBSON
As the comic novelist turns 80, he
looks back on his childhood in a
working-class Jewish family in
Manchester (his father, he says, was
a regimental tailor, upholsterer,
market-stall holder, taxi driver, balloonist and magician), and how he
grew up to be a writer.
Jonathan Cape, March 3
BLESS THE
DAUGHTER RAISED
BY A VOICE IN HER
HEAD BY WARSAN
SHIRE
The British-Somali
poet whose lyrics
were used by
Beyoncé on the
album Lemonade has
established herself as
such a star that it is a
surprise to realise
RUN, ROSE, RUN
BY DOLLY PARTON
AND JAMES PATTERSON
 Writing 9-5:
Dolly Parton has a
debut novel out
SCREAM
Billed as a relaunch, this pits the
three main stars of the slasher franchise against old Ghostface yet
again, in what’s actually a direct
sequel to Scream 4, and may (or
may not) benefit from its wholly
new writing/directing team.
Jan 14
this will be her first full-length
poetry collection.
Chatto & Windus, March 10
IN THE MARGINS
BY ELENA FERRANTE
The author of the Neapolitan Novels delivers her thoughts on
the pleasures of reading
and writing in this collection of never-beforepublished essays.
Europa, March 17
FRENCH BRAID
BY ANNE TYLER
A new Anne Tyler
novel is an island of
certainty in a tumultuous world. The latest from the author of
Dinner at the Homesick
Restaurant follows a
single family from the
1950s up to today.
Chatto & Windus,
March 24
MASS
The parents of a high-school shooting victim (Jason Isaacs, Martha
Plimpton) and those of the boy who
killed him ( Ann Dowd, Reed
Birney) wrestle in person with their
related demons, in a shattering,
superbly acted chamber piece.
Jan 20
GETTY IMAGES
THE BETRAYAL
OF ANNE FRANK
BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN
L e d b y a n o b s e s s e d re ti re d
FBI agent, a team using radical new
technology claim to have solved
the mystery of who or what
finally betrayed Anne Frank’s family to the Nazis.
William Collins, Jan 18
BELFAST
Kenneth Branagh’s black and white
cine-memoir, starring Jamie Dornan as Branagh’s own father (see
interview, p6), offers fond and
fraught vignettes from a 1960s
Northern Irish childhood.
Jan 21
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
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 Rock on: Hayley Bennett as Roxanne in Joe Wright’s musical Cyrano  Bait and switch: Milena Smit (left) and Penélope Cruz (right) in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers
filmmaking project, in Joanna
Hogg’s gloriously sharp, surprisingly funny continuation of her
semi-autobiographical drama.
Feb 4
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Bradley Cooper plays a fairground
conman on the make in Guillermo
del Toro’s lustrous, malevolent new
adaptation of William Lindsay
Gresham’s 1946 novel. With A+
femme fatale-ing from Cate Blanchett.
Jan 21
BELLE
Japan’s Mamoru Hosoda directs a
kaleidoscopically beautiful and
poignant reimagining of Beauty
and the Beast, about a high school
student with a double life as an
online pop starlet.
Feb 4
OPERATION FORTUNE:
RUSE DE GUERRE
Guy Ritchie mounts a jolly-looking
spy romp with Jason Statham topping the bill, Josh Hartnett playing
“Hollywood’s biggest movie star” –
remember those days? – and Hugh
Grant as the billionaire arms dealer
they must thwart.
Jan 21
THE SOUVENIR: PART II
Devastated by her boyfriend’s
death, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne)
pours her energies into a student
FLEE
A wrenching awards hopeful in
both the animation and documentary races, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film relates the story of escape
from Afghanistan to Denmark of a
fugitive named Amin, whose journey of self-discovery captivates.
Feb 11
THE DUKE
The spirit of Ealing comedy lives on
in Roger Michell’s gloriously funny
and moving final film, about the
1961 theft of a Goya from the
National Gallery. Jim Broadbent
and Helen Mirren star.
Feb 25
PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT
The latest from Jacques Audiard,
director of A Prophet and Rust and
Bone, is a dreamy, steamy monochrome drama charting the crisscrossing sex lives of hot young
Parisians.
March 4
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURES;
PARALLEL MOTHERS
Two women, about to give birth in
a hospital ward, become friends.
But have their babies been somehow switched? Penélope Cruz
returns as the muse for a Pedro
Almodóvar melodrama with Hitchcockian frissons.
Jan 28
DEATH ON THE NILE
Vastly delayed – by Covid, but also
the huge question marks hanging
over Armie Hammer’s career – this
brings Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot on
board a cruise for a corpse, remaking one of Christie’s cleverest plots.
Feb 11
THE BATMAN
Welcome to the next era of the
caped crusader; after the rather
pained stint Ben Affleck put in, it’s
Robert Pattinson’s turn. A noirishly
rain-soaked Gotham is playground
to both Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz)
and The Riddler (Paul Dano).
March 4
TURNING RED
Another ingenious-sounding com-
ing-of-age fable from Pixar, about a
13-year-old girl who transforms into
a giant red panda at moments of
high excitement or stress.
March 11
DOWNTON ABBEY 2
Filming stalled between lockdowns, but never fear: everyone’s
back for the second one, originally
intended for this Christmas. And
don’t assume that Maggie Smith’s
Violet is dead quite yet, whatever
they implied last time.
March 18
THE WORST PERSON
IN THE WORLD
From Norway ’s Joachim Trier
comes one of the finest romantic
comedies in years, about a young
Oslo woman (Renate Reinsve –
remember the name) who bounces
gamely between lovers and vocations.
March 25
THE LOST CITY
Anyone for Re-mancing the Stone?
Sandra Bullock and Channing
Tatum star as a chardonnay-slurping novelist and her dim-but-hunky
cover model on a chaotic jungle
adventure.
March 25
6
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
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Cover story
‘It’s not all men in masks doing bad things’
‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ pin-up Jamie Dornan on starring in Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-tipped new film ‘Belfast’ – about his hometown
By Jessamy CALKIN
It’s probably going to
take a while for Jamie
Dornan to shake off his
association with Christian Grey, the billionaire entrepreneur with aberrant
sexual tastes. Fifty Shades of Grey
(2015) was a blockbuster film based
on a bestselling book, which made
more than £1 billion, had two questionable sequels, and some fairly
terrible reviews. There will, Dornan says, be nothing like it again.
“At the time, I was asked if I was
scared of being typecast – as what?
As a BDSM-loving billionaire? I
think that’s a one-off. Nothing close
to that has come my way again –
I’ve barely worn a suit since.”
Walking on Rodborough Common, in Gloucestershire, Dornan is
friendly and funny. He says good
morning to passers-by and hello to
their dogs. He has an insouciant
take on life and laughs easily – look
up his appearance on The Tonight
Show with Jimmy Fallon, when he
and Fallon took it in turns to read
the most lurid lines from Fifty
Shades of Grey in different accents.
In short, he is good at being teased.
This is lucky, because inevitably
he has taken his fair share of flak.
“I’m well used to it. You know what
really helps? I’m from a place where
taking the mickey out of each other
is our common currency. It’s how
we communicate – it’s how we
show affection. So if you’re from
Belfast and you give a load of s---,
like I do to my mates – if you can’t
take it back, you end up a bit
screwed. But I’ve always been able
to give s--- and take s---, so I’m sort
of armed for it.”
But what Dornan is known for
could be about to change. His new
film, Belfast, is a semi-autobiographical story written and directed by
Kenneth Branagh, about the start of
the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Set in 1969, it tells of the sacrifice
made by a family who leave the
community they love as it becomes
overwhelmed by sectarian violence, with an incredible performance from 11-year-old Jude Hill as
Buddy (a stand-in for the young
Branagh). The film – starring Judi
Dench, Ciaran Hinds and Caitriona
Balfe, with a score by Van Morrison
– has attracted huge accolades at
festivals, a growing Oscar buzz, and
is up for seven Golden Globes,
including a best supporting actor
nomination for Dornan himself.
The 39-year-old Dornan plays Pa,
Buddy ’s father. It is his most
profound role yet, and one that he
hopes will define him. “It’s a different take on that part of the world
than we’ve seen before – not to
detract from what Jim Sheridan did
with In the Name of the Father or
what Steve McQueen did with The
Hunger – they’ve all got their place,
and they’re great. But this is just
seeing it through a different lens.
“As someone who’s from Northern Ireland, I think it’s really
important to constantly offer up a
different perception of what it’s like
– it’s not all men in masks doing bad
things. I’ve travelled the world for
20 years trying to explain to people
that it’s a great place.”
It was lockdown, says Dornan,
that finally gave Branagh “the space
to realise his 50-year plan” of writing this movie. In the end, the script
only took him a few months. (“It’s
been in his head for years,” says
Dornan.) In November, the film premiered in Belfast, the city in the
suburbs of which Dornan grew up.
“It was a very special occasion –
nothing could top that. We really
wanted it to resonate with people
from home – and it did.”
Tonight also sees the first episode
of The Tourist, a BBC thriller series
written by Jack and Harry Williams
(responsible for television hits such
as The Missing), set in the outback of
Australia. Dornan plays a man who
loses his memory after a car crash
caused by a menacing HGV – in a
fantastically good opening
sequence reminiscent of Spielberg’s Duel. The atmosphere of the
series is strangely comic and somewhat surreal. “Just when you’ve
cracked the tone you’ll be thrown
off the scent, and there’s a lot of
humour to it, which comes at the
darkest moments – but that’s what
life is like,” says Dornan.
“It’s a strange thing to end the
year with all this positivity,” he continues quietly, “with so much praise
for Belfast and a lot of good talk
about The Tourist – because on
many levels it’s been the worst year
of my life, and the hardest.”
In March 2021, when Dornan was
still in quarantine in Australia having just arrived for The Tourist’s
five-month shoot, he received the
news that his much-loved father
had died of Covid. Jim Dornan was
an obstetrician and gynaecologist
who had just taken on a professorship in the Middle East, and his son
was stuck in a hotel in Adelaide,
grieving and unable to travel.
Grief is such a profound and
complicated emotion and Dornan is
clearly still in its throes; the family
has not even had a funeral yet.
Jamie was very close to his father,
but had not seen him for 18 months
before his death, due to the compli-
 ‘I can be a real cynic’: Jamie Dornan in new BBC drama The Tourist
DORNAN RISING: EIGHT ROLES
MARIE ANTOINETTE
(2006)
THE FALL
(TV, 2013-16)
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
(2015)
ANTHROPOID
(2016)
A PRIVATE WAR
(2018)
MY DINNER WITH HERVE
(2018, TV)
WILD MOUNTAIN THYME
(2020)
BARB AND STAR GO TO
VISTA DEL MAR (2021)
cations of lockdown and his filming
schedules, and he is distraught that
his father never got to see him in
Belfast; he had imbued the role of
Pa with so much of him.
“Truly, you could search far and
wide and it would be very hard to
find something negative to say
about my dad. He was a beacon of
positivity – that is my overriding
takeaway. His kindness, his willingness to talk to anybody and everybody – he used to say, you treat the
person who cleans the court the
same as you treat the judge. Dad
had time for everybody.
“I’ve tried to take that into my
own life. We’re talking about a professor of medicine here, an insanely
intelligent man. He was so positive
– he would say, this has happened,
how do we move forward and get
something good out of this?”
Dornan’s mother, Lorna, died of
pancreatic cancer when he was 16.
Later, his father told him, “Don’t let
this be the thing that defines you.”
“Sure,” says Dornan. “You wear it,
and it shapes you, and colours you
forever, to lose your mother at such a
young age, and life will never be the
same again – but you can’t lead with
it. I am probably a much stronger
person as a result. I was young and
naive and I had to grow up really
fast. I had to find a strength and
resilience that I didn’t know I had.”
Another thing he inherited from
his dad, he says, is that he never
gets hangovers. “Despite being the
last man to leave the party and the
first up in the morning,” his father
seemed immune. Dornan, too,
should have a hangover today, having stayed up late last night with
friends knocking back tequila.
You’d think he might at least be
worn out from being so goodlooking. But instead he seems fresh
and springy, as we take our walk on
the common, “beautiful even on a
s---- day like today”, with its lovely
views of the Stroud valley.
He and his wife, the composer
and musician Amelia Warner,
moved here several years ago after
falling in love with the area. “We
used to come pretending we
needed to get away from the
stresses of London, even though we
didn’t even have kids and life was
not that stressful.” When they did
have children, they had an excuse
to move permanently, and three
years ago, they bought the house
they live in now, on the edge of a
village. “There’s two pubs and a
postbox – it’s not a metropolis.
Everyone leaves you to it, no one is
that interested in what you do – no
paparazzi or any of that c--p.”
They have three daughters:
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
7
ROB YOUNGSON/FOCUS FEATURES; IAN ROUTLEDGE/TWO BROTHERS PICTURES
***
 ‘In Belfast, tafjing the micfjey out of each other is common currency. It’s how we show affection’: Jamie Dornan as Pa with Jude Hill as Buddy in Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical Belfast
Dulcie, 8, Elva, 5, and Alberta, 3. I
wonder whether he’d mafje a film
lifje Fifty Shades of Grey now, when
there’s his daughters to consider?
“I can be a real cynic, and if it
wasn’t me in the film, it’d be different. As my girls get older, will they
have to field some awfjward questions? Yeah! But will it have a damaging effe ct on them or my
relationship with them? No.”
Dornan got the Fifty Shades role on
the strength of the 2013 series The
Fall, which made his name and won
him a Bafta nomination. He was
convincingly creepy as Paul Spector, a social worfjer who was simultaneously a loving father and a
sadistic serial fjiller, being hunted
‘Have I been typecast
as a BDSM-loving
billionaire? I’ve barely
worn a suit since’
down by DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian
Anderson). Before he toofj up
acting, Dornan spent seven years as
a model (having dropped out of a
business studies degree at Teesside
University), lolling about in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Dior and
Armani. It is hard to imagine him
modelling, given the fact that he’s
just told me he has an abnormal
amount of adrenalin, and finds it
impossibly hard to fjeep still (“I
can’t have a day where I don’t move
– I just get really wriggly – I have to
do lots of exercise”). But he managed. “I just loofjed sad and thought
about the money.”
Clearly, Dornan does not tafje
himself too seriously – which is just
as well, since he’s made his fair
share of badly-received films. There
was 2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme,
described by one critic as an
“execrable romcom that’s almost
surreal in its unashamed awfulness”. Dornan sticfjs up for it (“I had
one of the most incredible experiences of my life on that set, worfjing
with brilliant people lifje Emily
Blunt and Christopher Walfjen,
John Hamm…”), but admits that it
had its flaws. “It has an oddness that
I thinfj if you just gave yourself to it,
you would enjoy. But there were
also some very silly moments that
were Oirish with a capital O.”
He has also made some exuberant choices (such as last year’s Kristen Wiig comedy Barb and Star Go to
Vista Del Mar) and some wonderful
films – such as Matthew Heineman’s
A Private War, about the journalist
Marie Colvin, and Sean Ellis’s
Anthropoid, based on a true story
about Czech resistance fighters,
with his good friend Cillian Murphy. One thing he learnt from Murphy (“I hate to give him any credit,
but he won’t read the Telegraph”) is
how to focus on the experience of
filming and stop worrying about
whether people will lifje it. “To just
seize the day, enjoy the chance to
worfj with all these cool, talented,
creative people – and whatever the
fallout is, however it’s received or
does at the bloody box office, is
totally out of your control – so put
the worfj in and enjoy it.”
We’ve finished our loop of the
common and Dornan has to rush
off. He has a lot on – a few days on
the west coast of Ireland, and then
he and his family are going to Los
Angeles for the American premiere
of Belfast. There will be a lot to
celebrate. It’s lucfjy that he doesn’t
get hangovers.
The Tourist is on BBC One tonight
at 9pm and the full series is on
bbc.co.uk/iplayer. Belfast is in
cinemas on Jan 21
8
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
***
History
A beaver for Your Majesty?
From parmesan to giraffes, here are the strangest diplomatic gifts of all time
By Paul BRUMMELL
THE SHAH DIAMOND
from Fath-AlT Shah Qajar,
Shah of Iran, to NTcholas I,
Tsar of RussTa, Tn 1829
This 88.7 carat diamond is one of
the star pieces in the gem collection
of the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow.
In the early 19th century, Tsarist
Russia was pushing into the Caucasus and Persia. By 1827, they had
reached Tabriz, in the northwest of
modern Iran. Persia sued for peace,
signing a treaty largely the work of
the Russian playwright turned diplomat, Alexander Griboedov. Made
“minister resident” in Tehran as a
reward, Griboedov travelled to
meet the Shah. The visit began
well, but unfortunately gifts from
the Tsar were delayed in transit;
then Griboedov’s servants misbehaved. When the Shah’s eunuch
and two women he claimed were
being held in Tehran against their
will took refuge in the Russian mission, all hell broke loose. Tehran’s
mullahs incited the people to take
them back and, in the fray, Griboedov and 37 others were stabbed to
death. Terrified of reprisal, the
Shah sent his son to St Petersburg
with this diamond. The mission was
a success: the Tsar declared himself
convinced of the Shah’s innocence.
SEVEN BEAVERS
from the town of Reval (now
TallTnn) to KTng Hans of Denmark
and Norway Tn 1489
The Hanseatic League was a powerful confederation of merchant
towns in medieval Europe. When
King Hans ascended the Danish
throne in 1481, then the Norwegian
throne in 1483, he sought to dent
their power. In 1489, the town of
Reval gave him a gift to persuade
him to look upon the League more
favourably – seven beavers.
Beavers had been extinct in Denmark for five centuries. They were
also valued for their fur and meat
(the tail was exempted from the ban
RESOLUTE DESK
from Queen VTctorTa to US PresTdent
Rutherford B Hayes Tn 1880
In 1845, the British explorer John
Franklin set out to find the Northwest passage through the Arctic
Sea. His ships reached Baffin Bay,
between Greenland and Canada,
but were never seen again.
Finding Franklin became an
obsession. So many expeditions –
British and American – set out
(including the HMS Resolute from
London) that they began bumping
into each other in Arctic waters. In
1852, the Resolute itself ran into
trouble and was abandoned. Then,
in 1854, news arrived in London: of
SARAH FORBES BONETTA
from Ghezo, KTng of Dahomey, to
lTeutenant commander FrederTck
E Forbes of the Royal Navy Tn 1850
Inuit testimony that Franklin’s
crew had perished. They had died
of starvation (not before resorting
to cannibalism). In 1855, a whaler
found the Resolute drifting at sea,
and brought her to Connecticut.
Congress voted to repair her (at a
cost of $40,000) and send her back
to Britain as a gift. When the Resolute was retired in 1879, Queen Victoria had the salvaged timber
turned into a magnificent desk,
carved with scenes of arctic exploration. It has been used by most
presidents and currently sits in the
Oval Office. Pictured above, in June
1963, children of the Kennedy clan
peer out from a panel added by
Roosevelt to hide his leg braces.
MINIATURE PORTRAIT OF
KING LOUIS XVI OF FRANCE
from KTng LouTs XVI to
BenjamTn FranklTn, then US
mTnTster to France, Tn 1785
Forbes was captain of the HMS
Bonetta, which in the late 1840s
was carrying out anti-slavery duties
in West Africa. In 1850, Forbes was
invited by King Ghezo to a series of
celebrations. When he learnt that
these included human sacrifice, he
gave the king $100 each for three of
the men. He also saved an eightyear-old girl whom Ghezo offered
him as a gift. Given his mission,
Forbes decided she was crown
property. Baptised Sarah Forbes
Bonetta, the girl arrived in England,
where the Queen agreed to fund
her education. Sarah charmed the
Queen, who called her Sally. Her
health was poor in England,
though, and in 1851 it was decided
she might fare better in the care of a
missionary society in Sierra Leone.
In 1855, she returned, becoming
friends with Princess Alice. The
Queen later became godmother to
Sarah’s child, Victoria.
Franklin arrived as a diplomat in
France in 1776, seeking support for
America’s War of Independence. By
1785, he had signed a treaty of amity
with France and represented the
United States at the court at Versailles. In gratitude, Louis XVI presented him with a miniature of
himself, in a gold case set with 408
diamonds. Such value was problematic: refusing it would insult the
king, but accepting gifts from foreign powers contravened the Articles of Confederation – a forerunner
of the Constitution. In the end,
Franklin was allowed to keep it, and
he bequeathed it to his daughter,
Sarah, asking she refrain from turning the diamonds into jewellery.
She (sort of ) complied, turning
some into cash instead. As did later
generations: by the time it passed to
the American Philological Society
in 1959, just one diamond remained.
on eating meat during Lent), but
chiefly for castoreum, a vanillascented oil secreted from the castor
sac (next to the genitals), used by
the beaver to waterproof
its fur and mark
territory. In medieval Europe, castoreum was
th o u gh t t o b e
medicinal – a
12th-century Abbess
prescribed beaver testicles in warm wine to
reduce fever – and it’s still
occasionally used in perfume (and a particular
brand of Swedish
schnapps called
BVR HJT). Beavers were also designated diplomatic gifts in 1670,
when Charles II granted a royal
charter to traders in Hudson Bay.
For the privilege of trapping and
selling beavers, they were required
to pay two black beavers
and two elk to any visiting British monarch.
The rent has only
been paid four times
– most recently in
1970, when Queen
Elizabeth was given
live beavers in a
tank. They reportedly misbehaved
throughout the entire
ceremony.
MOON ROCKS
from PresTdent NTxon to the
world Tn 1969 and 1972
Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for
mankind” in 1969 was a defining
moment of the 20th century, so it’s
not surprising that President Nixon
wanted to crow about it. That year,
he commissioned Nasa to put
together gifts for each US state, and
for nations around the world: a flag
and four particles of moon weighing 0.05 grams, housed in a magnifying acrylic dome. He repeated the
gift with Apollo 17 in 1972, though
by then, interest in the space programme had waned. While many of
the rocks remain on display in
museums, the whereabouts of others are unknown. Afghanistan’s and
Libya’s have disappeared, and Malta’s was stolen. Some have been sold
– including a number of fakes. In
1998, a retired special agent named
Joseph Gutheinz took out an ad in
USA Today pretending to be a broker for a rich client in search of
moon rocks. His bait, though, was
taken not by someone peddling
fakes but a genuine rock – for
$5 million. It had been sold to the
peddler by a retired Honduran
colonel, who claimed he had been
given it by deposed president
López Arellano. Seized in a sting, it
was returned to Honduras in 2004
and is now on display in the capital.
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
***
9
POEM OF THE WEEK
Marianne Moore
PA; GETTY NMAGES/NSTOCKPHOTO; GETTY NMAGES/EYEEM; CORBNS VNA GETTY NMAGES; ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AP/NASA
Marianne Moore’s first book came
out in 1921, and she was furious
about it: it was printed by
admirers, without her consentM It
was only after years of pleading
from the likes of TS Eliot, Ezra
Pound and William Carlos
Williams that she published
anotherM A perfectionist from her
boots to the tip of her tricorn hat,
Moore ruthlessly revised and
edited her work, cutting her most
famous poem, Poetry (which
begins “I, too, dislike it”), from 29
lines to just threeM But that same
steely perfectionism created
crystalline wonders like this
week’s poemM The underwater
world it depicts is beautiful – a
shoal of fish “wade” through the
sea’s “black jade”; a mussel opens
and closes like an “injured fan”
– but also a battle-ground: a rough
cliff scarred by “hatchet-strokes”
is at war with the water eroding itM
There’s a similar battle between
smooth and jagged going in the
poem’s unforgiving formM Those
cliff-edge line-breaks are no “ac-/
cident”, but rather the result of a
rigid pattern of syllables per line
(1, 3, 9, 6, 8; tweaked from an
earlier version with six lines in
each stanza)M It’s a fiendishly
difficult way to construct a poem,
but Moore pulls it off with a
limpid graceM
Tristram Fane Saunders
THE FISH
wade
through black jadeM
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fanM
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with
spotlight swiftness
into the crevices –
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodiesM The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the otherM
A GIRAFFE
from the Governor of Egypt to
the King of France in 1826
Giraffes were a popular diplomatic
gift in the renaissanceM Lorenzo de’
Medici was presented with one by
the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay in 1487,
to aid a commercial treaty (Giorgio
Vasari’s portrait of Lorenzo portrays him receiving the giraffe)M
The practice rather dried up after
that, but in 1826, Muhammad Ali
Pasha, Ottoman governor of Egypt,
decided to send a giraffe to France
to help win him military supportM
Shipped from Alexandria to Marseille in a vessel that had a hole cut
in its deck to accommodate the
giraffe’s neck, it was brought to
Paris by the naturalist Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who determined the 500-mile journey should
be made on footM The procession
included several cows, to furnish
the giraffe with its daily ration of 25
gallons of milk, and Saint-Hilaire
ordered the giraffe a made-to-measure oilskin, decorated with the fleurde-lys of the French monarchy, and
the arms of Muhammad AliM
Once in Paris, the giraffe lived
at the Jardin des Plantes, and
prompted giraffe-themed wallpaper and biscuitsM It died in 1845M A
second giraffe, sent by Ali Pasha to
England in 1827, was painted by
Jacques-Laurent Agasse (pictured)M
50 BLOCKS OF CHEESE
from the Republic of Venice to
the Sultan of Egypt in 1512
The Portuguese explorer Vasco da
Gama’s arrival in India in 1498
threatened the lucrative
trade in spices between
Venice and the Mamluk Sultanate in EgyptM In 1502 and
in 1512, Venice despatched
missions to Sultan Qanash
al-Ghawri of Egypt to solve
trade disputes and convince him to act against the
PortugueseM The Venetians arrived with gifts,
which in 1512 included
150 gowns (velvet, satin
and threaded with gold), furs
(including 4,500 squirrel) and 50
blocks of cheeseM Historians have
debated exactly which cheeseM The
consensus is to something akin to
Grana Padano, a hypothesis supported by the popularity of hard,
crumbly cheeses as gifts from
other Italian courtsM In 1511, Pope
Julius II gave 100 parmesans to
the young Henry VIII, in gratitude for his support for the
Pope’s anti-French LeagueM
Extracted from Diplomatic
Gifts: A History in Fifty
Presents by Paul Brummell
(Hurst, £25), publishing at
the end of January
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice –
all the physical features of
accident – lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
deadM
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youthM The sea grows old in itM
From New Collected Poems
(Faber, £30)
10
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
***
he killed herself in November
1980, at the age of 53. The most
horrible death imaginable –
pills, washed down with weedkiller. In her agony she crashed
through a glass door.
This was in Los Angeles – 2620
Hutton Drive. Rachel Roberts was
born in Llanelli, in 1927, the daughter of a Baptist minister, and though
she yearned, as a child, for a more
exotic and dramatic world than was
on offer in South Wales – she fancied dressing up; she wanted to be
noticed – Roberts was always tormented by a puritan conscience,
which made her ill at ease in Hollywood, mistrustful of success and
happiness. As she wrote in her
diary, “Yes, I have a sweetness and
a warmth and intelligence and talent, but I have also a devastating
psychological flaw that is finally
crippling me.”
The roles for which she is best
known – Albert Finney’s mistress
Brenda in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Richard
Harris’s mistress Mrs Hammond in
This Sporting Life (1963) – capture
Roberts’s turmoil. She could portray women whose brief pleasure
had to be followed by endless bleak
punishment. As Richard Gere, who
played another of her younger lovers in Yanks (1979), put it, “I always
sensed something fragile about her,
tensed up, ready to snap.”
Fully aware that, psychologically,
she was “personally adrift and promiscuous and unstable”, in 1955,
after graduating from RADA, and
with stints in rep in Swansea and
Stratford, Roberts married the
excellent character actor (still with
us at 89) Alan Dobie, in the hope
he’d bring her a steadying domestic
calm. Unfortunately, “Alan’s dourness was beginning to depress me”,
and in her search for colour and raciness she latched onto Rex Harrison.
They met during a production of
Chekhov’s Platonov at the Royal
Court in Sloane Square, in October
1960 – “Rex cut such a dash… There
was something Edwardian about
him, something silky and ruffled” –
and Roberts’s love for him had an
intensity which oscillated with
hatred: “Days of deep shock, rage,
anger, terror, relief and hope.”
Was she too domineering for
him? Was there too much wild
energy? Their wedding was in
Genoa in 1962, when Harrison was
in Italy making Cleopatra, but a
chill soon descended – Roberts hit
him with a shoe and had assignations with the chauffeur. She was
jealous of his numerous ex-wives.
“My large personality needed
Rex’s existence,” she said, but his
GETTY IMAGES; POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
S
The Story Behind...
Rachel Roberts’s kitchen sink life
Richard Burton wasn’t Hollywood’s only Welsh hellraiser – but the world was less forgiving to a woman
By Roger LEWIS
exalted status and stardom only
served to rub in Roberts’s feelings
of inadequacy. Harrison didn’t like
to mix with audiences or the ordinary public. He was driven in a
Rolls to Warner Brothers. He had
prestige and power – and Roberts
fed off this, and loathed herself for
doing so: walking through the
mimosas in the South of France,
travelling First Class on the Golden
Arrow and the Rome Express,
swishing into the Dorchester lobby
in furs. “I basked in the sun.”
Innately feeling harassed, and
with nothing to cling to, Roberts
reacted by behaving appallingly, as
Richard Burton, himself no angel,
documented. “Maniacal,” he called
her, “totally demented… stupendously drunk… totally uncontrollable… a mad case of alcoholism.” On
one occasion, Roberts stripped
naked, flashed her pubes at sailors
and molested Harrison’s basset
hound. “Outrage in Rachel’s case
has now become normal,” wrote
Burton in December 1968, when he
additionally noted her “very cheaplooking dyed blonde hair”.
Crammed with contradictions,
Roberts lapped up the luxury and
celebrity, while also saying she
despised it – fame cut a person off
from warmth and honesty and was
“pathetic and paltry”. She yearned
to be a leading lady and then disliked the vanity of such an ambi-
 ‘Edwardian – silky and ruffled’:
Roberts with Rex Harrison in 1968
tion. She had strong features, which
though never beautiful, were not
improved by plastic surgery.
Harrison eventually tired of the
antics, which had exposed him to
public humiliation – Roberts crawling around on all fours barking like
a dog and biting Robert Mitchum;
demanding an uncooked egg in a
posh restaurant; singing Welsh
rugby songs and wearing tarty
clothes, such as transparent tops,
suede miniskirts and thigh-length
boots. The last straw was her misbehaviour at a royal premiere:
“Princess Margaret had no time for
Rex Harrison’s sloppy-looking,
drunken, noisy wife,” said Roberts,
putting herself in the third person.
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
 ‘Totallb
demented…
stupendouslb
drunk’: Welsh
actress Rachel
Roberts trbing
an ice-cold
shower in
London, 1954
***
11
Simon Heffer
Hinterland
Vaughan Williams wrote the theme music for his
turbulent times. It’s time we recognised this titan
 Britain’s musical conscience: Ralph Vaughan Williams in Surreb, 1949
What are we to make of all this?
First, Roberts was right to be indignant that, were she a man, her bad
b e h av i o u r wo u l d h ave wo n
applause, even admiration. It irked
her she should be chastised as a
nuisance and for not “obebing the
rules of civilised behaviour. Yet Rex
often doesn’t. Robert Shaw didn’t.
Burton didn’t. O’Toole didn’t.” Verb
true. Secondlb, Roberts is a warning about what can happen if bou
become overdependent: “I didn’t
make a life of mb own… I lived
entirelb through him,” she said of
Harrison. Ten bears after the
divorce, she was still dreaming of a
reconciliation: “I still love mb special, dbnamic, sillb, crustb, unbearable Rex.”
Finallb, there is her Welshness –
the chippb Celtic strain uneasb with
Anglo-Saxon cool. Comparing her
fate with that of Burton, Roberts
said theb’d become “croppers in the
ebes of the world” because theb’d
wanted to impress; “insecure,
cursed with feelings of inadequacb”. Despite manifest gifts and
public recognition (Roberts won
BAFTAs and was nominated for
Oscars), “underneath, the uncertainties and the instabilities bubbled awab ”. There were other
resemblances between Roberts and
Burton, too. Dissipation, frabed
nerves, adrift from one’s origins, an
inabilitb to settle.
The Welsh are supreme at being
actors and actresses because flambobance is suppressed; it is the
guiltb secret, which bursts out now
and again in lunatic wabs, quick
and fierce. There’s a sense of flight,
dispersal, a splitting up of the emotions. Yet what is the alternative? To
be respectful and drb? As Rachel
Roberts said, “I still have emotional
power, but it is locked up inside me,
devastatinglb, eating me alive.”
Born in Glamorganshire, I’m not
dissimilar.
s this the bear we finallb grasp
the greatness of Ralph Vaughan
Williams, born 150 bears ago?
Because manb still don’t. The verb
fact he was an English composer
continues to count against him,
but not, perhaps, for the same
reason as when his centenarb was
marked in 1972. Then, he was in
the middle of a posthumous period
of neglect (he had died in 1958) that
seemed rooted not least in the
critical belief that an Englishman
– unless he were as cosmopolitan
as Benjamin Britten – simplb
could not write great music.
Also, Vaughan Williams’s idiom
was out of kilter with the
prevailing vogue for atonalism,
which Kathleen Ferrier famouslb
dismissed as “three farts and a
raspberrb, orchestrated”.
Now, when it is fashionable for
so-called intellectuals to suspect
English culture because of what
theb consider its implicit racism,
Vaughan Williams suffers for that
reason, too. He embodied white
privilege: an upper-middle class,
Oxbridge-educated, white
heterosexual man with a private
income, he is the antithesis of the
diverse fantasb that so manb in the
arts establishment, from the BBC
downwards, strive to celebrate
irrespective of anb consideration
of merit. This blind prejudice
diminishes too much of the
achievement of a man who has,
at last and despite everbthing,
become – almost bb accident –
one of the nation’s most
popular composers.
But in Vaughan Williams’s
sesquicentenarb bear, it is time to
strip awab all the prejudices, and
indeed the somewhat superficial
reasons for his growing popularitb
– such as Classic FM’s
championship of The Lark
Ascending, which in truth is not
among his most profound works
– and to examine whb he is not
merelb a great composer, but one
of Britain’s greatest cultural
figures, to rank with Shakespeare,
or Milton, or Dickens, or Turner,
or Constable, or Wren.
The long-standing criticisms of
Vaughan Williams range from the
superficial to the ad hominem: that
his music rarelb strabed bebond
the influence of English folk song,
and that therefore it doesn’t travel;
that he didn’t innovate because he
was innatelb conservative; and
that he was some sort of
Betjemanesque bumbling old toff
who, as a result, need not be taken
seriouslb. None of this equates
with the realitb, which is that he
wrote the turbulent theme music
I
for the turbulent decades through
which he lived. He gave the bears
from the 1900s to the 1950s the
expression theb demanded; he
captured emotions, ideas, currents
and feelings, depicting them in his
music more universallb than
anbone else could.
It is a matter of record that
Vaughan Williams set out to write
a “national music” and that he
drew some of the inspiration to do
so from his collecting and studb of
English folk song in the decade
before the Great War. Throughout
his life the influence of folk song
was apparent in some of his work
– from the tunes he wrote for The
English Hymnal in 1906, through
The Lark Ascending in 1920, and
the Five Variants of Dives and
Lazarus in 1939. But folk song is
supposedlb suffocating influence
of English folk song. The
percussive Piano Concerto and the
ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing
– both from 1930 – and his
unprecedentedlb dissonant F
Minor Sbmphonb of 1935
continued to reflect a sense of
doubt and fear, and an absence of
the cheerful optimism that
characterised the composer’s earlb
work. In the age of the great
depression and the rise of Hitler,
he struck an appropriate tone;
and it became more so bb 1936
with the first performance of Dona
Nobis Pacem, a cantata about the
threat to peace being posed bb the
rise of fascism.
Bb the time war came again, he
was the musical conscience of the
nation, with a stature as a public
figure unknown among British
composers todab. Throughout that
war, and after it, he articulated the
feelings of the people for whom he
wrote, not just through his
radicallb contrasting Fifth and
Sixth sbmphonies, but finding a
whole new audience through his
film music – not least his score for
Ealing’s 1948 epic Scott of the
Antarctic, about another
dimension of British endeavour.
But this musical achievement
was not the component of
Vaughan Williams’s moral
greatness as an artist. His success,
following on from Elgar’s, finallb
put British music on the map
He was out of kilter
with the vogue for
‘three farts and a
raspberry’ atonalism
even apparent in his film music
from the 1940s, such as his score
for Powell and Pressburger’s 49th
Parallel; and it appears, brieflb and
bb wab of stark contrast, in one of
the works that labs claim to be his
masterpiece, the violent,
disorientating and overwhelming
Sixth Sbmphonb.
And that brings us to the point
about Vaughan Williams: he was
an innovator, an experimenter, a
man who absorbed the currents of
what was going on around him and
expressed it in his writing. Before
the Great War he projected the
then hugelb pervasive influence of
Walt Whitman in his A Sea
Symphony and his choral work
Toward the Unknown Region; he
embraced the interest in Tudor
polbphonb in the Tallis Fantasia
and his own experience as a man
living and working in London
in his London Sbmphonb – or
as he called it, his “Sbmphonb bb
a Londoner”.
But then the war changed
everbthing. His Pastoral
Sbmphonb, caricatured as “VW
rolling over and over in a ploughed
field on a muddb dab” was in fact
about the landscape, and the
trauma, of the Western Front. His
oratorio Sancta Civitas, finished in
1925, had a darkness that infused
much of his music in the inter-war
bears and owed nothing to the
ROLLS PRESS/POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Theb separated in December
1969, and Roberts went off her
rocker. She started to swallow overdoses and was regularlb having her
stomach pumped. “I want to f---ing
kill him,” she said of Harrison to a
doctor at the Cedars of Lebanon
Hospital. When her agent Aaron
Frosch sent a basket of cheese, she
threw it out of the window, sabing
the gift was “vulgar and pretentious”. Roberts went on Russell
Hartb’s chat show, called the host “a
sillb c---” and said of her cats, “all
theb want to do is screw”. Hartb’s
other guests, Sir Peter Hall, Elton
John and Barbara Cartland, fell into
an embarrassed silence.
internationallb, with America
especiallb devouring his work.
Both through the example of his
own music and through his
teaching at the Robal College of
Music, he nurtured the composers
of the English musical renaissance
– including Herbert Howells,
Arthur Bliss, Jack Moeran, Gerald
Finzi, Ruth Gipps and Stanleb Bate.
He set an example, too, of wider
amateur participation in music,
leading the Leith Hill festival in
Surreb with choirs from the
neighbouring villages. He was one
of those engaged in founding what
became the Arts Council, and
broadcast on radio and on film
about the importance of music and
of cultural life. His mission was not
merelb to write great works –
which he unquestionablb did – but
to advance civilisation, not just in
Britain but wherever his music his
plabed. He was a great
Englishman, but also a great
cultural figure who is increasinglb
appreciated internationallb.
The emphasis on the
commemoration of Ralph Vaughan
Williams this bear should be about
the moral greatness that comes
from such a commitment to art,
and not just about the jollb tunes of
his theb plab on Classic FM. Go out
and listen to his music – and not
just the obvious, popular
favourites – and bou will begin to
see dimensions to this titan bou
had not thought existed.
12
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
***
Books
So fresh! Our pick of 2022’s brightest new novelists
Whether it’s an unlertaker’s BDSM alventures or a family cursel to fall out of winlows, the season’s best lebuts are full of surprises
S Lewis’s adage that we read
to know we are not alone may
have become a banal observation, but being inside a character’s
interior struggles while they navigate personal crises with all their
human flaws is one of the novel’s
perpetual strengths.
Four of the new year’s most
accomplished debut novelists, Sara
Freeman, Renée Branum, Ella Baxter and Jakob Guanzon, take us
back to this elemental function of
literature. Poverty, grief, family
ties, lack of self-knowledge – their
heroes variously face them all. That
our sympathies are engaged so skilfully and hope so adeptly snatched
from the jaws of defeat is proof of
the strength of these new writers’
storytelling, and the sincerity of
their enterprise: chipping away at
the truth of how people are, how
they behave and what they feel.
Australian artist and writer Ella
Baxter has admitted to being in a
“valley of grief ” when she wrote
New Animal (Picador, £14.99), in
which Aurelia, a young funeral parlour cosmetician in New South
Wales, hurls herself into the shame
and tawdry exploitation of the
BDSM scene after her mother dies.
Baxter is fascinated with the female
body, which “trots everywhere
with you like an indebted lover”,
and how it assimilates extreme
emotions. Aurelia investigates,
through often savage humiliations,
how far she can use sex as a violent
displacement activity.
Self-destructive anti-heroines
are in vogue, but what Aurelia’s
story makes clear is how underrepresented female sexuality still is.
A key scene in which Aurelia first
tries out the position of a “dom”,
C
rather than a “sub”, is a direct challenge to the reader’s conception of
what is admissible sexual behaviour for a woman – even more so as
it is partly played for laughs.
By the end, Aurelia counter-intuitively finds a renewed bond with
her body after placing it under
duress. The novel closes with her
preparing a stillborn baby girl for a
funeral, prompting a reflection on
the power of the female body, with
its almost infinite capability to reabsorb pain, “like a mechanical ocean
recycling its own salt”.
A stillborn child also lies at the
centre of Canadian writer Sara
Freeman’s Tides (Granta, £12.99),
in which 37-year-old Mara flees to a
New England coastal town in the
wake of losing her baby. While her
behaviour is in no way as extreme
as the protagonist of New Animal,
her plight feels more precarious.
With little money, she lives as an
itinerant before getting a job in a
local wine store and embarking on
an affair with its owner. The seaside
town for Mara feels less like a place
of possible renewal, a fresh tide,
than a pull toward death, where
after losing a child “you go along
with her”. “You won’t be happy
until you’ve burned the whole
house down,” she recalls a friend
telling her. Is redemption even a
possibility? Here, as in New Animal,
deliverance is far from guaranteed.
If Freeman lacks Baxter’s leavening humour, she makes up for it
with a honed lyricism: “When she
pictures it – herself in this town forever – it reminds her of a silent
movie she once saw in which a man,
shot dead on a sidewalk, steps out
of the outline the police chalked,
looks down at his own figure, then,
From Churchill
to Sir Mix-a-Lot
Time to retire your oll ‘Dictionary of Quotations’ –
this new volume busts myths about who sail what
By Jonathon GREEN
satisfied with the line, settles back
down, closes his eyes, dies all over
again.”
Mara’s brush with near-destitution
in 21st-century America pales in
comparison with the privations
faced by the hero of Filipino-American writer Jakob Guanzon’s Abundanc e ( Dialog ue, £14. 99). A
single-father ex-convict, Henry is
living with his eight-year-old son in
his pickup in the Midwest, after
being evicted from their home on
New Year’s Eve. We learn in flashbacks how his life has unravelled;
each chapter tells us exactly how
much he has in his pocket. In such
dire straits, can he function as a
father?
Guanzon carefully builds a portrait of a character with at least one
tragic flaw, searching for dignity
and clarity. The honest and tender
scenes with his son form the novel’s
heart and soul, but it is also ignited
by tense crime-novel confrontations and some brilliantly sustained
descriptions of down-at-heel discount America. In a Walmart,
“None of them walk. They trudge
and shuffle down the main lane, as
if their rickety shopping cart
wheels were propelled by some
hidden motor that was actually
towing them along, like a tractor
hauling off a felled rodeo steer”.
Whereas in Abundance a fatherson bond is the pathway for salvation, in Cincinnati-based writer
Renée Branum’s Defenestrate
(Jonathan Cape, £14.99) the relationship between a twin sister and
brother is a Gordian knot of selfhindering, stagnation and denial.
Co-dependent and regressed,
THE NEW YALE BOOK
OF QUOTATIONS
ed Fred R Shapiro
1138pp, Yale, T £30 (0844 871 1514),
RRP £35, ebook £35

Quotations collections
were simpler once:
there was Oxford for
home consumption,
and for a change, Bartlett, closely pursued by
Brewer, across the pond. There
were others, of course (the evercaustic US essayist HL Mencken
came up with an enjoyably tart
example), but, in every sense, that
trio of hardbacked, multi-paged
offerings provided the go-to heavyweights. Like Samuel Johnson
( good for 110 quotes here), who
These
writers
all chip
away at
the truth
of how
people
are, anl
what they
feel
chose only the “best writers” to provide his dictionary’s usage examples, such were the foundations of
these long-established tomes. You
were on predictable, solid (but also
stolid) ground with each. The
workhorses did their job, growing
ever-more tattered, ever less contem porary, but no matter. They
gave and you were happy to receive.
If one is not careful, the quote is
the cracker motto of the intellectual
classes. Easy come, easy know. The
problem, it transpires, is that (all
too) often you were self-deluded.
R e s e a rc h w a s f a r h a rd e r i n
pre-internet days, and defaults
were sometimes embraced: if in
doubt, attribute the errant mot to
Churchill. Failing him, Wilde or
maybe, tipping a grudging hat
to gender parity, Dorothy Parker.
If it began with “Sir…” then give
20-somethings Nick and Marta
move to Prague from the Midwest
to indulge their obsession with
their family’s “falling curse”, said to
be traceable back to Czech ancestors. The jinx dooms the bloodline
to lose their footing at some point.
It is an original conceit, with an idiosyncratic humour that reminded
me of Ottessa Moshfegh. Nick and
Marta’s shared hero is Buster Keaton, king of the pratfall, and there
are some wonderful digressions
about that comic genius that
shouldn’t really work, but do.
When Nick takes a serious fall
from his apartment balcony, Marta
begins to wonder: was it attempted
suicide? Branum cleverly suggests
how Marta’s preoccupation with
this nagging conundrum allows her
to avoid confronting her own
demons. Branum’s primary fascination is with the binds of family and
the dread of autonomy, but her gaze
is wider and more mystical, as when
she considers the siblings’ mother’s
Catholicism: “My mother sees, in
the fall of the apple from the mouths
of the first of us, a great need opening up through centuries until
Christ reversed the arc of the fall
with his body… It is strange that we
try to keep ourselves safe in the
light of this, to dare survival when
God himself could not keep himself
alive in our midst.”
If a single theme unites these
books, it is about finding a way of
coming face to face with what Tides
calls “the dark possibility of the
road”. Or, as Henry puts it, at the
close of Abundance, “It was his job
to keep looking forward, to keep
looking up”, despite “the dread or
anticipation of the sprawling freedom that was closing in on them”.
 But me no butts: rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot
is in The New Yale Book of Quotations
ILLUSTRATION: RUBY MARTIN FOR THE TELEGRAPH
By Alasdair LEES
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
***
13
To order any of these
books from the
Telegraph, visit
books.telegraph.co.uk
or call 0844 871 1514
it to the Great Cham. Like popular
etymology, this was a mistake.
In 2006, Fred Shapiro of the Yale
Law Library (and a leading OED
contributor) brought out the fruit
of nine years’ research: The Yale
Book of Quotations. Using the level
of research that the internet had
made accessible, and aiming for the
kind of bibliographical and chronological exactitude that Oxford
demands of its lexicographers, he
took a new look at the field. And in
so doing brought the old stagers up
to date. His collection acknowledged much of the monochrome
trustworthiness of the classical
canon, but added the sometimes
lurid colour of modernity, and even
moved to embrace the CGI specialities of the digital world. This, the
revised and expanded second edition, carries on as before.
If the book has a USP, it is reattribution, not least in the section
“Anonymous Was a Woman”, a
paraphrase of Virginia Woolf who
opined that, “Anon, who wrote so
many poems without signing them,
was often a woman.” So, inter alia,
Voltaire loses his best-known saying to Evelyn Beatrice Hall, Hemingway his to Mary Colum and,
perhaps most revelatory of all,
Churchill hands over “iron curtain”
to Ethel Snowden.
Shapiro has spread a wide net.
Some familiar names are missing,
but the stars of the baby-show have
resisted eviction with the bathwater. On the cover, he namechecks Plato, Shakespeare, Isaac
Newton and Mark Twain, though
we should note also Alicia Garza,
who came up with “black lives matter”. Within, things are broader-
Shapiro reassigns
Churchill’s famous
‘iron curtain’ line
to Ethel Snowden
brush. Henry Fielding (Tom Jones)
gets his entries, but so does Helen,
of Bridget Jones renown. Galen, the
Greek physician, has his line, next
door to Tony “Two Ton” Galento, the
prizefighter. Eric Partridge, my predecessor as a slang lexicographer,
has a walk-on. The second edition
adds Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs,
Barack Obama and David Foster
Wallace to the thousands of voices.
Readers will have their favourites;
rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot’s celebration
of “big butts” may not appeal to all.
Quotation (Johnson again) “is a
good thing: there is a community of
mind in it”. Once, undoubtedly,
true; but Shapiro’s book, with its
infinitely wider embrace than Johnson would have permitted, may be
less soothing. Perhaps the problem
will not simply be who gets to be
quoted – there is one bear of nugatory brain here, whom I for one
would have excluded with joy – but
the choice of lines. Shapiro has the
right to impose his own tastes. But
then this is a book, and only so
many pages can be bound; the limits of physical space are something
else that digitisation has abolished.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was my first reference book, a
birthday gift in 1959. If we emphasise the term “book”, then I suspect
that Shapiro’s fine compilation may
be my last. One only need look at
the disappearance of once-mighty
reference publishers, the everthinner “reference” shelves in the
equally diminished world of bookshops, to see that print reference is
another victim of digital modernity.
For once, however, I cannot
grieve. (I’m parti pris: my own Dictionary of Slang last demanded dead
trees in 2010; since then it has been
online, and infinitely improved for
it). Yet as the essayist Louis Menand,
writing the foreword, notes, this is
“a fun book to browse” – and browsing, the flipping of pages, the pursuit of something that catches the
eye, requires a tangible object. It is
also, he adds, a fun book for scholarship, the reverse of the reference
coin. Wit and wisdom: what else,
readers, could we need?
14
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
***
White guilt –
the paradox
This historian calls for an honest look
at British slavery, but fails to deliver it
By James WALTON
WHITE DEBT
by Thomas Harding
320pp, W&N, T £16.99 (0844 871
1514), RRP £20, ebook £11.99

ART
BOOKS
FACE TI M E
TOM HUNTER
In a comedy sketch by
Mitchell and Webb, one
SS man turns to another
and asks in a tone of
troubled bewilderment,
“Are we the baddies?”
Now with White Debt, Thomas
Harding sets out to make British
readers ask much the same question in much the same tone.
Near the beginning, Harding –
who has a degree in political science from Cambridge – claims he
“had no idea that British people…
ran slave plantations in the Caribbean”. Moreover, all the white Brits
he’s ever known, including himself,
have “tut-tutted” about the evils of
slavery in the American South,
before “in the next breath we
proudly talked about the British
Empire and all that we had accomplished”. If he’d been born in 1868
rather than 1968, these claims
might perhaps have been plausible.
As things stand, they’re an early
sign of the book’s main flaw. Having
found a story of British iniquity that
really has been largely forgotten –
and telling it with some aplomb – he
can’t resist such unhelpful journalistic add-ons as exaggeration to the
point of caricature, an over-concern with his own reactions, and
the kind of editorialising that leaves
the reader with badly bruised ribs.
The story in question took place
in the British colony of Demerara
(now Guyana) in 1823. The Atlantic
slave trade had been abolished 16
years before, but slavery itself continued as cruelly as ever – although
not with the approval of all the colonists. To the disgust of many
sugar-plantation owners, the local
missionary John Smith taught his
black congregants to read – and
even went so far as to suggest that
ferocious beatings for the smallest
of misdemeanours might not be
entirely in accordance with God’s
will. Among Smith’s literate congregants was Jack Gladstone, son of
an enslaved mother and thus
enslaved himself since birth.
Believing that full emancipation
couldn’t be long in coming, Jack
sought to accelerate the process by
organising an uprising of around
12,000 people, making it the biggest ever in a British colony.
As uprisings go, it was impressively non-violent, with plantation
owners and overseers put in stocks,
but otherwise left unharmed.
Portraits that
refer to
paintings have
a long tradition
in the history of
photography.
Here, Tom
Hunter’s 1997
picture, Woman
Reading a
Possession
Order, echoes
Vermeer’s
Girl Reading
a Letter at an
Open Window
of 1657. The
image features
in Face Time,
a journey
through the
history of
photographic
portraiture
by Philip
Prodger, the
former head of
photographs at
the National
Portrait Gallery.
Thames &
Hudson, £30
Nonetheless, instead of agreeing to
the hoped-for negotiations, the
governor of Demerara declared
martial law, gathered a militia and
carried out a series of murderous
reprisals culminating in the massacre of more than 200 “enslaved
abolitionists”, as Harding characteristically prefers to call them.
Jack went on the run, but was
arrested and put on trial for his life.
Not long afterwards, so too was
John Smith, charged with helping
to incite the rebellion. Neither trial,
it’s fair to say, was a just one. Yet,
because Harding lays out what hap-
Is it really true that
‘little has changed in
the Caribbean since
the time of slavery’?
pened with such novelistic, pageturning ( but still assiduously
researched) flair, it would feel like a
spoiler to reveal any more than that.
The continuing trouble, though,
is that Harding doesn’t leave it
there. His previous books of history
have drawn on his own family’s past
in a successful bid for emotional
resonance. Hanns and Rudolf, for
example, vividly described how the
commandant of Auschwitz was
tracked down by the Jewish Nazi
hunter Hanns Alexander – who was
Harding’s great-uncle. Legacy, his
history of the Lyons food business,
benefited greatly from the fact that
his family had owned it.
Here, however, the family connections feel distinctly tenuous,
and at times rather desperate. “In
the 1920s,” he confesses, “my family
ran the Trocadero in central London”, where the entertainment
included “a dance troupe who put
on blackface”. Not only that, but
one of Lyons’ “marketing cam-
paigns for cocoa used racist caricatures of Africans”, and his grandad
was a friend of Enoch Powell’s.
“Writing about all this,” he assures
us, “makes me deeply uncomfortable. There’s also shame.”
Harding’s personal sense of
shame runs throughout White Debt
– even after one activist tells him
that when white people talk about
slavery, “it shouldn’t be all about
‘me and my White guilt’”. But, you
can’t help wondering, has he really
earned it? In fact, one way of reading White Debt is as an inadvertent
warning against the dangers of
excessive hand-wringing.
Harding gets himself into a right
old tangle as he tries both to speak
for black people and not to be so
racist as to speak for black people.
There’s also a pronounced nervousness about causing offence that
leads him to banish the N-word
even when quoting from contemporary documents – despite it being
a more authentic reflection of the
racism involved; and to accept
without question whatever black
activists tell him. (According to one,
“little has changed in the Caribbean
since the time of slavery”: an assertion that feels somewhere between
highly dubious and quite insulting.)
More damagingly, this nervousness
infects the main story. Might it be
that he is so determined to show
that enslaved people did more to
win emancipation than any white
abolitionists that he ends up overstating the role of the uprising?
Harding is obviously sincere, as
well as justified, in calling for an
honest discussion of the whole
business of slavery and its aftereffects. Even so, the awkward feeling persists that White Debt is
melancholy proof that, for the most
well-meaning of reasons, such honesty is now pretty much politically
impossible. Or, more melancholy
still, that this impossibility is one of
the after-effects that might never
go away.
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
***
To order any of these
books from the
Telegraph, visit
books.telegraph.co.uk
or call 0844 871 1514
‘Humankind cannot
bear very much reality’
If you seek consolation in deep midwinter, try this collection of
17 authors who all stared into the abyss – and emerged stronger
By Rupert CHRISTIANSEN
ON CONSOLATION
by Michael Ignatieff
304pp, Picador, T £14.99 (0844 871
1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99

In anxious and uncertain
times, we have all been
searching for consolation. “Humankind cannot bear very much
reality ” as TS Eliot
sharply reminded us: we tend to
look away and take the easiest way
out. My own response to the pandemic – typical enough, I guess –
has demonstrated this shying away.
Through the darkest days of the
lockdowns, what has kept me going
has been less the headlines about
hopeful vaccines or the tales of
NHS heroics than the more transient comfort I have found in commonplace small things: a limp pot
plant suddenly flowering on the
terrace, the good-natured ebullience of Schitt’s Creek, my evening
schooner of cold dry sherry.
But after reading Michael Ignatieff ’s new book, I feel almost
ashamed of myself: I’m nothing but
a first-world snowflake, grasping at
straws and failing to think about
life hard enough. What Ignatieff
offers is something sterner: 17 brief
biographical essays on men and
women who, in the course of more
than two millennia of Western civilisation, have looked the deepest
horrors, agonies and deprivations
in the face and found philosophical
poise – a reason for it all, an inner
calm, a reckoning with death.
The result is something wise,
truthful, and kindly but, oh dear,
perhaps as alarming and depressing as it is consoling. This unintended effect stems from an intense
and unremitting seriousness of
tone: Ignatieff writes with such
lucid intelligence, but his honourable high-mindedness doesn’t
lighten up, leaving him immune
to the solace of laughter,
humour, comedy, the sense
that perhaps none of it matters much anyway. So just
be warned: P G Wodehouse
doesn’t get a look-in, and
there are no jokes and few
smiles here.
In other respects,
Ignatieff covers a wide
variety of positions, from
Job and his false comforters to the saintly founder
of the hospice movement
Dame Cicely Saunders.
The Pauline epistles conjure up promises of a Second Coming and paradise
 A profound
reflection
on consolation:
why did Ignatieff
omit CS Lewis,
pictured in 1950?
on the other side of earthly suffering; Cicero’s stoicism is tested by
both the death of his daughter and
the collapse of the Roman republic;
Marcus Aurelius meditates on life
as a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury signifying nothing.
Awaiting execution in prison,
Boethius decides that we are all
simply victims of the wheel of fortune, and that human agency is
helpless in the face of its wanton
spinning. God might be watching,
but he’s not going to intervene.
More than a thousand years later,
Nicolas de Condorcet and Karl
Marx nurse optimistic Enlightenment beliefs in social progress and
a potential amelioration in human
behaviour that the violence of the
French and Russian revolutions
would decisively crush. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi bravely clings to
the exhortation of Dante’s Ulysses
to his beleaguered crew that “you
were not born to live your life as
brutes/ But to be followers of virtue
and knowledge”.
Michel de Montaigne and David
Hume take the middle road and
seem the most immediately helpful
guides. Montaigne discards the
consolations of philosophy and
finds solace instead in the pleasures, rhythms and resilience of the
human body itself. Despite the pain
of his kidney stones, he finds life to
be worth living “simply because
you could feel its rhythms coursing
through your veins”.
Hume follows him: a man can sit
and think too much. “I dine, I play a
game of backgammon, I converse
and make merry with my friends.
And when after three or four hours
amusement, I wou’d return to these
speculations, they appear so cold,
and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I
cannot find in my heart to enter
into them any further.” That sounds
more like it to me.
A book like this will always provoke its readers to add or subtract
their own candidates for inclusion
or exclusion. I wasn’t quite persuaded that the cases of
the sociologist Max Weber
and the playwright-politician Václav Havel
belong here, but most of all
I regret the omission of
CS Lewis, whose essay “A
Grief Observed” – in which
he finds some Christian passage out of despair over his
wife’s death from leukaemia in the injunction to be
still and accept that we
don’t understand – is one
of the most profound
reflections on consolation that I know.
15
16
Saturday 1 January 2022 The Daily Telegraph
***
Books
Power in the
wrong hands…
From dictators all the way down to janitors, a fun
psychological study shows how authority corrupts
CORRUPTIBLE
by Brian Klaas
320pp, John Murray,
T £16.99 (0844 871 1514),
RRP £20, ebook £9.99

In his mundane job as a
New York school maintenance sup er vi s or,
Steve Raucci earned the
unlikely title of “the Don
Corleone of janitors”.
Told he could get a promotion if he
cut his school’s electricity bills, he
saved millions of dollars by keeping
classrooms freezing cold in winter.
Shivering teachers who brought
their own portable heaters in from
home would find the power cables
mysteriously cut. A photo of Marlon
Brando in The Godfather even hung
in Raucci’s office. In the best tradition of villainous janitors in ScoobyDoo, Raucci might have gotten
away with it too, had meddling colleagues not complained to management. In revenge, he planted
home-made bombs in their cars,
earning himself a 23-year prison
sentence in 2010.
Hollywood is now planning a
screen version of this tale of smalltime tyranny, which sounds similar
to zoo boss Joe Exotic’s murderous
schemes in the Netflix series Tiger
King. But in Brian Klaas’s book, Corruptible, it’s just one of many stories
about the dangers of power – be it in
the hands of ruthless dictators, David
Brent-style bosses, or the “Read the
Standing Orders!” bullies at Handforth Parish Council. “Why are so
many of these people dreadful?”
Klaas asks. And more importantly:
“How can we spot them – and ensure
they don’t become our leaders?”
On paper, Klaas is well qualified
to tackle this question. A professor
of global politics at University College London, he has interviewed
everyone from presidents and cult
leaders through to rebel commanders and criminals. He can also trot
out endless weird and wonderful
insights from behavioural studies,
be it about hunter-gatherer tribes,
ruthless CEOs, or the animal kingdom (typical sentence: “Psychopaths have much in common with
dark-footed ant spiders.”)
However, one challenge with a
book like this, of course, is that dictators are a challenging study
group. For a start, there are only a
few around. Plus, the likes of Kim
Jong-un don’t often do Oprah-style
sit-downs, telling “their truth”
about why they murder folk.
Instead, Klaas has to make educated guesses, drawing on examples lower down the global pecking
order, such as corrupt cops and
ruthless CEOs. Psychopaths, he
says, are actually far more common
in boardrooms and parliaments
than in the population at large. The
reason we don’t notice is that they’re
successful – unsuccessful psycho-
NETFLIX US/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Colin FREEMAN
 Small-time tyranny: zookeeper
Joe Exotic in Netflix’s hit Tiger King
paths, by contrast, end up in jail.
Lest we be too judgemental,
though, Klaas reminds us that our
rulers have to make choices the rest
of us don’t. He interviews ex-Thai
prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, a
man some regard as a mass murderer
because his troops shot dead 87
protesters who stormed the parliament in 2010. Vejjajiva, an Old Etonian, explains in plummy tones that
he had to show a firm hand: the protests, he believed, could otherwise
have sparked a far bloodier civil
war. “It’s easy to say Vejjajiva is a
brutal murderer,” Klaas observes.
“It’s harder to say how you would’ve
acted if you were in the seat of power
and the lives of thousands of people
were placed on your shoulders.”
This is a valid point – and one
Western leaders might want to bear
in mind when criticising their
counterparts in the world’s tougher
neighbourhoods. However, having
spent time dictator-watching
myself – it’s part of the beat as a Telegraph foreign correspondent – I’m
not sure Klaas really addresses why
some behave as they do. He doesn’t
grapple with complex cases like
president Assad of Syria, for example, once tipped as one of the Middle East’s more reform-minded
rulers. He’s now a war criminal for
turning Syria into a bloodbath, yet
it’s debatable whether he acted
purely for his own personal survival. Many would argue he was
pushed into it by his wider clan,
and by Russia and Iran, Syria’s military sponsors.
In similar fashion, corruption in
Third World governments isn’t
always down to a leader’s personal
venality, but the expectations of
their particular ethnic group that it
is their “turn to eat”. A president
who fights that expectation may get
plaudits from the World Bank, but
will alienate their own base.
The closest Klaas gets to meeting
a real dictator is interviewing
Marie-France Bokassa, one of the 57
children of emperor Jean-Bédel
Bokassa, who ruled the Central
African Republic from 1966 to 1979.
A tyrant from central casting,
Bokassa fed his enemies to crocodiles, and was said to eat their bodies himself. His daughter says Dad
was nice at times, but “authoritarian” and quick-tempered. Surely
that’s true of nearly every oldschool patriarch. Besides, don’t our
rulers need some inner steel? When
Jeremy Corbyn prevaricated on
Question Time over whether he
would ever press the nuclear button, he was heckled.
Klaas does concede certain limitations in this book. Too much psychological research, he says, is
based on studies done on posh Ivy
League psychology undergrads,
who are hardly representative of
the wider world, let alone tyrants.
But that doesn’t stop him quoting
such research – and studies involving other species. In 300 pages, I
come across references to lemurs,
springboks, macaques who’d been
fed cocaine, and, of course, meerkats (is there a single meerkat pack
that doesn’t have a team of Harvard
psychologists analysing them?).
Still, Klaas writes entertainingly,
and while this book may not be the
last word on how to stop future
Putins (or Trumps), it’s a fun guide
to the darker recesses of the political
mind. And, no, he hasn’t bribed me
to say that...
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 January 2022
***
To order any of these
books from the
Telegraph, visit
books.telegraph.co.uk
or call 0844 871 1514
17
PAPERBACKS
READ THIS WEEK
America in the 1890s, 1990s and 2090s
The ‘A Little Life’ author returns with an awe-inspiring novel that takes speculative fiction to a new level
By Lucy SCHOLES
NO ONE IS TALKING
ABOUT THIS
by Patricia Lockwood
224pp, Bloomsbury, £8.99

Written in short, tweet-like
paragraphs, Lockwood’s brilliant,
Booker-shortlisted novel begins as
a very funny satire about the
internet, before taking a dark turn.
TO PARADISE
by Hanya Yanagihara
720pp, Picador, T £16.99 (0844 871
1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99

About a third of the way
through Hanya Yanagihara’s awe-inspiring new
novel, the narrator of the
section in question – a
Hawaiian boy directly
descended from the island’s royal
family – has the significance of his
lineage impressed upon him. As
Hawaii becomes the 50th American
state, his mother impresses upon
him: “This doesn’t change anything, you know, Kawika. Your
father should still be king. And
someday, you should still be king,
too. Remember that.” Kawika is
struck by the peculiarity of her syntax: the “strange mix of tenses, a
sentence of promises and grievances, reassurances and consolations”.
To Paradise itself might be best
described thus. It too deals in multiple tenses: an America that could
have been, one close to the world
we know, and one that could still
come into being.
The novel is split into three
“books”. Each exists in its own bubble, but a Washington Square townhouse in New York’s Greenwich
Village takes centre stage in all
three. Meanwhile, characters share
names and traits, and themes and
motifs re-emerge: illness and disability; absentee parents; the sometimes terrible, sometimes
extraordinary lengths we’ll go to in
order to protect those we love; the
question of what separates life from
mere existence; and our desire to
believe in the possibility of creating
a better world, even if better for
some is never better for all.
Opening with a counterfactual
version of the late 19th century – in
which New York is one of eight
Free States where same-sex marriage is legal, and (white) women
have the same rights as (white) men
– we’re then transported to 1990s
Manhattan, where AIDS is the ominous backdrop to what’s otherwise a world of enviable
privilege. Finally, the novel
draws to a close with an
unnerving portrait of New
York at the end of the
21st century. Ravaged
by increasingly
deadly pandemics
and climate change,
its surviving citizens live under
draconian state
surveillance.
“Zone Eight ”,
this final section,
might cut a little
 Breathtaking feat
of world-building:
Hanya Yanagihara
New York at the close
of the 21st century is a
ravaged, draconian
surveillance state
too close to the bone for some, but
Yanagihara has always leant fearlessly into what horrifies, disgusts
and terrifies us. Critics of her
Booker Prize-shortlisted debut A
Little Life likened its graphic depiction of child abuse and self-harm to
trauma porn. “Zone Eight” induces
its own visceral reaction: a cold
sense of dread crept up my
spine, yet the characters are
so well drawn and the plot so
well paced, I couldn’t put
it down.
The relentlessness
of A Little Life was
magnificent. The
way it drilled so
deeply, again and
again, into the suffering of its central character was
a virtuosic imitation of what it’s
like to be
trapped in the
never-ending
cycles of abuse
and trauma. Yanagi-
hara’s reach here is different –
broader and more diffuse. She’s
concerned with the universal as
much as the specific, and the ramifications that the choices individuals make have on the society around
them. Although perhaps not as
ruthlessly immersive as A Little
Life, nevertheless the world-building on display here is nothing short
of breath-taking. Yanagihara proves
herself equally skilled at reproducing the rich textures of an Edith
Wharton novel as she is at invoking
an alarmingly believable dystopia.
If there’s a slightly weaker link, it’s
the lengthy middle book – untethered from the ballast of Washington
Square, the story told here in
Hawaii drifts – but I’m nit-picking.
There’s a moment towards the
end of the first book when David –
scion of a blue-blooded New York
family, who has fallen in love with a
penniless piano teacher – is poleaxed by a letter that exposes his lover’s chequered past. “It was as if he
had experienced the story rather
than read it,” Yanagihara writes.
To Paradise feels exactly like this.
In the same way that the failed utopian projects described therein
aren’t for everyone, this is a novel
that won’t please all readers. But
whether you find it beautiful or terrifying, read it as a story of fear and
despair or one of solace and hope,
one thing is impossible to deny:
Yanagihara has taken speculative
fiction to a whole new level.
CONCLUSIONS
by John Boorman
256pp, Faber, £10.99

“I have spent more time on films I
have not made than on the ones
I have,” writes the 88-year-old
director of Point Blank and
Excalibur, reflecting on his career
in a memoir that’s funny and
philosophical by turns.
ACTS OF DESPERATION
by Megan Nolan
304pp, Vintage, £8.99

A young woman living in Dublin
looks back on a dysfunctional
relationship that scarred her early
20s in Nolan’s intelligent, elegant
first novel, a gripping portrait of
love turned toxic.