Lost in translation

The BBC’s Hugh Schofield wonders why French books – and especially modern French novels – don’t sell abroad. This is in spite of the fact that France has a thriving literary culture, and despite the popularity of books translated into English from other European languages, notably Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The authors and readers interviewed by Schofield propose various reasons, ranging from the supposed elitism and intellectualism of French literary culture to the unexciting covers of French novels, and on the other side, the laziness and misconceptions of Anglophone publishers and readers.

I actually quite like French book covers, as well as French bookshops, which are described rather dismissively as ‘cramped and colourless’ in Schofield’s piece. Those unadorned cream covers, enlivened only by the author’s photograph, are surely what makes a book distinctively French - it wouldn’t look right to have a French novel that wasn’t in that familiar Flammarion, Gallimard or Livre de Poche style. I can see a number from where I’m sitting (see photo below), and they bring a breath of the Left Bank into the room. As for French bookshops, I’m rather fond of their uniform rows of identical-looking volumes and studiously highbrow demeanour – all very un-Waterstones, and long may it continue.

I wonder if the absence of modern French writing from British and American shelves has something to do with the fact that the small publisher Harvill (absorbed first into Harvill Secker and more recently into Random House), which was largely responsible in the post-war years for introducing English-speaking readers to contemporary European writers, had a bias towards other countries, such as Portugal, Russia, and the old Eastern bloc - or was it just that there happened to be a number of brilliant translators available from those nations? But then I've just remembered that Harvill published the detective stories of Daniel Pennac, so maybe I've got that wrong. (Perhaps my brother Michael, who used to work for Harvill, will read this and be able to help out here).


Whatever the explanation, Hugh Schofield is basically right in his assessment that a great deal of contemporary French literature remains untranslated into English. If a major Spanish author like Javier Marias or Javier Cercas brings out a new novel, you know it’ll only be a matter of time before an English translation appears, and that it will be enthusiastically picked up by the Sunday broadsheets, as well as by the LRB and New York Review of Books. But there’s rarely an equivalent process, or fuss, over a French literary success, apart from, as Schofield points out, the headline-grabbing Michel Houllebecq.


I confess to having a personal interest here, since I’ve developed a yearning to read a couple of recently-published French novels, and I’ve been frustrated at the absence of English translations. I discovered these books via one of my current favourite blogs – The Catholic English Teacher. I know it won’t appeal to my agnostic and atheist readers, but I think it’s one of the best literary blogs around - and I love the masthead. Despite the title, Roy Peachey, the blog’s author, is remarkably well-informed about a range of contemporary literatures in languages other than English, and especially in French. Having read his recommendations, I’m keen to track down L’art francais de la guerre by Alexis Jenni, which won the Prix Goncourt a couple of years ago, and also the work of Claire Daudin, who as well as being a prize-winning novelist is also an expert on Mauriac, Bernanos and Peguy. However, neither of these authors has yet had any of their writings translated into English.


There’s a particular pleasure in being able to read something, however brief – a short story, an article, a poem even – in the language in which it was written. But as it stands, my French isn’t quite up to it, despite the fact that I have an ‘A’ Level in the subject. You could see this as the fault of the British education system – a failure to teach languages so that people can actually use them – or a reflection of my own laziness and lack of linguistic flair. I did only get an ‘E’, after all. Mind you, I enjoyed sixth-form French: watching Mr Levine pacing back and forth, gesticulating expressively as he went into raptures over poetic passages from Zola.


As I mentioned in a recent post, I had a bit of a Mauriac phase around the time of our visit to Bordeaux last summer. As our driver, Marise, pointed out while transporting us from the station, Mauriac is one of the three local ‘M’s – the others being Montaigne and Montesquieu. My family mock my habit of having to read something by a local author wherever we go: it was Saramago in Lisbon, Hammett in San Francisco, etc.  On this occasion, I read Therese Desqueyroux before we left home, and Le Noeud de Viperes on the way back, both in English translations (sorry, can't seem to do the accents on Blogger). 
However, on our return I was keen to read more by Mauriac and searched online for a collection of his post-war political articles - or Bloc-Notes. (Mauriac, a devout Catholic, was nevertheless a staunch opponent of the Franco regime in Spain and a supporter of the French Resistance.) But I discovered that these were only available in the original French, and reading them has been a bit of a struggle, to say the least. (Those books in the photo above? They all belong to my Other Half, who was a much better student of French literature than I ever was.) 


And so I’ve gone back to basics. Since October I’ve been working my way through Hugo’s French in 3 Months, filling in the gaps created by failing memory. I’ve just reached the end, and after Christmas it’ll be on to the advanced course. Mind you, as I related last week, I made a similar resolution earlier this year with regard to Portuguese, and that fell by the wayside. And then there was the year I took a Pavese novel in the original Italian on holiday, but gave up after a couple of chapters. I love languages, and since childhood I’ve been deeply envious of those who were brought up to be bilingual, but I’m a bit of a magpie – I tend to know a little about a lot and don’t speak or read any single foreign language very well.  We’ll see how it goes.


So, when it comes to contemporary French literature, I’ll have to wait, either for my facility with the language to improve considerably, or for some enterprising small publisher (do they still exist?) to develop a line in translations of modern French novels. Either way, I think I’m going to have to be very patient.

My fiction addiction

I’ve given up on Goodreads, the website (now owned by Amazon, I understand) that lets you tell people which books you’ve been reading, and what you think of them. Not only is the site counter-intuitive (or maybe it’s just me), but there’s a patronising whiff of the school report about its updates: ‘Martin made progress with Cousin Bette’, indeed. On the other hand, what’s the point of reading a book if you can’t share the experience with your friends?  So today I’m writing a post about my recent reading.

I'll begin with a confession. Until a few months ago, my reading of fiction had fallen away and in the past year or two there have been very few novels leavening my diet of historical works and biographies. This, despite having not one but two degrees in English Literature: but then, as a student, my primary passion was always for poetry rather than prose. There was a brief Mauriac obsession last summer, after our visit to Bordeaux, but my most memorable reading experiences of late have been John Guy’s book on Thomas Becket, Amanda Vickery on the lives of eighteenth-century women, and James McPherson on the American Civil War. If asked to justify my focus on non-fiction, I would have argued that the best historical writing encompasses many of the characteristics of good novels: engrossing narrative, compelling characters, stylish prose.

But I began to think I was missing something, and so this summer my novel reading revived. It’s one more thing that I can credit the late Norman Geras with. As I wrote in my appreciation of him the other week, I never ceased to be impressed by his appetite for fiction and his insightful writing on his favourite novelists, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. When we visited him earlier this year, Norm described his daily novel-reading habits and quizzed me about my own preference for non-fiction, so that I began to feel rather embarrassed by my abstention from fiction.

Spurred into action, I took from the shelf a novel that I’d been meaning to finish for ages: Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. If you look back at my Normblog profile, you’ll see that I claimed to be reading this as long ago as 2007, but in fact I never got beyond the first few pages. Returning to the book, I was immediately captivated by Nemirovsky’s account of refugees fleeing occupied Paris – made even more compelling by the author’s personal experience of her subject-matter, and by the knowledge that very soon after writing it, she would herself become a victim of Nazi terror.

Having realised what I was missing by excluding fiction from my imaginative diet, I went on to fulfill a long-overdue promise to myself, to re-read Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’d seen that there was a new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that supposedly captured the dynamism of the original Russian better than the Penguin version by Constance Garnett that I’d read many years ago. (I should add that my return to Dostoievsky was partly prompted by my renewed interest in religion: Karamazov was the book that inspired the actor Martin Sheen to return to Catholicism, and it’s surely one of the great Christian novels.) The new translation turned out to be every bit as lively and engaging as its was reputed to be, capturing the humour as well as the pathos of this greatest of Russian writers.

This doorstop of a novel book-ended, so to speak, my summer: I read about half before we went away on holiday and the other half when we returned. In between, I spent two weeks lying beside a Portuguese pool, but whereas normally I would have packed mostly non-fiction, this time I threw in a scattering of novels. On the long train journey south through France and Spain, I’d been reading a book about the little-known wartime hero Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who was responsible for helping hundreds of Jews and others escape from occupied France. Then, on arrival in Portugal, I followed this with something I’d really been looking forward to: Neill Lochery’s account of wartime Lisbon, which included a fascinating collection of photographs of the city and the celebrities and spies who took refuge there. Unfortunately, the photos turned out to be the best thing about this badly-written and poorly-edited volume. Nevertheless, there was a connection between these two non-fiction appetisers and the first novel I read on holiday - Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March, set in the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire – since Otto von Hapbsurg had been one of those helped by de Sousa Mendes to escape to Portugal. I shall certainly be reading more by Roth. Then it was on to a non-fiction book with an Austrian theme: Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, which I bought because of my interest in Ludwig’s philosophy, though he turned out to be just one member of a fascinatingly eccentric family, none more so than his brother Paul, an accomplished one-armed concert pianist.

Norm Geras’ influence was apparent in my next novel choice (he’d recommended it on his blog): John Williams’ reissued Stoner. My absorption in this slim volume was reflected in the fact that I read it in virtually one poolside sitting. However, I should add that I found the story of this obscure, disappointed mid-western teacher unrelievedly depressing, lacking any hint of possible redemption.

My ‘big read’ of the holiday was Os Maias – The Maias – by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiros. One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to improve my knowledge of Portuguese to the extent that I’d be able to be read something by this author, or perhaps by Pessoa or Saramago, in the original, by the time we went on holiday. However, this went the way of most of my resolutions, and I ended up, once again, opting for a new English translation. I’d bought the Carcanet edition following our first visit to Lisbon seven years ago, when we’d stayed in a small hotel that had been the model for the family home in de Queiros’ novel, but had never quite got around to reading it. Then I read that Margaret Jull Costa, whose renderings of Saramago and of Spanish authors such as Javier Marias I had long admired, had produced a new translation. I wasn’t disappointed: the novel is compendious, rollicking, moving, a great nineteenth-century realist novel, with some Dickensian touches but without any Dickensian caricatures or sentimentality. I thoroughly recommend it.

De Queiros was influenced by the great French realists, and especially by Balzac, another embarrassing gap in my reading, so on my return I plucked Cousin Bette from the shelf and jumped into the middle of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ cycle. The experience was rewarding, but it didn’t really whet my appetite for more by the same author, not just yet anyway. However, I was now feeling inspired to plug other shameful gaps in my literary knowledge, and at the same time wanting to stick with the nineteenth century for a little longer, so this autumn I turned back to the English classics. From Balzac I went on to Dickens, rapidly consuming The Old Curiosity Shop – sentimental and maudlin at times, but still compelling – and Oliver Twist – apprentice work for the far superior David Copperfield, but a lively youthful narrative all the same. Then from George Eliot's oeuvre I selected Adam Bede, which I’d never read, and found completely absorbing, not least because of my identification with its Methodist theme, and at the moment I’m rather plodding my way through The Mill on the Floss.

Another novel I’d never got round to reading was Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which starts very engagingly, but then kind of loses its way. What critics describe as a fascinating double narrative replete with fluid identities, I thought was a flawed and poorly structured piece of work, in which personal biography was never quite fully transformed into imaginative literature. But the highlight of my autumn reading so far has been Vanity Fair, another unforgivable omission from my literary knowledge. There were many similarities with The Maias - another thoroughly engaging, inventive and light-filled imaginative experience.

So, after a dry period with no novel-reading at all, I’ve now become reliant on my regular fiction fix and have to have a novel in progress all the time. (This doesn't mean I've stopped reading history books: I'm part-way through Hugh Thomas' classic account of the Spanish Civil War and am just finishing Mark Kishlansky's Penguin history of seventeenth-century Britain.) Now, I’m planning my December reading schedule. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I definitely want to be reading Dickens at Christmas. Christmas Carol would be too obvious but should I re-read Great Expectations or Bleak House, or seek out the unread Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend?

Watch this space for updates. And please feel free share your own recommendations, or your opinions of any of the books mentioned here.

Literary comings and goings

Mixed feelings on hearing of the death of Jose Saramago. On the one hand, he wrote one of my all-time favourite novels, was my point-of-entry to modern Portuguese literature, especially the work of Fernando Pessoa, and was responsible for initiating my love of Lisbon. I shall probably pack one of his novels when we go to Sintra this summer.

On the other hand, Saramago was a Stalinist hack who made stupid and hateful comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. Yesterday’s obituary in the Guardian only glanced at these matters, noting that Saramago worked for various newspapers after the death of Salazar and that ‘political wranglings’ and the writer’s ‘uncompromised and uncompromising communism’ were partly responsible for his being fired in 1975. In fact, Saramago was deputy director of Diário de Noticias, which had been a fascist organ but was nationalised and became communist-dominated after the revolution. The obituary fails to mention his ruthless attitude to those who failed to follow the party line. In a previous post, I quoted the view of Jorge de Azevedo:

For Saramago, black is black; there were no different viewpoints, no debate. He was hard on people working at the newspaper who were not party members; he made life extremely difficult for them. Because of this, he has a tough image that remains.

There is only the briefest reference in the obituary to Saramago's fervent hatred of Israel. A summary of the contents of his late publication The Notebook describes it as ‘a series of blogs, more often in fact essays, articles and a few rants – against Israel, fundamentalism, George Bush and Silvio Berlusconi – covering the year from September 2008 to August 2009.' But 'rant’ is an inadequate word to describe the author’s comparison of a Palestinian city blockaded by the Israeli army to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He also described Israeli soldiers as ‘experts in cruelty with doctorates in disdain, who look down on the world from the heights of the insolence which is the basis of their education.’ He continued, in words that betrayed an antisemitic as well as anti-Zionist cast of mind: ‘ We can better understand their biblical god when we know his followers. Jehovah or Yaweh or whatever he is called, is a fierce and spiteful god, whom the Israelis always live up to.’

In other literary news: I can be less equivocal in welcoming the appointment of Geoffrey Hill as the new Oxford professor of poetry. Without wishing to sound elitist, when I heard the news I thought: at least they've given the job to a proper poet. When I was a student, it felt as though Hill's Mercian Hymns had been written to appeal to all of my youthful enthusiasms: the history of early England, modernism, sacramental Christianity. And to someone whose socialism had been sparked by reading Ruskin, the twenty-fifth section of the sequence had a particular resonance:

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in

memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent

in the nailer's darg.

The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale

mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the

troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust ---

not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the

'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in

memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent

in the nailer's darg.

We shan't see his like again, ctd.

In his account of Michael Foot's funeral, Jonathan Freedland reports that Peter Jones, the former vice-chairman of Plymouth Argyle, spoke of Foot's stedfast devotion to the team, 'through thick and thin' , and shared this anecdote:

Arriving for a recent away game at Selhurst Park, a steward asked the ninetysomething Foot whether he was carrying an offensive weapon, whereupon he produced a battered copy of Milton's selected poems, explaining that Milton's poetry represented one of the most potent weapons in English history.

Freedland comments: 'Lying silent in his wooden box, Foot seemed to come alive once more.'

Lusolinguistica

I've been brushing up my rusty and extremely rudimentary Portuguese, in anticipation of a visit this summer. My dedication to the task wavers, as I swing back and forth between fascination with and aversion from this most unfamiliar of European Romance languages. I keep myself motivated by the dream that one day I might be able to make sense of the volume of Pessoa's poetry that I bought when we were in Lisbon a few years ago (until then, I shall continue to rely on Richard Zenith's excellent translations) - or, failing that, at least order a drink without making a fool of myself.

Someone once described Portuguese as sounding like Spanish spoken by Sean Connery. Not only is this insulting to the Portuguese, who deeply resent such comparisons with their former colonisers, but also completely misleading. In fact, spoken Portuguese sounds nothing like Spanish. There's a closer aural resemblance with Russian, particularly in the way 'l' is pronounced, and in the ubiquitous 'sh' sounds. Not to mention the echoes of French, especially in the frequent nasal vowels ('bon', 'mim'). Then there are the dipthongs, such as 'ao' and 'oes', which are uniquely Portuguese and for which it's difficult to find equivalents in other languages. Finally, after years of learning to unflatten my southern English 'a' when trying to speak French, German or Italian, it's disarming to come across a European language in which (for example) the words 'para' and 'banca' sound like they're being spoken by a Cockney rather than by a Scot.

I started off with the BBC's lively little Talk Portuguese book and CD: all chirpy voices and annoying jingles, but it leaves you with a good grasp of the basics. I've now moved on to Teach Yourself Portuguese, which pleases me by interspersing the dialogues with grammatical explanations: something that BBC language courses, in hock to a spurious pedagogic pseudo-progressivism, seem to have spurned (as I argued here, this kind of withholding of the academic tools of the trade is actually patronising rather than empowering).

I only have two criticisms of the Teach Yourself course. One is the execrable quality of the CD (at least on the version I own), which seems to have been recorded in a cupboard and which features actors with less-than-crystal-clear enunciation (grasping spoken Portuguese, with all those 'shushy' consonants and swallowed vowels, is difficult enough for beginners). The other is the decision to teach European and Brazilian Portuguese together, which is as misguided as the BBC's attempt to combine European and Latin American Spanish in its Suenos course. The pronunciation and even the vocabulary used in Portugual and Brazil are often very different, and listening to the CD it can be difficult to make out which country the speaker comes from, and therefore which form would be appropriate in which location.

The compensation for all of these frustrations is being able to understand just a little of what my favourite Portuguese and Cape Verdean artists are singing about. Here's Mayra Andrade, providing the perfect accompaniment to a sunny spring afternoon:

From Barbauld to boycotts: Enlightenment wisdom for today

I'm nearing the end of William McCarthy's monumental biography of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Having got over my linguistic pedantry, I'm now thoroughly enjoying it. I'd forgotten, though, how long and disgressive literary biographies can be, with every new text requiring extensive exposition, compared to the straight-down-the-line narrative of political biographies (but then my standard of comparison is probably unfair: the last book I read before this one was David McCullough's peerless John Adams).

In reading about Barbauld and the milieu of Rational Dissent, the political and religious debates of late 18th and early 19th century England have often struck me as strikingly contemporary, anticipating many of our own. And Anna Laetitia and her contemporaries, battling for Enlightenment values in a world still dominated by ancien regimes, offer words of wisdom that have much to say to our own time, with its siren voices of anti-Enlightenment reaction. Here, for example, is Barbauld responding to Chateaubriand's Romantic and anti-rational case for religion, but she might just as well as be writing about Eagleton, Fish, Armstrong and other 21st century pro-faithers:

First examine, then believe, and when you have found the truth, let it engage your best affections, is the order which would be recommended by a sober English divine; but this order is inverted by Chateaubriand, who would have us first like, then believe, and when we believe stoutly, we have leave to examine as much as we please...

Every where imagination and enthusiasm, an imagination certainly brilliant and poetic; an enthusiasm, whether real or fictitious we pretend not to determine, takes the place of reasoning and sound argument...

...[H]is partiality for the marvellous and the romantic is every where apparent..[But] if when we ask ourselves what has the author done? what has he proved? it may be answered, he has proved that the Roman Catholic religion, with all its pomps and ceremonies, is wonderfully adapted to amuse the imagination, but he has scarcely aimed at establishing the truth of its doctrines...[H]e makes us suspect that he receives the whole as a matter of taste than of belief.

And here is Barbauld's brother, John Aikin, writing about the 'antisaccharist' campaign of the early 1790s, which saw opponents of slavery foregoing sugar imported from the West Indies. An early supporter of the action, Aikin later became disillusioned with it, and his explanation could just as easily stand as a riposte to those who advocate boycotting the goods of a certain Middle Eastern country today:

I own I am pretty well-convinced that it can now do no good, for if the public is not more earnest in wishing the abolition, it will never be so; and while the demand is limited, the self-denial of a few can have no effect on it. As I am convinced, too, that the public opinion runs strongly against all innovation, and that those who appear to have nicer feelings than their neighbours are looked upon with an evil eye, I can conceive that anti-saccharism may really throw a prejudice upon the cause.

Michael Foot (1913 - 2010)

With the death of Michael Foot, the British parliamentary left has lost one of its towering figures. Politician, journalist, campaigner, scholar, Foot was also one of my early political heroes. When I was studying British Constitution 'O' Level in the early Seventies, we went on a school trip to the Houses of Parliament. While we were milling around in the lobby, a familiar shock of white hair flitted across our line of sight, and an awed whisper passed from boy to boy - 'It's Michael Foot! (thanks to the influence of our teacher, we were Tribunites to a man). It was the first time I'd seen a famous politician in the flesh (unless you count the dreary experience of watching the local Tory MP, Norman St. John Stevas, campaigning outside the shops on our estate).

Even as my politics moved in a Marxian direction in the Eighties, I retained an affection for Foot. He was, after all, the first leading Labour politician to quote Gramsci in a party conference speech. OK, so maybe his time as Labour leader wasn't his finest hour, but the sneering at him on the Tory benches and in their lackey newspapers simply because of his dress sense was shameful.

He was one of the few major politicians of our time - and maybe the last? - who was also an accomplished scholar and intellectual. Here he is, in one of his last public appearances, unveiling a memorial stone to one of his heroes (and another of mine) William Hazlitt, in St. Anne's churchyard, Soho, in 2003:

Eh oh

This'll make a change from all the religion and politics...

Last week I heard Simon Mayo interviewing Andrew Davenport, the creative genius behind those contemporary classics of children's television Teletubbies and In The Night Garden, who has finally begun to emerge from behind his puppets and receive some of the recognition he deserves (it was the second BBC interview with him I’d heard in the past month).

Davenport’s creations hold a special place in the hearts of anyone who was a young child (or a parent of young children) in Britain in the Nineties or early Noughties. Our own children were born in the mid-Nineties, so for them (and us) Andrew will always be, first and foremost, the voice of Tiny from Tots TV. And the question I’d ask him if I was conducting the interview would be: how on earth did someone with such a deeply resonant voice achieve the high-pitched tones of that anarchic green-haired puppet?

Everyone now associates Davenport with Teletubbies, not surprisingly since it was the first of his creations for Ragdoll to gain international recognition. (On a serious note for a moment: John Bayley informs us that, once her dementia set in, Teletubbies was the only TV programme that gave Iris Murdoch any pleasure.) But Tiny and Tom, with their echoes of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers (with the French-speaking Tilly their Margaret Dumont?), are surely one of the great comic partnerships. And for all the simple, wordless brilliance of Davenport's later productions, it's a shame he no longer has the scope to deploy the knockabout verbal wit he showed in the scripts for some of those earlier shows. If you don't believe me (and you've got a few minutes to spare) take a look at this clip, but make sure you watch it through to the end:

Our shelves also contain dusty, worn-out VHS tapes of some of Davenport’s other early programmes, such as Brum and Rosie and Jim. What's more, living as we did in the Midlands when our children were young, we made frequent trips to the Ragdoll shop (sadly, no longer there) in Stratford-on-Avon. Once, we even saw the actual Rosie and Jim barge tied up on the river outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Now here’s my bid for Pseuds' Corner. If Tots TV - full of eccentric wit, but retaining a conventional narrative structure and recognisable characters - was Andrew Davenport's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then maybe the more symbolic and mythopoeic Teletubbies is his Ulysses, and In the Night Garden, with its dreamy, half-conscious associative technique, his Finnegan's Wake. Or maybe Teletubbies is Davenport's Waste Land and In the Night Garden his Four Quartets?

I should stop now...

Kolakowski continued

A couple more Kolakowski-related recommendations:

Norm defends Marx against Oliver's Kolakowski-inspired dismissal of his legacy

and

Michael Weiss gives his own take on the Polish philosopher's spat with E.P.Thompson.

(Incidentally, I haven't looked in on Michael's blog for a while: I'd also recommend his recent posts on - inter alia - Kruschev, Byron and - going back a bit - the subversion of the UN Human Rights Council by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.)

Reclaiming Rabbie the radical

Sunday marks the 250th birthday of Robert Burns who, according to a new biography, was a staunch republican and admirer of the French Revolution. And one of Scotland's finest contemporary poets, Jackie Kay, claims that Burns was 'a sophisticated political thinker about representation, the origin and limits of political authority, and the need for liberty and equality', whose most famous poem, sung at the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, 'could just as easily have been sung on 20 January 2009 in Washington'.

My ties to Scotland are rather remote - my ancestors were Jacobite Aberdeenshire farmers who migrated to England in the early nineteenth century  - and I probably shan't be lured by the Scottish government's appeal to 'come home' this year. But I'm tempted to pour a glass of Glenmorangie on Sunday to toast, not the kitsch shortbread-and-tartan image of popular memory, but a great radical poet and son of the Enlightenment.

Nice diary, shame about the politics

Extracts from Alan Bennett's diary of the preceding year have become a regular feature of the New Year issue of the London Review of Books. It would be easy to send up these edited extracts, with their luvvy name-dropping and predictably Bennettian observations on the minutiae of daily life, if Bennett and the LRB didn't do it so well themselves: the front page byline for this year's diary is 'Alan Bennett eats his lunch'. 

This year there are the usual entertaining glimpses into the world of the London literati, including an account of Ned Sherrin's memorial service ('The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost's') and of meeting the Prime Minister at a Downing Street reception ('We're...astonished at how different Brown is from the dour figure he presents in the Commons' 'Andy Burnham...looks as if he's strayed out of an early Pasolini movie'). And only Bennett, writing about encountering Marxist literary academic Arnold Kettle and his wife at a protest meeting when he was a schoolboy, would think it important to note that they were 'customers at our butcher's shop'. This year Bennett has included quotations collected in the notebooks that he has been keeping for the past forty years, such as this from his mother: 'I wouldn't want to be as bald as that. You'd never know where to stop washing your face'.

But to enjoy these nuggets of humorous observation, you have to put up with an awful lot of predictable pseudo-leftish political comment, such as this entry for 14 March:

Every day practically I bike past the two bored policemen who, armed and bullet-proofed, guard the house of the foreign secretary. I could give the address, and were I a Muslim and even had it in my possession, it would be enough to land me in custody. Passing the policemen so often, my natural inclination would be to smile. I never do because though I know they're bored and it's not their fault, I feel to smile condones a state of affairs (and a foreign policy) which necessitates ministers of the crown being under armed guard. 

From a writer whose best work demonstrates a mature sagacity, this is disappointingly juvenile. Attributing the terrorist threat (which means that some of his fellow-writers, as well as politicians, have to live under armed guard, and could do with solidarity not scorn from the likes of Bennett) to our old friend the BFP (British foreign policy), thus letting off the hook the theocratic ideology that inspires it (and would tear down everything that Bennett stands for), aligns Bennett with the shallow politics of the Galloways, Pilgers and Milnes of this world - poor company for a writer of such wisdom and wit. But you can see  why  the LRB loves  him.