Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands.
Introduction: Hilary Mantel
Writing in 1938, Cyril Connolly identified journalism as one of his Enemies of Promise. He warns young writers against reviewing, identifying the danger of ‘short articles for quick returns’– though in his day, two thousand words was considered short. He insists that ‘any other way of making money would be better… reviewing is a whole-time job with a halftime salary.’ The author runs the risk of losing energy, ‘frittering it away on tripe and discovering that it is his flashiest efforts that receive most praise’. The only way to preserve yourself, Connolly advises, is to ‘manoeuvre’ so you never review a bad book.
That answer is a clever one, and more demanding than it appears. To fix a book in context needs background reading. When the paper unearthed my old letters– I had no idea they kept such things– I saw that I was always asking for time, more time to learn– and it was always granted. Sometimes I was slow because I was over-committed, but sometimes because I was fascinated. The editors forgave my occasional bouts of critic’s block. They are forbearing with all their writers; sometimes it must seem unclear whether a piece is in progress or regress, or whether it will ever arrive at all. I am indebted to them for patience, and to Mary-Kay for encouraging me out of my shell. I had trained myself out of digression, but the paper was at ease with it. I was wary of jokes, but they didn’t mind those either. And when I wanted to say something more personal, they were listening.
American Marriage, 1988
There is even a section called ‘The Beauty of Marriage’. It occupies page 343– but then a lot of page 343 is white space.
Sociology has never made it into the gentlemen’s club of the ‘hard’ sciences; many people have suspected that it is simply a higher form of gossip.
For the women who decide to stay in heterosexual relationships, there is one ultimate uncertainty: ‘I wonder if he has any emotions at all?’
These statistics do seem to contradict one’s belief and everyday experience. But then, to judge by this sample, few extramarital adventurers ever tell, or are found out. Some are most adroit at juggling their relationships; one woman admitted to 12 lovers since her marriage, some concurrent, and affairs that had lasted between two months and 33 years. These lovers are ‘dear men’, ‘precious men’, willing to talk about their deepest feelings, and with a thorough working knowledge of female anatomy. They are generally, of course, someone else’s husband.
On Christopher Marlowe, 1992
Why did the secret services bother with the young literati? Because they were clever, and good at understanding plots; because they always needed money; because they were footloose and willing to travel; because they had the entrée to great households, and could be induced to spy on their patrons.
To men of this mentality, religion was the servant of the state. It kept the masses quiet– such men acknowledged, in that respect, the atheist’s objection to faith– and it also provided a touchstone of allegiance.
Once you have praised The Reckoning for its sharp focus, it seems ungracious to carp at it for not taking an overview. To get the best from the book you need to understand about the succession problem, about Elizabeth’s constant equivocation, about the efforts of her ministers to stampede and panic her into action; you need to know why the secret service was necessary. Could Nicholl not have provided a swift, synoptic background? Of course, specialists would have quarrelled with it, but it would have supplied the one lack in his fascinating book. He doesn’t usually make the mistake of assuming the reader knows everything he knows, but there are areas of obscurity. He refers, in a phrase, to the Lopez affair. Has he explained it somewhere? The book is, necessarily, one-paced and choked with detail; you might blink and miss something. But ‘Lopez’ is not in the index: so perhaps he hasn’t explained.
The Murder of James Bulger, 1997
There are times when As If takes on the air of a set of writing exercises. Blake Morrison goes to a restaurant alone, watches three couples, makes up stories about their relationships. We’ve all done it, but it’s slightly indecent to do it cold on the page.
It would not serve any purpose to summarise what Blake Morrison has discovered about the family life of the two young accused– except to say, that with its run-around fathers and suicidal mothers, it is not too different from the home life of our own dear queen. Deprivation, neglect, violence: there is a monotonous circularity to it, it hasn’t the shape of a good story. Sometimes, in order to find enough story to tell, Morrison has to invent naivety in himself. He has to spend pages misunderstanding, refusing to accept that the legal system isn’t going to change in mid-trial. It is not difficult to grasp the essentials.
There are questions here that need to be addressed in the language of human rights, not the language of pity and empathy. Nothing that Blake Morrison adduces can convince the reader, or would convince a court, that the boys were incapable of forming the intent to murder. To insist that they were so incapable diminishes them as moral beings. For the most humane of reasons, Blake Morrison wants to take away part of the responsibility from Thompson and Venables. But to do that is to take away part of their humanity. If two ten-year-olds of normal intelligence cannot tell right from wrong, and do not know killing is wrong– then what is the worth of a ten-year-old? Blake Morrison confuses the concept of ‘the age of reason’ with the fact of ‘the age of criminal responsibility’. (The latter is 18, he says, in Romania– a country notoriously concerned with child welfare.)
It is strange that people think– and many people do think it– that the way to protect children is to deprive them of status, to reduce them to something less than adults. It is possible that to adopt the kinds of system Morrison and Sereny advocate would effect this reduction, and create a system where children have fewer rights than at present and are even less protected.
Consider Sereny, in her new preface to The Case of Mary Bell. ‘Can it be right to subject young children to the awesome formality of a jury trial? How can a jury be expected to understand the thought processes, the emotions or language of children?’ But why should they not? Have they not been children? Have they not memories? Can only psychologists and social workers understand children? Is the whole concept of childhood to be medicalised? Is childhood a pathological state?
It is certainly undesirable to make the lives of poor people into public property; why is it that from those who have least, and have suffered most, even privacy is taken away? Blake Morrison’s plea is for understanding, more understanding, more understanding still. What if I am the object of all this understanding? What if your understanding looks to me like interference, like expropriation, like colonisation? I am not sure that we should indulge ourselves in our favourite pastime of exploring the nature of evil. Perhaps all we need do is to say, with Rousseau: ‘There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something.’ And to know that everything can be salvaged, this side of the grave.
Britain’s Last Witch, 2001
Gaskill does not try to work out how much money Duncan made, but is certain that the various bodies and societies who exhibited her took a much greater share of the proceeds of her work. By the evidence he gives of changes in her family’s circumstances, she made enough to lift them out of poverty; this was achieved by a tough schedule and constant travelling, and by submitting herself to physical indignities at which a prostitute might baulk.
The Hair Shirt Sisterhood, 2004
Though the temporarily thin find it easy to preach against the fat, we are much more interested by anorexia than by obesity. We all understand self-indulgence but are afraid that self-denial might be beyond us. We are fascinated by anyone who will embrace it– especially if there’s no money in it for them.
The case is now altered. The ideal body is attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a CEO, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated six-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.
The People’s Robespierre, 2006
From 1791, Robespierre lived quietly with the family of a master carpenter, whose daughter may or may not have been his fiancée, and probably, Scurr thinks, wasn’t his lover. It’s not much to go on. The writer, and the reader, knows that an unrecorded private life doesn’t mean there was none. It just means that it’s private.
Scurr keeps her promise to be Robespierre’s friend; at this distance, a critical friend can get close without the risk of a falling-out leading to rapid decapitation. Her book is a straightforward narrative history, and she is a steady guide through complex events. It is judicious, balanced, and admirably clear at every point. Her explanations are economical and precise, her examples well chosen and imaginative, and her quotations from original sources pointed and apt. It is quite the calmest and least abusive history of the revolution you will ever read.
Was he duplicitous himself? He was not consistent, and Scurr sees why. He made a sharp distinction between what was possible in a country at peace and a country under threat from external aggression and civil war. In ordinary times, he thought, there was no need for capital punishment, because the state had enough power to constrain the criminal and render him harmless. But in a time of war, when the state was subject to sabotage, it could not necessarily protect itself; you could not ask the soldier to kill enemies on the battlefield if the state did not have similar sanctions for its internal enemies. Similarly, he was anti-censorship, taking the principle of freedom of expression so seriously that he would have carried it to a logical conclusion and permitted pornography. But once again, the principle must give way before the greater necessity of national defence: a government at war cannot, he thought, allow its journalists to be the enemy within.
Marian Devotion, 2009
In the Catholic world in which I grew up, men were ministers of grace, and women mopped the church floor on a Friday night with big soggy string mops.
On Danton, 2009
But Lawday creates some great set pieces and striking turning points. At Danton’s first meeting with Mirabeau: ‘The two men had sat inspecting each other in silence for some minutes, impressed by each other’s ugliness.’
Meeting the Devil, 2010
Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands.
Royal Bodies, 2013
But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. You will remember how the young Diana taught for a few hours a week at a kindergarten called Young England, and when it was first known that she was Charles’s choice of bride, the press photographed her, infants touchingly gathered around; but they induced her to stand against the light, so in the resulting photograph the nation could see straight through her skirt. A sort of licentiousness took hold, a national lip-smacking. Those gangling limbs were artlessly exposed, without her permission. It was the first violation.
On Charles Brandon, 2016
What does it mean, to be lacking in Tudor? If Tudor is terror in the name of the church and torture in the name of the state, iconoclasm, cruelty to animals and poor sanitation, the castle must fall short.
Two years on, Anne gave birth to a second girl, and died. Later, when Charles got around to thinking about the formalities, he was able to disentangle all this, obtaining with seeming ease a dispensation from the pope freeing him from the Mortimer marriage. Margaret at some stage had an illegitimate child by a priest; Charles had three recognised illegitimate children who, confusingly, share names with his legitimate ones. The addled writers of the HBO series The Tudors strained every nerve to come up with sensational storylines, without rivalling the truth of these people’s lives.
Though Charles’s career was packed with spectacular incident, it lacks the final flourish of an execution, which probably accounts for his comparatively low profile in Tudor pop mythology. A natural death, for one of Henry’s councillors, seems an almost unnatural feat. Charles managed it because he was in no way Henry’s rival, though he was his accredited double: as a commentator on the site the Tudor Enthusiast puts it, ‘the original Charles Brandon is same fat ugly dude like henry the 8th himself, perhaps that’s why he likes him so much.’ Henry must sometimes have wondered what his ministers thought of him, not as a king but as a man– but from Charles he could count on straightforward admiration and gratitude.