
A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own.
Isaiah Berlin
They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. Isaiah Berlin, born in 1909, was fourteen years older than Richard Wollheim, and, coming into the world either side of the First World War, the two men had their roots in different centuries. Though they both made unique contributions to twentieth century British philosophy, their work...
Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, class privilege and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary, but a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency.
A Crack in the Cosmos
If Jesus was McDonald, a fellow with a great burger shack, St Paul was Ray Kroc, establishing the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing standardising directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians and Thessalonians. He erected a warm and personal supernatural system to stand against the cold, impersonal natural system of science. Indeed the global franchise itself grew out of the war of faith against Greek science.
Different Colonisations
The ethnic makeup of this Indian ocean island is complex. The Zarabes are North Indian Muslims, the Zoreils are whites from metropolitan France, the Malabars are Hindu Tamils, the Yabs are poor whites, also known as ‘petits blancs’ while the rich families who own the coffee, nutmeg, vanilla and sugar plantations are the ‘gros blancs’. It’s not so much a melting-pot as a lasagne. The Swiftian narrator judges her birthplace harshly: 'a heap of rubble'.
A Long Way to Peace
The man appointed as secretary of state was William Whitelaw, whose gentlemanly and sometimes bumbling manner concealed a sharp political brain. In summer 1972 he made an abortive attempt to negotiate secretly with the IRA. The talks produced no progress, and a brief IRA ceasefire ended. Irish officials reported that John Hume told them that ‘at the request of the IRA … an internee, Mr Adams, had been released from Long Kesh today’.

G’wan the Normies!
Here’s a question. If the Normans, with whom it is has been claimed all our troubles began, were playing Transnistria, or some other faraway land, should we be up for the Normans? Well no, of course not! But hold on … maybe we should. After all, there are Norman surnames all around us. Aengus Ó Snodaigh’s mother, the distinguished artist Cliodhna Cussen, had one. My own name could be Norman. The person beside you on the bus might be one of them.
Maybe we should avoid stirring things and just say: ‘Well, even if the Normans did some bad things,...
The signature Norman work of asset-grabbing was completed within a generation of the Battle of Hastings, when England was effectively controlled by around 250 people. Beneath the top tier were about 2,000 landed knights and beneath them around 8,000 new settlers, not all of them especially powerful. In all, about 10,000 Normans came to Britain around the time of the conquest. Ireland’s land records were lost to fire in 1305, but they would have shown that the top Norman tier here numbered about 25 people.

Spurning the Dust
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995
Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019
American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L Mickenberg, University of Chicago Press, 426pp, $38, ISBN: 978-0226256122
What is it about millennials and their conceit about changing the world? The most politically committed of those born around the dawn of the twentieth century were that arrogant. They believed they knew better than their parents, their bosses,...
Alexandra Kollontai, a leading revolutionary who was on the central committee of the Bolshevik party, married twice and had a succession of lovers. In her autobiography she titled herself, ‘A Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman’. However, her concept of sexual emancipation appalled Lenin, who accused her of promulgating what he called 'the glass of water theory'. This arose after she was alleged to have said that ‘the sex act should be viewed as equivalent to drinking a glass of water’. In fact this is not an accurate account of what she said.

The Mysterious Alice Munro
In July 2024, three months after Alice Munro died, her daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star, revealing that her mother’s husband and her own stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Sixteen years after the abuse occurred Alice Munro was told of it. She decided to remain with Fremlin, with whom she had been living for seventeen years at that stage. In her essay, Andrea writes:
I ... wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another...
Alice Munro has been tried in the court of literary public opinion, and found guilty: of being selfish, of not being a good mother, of not accepting the moral standard of the present day. But perhaps the case is too complex for trial by public opinion. I do not think it facetious to suggest that the only form adequate to dealing with the issue is a story, a story written by a writer of the calibre of Munro herself.