I am covering Sam Leith’s beat while he’s away. Read my Evening Standard column here. Enjoyment guaranteed, or your money back. I can say that, now the Evening Standard is free.
Archive for the ‘Comment’ Category
January 4th, 2010
Peasants online
I am both a medieval nerd and a neophile. So I will be following with interest the links between the fourteenth century and new forms of electronic publishing in 2010, not least because Summer of Blood is now available to buy on Amazon Kindle.
Many of my fellow writers are suspicious of e-Books and e-readers, worrying that they will displace the printed book entirely, to the ruin of authors, detriment of humanity etc. I have mixed feelings, erring ever-more towards being very excited by the possibilities of e-publishing, once a really good portable device hits the market. (Probably this will be the iSlate/iPad/iWhatever.)
This thought came to me as I was reading John Naughton’s excellent piece on Kindlemania in today’s MediaGuardian.
December 21st, 2009
Canterbury, NY
I have subscribed to the New Yorker for a few years now. (Friday afternoons, I usually take that and the Speccie to the pub. They’re good reading partners, despite the difference in political outlook and tone.)
There’s not a whole lot of good stuff on medieval history covered in the New Yorker, so this week it was with some delight I read this piece by Joan Acocella about Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales. Well worth a look, although I’m afraid the link I’ve provided only directs to an abstract of the much-longer article. You’ll have to subscribe to get the full thing. (Or maybe wait awhile? Sometimes they put stuff up after a delay of a few weeks.)
Poor old Peter Ackroyd, a writer I very much admire, takes a bit of a kicking from Acocella for his free-handed retelling of the Tales. I doubt he minds very much. If he does, he shouldn’t. Granted, the combination of a prose rendition and Ackroyd’s pottymouthed generosity with modern profanity gives his version of the tales a very different feel to the original. The poetry is literally lost in translation. But then, isn’t all poetry? If you want to inhale the spirit of Chaucer, just read the original. Middle English ain’t that hard, and every decent verse edition out there has extensive footnotes to help you along the way.
Ackroyd’s book, as it says quite pointedly in the title, is a retelling. It’s a spirited modern take, and a good introduction both to Ackroyd and to Chaucer.
Anyway, subscribe to the New Yorker, read the piece and have a very Merry Christmas.
November 5th, 2009
An attack of general feebleness
David Cameron’s letter to The Sun today hasn’t cut much mustard with hardline Eurosceptic Tory MEPs. Nor, one suspects, has the foggy repositioning of Tory policy on Europe in the light of the Lisbon Treaty’s ratification done much to endear Cameron to those in the party base who are suspicious of his preference for power over idoelogical purity. (Guido has a good statement of the position).
But what of the electorate at large? We were promised a referendum on Europe by Labour. They lied to us. Whether you are a Europhile or Eurosceptic, that should make you angry. But on this, as with so much else, we are all possessed of a general feebleness as the Government does with our lives what they please.
August 28th, 2009
Climate change camp v proper rebellion
Here’s an exercise in (un)historical imagination. It is June 1381. You are Wat Tyler, leading a ragtag army of villagers from Kent and Essex on a righteous crusade of justice against corrupt government, punitive taxation and social injustice.
You are on the way to Blackheath, where you intend to set up camp. But on the way there, you step through a wormhole in the fabric of space-time and end up in August 2009.
When you arrive at your destination, you are startled to find that the whole place has been taken over by a load of Hampstead hippies, with foldaway Brompton bicycles, buck-teeth and deferred places to study PPE at Oxford.
Several of them are strumming guitars and a working group is pitching a wigwam, using the camp-building skills they picked up doing their Duke of Edinburgh bronze award.
Tell me seriously that you do not feel your hand tighten around the handle of your pitchfork.
- Read the rest at The Evening Standard website.
August 3rd, 2009
Riding through the glen, etc
Last month I reviewed a couple of new books about Robin Hood for The Times. (You can read the piece here.) I signed off with a slightly cheap shot at Russell Crowe, who has been cast to play Robin in Ridley Scott’s new film, due next summer and currently filming in Wales.
Robin Hood is an essential part of the tradition of popular English literature, and has worn a thousand different faces and causes since he first appeared (probably) in the thirteenth century. But the tendency has been for him to become softer, slushier (and more socialist) with each passing age. The two big films that have been made about him in my lifetime have been the appallingly cheesy ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ and the Disney version in which Robin was played, as I recall, by a rather gay little fox.
None of this is really true to the original Hood tradition. The medieval tales were violent. Robin was uncompromising and fairly unlikeable at times. So in fact, I do think Crowe is a decent pick to play Robin. He’s rough around the edges. He’s grumpy. He’s good with a sword.
The question is whether the script, which has apparently been through a number of rewrites, has stayed true to the original suggestion that Crowe’s Robin will be a dark and morally ambiguous creation, probably related to Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale’s gruff and bothered Batman. I do hope it has.
The life of a peasant in 2010
Describing unenlightened folk such as Islamic fundamentalists as ‘medieval’ is commonplace nowadays. Columnists do it out of idleness when they’re seeking a single word that implies unenlightened, old-fashioned and cruel. Politicians do it because they know it is controversial enough to make headlines, without actually being racist.
But sometimes, just sometimes, calling a modern society medieval is entirely accurate. Read this, from the English-language Pakistani news site The International News. There’s tantalisingly little reporting, but here’s the first line, just to whet your appetite:
“Twenty-eight bonded labourers, including women and children, were freed from the private jail of Haji Sher Jamali, a local PML-Q leader, police said on Tuesday.”