My blog

Category: Book Review

  • Sir Paul McCartney’s Lyrics: “geniality and humility”

    Christopher Jackson

    I once commissioned Paul Muldoon for a poem for a magazine for which I was editing the poetry section. He was very responsive to the idea that the readers of a high end luxury magazine ought to have some poetry in their life. I made it clear I would pay £100.

    Muldoon sent a poem which was really a song lyric and I still remember it’s refrain: “It’s been an uphill battle to go downhill all the way.”

    Incidentally, when I tried to pay Muldoon he went mysteriously dark, though his home address was on his email. When I was next in New York, I took a hundred dollars down to his apartment on the Upper West Side, and gave it to his wife, Muldoon being out of town in New Jersey.

    I later discovered that he was financially secure many times over. He simply didn’t need the money and wasn’t interested in it.

    In that he was a strange kind of poet. I didn’t know then that this was the same apartment which Paul McCartney had begun occasionally visiting in order to have the conversations which make up this book. Had I known, I might have stayed around a bit.

    This book, writes McCartney in the foreword, was a far more feasible project than a straight autobiography: the songs, in any case, tell the story of his life better than a prose book. The book is the product of a series of enviable conversations between Muldoon and McCartney, but with Muldoon’s contributions elided.

    In some respects, this is a shame as I expect the back and forth would in some ways have been more interesting than what we are presented with here. Muldoon is one of the greatest poets of our time, and would be greater still if he could always bring himself to write comprehensibly. I expect some of what we have here would be more exciting if we could hear the pair of them sparking off each other.

     

    With the conversations divided into chapters centred around songs, some of them can seem a bit perfunctory – a couple of pages for ‘A Day in the Life’, that remarkable work, about which books could be written. There is much that could be said about McCartney’s contribution in the second part of the song after the titanic crescendo of the orchestra, which isn’t touched on here.

     

    McCartney has in the past said it was a song he’d had lying around. It would have been interesting to know the process by which the two were yoked together. Though the truth is, for most of the time in songwriting, the songwriter is in receipt of forces he won’t understand and there is a sense in which McCartney can sometimes seem a baffled visitor on his own songwriting past.

    But this is to carp about what we don’t have instead of to celebrate what was actually managed. We should be grateful for this: McCartney is a world-historical figure who is far busier than most, and it’s good that he found the time for us at all.

    Besides there are some moments of real insight. For instance, in ‘All My Loving’, McCartney points out that it is an epistolary love song in the vein of Fats Waller’s ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’. But it is also to do with being on the road and not being able to see your love. That makes Lennon’s triad chords in the rhythm guitar all the more suitable because it mimics train tracks, and the rickety motion of transport.

    I’ve always liked McCartney. Lennon could be cruel in a way unthinkable for McCartney, and cruel to McCartney too. I think it probably stemmed from work ethic. Lennon had a sort of lazy streak which probably irked McCartney who, born with a gift which often seems to emanate from some other dimension, seems to have been born with a kind of duty to be true to it.

    He’s still hurt, of course. Things turned out better than they might have with Lennon, because at least they weren’t actively warring with each other. Apparently they had a nice conversation on their final meeting about baking bread.

    Strange forces brought these two together. It continues to feel marvellous that in Liverpool at that time, these four boys were permitted to meet, that their music found its audience. They then hit upon, and at the same time had a share in creating, a historical moment which we are only just beginning to understand.

    It was freedom: the freedom to experiment and to find out who and what one loved. And it was love, as McCartney has often pointed out, which underpinned it all. Over eight wonderful years, ‘Love Me Do’ became ‘And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make’.

    After that, McCartney got lucky domestically with Linda Eastman, and here and there the music falls off a bit. That seems to be a law of popular music: the energy of youth can only come once. It is invisible in those simple chord sequences which gave us She Loves You: there is a primal urge driving it forward which could only come once.

    Sometimes a magnificent song would come along: ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, ‘Band on the Run’, and much later, ‘Beautiful Night’.

     

    But something went out of McCartney’s life forever when John, with the malicious glee which sometimes characterised him, announced that he was leaving the Beatles. It appealed to John’s wrecking ball nature to destroy the thing he loved.

    It never appealed to McCartney – and still doesn’t. Every time we have a new initiative with the Beatles today – such as the AI project Now and Then, you feel that McCartney is the driving force. He wants to be back in Abbey Road again. Perhaps he wants to be young again.

    Yet this is to paint him as more melancholy than he actually is: optimism has always marked McCartney – a sense that somehow or other everything will be alright. His songs almost always insist on a good outcome, sometimes amidst sadness. Jude will make it right if he lets it be. Even Yesterday, on the face of it a very sad song, seems to resolve that sadness by the end: perhaps yesterday in that song is a place where the singer will one day comfortably reflect. It is a place he will one day revisit.

    That is what this book is, a kind of reckoning. It would have been possible to have done it differently and just published the transcripts as Seamus Heaney did in Stepping Stones and as Nick Cave did with Faith, Hope and Carnage.

    But it’s good to have this book. It doesn’t really alter McCartney’s reputation too much since he was already in the stratosphere anyway: it simply proves that genius can sometimes go hand in hand with geniality and humility. And if that’s the case with McCartney, it certainly had better be the case with us who, whatever our virtues, never had it in us to write ‘’Eleanor Rigby’.

  • Theresa May’s ‘Abuse of Power’: An Insightful Memoir – A Review by Christopher Jackson

    Theresa May’s ‘Abuse of Power’: An Insightful Memoir, by Christopher Jackson

     

    The memoir by the departed leader has evolved a little since Winston Churchill’s confident predictions regarding his own six volume account of his own premiership, “History shall be kind to me, as I intend to write it.” No PM today would expect to have the field to themselves quite as Churchill did.

    Nevertheless, we expect to hear from our prime ministers once they leave office – nowadays, this usually occurs just after Sir Anthony Seldon has told us, with his usual authority, what really happened – warts and all. In terms of UK Prime Ministers, the worst for my money is Tony Blair’s A Journey which could certainly have done with a proper edit, and the best is arguably by the man whom he defeated in 1997, Sir John Major.

    The biggest difficulty with the genre is that what one has to say will usually in some way impact the current incumbent, and most people who have been PM have such a vivid memory of the difficulty of the job that they have no wish to make daily life any harder on their successor than it is already likely to be.

    But there are other problems: one is practical, and the other moral. Practically, the writer needs to be discreet about many decisions, often leading to a banal narrative as happened in the case of Bill Clinton who may well be accused of having written the most boring book of all time in the shape of My Life.

    Morally speaking, one must justify one’s tenure while also avoid looking too self-serving. Typically the man – or woman – of action won’t have the literary experience to walk such a tightrope.

    Theresa May has bypassed all this and written one of the best of prime ministerial memoirs. She has done so largely by taking herself out of the equation. The quality and originality of this book is somewhat unexpected: May was never known when prime minister for her fluency as a speaker.

    In fact, the office seems often to have constricted her powers of expression, and the reader will sometimes wish that if she could think and write like this, that she should have done so more freely when she was the nation’s leader. At a recent Finito event she gave a brilliant exposition of her social care policy – the very same policy which she had once struggled to elucidate on the campaign trail in 2017.

    The point about Theresa May is that she was the most moral prime minister since Gladstone. Had things gone a little differently – especially had she not called that disastrous Snap General Election in 2017 – I think she had the work ethic, the quiet vision, and the character to be a great prime minister. Her grasp of detail was second to none. Brexit wouldn’t have been done without her hard work, and I don’t know of anybody on any side of the political divide who doesn’t admire her stance on modern slavery. Which politician since Wilberforce has found an issue of such importance and done so much to raise it in the public awareness?

    This memoir then, which is both brilliantly written and full of a central truth which we need to heed, is partly a reminder of what might have been. But it’s more than that – because it tells us what we have become. The book begins with May leaving office and adjusting to life outside Number 10:

    Having more time to think about my experience enabled me to consider the themes that underpinned the issues I encountered. Because, although in some sense every problem or opportunity I dealt with was different, over time I started to understand the similarities between them and to recognise more clearly what had driven behaviours and hence outcomes.

     

    And what was this? It was, writes May, a fundamental misunderstanding about the very nature of power and politics. She argues powerfully throughout this book that we have lost our sense of service in relation to others; further, she states that this is especially the case when it comes to decision-makers. This insight becomes a sort of skeleton key which unlocks a huge amount of what we have seen over the past 14 years, and it is certainly not confined to the Conservatives, though I note in passing that I think Sir Keir Starmer would surely agree with its central thesis.

    What Theresa May is describing is exactly the sort of immorality pandemic which Starmer made the centre of his first speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5th June. May explains the problem in its entirety in her excellent introduction:

    By personal interest, I don’t mean personal financial interest. This is much wider than that. It is about seeking to further your own interests, protecting your position, ensuring you can’t be blamed, making yourself look good, protecting your power and in so doing keeping yourself in power.

     

    Theresa May has placed her finger on the problem, and she is also the right person to be sending out this message. Whatever was said about her when Prime Minister, I don’t recall anyone saying that she was out for herself.

    This is partly due to her upbringing. I have always felt a sense of sympathy towards Theresa May because of what happened to her parents, and also often wondered at her quiet strength regarding it. Her father’s death in a car accident and her mother’s death from Multiple Sclerosis at a time when there were far fewer treatments than there are today cannot help but be central biographical facts. Not only has she navigated them, but she has done so without trying to gain popularity by her having done so. This dignity is extremely rare – and was mistaken for froideur when she held the highest office in the land.

    But in Abuse of Power she writes elegantly about what growing up as the daughter of a vicar means to her:

     

    Perhaps the background of growing up as a vicar’s daughter is not so far removed from the requirements of being a senior politician as it might at first seem. As a child of the vicarage, you are not just yourself, and you are not just seen as representing your parents (although when your father is the local vicar, that is more significant than it is for most children). Like it or not, you are also a representative of a wider body – the Church.

    This observation enables May to make an admission that wouldn’t be so powerful had it not just been shored up with her understanding of how the world works: “There were times [when a senior politician] when I stopped myself from making a funny aside or what I thought was a humorous quip because it could have been taken out of context,” she writes.

    She did play it safe this respect – and she did so too much. I’m sure she sometimes reflects that she might have been braver in showing the electorate who she really was.

    But though it is too late for that, it’s not too late for this book. If we accept that this form of naked individualism has become a problem, then by applying that insight to the problems of the day, we can begin to see that problem’s scale. Whether she is looking at Hillsborough or Primodos, at Putin and Ukraine or at Grenfell, the idea that power has been abused is an effective microscope by which to see what has really been going on. The effect is of a light shone on public life – and therefore on us for allowing the perpetrators to be there.

    Nor is this book without answers. Towards the end of it Theresa May writes:

     

    I referred earlier to there being too many careerist politicians in Parliament today. I was reminded of this in a conversation I had recently with a young woman who showed an interest in politics. I said we needed more good women in Parliament, and asked if she was interested in becoming an MP. She had indeed given it some thought and was not dismissing the possibility, but she wanted to know how to become a Cabinet minister. This misses the point. The core of an MP’s job is providing service for their constituents. Anyone who doesn’t see that as good enough in itself is failing to understand the essence of our democracy.

    ‘Dismissing the possibility’ is very good – it amounts to a very telling character sketch in three words. It’s one of many insights in an important book which I hope the huge number of new MPs will read. Theresa May’s premiership has some of the hallmarks of a missed opportunity, but this book doesn’t repeat that error. It’s both a powerful indictment of our core motives as a society and, in its implications, a call to arms for us to do better. And when it comes to that, as I’m sure Sir Keir Starmer would agree, there’s no time like the present.

     

    For more book reviews see these links:

     

    Review: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries

    Book Review: Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die

     

  • Lee Elliot Major – The Good Parent Educator: Book Review (2024)

    The Good Parent Educator by Lee Elliot Major, a review by Evgenia Lazareva

    I have been following Lee Elliot Major’s inspiring work for some time now. A global leader in his field, he advocates for social mobility and empowering parents. The captivating title perfectly defines a new era of parents post pandemic, which we all became involuntarily. Raising a young child in London puts immense and constant pressure to get it right education-wise, despite me working in the industry, so as soon as I saw the book, I clicked order.  

    It was just what I needed. A comprehensive step by step guide, an insightful education roadmap – from birth to workplace. Backed up by solid and thorough research, yet so easy to read, it is cleverly structured, with fascinating facts, key takeaways, and useful bits of advice. You can independently explore each area and dig deeper thanks to helpful additional reading and references provided at the end of every chapter. The author speaks as a parent and educator, thus making it very relatable.

    It also could not have come at a better time: emerging from lockdowns, still slightly traumatised by home schooling, it’s the right time to be rethinking education entirely. As parents, we desperately try to get our children ahead in this turbulent reality. We are also exhausted, confused, and some even consider relocating to the sunnier climates and leaving this “educational arms race” behind (I know I am). Wherever you end up, the information that Elliot Major presents in this book is applicable to any family. 

    It compels the reader to “reflect on what you think education is for”. It is not “just grades”, but the fact remains that certain university degrees result in much higher earnings. Do you then aim for Oxbridge, or look at the bigger picture? “Parents are the single biggest predictor of children’s life outcomes”, says Elliot Major. No pressure then. It is about balance, finding out what matters most to your child and using available resources and information. The good news? “Most things turn out to be ok in the end”.

    So how do you become a good parent educator? If you do only one thing, “instil a love of reading” in your child. Ok, I think I have nailed that one. If you are struggling, Elliot Major offers practical and realistic tips to succeed. The section on choosing schools struck a (painful) chord. It completely consumes parents and often is a significant expenditure. Read that chapter very carefully before going to any school visits, and you will be well equipped.

    Unfortunately, parents can’t solely rely on schools to deliver results. The evidence in the book states that “what happens outside, not inside, the school gates” and “stable and supportive home background” are key for academic success. Work needs to be done at home, and not just the homework (which is more important in secondary than primary). Children need help with their mindset, motivation, and efforts, and to “light the creative or sporting spark.” Elliot Major believes that “children should devote as much time to arts and sports as to scholarly study” as they are “central to human development”. I could not agree more and instantly felt better about myself as a parent educator by the end of chapter seven.

    The research on attainment of summer born children was eye opening. It is disappointing that our rigid system needs that much challenging. But there are things that can be done: in particular, don’t be afraid to become your child’s advocates. Elliot Major further explores tutoring, digital exposure, learning styles, assessments, and a few other significant areas that parents must be aware of.

    The book culminates at life after school: apprenticeships, universities, Oxbridge, and venturing into the job market. Once again, Elliot Major stresses that no matter which path you choose – and there is a case to be made for each of them – “nurturing essential life skills’ is crucial when stepping into the real world of work (and avoiding your adult children living with you).

    Wherever you are on your child’s educational journey, the knowledge and advice in this book are valuable. There is even a little quiz at the end for readers, which took me completely by surprise, but I did well. I will be re-reading this book as my child grows and in moments of parenting doubts, and will continue to empower my inner Good Parent Educator.

    The writer is the co-founder of Collab Education

  • Dame Esther Rantzen’s ‘Older & Bolder’: An Inspiring Journey – A Review by Ronel Lehmann

    Older & Bolder

    Dame Esther Rantzen

     

     

     

    I often remind our student candidates that is normal to be nervous before an interview. At their age, I was so very fortunate to shadow Esther Rantzen from her green room to live broadcast on BBC That’s Life and Hearts of Gold. The minute before she waited to walk on to receive rapturous live audience applause, you could see stage fright kick in and the shear look of terror on her face. Of course, it was all gone as quick as it arrived once the programme titles started rolling. It is good that in her golden years, she is still inspiring the next generation with her wisdom.

    Her sixth book Over entitled “Older & Bolder” is crammed with advice, gleaned from her own experience, what she has learned as a journalist, author and broadcaster, and from what she has been told on the rare occasions when she has actually listened to somebody else who turned out to be worth hearing.

    This energising book charts her time travels through her most significant memories, from meeting Princess Diana to creating a national outrage with a mischievous short film about a driving dog and reflects with candour and humour on the life lessons she has learned, revealing the hints, hacks and personal philosophies that have been her secrets to surviving almost everything.

    We may not all achieve what Dame Esther has, but here we can soak up her wisdom, laughter and learn from her, embracing the passing years and march boldly on.

    Over a career spanning five decades Dame Esther Rantzen has appeared in more than 2,000 television broadcasts, in her regular contributions to political and news programmes, including The One Show, she especially advocates protecting vulnerable people and growing old ungracefully. She is also a reality TV favourite with appearances on Strictly Come Dancing, First Dates, and I’m a Celebrity. As a journalist, she writes for the Daily mail, the Guardian, the Telegraph and The Times.

    She was awarded a DBE in 2015 for her services to children and older people, through her pioneering work as founder of Childline and The Silver Line.

    I am still in touch with Dame Esther today. Sadly, she was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Her quote “Remember that history is written by the survivors, be bolder as you grow older and make sure you float above any challenges that threaten to overwhelm you,” will resonate with all those who have had the privilege of meeting or working with her and the audiences of tens of millions who avidly placed their trust in her during a career spanning five decades.

    Her generosity of spirit to others less fortunate will always live on.

  • Steve Brill’s The Death of Truth: Unveiling the Web of Lies

    Book Review of The Death of Truth by Steve Brill, Finito World

     

    Dustin Thompson was living in Columbus, Ohio and getting along more or less fine in the pests control industry when the pandemic came along. As Covid took hold, he lost his job which led to a notable increase in time spent online. Eventually, he would be among those who perpetrated the 6th January Capitol Riots. His weapon? A coatrack.

    It’s a weird image – and perhaps it fits somehow with the sorts of weird states we can get ourselves into when we try to twist reality. Steve Brill’s book is an examination of how we got here, and it’s no surprise at all to find that the Internet is to blame. Specifically he notes that Section 230 – a 1995 law in the US allowing internet providers to police their own platforms and granting them immunity over content, no matter how far-fetched – was a landmark moment which nobody much noticed at the time.

    So what can be done? Brill suggests that Section 230 – and presumably similar provisions globally – be amended to take into account dangerous algorithms. He also argues for the scrapping of online anonymity, as well as an end to partisan primaries, which he argues create an atmosphere of resentment, which itself leads to misinformation. Of course, the title is a bit misleading in that truth itself, if it is true, can’t actually die: what happens is that individuals become severed from it en masse. Perhaps there’s hope there – and also in this authoritative and well-written book.

  • Book review: A Chilling Account in “A Very Private School” by Charles Spencer

    Finito World

     

    Many people who have been to boarding school will recognise the following question and answer. “When you think of the school, what’s the one word that comes to mind?” “Fear”. This establishes the theme of Charles Spencer’s book which raises many questions around privilege and trauma in our society. Spencer’s time at Maidwell Hall, where he boarded for five years in the 1970s, was truly awful, and the writer makes multiple allegations of sexual abuse about the staff there, sometimes naming them. It is extremely brave of him to speak out about his experiences. Spencer also manages to do more than simply to convey them – sometimes he is able to understand them, suggesting that this book has been the product of a considerable amount of painful reflection. “’Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth, and desperate for attention and affection,” he writes of one unnamed assistant matron who seems to have treated him especially badly.  Are things any better today? One hopes so, as much of this book is alarming to read. But I don’t think boarding school, since it involves wresting children from their parents at a young age, can ever really take fear out of the equation.

     

  • Book review: Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House and the World by Jen Psaki

    Finito World

     

    Jen Psaki has become a Democratic sage by virtue of having served in both the Obama and the Biden administrations, the latter for 16 months. In today’s polarised America, it was never expected to be a pro-Trump memoir, and it isn’t – but it also has a certain nuance which can be missing from the typical score-settling memoir. We get some vignettes of life at the top of politics. Barack Obama proves relaxed about her taking on the role of Director of Communications and then needing to go on maternity leave. Joe Biden is surprised to hear that he doesn’t help the grieving family members as much as he hopes to when he tries to relate their loss back to the loss of his own son Beau. ‘I thought I was helping them’. At one point, John Kerry makes a gaffe and Psaki learns the importance of quick feedback: it’s often better to speak your mind on the spot, than to pause and let a matter linger. At another point she observes, “Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them.” I suppose this is true, though, like a lot of the wisdom in this book, bordering on the obvious. Nevertheless, it’s worth a look.

  • The Poet at Work I: Tishani Doshi

    The Poet at Work I: Tishani Doshi

    As the government seemingly reduces the importance of poetry on the national curriculum, by making its study optional at the GCSE level, Finito World is introducing this regular series aimed at illustrating the utility of poetry, and examining the relationship between literature and the workplace. Poets are asked to produce a poem which speaks to what our first featured poet, Tishani Doshi, calls ‘ideas of work, leisure, community, labour, decoration, and poetry and the space we create for it all. ‘ After we produce the poem, we then give the reader a Q & A touching on the life of the poet and their relationship with work.


    Tishani Doshi is a poet and novelist born in what was then Madras in 1975. She has built an international reputation on the back of her poetry and novels – for which she has won many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her novels have also been critically acclaimed. Her most recent Small Days and Nights has been shortlisted for the Tata Best Fiction Award 2019 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020.


    In ‘Postcard from Work’ readers will immediately be relieved by the exotic colours – ‘the yellow trumpet flowers’ and the ‘sunbirds…diving in and out of this den of gold.’ It is a poem which begins in a blaze of light. It is a piece ostensibly about work, but where little work is done – except the perhaps more vital work of paying tribute to the natural world, and mulling our place in it. Sometimes the best we have to offer our masters is to take a mental holiday from the tasks they have set us to do.


    Doshi knows that we were not born only to consider ‘the price of milk’ but to find ways of being which let death know we mean to ‘hold on.’ Work has to be done – and someone has to do it, and that will mean taking a break from dreaming. Doshi zooms out to show us what tasks lie unfinished around the narrator: we might be in a seamstress’ (‘someone else will tend the hem’) or even at a vet (‘someone else will pry open the dog’s jaw’). All our leisure, the moments we snatch, must be supported by drudgery elsewhere. Doshi also makes her living as a dancer, and her poems always have something of dance about them – they are miracles of rhythm and movement, and full of a joy which does what poetry should do: her poems are the antidote we didn’t know we needed until they came our way.

     

    Postcard from Work 

     

    Forgive me, I have been busy 

    with the yellow trumpet flowers.

    They dance uselessly, slivers

    of rapture. I know the dishes

    need washing but the sunbirds

    are diving in and out of this den

    of gold. Their dark purple wings

    are soft nets, intimate with the leaves.

    Beaks poised to receive nectar. There are 

    days I neglect my beard. I grow tired 

    of digging. I imagine someone else

    will tend the hem, the torn sleeve.

    Someone else will pry open 

    the dog’s jaw for his evening pill. 

    Our throats are in constant need

    of shelter.


    I’ve sublet a room   

    to a poet who does not know 

    the price of milk but is ready 

    to lay down her spear and surgical

    instruments, to worship the roots

    of this labyrinth. If there is rain

    and soil, onions will grow. After 

    a day in the field, the poet and I 

    sit around a fire to sing. It is a way 

    of letting death know we mean to hold

    on. The threshold stays warm. We flick

    at night with a fly-brush, cheat insects

    of their audience with a chorus 

    resurrected from silence. Think 

    of the performance of this lament

    as our hunger, of the armchair

    in the corner, our repose. 

    Underneath, is a footstool 

    that hides.


    What is the interplay in your life between dance and poetry? Is it an entirely fruitful one or can it be said to be in any way antagonistic?


    Poetry came first, but in a way, poetry only came into being once I had dance. They’ve never been antagonistic, unless you count yearning for one, while you’re engaged in the other? But that feels such a natural way of being in the world. Both require a kind of vulnerability and strength – the making of your own vocabulary. When I’m in a lazy mode, which is my most natural way of being, I wonder at both the worlds of poetry and dance, the capabilities we don’t imagine for ourselves. 


    How do you find the business side of your writing life? Many writers I know struggle with invoices/tax/the admin of it all? But then I think that can also be a cliché and many writers be surprisingly scrappy and hard-headed?


    I studied business administration and communications before ditching it for poetry, so I can get around economics and accountancy alright, but that’s not to say I thrill in it. I move in waves. Sometimes I’m terribly productive about everything – to-do lists and all. Other times I want to be left alone to watch the flowers. 


    The UK government has recently said that poetry should be optional at the GCSE level – a significant demotion in its importance on the curriculum. What is your view on that and what do you feel the impact will be?


    One of my first jobs was to teach an introduction to poetry and fiction class to students at Johns Hopkins University. It was a required class, most of my students were pre-med or engineering. I like to think as a result that in future dentist waiting rooms, there may be a volume of Elizabeth Bishop lying around, or that someone designing a bridge might dip into the poems of Imtiaz Dharker for inspiration. I don’t know what the UK government’s motivations for demoting poetry are, but I hope usefulness was not a factor. Everything is connected. I can’t imagine any kind of life that doesn’t need the intuition and imagination of poetry.


    What sort of role does poetry have in India – does the government encourage it sufficiently or is there tension in your country also on that score?


    Well, our current prime minister unfortunately published a volume of poems, called A Journey.  Historically, tyrants have had a thing for poetry (see Mao, Nero, Stalin, Mussolini Bin Laden), which gives poetry a bad rep. Poetry as I remember it in school was rather fossilized and distant. I think at the college level, there have been serious efforts to rejuvenate and decolonize the syllabus. In schools, I fear they may still be standing up in front of classrooms with hands clasped, reciting “charge of the light brigade.”  


    Was there a particular teacher when you were younger who turned you onto poetry?


    Yes. Her name was Cathy Smith Bowers. I took one of her classes as an undergraduate in college, and it changed my life. 


    What’s your favourite poem about the workplace?


    I read this as a work poem, because I love my work, and my work is poetry.


    Love is a Place by EE Cummings 


    love is a place
    & through this place of
    love move
    (with brightness of peace)
    all places

    yes is a world
    & in this world of
    yes live
    (skilfully curled)
    all worlds

  • Book review: Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge

    Christopher Jackson

     

    This is a fabulous book written by a man who thought he might be prime minister but who has instead become Britain’s premier political podcaster. It always used to be said during the Cameron years that Stewart was the easiest man to get an interview with – perhaps he has always been a creature of the media.

    But this book tells us what it’s like to be a person of real interest and imagination caught up in Westminster and ministerial life. “Stop being so interesting,” as Liz Truss, then environment secretary, had said to her junior minister. Skilled at taking her own advice, it was never to be expected that Stewart would be able to follow suit. By the time he arrived in Parliament he had already walked Afghanistan on foot.

    Anybody who can do that might not particularly enjoy being reined in by parliamentary whips. Stewart was always an unlikely MP – and an especially unlikely Conservative MP, not least because he had voted Labour in his teens. He was a man whose life had already attained filmic proportions by the time he was representing the lovely constituency of Penrith and the Border. Brad Pitt had taken an option on one of his books.

    This book, an important work of historical documentation, won’t cause a deluge of applications from would-be candidates to Conservative HQ. Here we meet the lordly and embedded civil servant who thinks he knows better than the prisons minister. We see Theresa May – to whom Stewart would be admirably loyal over the ill-fated Chequers agreement – ‘with some of the monarch’s stiff authority’ – offering him a Cabinet position. Overall he would hold six ministerial roles during that turbulent time.

    Stewart is still by turns baffled and angry at Boris Johnson’s premiership and is especially good at pointing out the absurdity of Johnson as a Foreign Secretary: “A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous and the comically over-stated had been trapped in a department whose religion was tact and caution,” he writes.

    Johnson’s ascendancy would turn out to be far briefer than he expected. Stewart would probably have stood a good chance of becoming leader under different rules; he was certainly the best debater in the field in 2019. It wasn’t to be – in this book Stewart alikens his predicament against the European Research Group as being like a book club at a Millwall Game. He was up against those who had spent a lifetime thinking about the perfidy of Europe – and, in the case of Sir Bill Cash, thinking about nothing else.

    The final verdict is a grim one: “Nine years in politics had been a shocking education in lack of seriousness. I had begun by noticing how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given,” Stewart writes. This book will also not do the impossible and rehabilitate Britain’s shortest-serving PM: “I had found, working for Liz Truss, a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation. I felt that we had collectively failed to respond adequately to every major challenge of the past 15 years: the financial crisis, the collapse of the liberal ‘global order’, public despair and the polarisation of Brexit.” So back to the media then – where politicians increasingly seem happier in any case.

     

  • Review: The Letters of Seamus Heaney

    Christopher Jackson

     

    I don’t think any writer would in their right mind refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there is a lot in this book to make one wonder whether it might be the right course of action should Stockholm call.

    However busy Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – ‘famous Seamus’ as Clive James dubbed him – might have been before he was awarded the prize in 1996, life was a constant deluge of correspondence from that point on. ‘In the last two days I have written 32 letters,’ Heaney writes to the artist Barrie Cooke in 1985, ‘all of them a weight that was lying on my mind even as the accursed envelopes lay week by week on my desk. The trouble is I have 32 more to write…’ Of course, he’s too generous to point out that Cooke is by definition in the second tranche of 32.

    All poets must carry out administration, but if every one of those letters could have been a poem, this book measures out a sort of loss – the replacement of the actual work by the business of being, to use Yeats’ phrase, ‘the smiling public man’.

    Heaney had a terrific set of cards: supportive parents; warm friends; and above all, an ideal wife in the academic Marie Heaney, who bore him three adored children. Marie was the centre of his existence, but no letters to her are included here, though they certainly exist. She is still alive, and it seems likely that there will be a subsequent volume after she passes to round out the picture.

    This is therefore a tale of considerable success which was ordained, one feels, from the first. In poetry, the premier publishing house is probably still Faber and Faber, as it was in Heaney’s lifetime – a legacy of the role TS Eliot played in building up the original poetry list. It has probably gone down a bit since then since independent publishing is on the rise generally, and the books don’t quite have the caché they once did.

    In Heaney’s day to be asked to submit to Faber – not to come cap in hand – was rare. This book begins in 1964 with Heaney in his early twenties doing just that. We start then at the crest of a lifelong wave of success: Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966, and has never been off the syllabus since. Famous friendships accrued: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley and so forth.

    It is also a tale of mentorship: Heaney could never resist lending a supportive voice to young poets, perhaps knowing his luck in having been elevated above his peers even from a young age. It was a network of support in relation to the endeavour of an art form which is at once charmed and economically hopeless. Even well-known poets need shoring up. ‘Poetry is small beer,’ as W.H. Auden observed. The readership is always small, and predominantly confined to fellow poets. Even Heaney, who achieved a Tiger Woods level of success, died with an estate matched by many middling solicitors. Tiger Woods himself has a yacht big enough to play golf on.

    It was always kind of him to write back to poets who needed it; this book shows us that he made so many peoples’ days. To get a letter from him would, for many poets, have constituted an instant trip to the framers. That he did this is wholly admirable.

    And I don’t think his doing it can easily be separated out from the quality of the poems, which emanate out of that same generosity of spirit. There is a kind of glow to Heaney’s poems which is to do with a good heart mining the world for consolation. These letters are like that too – and they show him to be a willing citizen in the republic of letters.

    Poetry, and increasingly, literature itself isn’t a career. What is a career is to teach in a university, and publish books on the side which sell to an audience of 200 if you’re lucky. Heaney knew that the ship of his success had created dinghy-loads of unread poets in its wake. Perhaps there was guilt to that – but if so, he converted that guilt into this special book.