Thomas Jones

@moonjets.bsky.social

777 Followers 231 Following

I work @lrb.co.uk, most of my opinions are other people’s

By the time of his death on 8 July 1822, a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the adolescent opening of Queen Mab - 'How wonderful is death!' - had evolved into a hopeless question: "Then, what is Life?' Shelley had no answer, but he puts the question in a poem that rushes relentlessly on, spiralling back on itself through extremes of euphoria and despair, redrawing the bounds of what had been thought possible in English verse, until it is abruptly cut off.
In June 1935 they met Avdo Međedović, ‘our Yugoslav Homer’, a farmer in his sixties living near Bijelo Polje, a town in north-eastern Montenegro. He told Vujnović his life story – his nine years in the army brought to an end by a bullet to his left arm; his marriage at the age of 29 to a woman he’d never met; his career as a butcher ruined by his son’s gambling debts; his son disappearing to join the army – and he played the gusle and sang nine songs over the course of six weeks. ‘He sat cross-legged on the bench,’ Lord wrote a few years later, ‘sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered.’ One of Međedović’s epics was as long as the Odyssey.
In all, the EU estimated that more than 70,000 citizens of 12 countries died from heat-induced illnesses over a four-month period in the summer of 2003. This number represents more fatalities than have resulted from any EU or American conflict since World War Two or any natural disaster (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes and floods) to have ever struck a developed nation. It dwarfs the 1800 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and effectively renders trivial the 900 lives lost during the highly publicised Sars epidemic that struck in the same year as the heatwave ... Americans would need to experience more than 20 terrorist attacks equivalent in destruction to 9/11 before such a death toll would be approached. Yet the global response to this climate event, an event that reveals more about the profoundly changing environment in which we now live than any other yet endured, has largely been one of indifference.
The Ipcress File (the book) came out around the same time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton's spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just 'a little grey rusting Morris 1000' and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street. The class difference between the protagonists is less apparent in the igoos movies, though - Fleming's hero is an Etonian but Sean Connery wasn't - and I don't see that James Bond is a less boring name than Harry Palmer. Both men are tough and sexy and quick-witted. Still, Deighton's reputation was established as the creator of an anti-Bond, and it's at least true that 007 wouldn't be found messing around with eggs in the kitchen until Roger Moore whips a quiche out of the oven for Tanya Roberts in A View to a Kill in 1985.
The cover of Dan Bern’s first album
The annual G7 meeting brings together the leaders of the world's biggest economies: the US, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada and Japan.
December 2022. Starmer was referring to the result of the lobby's World Cup league in which he performed below Burnham. Starmer called the result a "brilliant" one for the Greater Manchester mayor. "He also got to see his boyhood team Argentina win the World Cup," he added. "It was a mixed bag, because he also got to see his boyhood team France lose the final and his boyhood teams Morocco and Croatia lose in the semis. But Andy sadly can't be with us tonight because he doesn't know where Westminster is." One person recalled to me this week that "the only time I have seen Starmer looking genuinely amused" was while telling that joke. I, and at least one
This absence of edge can at times lead to a lack of narrative tension in her fiction. “Everyone’s so tiresomely friendly and co-operative all the time,” the London Review of Books complained of Bel Canto, in which a group of hostages becomes enmeshed with their captors.
Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor and potential Labour leadership candidate, has arrived at Euston in London today, the Telegraph is reporting. It is not known yet why he is in the capital.
Wilson wants his novel to show how alike ants and people are. ‘There are of course vast differences between ants and men,’ he writes in the prologue. 'But in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence. Because of it, ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them.' We routinely use figurative language drawn from the human sphere when talking about ants - queen, soldier, worker - and there's a long literary history of comparing people to ants: the Trojan soldiers leaving Carthage in Book Four of the Aeneid, for example. But in both cases it's important not to confuse resemblance with identity. Anthill means to
Bomber is in many ways Deighton's least characteristic novel, though it's also probably his best, and it's hard to imagine anyone else writing anything quite like it. The book is a remarkable example of the way a narrative of great complexity can be constructed through the careful assembly of simple elements, and a timely reminder, nearly sixty years after it was written and more than eighty after it's set, that bombing a hospital is an atrocity whoever does it, and for whatever reason, deliberate or not.
I PARTIGIEN U n'è par véa dla glória Non è per via della gloria sa sém andè in muntagna se siamo andati in montagna a fè la guèra. a fare la guerra. Ad guèra a sémi stóff, Di guerra eravamo stufi, ad patria enca. di patria anche. Evémi bsogn ad déi: Ma avevamo bisogno di dire: lasés al méni lébri, lasciateci le mani libere, i pi, i ócc, agli uréci; i piedi, gli occhi, le orecchie; lasés durméi te fén lasciateci dormire nel fienile s'una ragaza. con una ragazza. Par quest avém spare Per questo abbiamo sparato, a's sém fatt impiché ci siamo fatti impiccare a sém andè e' mazèll e siamo andati al macello pianzénd te còr piangendo nel cuore, e al labri ch'al treméva. con le labbra che tremavano. Mò ènca acsè a savémi Ma anche così sapevamo che a pèt d'un bòia d'un fascésta, che di fronte a un boia di fascista nèun a sémi zénta noi eravamo persone e lou del mariuneti. e loro marionette. E adès ch'a sém mórt E adesso che siamo morti nu rumpéis i quaiéun non rompeteci i coglioni sal cerimóni, con le cerimonie: pansé piutòst mi véiv pensate piuttosto ai vivi, ch'i n'apa da pérd ènca lòu che non debbano perdere anche loro giovinèza. la giovinezza. I PARTIGIANI (Nino Pedretti - Al vòusi)
My Oxford colleague Steven Balbus goes much further. The coincidence of geometry that makes the Sun and Moon roughly the same size in the sky also means that they both contribute to the tides we experience on Earth. The beating of the solar and lunar tidal cycles against each other brings the difference between more extreme spring tides and lesser neap tides. This means there are liminal places on Earth that are covered with water occasionally but dry most of the time: ideal habitats for an oft-stranded species of fish to learn to breathe air or take its first steps onto land.
"Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his messagel' 'Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn't know enough about economics to understand what it was about.' 'But you identified different sources?' I asked yet again. 'Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.' From different agents?' I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day? 'Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him "Grock".
It's around this point that Brutus, by now in his twenties, surfaces in the historical record. In the summer of 59, a man called Lucius Vettius went to the Senate with information about a conspiracy to murder Pompey. The repentant Vettius confessed to being one of the conspirators; among the others he named was Brutus. The senators seem not to have believed him, but threw him in jail for carrying an offensive weapon. He repeated his allegations the next day, but 'removed Brutus' name from his speech entirely, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus' mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can't be true) that Brutus was Caesar's illegitimate son.
An aerial view of the decommissioned Alessandro Volta thermoelectric power station on the site of an abandoned nuclear power station in Montalto di Castro, Lazio, Italy
When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, 'he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall?' Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: 'Kai su, teknon' (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?'). It literally means 'You too, child, but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn't clear. Tempest cites 'an important article' by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked'. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar's putative last words were not 'the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son' but more along the lines of 'See you in hell, punk.'
A giant Captain Haddock with bottles for pupils applies a corkscrew to the head of Tintin who is trapped in a bottle (a dream sequence from The Crab with the Golden Claws)
The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them. The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best).
The ABC cinema in Basingstoke with Flashdance, Airplane and Rocky III on the marquee. Photo from cinematreasures.org
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla (1912)
FIFTEEN DAYS AGO: 2706 people in Italy had at this point tested positive for Sars-CoV-2; there were 443 new cases; 276 had recovered; 107 were dead. The Italian government announced on Wednesday, 4 March that schools would be closed the following day, and would not reopen until Monday, 16 March. A week had passed since Ash Wednesday. It would have been neat if the beginning of quarantine had coincided with the first day of Lent. And not merely neat: it might well have saved lives. But lateness is one of the defining characteristics of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two-week incubation period is only one of the reasons we are stumbling too far behind the virus. The belief that 'it won't be like that here' is strong: it was strong in Italy - it was strong in me - when the disease was concentrated in China. When I talk to friends and family in the UK, it sometimes feels as if I'm speaking not only from another country, but from another time, 15 days in the future. In each of the Terminator movies, the time-travelling hero repeats a shibboleth: 'Come with me if you want to live.' The message in the real world, though, is 'Stay at home.'
LL OF THIS was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn't paying attention. Italy's last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926. 'Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,' Dal Monte writes. 'He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.' What else was he supposed to do?
And then there's always a darker question lurking behind the one about whether or not robots can be people, and it isn't about robots but about people, and what it means when they - when we - treat others as if they weren't human. It is, or should be, troubling to realise that we have little difficulty not only in anthropomorphising computers, cars, toys or fictional characters, but also in dehumanising the people whose lives, sometimes but not always remote from our own, are instrumental to our happiness, or to our comfort.
The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them. The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under 6ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best). People obsessed with immigration didn't vote for the PD; they voted for the Lega. Facts count for very little. Salvini insists on a connection between immigration and crime, even though statistics show that both overall crime, and crime committed by foreigners, have gone down over the last ten years, at the same time that the number of asylum permits issued has gone up.
Donald Trump cosplaying Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now: ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning... Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR’
A black Ferrari (an F12, I think?) outside a bookshop in Parma with the campanile of the cathedral in the background lit by late evening light
London Review OF BOOKS And yet, however successfully it generates unease in the complacent reader, and for all its efficiency as a thriller, full of exciting chases, double-crosses, torture, escape and recapture, Fatherland is based on a flawed - and, despite the dystopian setting, unduly optimistic - premise: that the disclosure of the Final Solution by a worn-out cop and rookie journalist could threaten to destabilise a victorious world power and scupper the possibility of rapprochement between Germany and the United States. In the world Harris has created, the exposure of the Holocaust might provide a handy reason to back away from détente were America looking for such an excuse, but otherwise it would surely be tactfully ignored: governments, after all, have a knack for overlooking all kinds of human rights abuse, unless a cause for moral outrage happens to coincide with the national interest or the perpetrators have already been defeated and stripped of power.
A screenshot of two BlueSky posts, one quoting the message from Artists for Palestine UK that Nadine Shah read out at Glastonbury, the other quoting a piece that Daniella Lock wrote a few days earlier for the LRB blog. The first says: ‘The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw the proscription of Palestine Action.’ The second says: ‘On the current picture, the real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s attempt to proscribe it.’
Headlines from the Guardian UK to expand nuclear deterrent with US fighter jets capable of carrying warheads 30m ago Keir Starmer says government will stand firm on disability welfare overhaul 38m ago
From the Times Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, the UK's first director of joint warfare and now a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, last week speculated that Russia or Iran influenced the attack at RAF Brize Norton. "It is certainly the sort of activity carried out by foreign agents and they could have influenced the activists," he said. "They (Russian or Iran] were either behind this or rubbing their hands with glee," he said. "This is exactly the sort of thing a foreign power tries to do to paralyse military activity."
A map painted in Italy in 1573-74 showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled Golfo Mexicano
Glasman is enjoying a more relaxed role in public life these days. Amicably separated from Catherine, he now lives in a small flat in Dalston.
On​ 8 July 2013, the newly elected Pope Francis, on his first official trip outside Rome, arrived by boat at the island of Lampedusa to commemorate the thousands of migrants who have died crossing from North Africa. After casting a wreath into the water, he celebrated mass on the sports field that doubles as a migrant reception centre. He delivered his homily from an altar constructed out of an old fishing boat. ‘Where is your brother?’ he asked.
A woman says in Italian: ‘since Mussolini’s been in charge the trains are on time, everything’s in order.’ A man replies: ‘but there was no need to make him head of the government, enough to make him stationmaster.’
Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern.