‘‘How many terms do Egyptian presidents serve?” the joke goes. “Two. One in office and one in prison.” Both Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator for almost 30 years, and Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president, are under arrest and are in the middle of lengthy trial proceedings. Under Egypt’s military leadership, jokes are wearing thin.

On 1 November, the Egyptian TV channel CBC refused to air a new episode of El-Bernameg, the satirical programme fronted by Bassem Youssef, a comedian known in the west as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”. Youssef’s first programme since Morsi was toppled in July, which aired on 25 October, had divided audiences. As well as taking aim at Morsi, long the butt of Youssef’s jokes, he poked fun at the public adulation of Egypt’s interim military leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and at rising censorship.

There’s no evidence to suggest that the military forced CBC executives to pull El-Bernameg but even if CBC acted voluntarily – whether out of self-censorship or political conviction – there’s cause for concern. Karl Sharro, a Lebanese-Iraqi architect who writes a satirical blog on Middle Eastern politics called Karl ReMarks, says that he’s noticed a shift in the public’s attitude: when it comes to criticising the army, many Egyptians have become po-faced.

“A lot of people are hostile to critical thinking and have bought into the idea of the army as the vehicle for change,” he says. In this atmosphere, he believes, “Satirical ideas, because they are the harshest, will come to the foreground quite quickly.”

It’s not just supporters of the military who are losing their sense of humour: after the brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi supporters find little to laugh at.

During the Arab spring, Middle Eastern satire flourished as cartoonists, comedians and journalists took advantage of new media freedoms and used humour to undermine the authority of crumbling regimes. Youssef, too, was a product of the Arab spring – he was a heart surgeon before the revolution in Egypt but started uploading his videos on YouTube, reaching audiences of millions before he was offered a television deal in 2011.

Are Egypt’s most mischievous scribblers and joke-makers now retiring? Jonathan Guyer, a US journalist who profiles Egypt’s cartoon culture on his blog Oum Cartoon, doesn’t think so. Egyptian cartoonists are too diverse to generalise about, he says, but he knows a “handful” of cartoonists who have had their work rejected by pro-junta editors and some are choosing to print their most “critical and stinging cartoons” on their Facebook pages instead.

It could be that El-Bernameg simply has to return to its former home, YouTube. The long-term damage of such a move needn’t be so great. A spoof video on the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia set to a Bob Marley tune, “No woman, no drive”, has been seen by almost ten million people, bypassing press rules. It’s unlikely that Egyptians No laughing matter: a Morsi supporter denounces his trial on 4 November have had their last laugh.

What is the most important invention of the past 100 years? 
For me, it’s the transistor. It has had such an impact: I don’t think there’s an area of life that hasn’t been transformed in some way by the transistor, from computing and mobile phones to health-care technology.

What is the most important scientific discovery of the past 100 years?
Penicillin. I had a great-uncle who died at Dunkirk. If penicillin had been available at that time, he would probably still be around today. So that’s quite a personal one.

And sporting event?
The 1966 World Cup final. I’m the non-sporty one in my family. I can remember being completely silenced and put to one side of the front room, while my avid football-fan family watched the World Cup.

Which book, film, piece of music or work of art has had the greatest impact on you and why?
Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I love food, I love eating, I love cooking and France. The whole package is just a dream to me. It’s a book that I always take with me when I go anywhere.

Who is the most influential or significant politician of the past 100 years?
Nelson Mandela, because of the power he has had to unite. You only have to look at the world’s reaction to his illness at the moment.

And author or playwright?
J K Rowling. She’s been able to teach children to read and to enjoy reading.

How about someone in business?
Steve Jobs, for the joy that people have got from the iPod, then the iPhone and now the iPad – and because he showed that engineering and design were the same thing.

And sports person?
Jonny Wilkinson, because of what he did in the Rugby World Cup, in those last three minutes of the match when everything looked desperate. The ability of one person to kick a ball and have it lead to such joy – it’s just extraordinary.

And philanthropist?
Isaac Wolfson. He made all kinds of investments in technology and infrastructure. I think he should be better known.

Do you have a favourite quotation?
I wouldn’t say that this is my absolute favourite, but: “Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.” Eleanor Roosevelt said that.

Favourite speech?
Martin Luther King: “I have a dream . . .” Every time you hear it, it gives you the shivers.

What do you think will be the most significant change to our lives in the next 100 years?
There’ll be sensors everywhere. We’ll have the ability to add them to all sorts of devices and draw data, helping people live their lives better, whether it’s at work or in leisure or in health care. Any scientific advance has to be made with caution and with a strong ethical framework. This shouldn’t hold science back: you need to develop the ethical strand and the scientific strand at the same time. That’s the responsibility of all scientists and society as a whole.

What is your main concern about the future and why?
Water. Its distribution is very uneven. I think the potential for war or strife because of problems with water is profound.

What will be the most dramatic development in your own field?
This is going to upset some people. My area is quantum technology and it could be very disruptive. Think about the effect the quantum world will have on computing, sensing, communications, the measurement of time, the measurement of geography . . . The impact will be vast if we can seize the opportunity of quantum science and turn this into quantum technology. At the moment, we work down at a scale where electrons can be in more than one place at a time. That opens a whole new world of potential for how you might build electronic devices or optical devices and how to provide security for computers and have different way of communicating.

What do you think is the priority for the future well-being of the people and the planet?
The most important thing for me is to ensure that the world is investing in open-minded education. By this, I mean educating children so that they are able to question, not just learn by rote. Some of the conflicts we are seeing are driven by ideology. Opportunities for the world to create and to develop things could open up if education was available to everybody in a way that enabled people to develop their own thoughts and ways of questioning things.

Lesley Thompson is the director of sciences and engineering at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

We are nearly as certain as it is scientifically possible to be that there isn't any life on Mars. There is still every chance that there was life at some point, and we might still find it. The landscape is clearly marked with signs of water erosions, and Curiosity and Opportunity (the two rovers currently trundling around up there) have taught us a huge deal about its geology - including the discovery of "abundant" traces of water in Martian soil. Mars clearly had a lot of liquid water on its surface at some point.

The question, though, is why it doesn't have lakes, rivers, oceans, and streams any more - and what it looked like when it did. Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has taken a stab at visualising the Martian world of 3.7 billion years ago ahead of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (or Maven) mission which takes off on 18 November, producing a quite lovely animation:

It looks just like Earth because back then Mars had two Earth-like things going for it that it doesn't any more. Firstly, the habitable zone around the younger, larger Sun - that's the range of orbits around any star within which is neither too hot nor too cold for a planet to have liquid water on its surface - was further out, and secondly Mars also had a thick atmosphere. Without the pressure that comes with an atmosphere, liquid water will either freeze solid or evaporate instantly, as happens currently on Mars.

The habitable zone moving inwards had the happy side effect of making the Earth habitable, and eventually - as the Sun enters its final few billion years and swells in size, becoming a red giant - that zone may well move out further again and give Mars a chance at hosting liquid water again. That is, if it gets an atmosphere too, and that's the mystery. We know it must have been there once, but it isn't there now, and we can't be sure why that it. We're not even totally sure if the atmosphere's disappearance is wholly responsible for the transformation of Mars from wet, blue globe like you see above to dusty, red ball that looks like this:

That's a picture taken by the Curiosity rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

One possibility for what happened to the atmosphere is that Mars' core cooled down and stopped generating both plate tectonics and a magnetic field, which would have formed a barrier that would have stopped too many atmospheric particles being stripped away into space by the solar wind. Without active volcanoes to generate gases to replace the lost particles, you end up with the situation today where the surface pressure on Mars is, on average, 0.6 percent that of what you'll find on Earth. That's equivalent to being 35km up in the sky on Earth, nearly twice as high as where commercial aeroliners fly.

Maven is an orbiting probe that will launch on 18 November and try to uncover more data about Mars' atmospheric past. Here's Joseph Grebowsky, the mission's project scientist:

Studies of the remnant magnetic field distributions measured by Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor mission set the disappearance of the planet's convection-produced global magnetic field at about 3.7 billion years ago, leaving the Red Planet vulnerable to the solar wind. 

Maven has been designed to measure the escape rates for all the applicable processes and will be able to single out the most prominent. Previous remote Mars observations from orbiting spacecraft have observed the geological features that have been used to estimate the amount of water that did exist and have analysed the global distribution of water ice and surface chemistry to infer that water was lost through time. Mars Curiosity rover has the ability to analyse the chemical composition of the solid surface, which contains information of the atmospheric composition during the formation of the planet, in particular the isotope ratios, the lower atmosphere composition, and the current gas exchange with surface reservoirs. MAVEN is going to measure the current rates of loss to space and the controlling processes. Given the lower-atmosphere information and the nature of the escaping processes, one can extrapolate from current conditions into the climate of the past.

The probe will reach Mars in September 2014, and is scheduled to work for one Earth year on its mission of uncovering more Martian secrets.

After three years, two commissions, and intense international negotiation, the government’s draft Banking Reform Bill is finally making its way through parliament. The public has been promised a fundamental restructuring of the banks and a new age of financial stability.

The British financial system has not waited for parliament, however. It has reformed itself already. And its stability is, at least in one respect, more precarious than ever.

The crisis exposed two fundamental flaws in the UK’s banks. The first was a problem of illiquidity. When their creditors and depositors took fright and withdrew their funding, the banks could not call in the loans they had made. There was a liquidity mismatch. The banks were, quite literally, “caught short” – and the Bank of England had to step in to provide them with emergency funding itself when the public started running for the hills.

The second flaw was that some UK banks were not just illiquid, but insolvent. The loans they had made were not going to pay even when they came due, and the banks did not have enough capital to absorb the consequent losses. As a result, the Treasury had to stump up the cash, nationalising one bank (Northern Rock) and spending tens of billions of pounds buying shares in several others.

Public anger after these events focused on the behaviour of bankers. To its credit, the coalition government elected in 2010 realised that the roots of the problem lay deeper than that. To minimise future crises – and above all to avoid their costs being borne by the Exchequer – they decided that the very structure of the banking system needs to change as well. The result of the government’s deliberations is the draft Banking Reform Bill. Its merits – or lack of them – have been the subject of much debate.

The most enthusiastic assessment I have heard is that the bill is fine as far as it goes. John Vickers, the head of the government’s Independent Commission on Banking, says that the new liquidity and capital requirements it imposes are too weak. Others complain that plans to “ring-fence” the utility parts of the banks that will continue to enjoy taxpayer support do not go far enough. The government says that the banks’ international partners would accept nothing more.

However, while the government has been planning its counteroffensive the forces of finance have been on the move. If economic history teaches one lesson, it is that finance never stands still.

According to orthodox theory (and conventional wisdom), the economic function of the banking sector is to make loans to companies for productive purposes. Yet since the crisis of 2008 there has been an astonishing transformation in the way that corporate Britain funds itself.

The banks have been in repair mode, trying to catch up with the new regulatory requirements to reliquify and recapitalise their balance sheets. As a result, their lending to UK companies has gone into reverse. In the four and a half years leading up to the financial crisis, Britain’s banks supplied a net total of nearly £260bn in loans to UK companies. In the four and a half years since, they have called a net £110bn back in.

The shrinkage of the banks has left the field open for a new breed of intermediary. The slack has been taken up by investment funds specialising in corporate bonds. Instead of taking loans, companies have issued bonds in unprecedented quantities – and these have been bought by investment funds.

Rather than wending their way through the banks, the UK’s savings now find their way to its companies through the bond markets. Between January 2012 and July 2013, bank lending to the corporate sector shrank by nearly £26bn. Yet every penny of that and more was refinanced by bond investors, with nearly £31bn of corporate bonds being issued. Forget Funding Circle; this is peer-to-peer lending on an industrial scale.

If that were all there was to it, all would be well: the heartening tale of a Great Escape from a credit crunch to make the City proud – refuting once and for all the naysayers who whine that the only useful financial innovation of the past 25 years is the ATM.

There is, however, a hitch. Corporate bond funds have replaced banks as the providers of credit to companies: and investors in those funds have therefore replaced depositors in those banks.

Do these investment funds suffer any less from a liquidity mismatch than the banks? Not really. Typically, their investors can withdraw their money at a day’s notice, while the markets for the corporate bonds they hold are notoriously illiquid. Are investors any less susceptible to panic than depositors? Unlikely. They are, after all, the same people.

In fact, on closer inspection, the new system of corporate finance looks awfully similar to the old one – but for one crucial difference. Corporate bond funds, unlike banks, do not enjoy access to the Bank of England’s emergency lending facilities. If there is a run on a fund, that fund is on its own. The risk of a credit crisis originating in the banks has much reduced, only for it to re-emerge in the corporate bond markets.

These developments may have passed the government by – but thankfully they have not escaped the people at the Bank of England. In a little-noticed footnote to his second big speech since taking office, the new governor, Mark Carney, indicated that the Bank is actively discussing how it might support the ersatz banking activities of the corporate bond markets in a crisis, in return for more draconian regulation.

If you want to know what our new financial system is going to look like – and whether it will be safe or not – look not to George Osborne and the government, but to Mr Carney and the Bank.

The government could soon issue its first taxpayer-guaranteed sukuk, marking the UK’s entry into the lucrative, rapidly expanding market of Islamic finance, which was until now exclusive to Muslim countries. But what are sukuk and why are they important?

Sukuk (plural of ‘sakk’) are essentially government bonds that must comply with the moral code and religious law that comprises sharia (as any part of the holistic system of Islam must). This word will probably generate some trembling articles in the right-wing press, but sharia’s main stipulation in terms of finance is simply a ban on riba (interest). Since Islam sees money as a pure measure of value, and not a profitable asset in and of itself, the charging of interest on money is haram (forbidden). In lieu of interest, the issuer of a sukuk (in this case, the UK government) sells an investor or group the bond, who then rents it back to them for an agreed-upon rental fee. The issuer also signs a contract promising to buy back the bonds at a future date at par value. Sukuk are traded on 'real' assets, not risk and futures.

The first sukuk (which translates as 'cheques' or 'certificates') proposed by Osborne would only be valued at £200m, a miniscule amount in the context of the total Islamic finance market (currently valued at around £750bn and expected to double in value by 2017 according to the 2012 Global Islamic Finance Report), leading Jonathan Guthrie in the Financial Times to call it little more than an "amuse bouche". Issuing them is not about to end Britain’s economic woes with a tide of oil money from the Gulf.

Sukuk are at this stage a marketing tool: a gesture to the Muslim world that London is open for business. Whoever you are, we’ll suit your conditions (if you have cash). Osborne wrote an article to this effect in the FT last week, stating his ambition for London to be "the unrivalled western centre for Islamic finance". It would make Britain the first non-Islamic country in the world to issue sovereign sukuk, joining Egypt, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Qatar and Turkey. As London is already a global finance capital whose stock market dwarfs those of all these other countries put together, the potential for growth in a new sector of culturally-sensitive investment funds (another example would be green investment) is not to be underestimated.

But ensuring that the sukuk are watertight in their compliance with sharia will be the acid test for Osborne. If they’re not, they are rendered pointless and a huge waste of time and money. In the winter of 2011, Goldman Sachs proposed to debut a $2bn sukuk al marabaha (deferred payment) program, but it was judged non-sharia compliant and was aborted, causing a lot of red faces in some quite altitudinous boardrooms. Since sharia works horizontally rather than hierarchically – that is, fatwas (judgements on points of sharia) can be issued by anyone with the recognised Islamic qualifications and then debated on equal terms – scholars can often differ irrevocably on the finer points.

But even in the event that the government’s sukuk are eagerly snapped up, it is not going to revolutionise our financial relationship with the Islamic world. London is already a piggy bank for the world’s elite, whatever their religion, because, as Michael Goldfarb recently argued in the New York Times, skyrocketing prices and a tax law which is only able to skim British earnings mean that London property has now all but become a "global reserve currency" – a sort of hyper-money only accessible by the global super rich, most of whom don’t live here and don’t intend to.

And as the New Statesmanhas already shown, the Middle East in particular has been enthusiastically pouring cash into the UK (well, London) for the past decade anyway. Qatar alone owns 95% of the Shard, Harrods, over a quarter of Sainsbury’s, a fifth of the London Stock Exchange itself, the Chelsea Barracks, the Olympic village, 20% of Camden market, No. 1 Hyde Park (the world’s most expensive block of flats), and the US embassy building.

So if Osborne’s sukuk have a successful debut, it will herald a greater level of fiscal openness and consensus between the Islamic world and Britain, and it will make it easier for some of Britain’s own 2.7 million Muslim citizens to decide upon halal (permitted) domestic investments. As far as Treasury policy can be, this is socially inclusive. But that’s about it. Even in the case that a new enthusiasm for religiously-influenced investment boosts GDP, as each day passes we see that the previously accepted link between GDP and living standards has all but dissolved anyway.

It is highly unlikely this policy will make a difference to the life of the average British Muslim, and issuing a few culturally-catered bonds will not even begin to address the rampant inequality and instability of a British economy increasingly leaning on the crutch that is the trickle-down of elite foreign capital. The extent to which Osborne’s financial policy adheres to the central Islamic idea of maslaha (public interest) is, to put it mildly, up for debate.

Although I’m not a fan of Milius, the documentary about the self-mythologising writer-director John Milius, I can see the need for it. The more sanitised and secretive public figures have become, and the more stage-managed their escapades, the greater the appetite for bad or even mildly noteworthy behaviour. This is an age when celebrities don’t have to do very much to generate controversy—spending only one hour rather than two glad-handing on the red carpet in Leicester Square should just about cover it—so it’s hardly surprising that a swaggering macho marauder like Milius should appear so exotic to our eyes.

But Milius (the film) didn’t do a sound job of convincing me of the specialness of Milius (the man). I already like much of his work: he did uncredited writing on Dirty Harry and Jaws, and was instrumental in steering Apocalypse Now away from George Lucas’s vision of it as a low-budget Dr Strangelove relocated to Vietnam and toward Francis Ford Coppola’s daredevil splurge. (I say that as someone not enamoured of Apocalypse Now but convinced that its failings would not have been corrected by the presence of Lucas in the director’s chair.) Big Wednesday (which Milius directed as well as wrote) is the one film of his that has heart as well as ostentatious myth-making. I even have a soft spot for Conan the Barbarian, which is so mordantly sincere that it almost—almost—brings an operatic tone to its silliness.

Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson’s documentary can boast a battalion of adoring and starry expert witnesses: Lucas, who has pin-prick eyes and no neck and a voice like a machine humming three rooms away; Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who also appeared in last week’s industry documentary Seduced and Abandoned and are therefore perilously close to becoming the Hollywood equivalents of the rent-a-gobs and stand-up comics who once littered I Love the 1980s-style schedule-fillers; Spielberg, still waiting for an operation that will remove painlessly the baseball cap from his scalp; and a strangely coquettish Harrison Ford, wringing his hands effeminately. It falls to a lesser-known actor, Sam Elliott, to deliver the most inadvertently damning testimony. “He doesn’t write for pussies and he doesn’t write for women,” he says admiringly. “He writes for men. Because he’s a man.” With friends like Sam, eh?

John, John, John: everyone loves John. Though it all seems to be largely on John’s terms. If John declares himself a Zen anarchist, whatever that means, then his friends will all willingly parrot that line. Chiefly they appear to love him because he was never shy of drawing a gun on an executive if the meeting wasn’t going to his liking. Personally, I need a bit more than that in my filmmaking heroes. The makers of Milius don’t seem to have realised that a few dissenting voices would have fortified their portrait. He is by all accounts strengthened by opponents and adversaries. He needs enemies, someone says. But this film is nothing more than a massage.

‘Milius’ is released on DVD on Monday.

On 17 February 1961, the NS announced that Bertrand Russell and others who considered civil disobedience a valid form of protest would take part in an unlawful demonstration against Polaris and Britain’s nuclear policy. As the editors stressed, “We do not believe that either [Russell’s] assumptions or the tactics he advocates are correct in present circumstances, but we believe that he should have a full opportunity to explain his position.”

There are two different kinds of conscientious civil disobedience. There is disobedience to a law specifically commanding an action which some people profoundly believe to be wicked. The most important example of this case in our time is conscientious objection. This, however, is not the kind of civil disobedience which is now in question.

The second kind of civil disobedience, which is the one that I wish to consider, is its employment with a view to causing a change in the law or in public policy. In this aspect, it is a means of propaganda, and there are those who consider that it is an undesirable kind. Many, however, of whom I am one, think it to be now necessary.

Many people hold that law-breaking can never be justified in a democracy, though they concede that under any other form of government it may be a duty. The victorious governments, after the Second World War, reprobated, and even punished, Germans for not breaking the law when the law commanded atrocious actions. I do not see any logic which will prove either that a democratic government cannot command atrocious actions or that, if it does, it is wrong to disobey its commands.

Democratic citizens are for the most part busy with their own affairs and cannot study difficult questions with any thoroughness. Their opinions are formed upon such information as is easily accessible, and the Authorities can, and too often do, see to it that such information is misleading. When I speak of the Authorities, I do not think only of the politicians, whether in office or in opposition, but equally their technical advisers, the popular press, broadcasting and television and, in the last resort, the police. These forces are, at present, being used to prevent the democracies of Western countries from knowing the truth about nuclear weapons. The examples are so numerous that a small selection must suffice.

I should advise optimists to study the report of the committee of experts appointed by the Ohio State University to consider the likelihood of accidental war, and also the papers by distinguished scientists in the proceedings of the Pugwash Conferences. Mr Oskar Morgenstern, a politically orthodox American defence expert, in an article reprinted in Survival, says: “The probability of thermonuclear war’s occurring appears to be significantly larger than the probability of its not occurring.” Sir Charles Snow says: “Speaking as responsibly as I can, within, at the most, ten years from now, some of those bombs are going off. That is the certainty.” (The Times, 28 December 1960.) The last two include intended as well as accidental wars.

The causes of unintended war are numerous and have already on several occasions very nearly resulted in disaster. The moon and flights of geese have been mistaken for Russian missiles. Nevertheless, not long ago, the Prime Minister, with pontifical dogmatism, announced that there will be no war by accident. Whether he believed what he said, I do not know. If he did, he is ignorant of things which it is his duty to know. If he did not believe what he said, he was guilty of the abominable crime of luring mankind to its extinction by promoting groundless hopes.

Take, again, the question of British unilateralism. There is an entirely sober case to be made for this policy, but the misrepresentations of opponents, who command the main organs of publicity, have made it very difficult to cause this case to be known. For example, the labour correspondent of one of the supposedly most liberal of the daily papers wrote an article speaking of opposition to unilateralism as “the voice of sanity”. I wrote a letter in reply, arguing that, on the contrary, sanity was on the side of the unilateralists and hysteria on the side of their opponents. This the newspaper refused to print. Other unilateralists have had similar experiences.

Or consider the question of American bases in Britain. Who knows that within each of them there is a hard kernel consisting of the airmen who can respond to an alert and are so highly trained that they can be in the air within a minute or two? This kernel is kept entirely isolated from the rest of the camp, which is not admitted to it. It has its own mess, dormitories, libraries, cinemas, etc, and there are armed guards to prevent other Americans in the base camp from having access to it. Every month or two, everybody in it, including the Commander, is flown back to America and replaced by a new group. The men in this inner kernel are allowed almost no contact with the other Americans in the base camp and no contact whatever with any of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood.

It seems clear that the whole purpose is to keep the British ignorant and to preserve, among the personnel of the kernel, that purely mechanical response to orders and propaganda for which the whole of their training is designed. Moreover, orders to this group do not come from the Commandant, but direct from Washington. To suppose that at a crisis the British government can have any control over the orders sent from Washington is pure fantasy. It is obvious that at any moment orders might be sent from Washington which would lead to reprisals by the Soviet forces and to the extermination of the population of Britain within an hour.

The situation of these kernel camps seems analogous to that of the Polaris submarines. It will be remembered that the Prime Minister said that there would be consultation between the US and the UK governments before a Polaris missile is fired, and that the truth of his statement was denied by the US government. All this, however, is unknown to the non-political public.

To make known the facts which show that the life of every inhabitant of Britain, old and young, man, woman and child, is at every moment in imminent danger and that this danger is caused by what is mis-named defence and immensely aggravated by every measure which governments pretend will diminish it – to make this known has seemed to some of us an imperative duty which we must pursue with whatever means are at our command. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has done and is doing valuable and very successful work in this direction, but the press is becoming used to its doings and beginning to doubt their news value. It has therefore seemed to some of us necessary to supplement its campaign by such actions as the press is sure to report.

There is another, and perhaps even more important reason, for the practice of civil disobedience in this time of utmost peril. There is a very widespread feeling that the individual is impotent against governments, and that, however bad their policies may be, there is nothing effective that private people can do about it. This is a complete mistake. If all those who disapprove of government policy were to join in massive demonstrations of civil disobedience, they could render governmental folly impossible and compel the so-called statesmen to acquiesce in measures that would make human survival possible. Such a vast movement, inspired by outraged public opinion, is possible; perhaps it is imminent. If you join it, you will be doing something important to preserve your family, friends, compatriots, and the world.

An extraordinarily interesting case which illustrates the power of the Establishment, at any rate in America, is that of Claude Eatherly, who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. His case also illustrates that in the modern world it often happens that only by breaking the law can a man escape from committing atrocious crimes. He was not told what the bomb would do and was utterly horrified when he discovered the consequences of his act. He has devoted himself throughout many years to various kinds of civil disobedience with a view to calling attention to the atrocity of nuclear weapons and to expiating the sense of guilt which, if he did not act, would weigh him down. The Authorities have decided that he is to be considered mad, and a board of remarkably conformist psychiatrists has endorsed that official view.

Eatherly is repentant and certified: Truman is unrepentant and uncertified. I have seen a number of Eatherly’s statements explaining his motives. These statements are entirely sane. But such is the power of mendacious publicity that almost everyone, including myself, believed that he had become a lunatic. In our topsy-turvy world those who have power of life and death over the whole human species are able to persuade almost the whole population of the countries which nominally enjoy freedom of the press that any man who considers the preservation of human life a thing of value must be mad. I shall not be surprised if my last years are spent in a lunatic asylum – where I shall enjoy the company of all who are capable of feelings of humanity.

This week’s critic at large is Laurie Penny, who interviews the ever-popular Neil Gaiman. Gaiman says that the real problem with such a degree of popularity is the inability to write it produces: he cannot find time to be a “writer”, rather he is a “traveler, a signer, a promoter, a talker, a lecturer.” Nevertheless, he has found the time to write not only one but two books: Fortunately, the Milk… a children’s book about the wild tales a father tells to his children to explain why he is late from the shops and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, an adult horror story about a bookish, lonely child who meets ancient monsters at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden.

Ultimately, Penny seeks to discover why Gaiman appeals so much to the lost and alone. She concludes: “More than anything else, Gaiman’s work is about escapism and he appeals to those who long to leave their lives. Which, at some point or another, is almost everyone.” Gaiman recognises this escapism in his work but for him “there’s nothing wrong with escape”.

This is a fascinating interview that, among other things, touches upon the self-reflexive nature of Gaiman’s work, his “personal brand” image that is now being emulated by younger authors - his past with the Church of Scientology and being in a punk band.

Jude Rogers reviews the debut album Pure Heroine by teen sensation Lorde. Her number one single “Royals” was used to herald the arrival of Bill de Blasio, New York City’s new mayor, onto the victory platform on 5 November. Rogers is aware that:

Politicians plumping for youthful aural support is nothing new. Gordon Brown said he “loved” the Arctic Monkeys (his slice of Lester Bangs criticism: “They are very loud”). But with Lorde comes a self-awareness that shimmers in every part of her presentation.

It is this self-awareness that has Roger’s hooked. Lorde sings about the rich-poor divide, she satirises the pop-star world and is “acutely aware of the way in which young people are caricatured.” All in all, Lorde is a refreshingly new voice: a clever female pop star aware of how she can “access and shape the world.”

Never heard of Georges Simenon? Well, you probably will soon, because over the course of the next seven years, Penguin are going to be releasing a new translation of each of his 75 – yes, 75 – Inspector Maigret novels every month. The first one – Pietr the Latvian – has been translated by David Bellos, and author Ian Sansom is a fan. He appreciates the novel for its paradoxical, liminal tone, most particularly that of its “beautiful-ugly”, “exceptional unexceptional”, “delightfully dull” detective protagonist. However, more so than the novel itself, it seems Sansom is fascinated by its author. “If Simenon were the analysand,” he writes, “then Maigret would undoubtedly be the therapist.” Over half the review, in fact, deals with how hedonistic and prolific Simenon was – “a writer with a quantitative career, as well as qualitative achievements”.

Also this week, Adrian Smith lauds the new C J Sansom: Dominion - a 650-page counterfactual historical novel which posits a rather big What If. What if, instead of Churchill, Lord Halifax had succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and France's surrender in 1940 led to Britain signing a peace treaty with Hitler? Smith and Sansom both hold PhDs in history, and Smith's qualms with the novel's comprehensive research are relatively minor (“Etonians play football not rugby”). The rest of Sansom's alternate timeline is praised as realistic while remaining compelling reading: the Gestapo operate out of the University of London library, Senate House (a building Hitler famously coveted), and blackshirted Fascist Oswald Mosley has become home secretary. Most extreme of all, Hitler assists Enoch Powell fight to retain India for the Empire instead of allowing it independence. However, Smith does note the contentious choice Sansom has made in his speculative portrayal of the Scottish National Party, whose nationalism leads them to collaborate with the Nazis. In the year before Scottish independence goes to the polls, apparently even things that never happened can cause controversy.

This week’s Critics section also features:

• The Goldsmiths Prize
• Ryan Gilbey's film critique of The Counselor and Don Jon
• Downton Abbey and Poiriot according to Rachel Cooke
• Antonia Quirke on BBC radio 3's Discovering Music
• An analysis of Rahul Sagar's book Secrets and Leaks: the Dilemnas of State Secrets by Katrina Forrester
• Neel Mukherjee's review of Penelope Fitzgerald: a Life by Hermione Lee
• Frances Wilson assessment of John Sutherland's A Little History of Literature and John Freeman's How to Read a Novelist
• Olivia Laing's examination of White Girls by Hilton Als 

Last week, in a move that threatened to shake the very foundations of our world, Michael Gove admitted he'd made a mistake.

Okay, “admitted” isn’t quite the right word: the written ministerial statement, released at lunchtime on a Friday (when every self-respecting education hack is looking for a story), managed to blame both Labour and local authorities for the cock up. Nonetheless, the substance of the matter remains that the Department for Education (DfE) had promised something, found it couldn’t deliver, and now everything is going to cost more and arrive late. The affair tells us much about the difficulty of de-politicising the systems through which central government doles out cash.

The story, as with so many of Gove's travails, involves school buildings. One of the Tory party's main criticisms of Labour's mammoth construction programme was that it was wasteful – that its largesse was focused not on the schools with the most dilapidated buildings, but on the councils that shouted loudest about deprivation. The coalition’s smaller replacement programmes would put an end to this, by distributing cash solely on the basis of physical need; maintenance funding was meant to be handed out in the same way.

This is easier said than done, though, because no comprehensive survey of England’s schools existed (Labour scrapped the requirement on councils to conduct one back in 2005) – so since 2011, the government’s been conducting one. Most of the work’s been done by a trio of construction consultancies; to save money, though, where councils had continued to collect their own data, the government intended to use that. The whole thing was meant to be done by last July.

It wasn't. In his statement on Friday, Gove admitted that the council data had turned out to be both “inconsistent” and “inaccurate”. As a result, those consultancies were going to have to survey another 8,000 schools, and the whole thing won’t be done until next summer. Gove didn't tell us how much this would cost, but those firms aren't going to work for free; the first 11,000 surveys reportedly cost around £30m.

So, this is a cock up. But it is, on one level, the good sort of cock up: the kind you want your government to be making. It tried to use a shortcut, found it couldn't, and quietly backed down. Yes, it'll cost, but it would have cost anyway. At least they were trying to save money. No harm done.

On another level, though – nobody saw this coming? Are you kidding me? Of course the data is inconsistent, what kind of miracle would it take for 90 councils to produce comparable data, with no guidance whatsoever? And as for “accurate”, one of the things that triggered this whole exercise was a suspicion that councils were gaming the system, crying poverty to get themselves bumped up the waiting list. Did it really not occur to anyone that council surveys might be slightly on the biased side?

This isn't going to have much of an impact on the current school building programme: the DfE has already decided which schools were most deserving of its largesse, without the benefit of this grand survey (this, one might think, raises questions in itself). But it does mean another year of handing out maintenance funding based on pupil numbers, rather than actual need.

More than that, though, the affair highlights the difficulty of coming up with an “objective” basis for making public spending decisions. These surveys, construction consultants tell me, are always mildly subjective: a slight difference in judgement can, scaled up to an entire school, mean a big differences in cost.

What’s more, when it comes to school buildings, the whole notion of “need” is as much art as science. Research on the effect a building has on how much learning happens inside it has been limited and contradictory. If one school does well with a poor building, while another does badly with a better one, which is more deserving of scarce public funds? What if one school, in relatively good nick, could be improved with a small investment, while another, worse one would cost vastly more to patch up? Which should be prioritised? There’s no “correct” answer to these questions: all such decisions are inherently political.

This is a pattern you see time and again in government financial decisions, on everything from NHS spending to council funding to who should pay the most tax. Politicians can come up with a formula based on an objective set of numbers – but which numbers they choose, and what they do with them, will always be a matter of judgement.

In the scheme of things the cost of this latest mess is small, and it’s better to have this database then not to have it. But the notion that any system for allocating scarce schools capital funding could ever be “correct” was always a pipe dream. You can’t replace politics with science.

The Counselor (18); Don Jon (18)
dir: Ridley Scott; dir: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

A debut need not be the product of a newcomer, as demonstrated by two films in which veterans of one discipline try their luck in another. The novelist Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been short of attention from cinema: John Hillcoat made a fine, harrowing film of The Road and there were middling versions of No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. But The Counselor marks the first time that McCarthy’s name has appeared in the opening credits under “Written by”, rather than “Adapted from”. The spare, singed stoicism and bitter poison one might expect from his pen risks being detoxified by the “Directed by Ridley Scott” that follows. This may stand as cinema’s foremost mismatch until the day that Lars von Trier adapts Jilly Cooper.

The Counselor has the studied cynicism of a Bond novel and the high gloss of a Bond movie. It even features a pantomime villain with a predilection for exotic pets – Malkina (Cameron Diaz), whose hobbies include keeping cheetahs, being some kind of unspecified drugs overlord, intimidating her boyfriend (Javier Bardem in a Green Day fright-wig) and cleaning car windscreens in a novel way. How shall I put this? She’ll take her vulva to your Volvo. All things considered, it’s unlikely to catch on at the local Shell.

There is no cinematic equivalent to the literary Bad Sex in Fiction Award but perhaps The Counselor could be the catalyst for one. It’s regrettable enough that the film opens with coy pillow talk (“Where do you want me to touch you?” “Down there”) between the main protagonist (a corrupt, nameless lawyer played by Michael Fassbender) and his lover (Penélope Cruz). Even worse is the realisation that this scene is intended as an appetite whetting pre-credits sequence, complete with dramatic score. In The Spy Who Loved Me, it was a ski stunt that turned into a parachute jump. In The Counselor, it’s cunnilingus.

“You are the world you have created,” the lawyer is told when he starts bleating about his awful fate. The world of the film is one in which sex, drugs and money have filled the vacuum occupied normally by morality and compassion. Yet the ugliness of the environment doesn’t stink as much as Scott’s fawning camera, which seems to celebrate the opulence and narcissism decried by the screenplay. Not that the script is perfect. Characters speak in cryptic crossword clues. Buying a diamond ring involves a philosophy lecture: “Adornment is about enhancing the frailty of the beloved,” says the jeweller. You don’t hear that at Ernest Jones.

When someone does speak plainly (a gangster tells our hero, “There is no choosing; there is only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago”), the words are a relief. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, not without its healthy parts (Brad Pitt is witty as a self-satisfied crook in a milk-white suit) but prey to a creeping artistic gangrene.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt may be shorter in the tooth (he’s 32 years old to McCarthy’s 80) but this former child star has also taken a notable new career path. As an actor, he is unusual in moving between material of jaunty lightness – (500) Days of Summer and the batty sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun– and masochistic intensity: his strongest work was as a janitor exploited by criminals in The Lookout and as an abused hustler in Mysterious Skin. He also earned his blockbuster spurs in Inception and The Dark KnightRises, which must be how Warner Bros came to back Don Jon, his first film as a writer and director. It’s difficult to believe a major studio would have stumped up for what is, in effect, an overextended short had it been made by anyone else.

Gordon-Levitt plays Jon, a libidinous Italian- American unable to reconcile the shortfall between real sex and the online pornography to which he is addicted. A brassy new girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson) reads him the riot act, while an unpredictable older woman (Julianne Moore) provides unsolicited tutelage.

The film’s powerful points about the commodification of desire are made in the opening minutes. After that, Don Jon has nothing to offer but learning curves. Still, Brie Larson is a model of understatement in a near-wordless performance as Jon’s sister, her bored eyes clamped to her smartphone. And next to The Counselor, with its wipe-clean, laminated images, it’s refreshing to see a movie so visually undemonstrative. A lot of care went into making this film look as undernourished as its hero’s emotional life. At least, I hope it did.

On the dockside in Boston I spotted Fia’s Seafood – they were offering “twin lobsters” for $28.95; I ventured in and asked if the lobsters were identical or non-identical twins. “Why d’you wanna know?” the maître d’ snarled. “Because,” I replied, “I can only perform unnatural psychological experiments on them if they’re zygotic.”

The president was in town for a speech and the area around the State House was fraught with security: state cops on cliché Harleys, FBI agents in cliché letter jackets, and most intimidating of all those excessively polite men in pale yellow raincoats with pig’s tail antennae dangling from their ears. I gave them all a swerve and took the Red Line into Cambridge.

Sometimes it seems to me that the relationship between American society and its fast food is as close as that of ... well, identical twins. Foreigners writing on US gustatory habits have always understood the cafeteria and the lunch counter as the extension of the production line into the stomach. If you haven’t already, take a look at Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s ecstatically enraged depiction of American fast food in his 1933 novel, Journey to the End of the Night.

Emerging into the darkness of Harvard Square, I also gave the raggedy man standing by the subway exit a swerve. (His sign read “Looking for a Little Human Kindness” – how corny can you get?) The street folk were thronging about Starbucks, homing in like zombies on its smell-a-round of deceit – the odours of bread, pastry and roasted coffee that as one enters are dissipated by the cold winds of commercial calculation. In the lift down to the basement I sighed as I tapped my receipt code into the console. “They gotta do it,” an academic-looking type said, “else the homeless people trash the restrooms – they smear shit on the walls – I guess they’re really aggrieved.” I gave him an admiring glance and said, “Nice use of ‘aggrieved’.”

Back on the surface I passed by the Bridge Over Troubled Water trailer – “Reaching Out a Helping Hand to 16-24-Year-Olds” – before coming upon Mr Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers, a Boston landmark – or so its sign asserted – since 1960. Inside, the tables were covered with wood-grain laminate and the chairs were of the green plastic, lawn variety. A waiter with a T-shirt that read – wholly in innocence – “We Beat the Meat”, showed me to a table. Looking around me I saw that this was an establishment dominated by what Walter Benjamin characterised as the “vertical type” of modern consumerism: hokey old advertisements for Chesterfield cigarettes; triangular road signs that showed stick figures crawling on their knees towards beer glasses, and which were captioned “STUDENTS CROSSING”; over several tables there were small signs that said “Johnny Cash Ate Here”, or “Robert Plant Ate Here” – claims I didn’t doubt for the thousandths of a second necessary for a computerised trading system to make a ruinous interest-swap.

Mr Bartley’s menu was equally diverting; the standard seven-ounce burger came in a plethora of guises. The Obamacare was glossed thus: “Nobody knows what’s in it ... ask the liberal sitting next to you”, and costed at: “$ Trillions”; while the Fiscal Cliff – “it’s here!” – was rather more optimistically priced at $13.85, for which you got crumbled bacon, blue cheese, red onion, balsamic vinegar and additional onion rings. I wish I could tell you I ordered a Mark Zuckerberg (“America’s richest geek, Boursin cheese and bacon with sweet potato fries”), which was a snip at 13 bucks – but, strange to relate, my sense of humour seemed to have deserted me. While I sipped my coke and chewed on my standard Mr Bartley’s cheeseburger (the only novelty being that I opted for provelone) I stared about me at my fellow preppies, who, to a man and a woman seemed to be channelling Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in those early scenes of Love Story– before the crab bites.

Lucky us. Out there in the streets the chill winds blew along Massachusetts Avenue and our brothers and sisters were dunking in the trash cans for discarded donuts. As I say, I often feel that American society and American fast food are twins separated at birth; and while one has been fed on 100 per cent ground beef and French fries cooked to a golden perfection, the other has been starved, beaten and otherwise degraded. It’s an unnatural psychological experiment – nonetheless I’m sure you’ll agree that it has to be done.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

Recently on CNN, Piers Morgan sat at a table across from Ricky Gervais and grilled him about gun control. “Iowa has been giving out gun permits to blind people,” he told the comedian. “Not just partially blind people, but completely blind people, who aren’t allowed, legally, to drive cars.” Gervais stifled a smile. “Well, I learned about this through one of your tweets,” he offered. “And I understand you thought this was a bad idea.” The CNN chyron chimed in: “GUNS FOR THE BLIND?!”

Morgan’s gun-control activism has been a constant cable-news hum over the past year, his reformist ardor mounting nightly. There was the now-infamous interview with sad-sack right-wing radio host Alex Jones, who ranted unintelligibly while Morgan asked him to calm down. There was the sit-down with gun-rights activist Larry Pratt during which Morgan exploded: “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?” In recent months, the decibel level has risen—conveniently tied to the release of Morgan’s new book, Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney, which charts Morgan’s metamorphosis from gossipmonger into moral crusader.

Morgan has already published a bushel of memoirs, gabby catalogs of his celebrity run-ins. (“Then Fergie called to offer her sympathy. ‘Believe me, Piers, I’ve been there,’ she said, her voice quivering with emotion.”) These books are lively and crass, the chronicles of a bottom-feeder happily in his element. But Shooting Straight is pure self-righteousness. It features one particularly revealing bit in which Morgan attends the premiere of “The Newsroom”—a show unafraid to inflict its own gut punches of sanctimony—and marvels at anchor Will McAvoy’s perfect integrity. “ ‘The Newsroom’ showed me what’s missing from my own show—a voice,” Morgan writes. And then he set his sights on gun control.

It can be hard to reconcile this newly high-minded Piers Morgan with the Piers Morgan who built his reputation in the Fleet Street muckraking corps. Even in that shamelessly scummy milieu, Morgan was a standout. At 28, he became the youngest-ever editor of News of the World, where his many scoops included a tell-all from Divine Brown, the prostitute who serviced Hugh Grant in his car on Sunset Boulevard. (Front page: “It’s THAT tart in THAT dress.”) He once gleefully ran photos of a TV presenter kissing a woman who was not his wife, then got punched in the head by said presenter. In 2004, he was fired as editor of the Daily Mirror for printing doctored photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. He eventually sought refuge in reality TV. By the time CNN hired him to replace Larry King—billing him as “a little bit dangerous” in its ads—Morgan was familiar in the U.S. primarily for his role on “America’s Got Talent,” as an arbiter of boy bands and piano-playing pigs.

And yet there isn’t much daylight between the two versions of Morgan. In gun control as in celebrity sex busts, he is a mastermind at the game of cheap provocation. This is what made him a star in the tabloid world, where shock value is news value and blatancy is currency. The trouble is that he has channeled the very same sensibility into his anti-gun campaign. You might call it tabloidism as activism, sensationally and recklessly applied.

Gun violence, it turns out, hasn’t always gotten Morgan’s journalistic juices flowing. In his 2005 book, The Insider, he describes his initial reaction to the 1996 Dunblane school massacre: “Just after 10am, the newsdesk told me there were reports of a shooting at a school in Scotland. I was not immediately that interested. Scottish stories rarely get into the English edition unless they are pretty spectacular.” In Shooting Straight, Morgan revisits this episode, but this time he simply declares: “I was determined that something meaningful would be done to try and prevent anything like this from happening again.”

Morgan’s current determination is hard to deny. His effectiveness is less clear. For one thing, there’s the way he handles guests. Morgan tends to let hotheads like Jones rant unchecked (ostensibly to expose their insanity, though after a point, he is just giving them a bigger platform). But then he steamrolls authors and academics whose logic is actually worth debunking. Take economist and gun-rights proponent John Lott, whose head Morgan permitted to occupy one side of a split-screen while he talked over him for ten minutes. Lott, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime, attempted feebly to interject, but Morgan wasn’t having it. “I am going to keep talking, so I suggest you keep quiet,” the host informed the guest. To which Lott replied, shoulders slumping: “I don’t see what the point of having anybody on is if you’re going to talk for ninety percent of the time.” And still Morgan barreled on.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

Meteorite impacts can be very destructive. One that fell in Mexico around 66m years ago created a 180km crater and caused the extinction of dinosaurs while spewing debris and molten rock into the air. Now, in what is a fascinating tale of serendipity, researchers have found that these events don’t entirely destroy all traces of life at the site of impact. Molten rocks can capture and preserve organic matter as they cool down to form glass beads.

When a meteor enters Earth’s atmosphere, the air around the meteor gets very quickly compressed causing it to heat up, scorching everything in its path. Most of the time that is where the story ends, as the meteor burns up in the sky as a “shooting star”. But sometimes it is big enough to reach all the way to the surface and transfer its remaining energy to the ground.

This energy is dissipated, as mild earthquakes, sound shockwaves – but mostly as heat. The heat energy can be so great that it melts rocks on the surface and hurls them up in the atmosphere. Anything that comes in contact with this molten rock would presumably get burnt, leaving nothing but rocky material that cools down in the atmosphere, forming glass beads and tektites (gravel-sized natural glass). This is what City University of New York researcher Kieren Howard assumed, but he was able to show that his assumptions were wrong.

For his PhD, Howard was studying the glass beads and tektites found near the Darwin crater in Tasmania. The 1.2km wide crater was created by a meteorite impact about 800,000 years ago.

The natural glass formed during cooling is (as implied by the term glass) not crystalline. Instead of a regular arrangement of atoms, the atoms inside it are randomly arranged. Howard’s analysis, however, kept showing the presence of crystals. At first, he dismissed this as a problem with the machine or with his method of analysis. But when it kept showing up, as a good scientist, he thought he should ask an expert to look at his data.

“This is unusual,” says Chris Jeynes, a physicist at the University of Surrey. “If there were indeed crystals, then it was the result of uneven cooling, which can occur when something gets trapped inside these glass beads.”

Jeynes used proton-beam analysis, a method to peer inside the glass to reveal its elemental make-up. Inside he found carbon. “Howard had no idea what his samples were, and he was very surprised when I told him,” Jeynes says.

The natural glass formed should contain only silicon, titanium, oxygen and other metallic elements in trace amounts. Detection of carbon meant that there was some organic matter inside. The only hypothesis was that, somehow during the formation of these glass beads, they captured organic matter that was floating in the atmosphere. That organic matter might have already been in the air, but it might also include material thrown up by the impact.

Howard then went to another expert to break open these glass beads and reveal what the carbon-rich matter was. It turned out that it included were cellulose, lignin and other biopolymers. This meant that somehow this matter, which originated from plants, had survived the temperature of more than 500°C, which is what the molten rock would have reached before cooling into a glass bead. Usually these temperatures will break down the organic matter, but clearly it didn’t in this case.

Mark Sephton, a geochemist at Imperial College London, was surprised and pleased: “What the results show is that these glass beads can capture an aliquot of the atmosphere of the planet at impact. It is like a time capsule of that ecosystem.” These results are published in Nature Geoscience.

The implications are enormous. It shows that other meteorite impacts, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, could have created such time capsules too. Sephton is now working on finding glass beads from other impact sites to reveal information about Earth’s ancient atmosphere.

This method of analysis means that we could also go looking for similar beads on other planets, like Mars, where meteorite impacts are common. They could also reveal vital information about the past atmosphere of those planets. Maybe they captured organic matter – if it ever existed there.

“We would not know any of this if it wasn’t for Howard,” Jeynes says, adding that Howard’s persistence to find out what “the wrong results” led the researchers to a phenomenon that nobody knew existed.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

I’ve just returned from the dress rehearsal of Curlew River at St Giles Cripplegate in the City of London. This moated church was originally built in the 12^th century and is now enclosed by the concrete towers of the Barbican Centre.

It’s a strange island outpost but an apt setting for one of Britten’s most unusual and – I think I’m right in saying – least performed works.

It’s an opera about a mother who has lost her child. It’s sung by an all-male cast and consists of just a few characters: the mother (called ‘the madwoman’ because she is wracked by grief); the ferryman; and the traveller.

It’s a very simple story: the madwoman arrives at the bank of the Curlew River. She’s in a state of distraction and begs the ferryman, who’s dismissive of her plight, to let her come on board. In desperation, she explains she is searching for someone, and eventually the ferryman relents.

As they cross the river, the ferryman explains that this day is an important anniversary. A year ago a boy died by the Curlew River, having been abandoned by his cruel master. The boy’s tomb is now a site of pilgrimage.

As the ferryman tells the story, it becomes apparent that the boy who died is the madwoman’s son. On disembarking from the boat, she is taken to the graveside to say a prayer for his soul. At the end of the opera, the boy appears to the assembled company and blesses his mother.

Britten called this small-scale opera a church parable and wrote it to be performed in Orford church near his home at Aldeburgh. The first production was in 1964, but the idea for Curlew River had been planted in the composer’s mind eight years earlier – in Tokyo.

On a world tour with his partner Peter Pears in 1956, Britten had stopped off in Japan and seen a fifteenth century Noh play called Sumidagawa or The Sumida River.

Britten’s first reaction to the play was to laugh. As Britten scholar Mervyn Cooke points out, Britten may have found the distinctive warbling of the singers reminiscent of Spike Milligan’s Eccles in The Goon Show.

But Britten’s initial embarrassment was supplanted by deep interest. It was clear to him that his experience of the Noh play would form the basis for a work of his own.

Before he could get round to it, however, there were other projects to tackle – in particular the War Requiem, an incredibly elaborate choral work commissioned for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962. After its completion he sought a change of direction and Curlew River provided the outlet.

Like Sumidagawa, Curlew River has a small number of soloists and a chorus. Like the Noh play, it is sung by an all-male cast, wearing masks and acting the story through sparse, stylized movements. The libretto of Curlew River was closely based on an English translation of Sumidagawa; and Britten used flute, drums and bells to inflect the score with the air of Japanese music.

This, however, is the where the comparison ends. Britten took the story of Sumidagawa and transposed it to the East Anglian fenlands. He also framed the story as a medieval mystery play, and replaced the Buddhist reference points with Christian ones. Monks enter the church singing a plainsong chant and the abbot, at their head, announces that they are going to act out a story.

As the monks remove their habits and disperse about the stage, the three main characters emerge: the madwoman, the ferryman and the traveller. In this production, they are played by Ian Bostridge, Mark Stone and Neal Davies, and directed by Netia Jones.

On paper, it doesn’t seem at all surprising that Curlew River is difficult to stage. It’s not big enough for an opera house and tricky to pull off in a theatre. It’s a bizarre fusion of mystery play and Noh play, and comes with a wodge of notes by the first director Colin Graham, prescribing rules for how it should be performed.

But in Netia Jones’ interpretation, which pays no heed to past productions and concentrates purely on the emotional core of the story, the opera feels startling resonant and true.

It’s extraordinary that Britten should have written a work of such power based on a Japanese play which he could hardly have understood as he was watching it. But perhaps this is the experience he intends us to have in the audience of Curlew River. The characters are like abstract cut outs – open to interpretation, almost like vessels to be filled by the voices of the singers, shapes onto which we can project our imaginations.

The director Netia Jones suggests this idea to us by projecting monochrome film footage onto a blank, white stage. The madwoman, dressed in a long black robe, appears neither male nor female: she simply represents a figure of grief, rather than a character in any realistic sense. Ian Bostridge’s tall, ethereal physical presence intensifies the effect; you completely forget that he is a man playing a woman’s role.

The fact that the story is being acted out by monks who are themselves played by singers implicates the audience in the drama all the more fully. By recognizing that the drama is just a construction we are, conversely, more aware of its connection to real life.

Very little actually happens in the opera, but the relationships between the characters are closely observed. It takes a long time for the madwoman to persuade the ferryman to give her a place in his boat. He enjoys ridiculing her crazy behaviour and mocking her pretensions.

While the ferryman is unmoved by the madwoman’s condition, the traveller is more immediately responsive to her plight, and the chorus, who represent the other passengers, are easily swayed in either direction. Only when it’s revealed that the dead boy is the madwoman’s son does the ferryman show pity and lead her to the boy’s grave.

As the ferryman turns to makes preparations for the return crossing and the other passengers proceed with their journeys, there is a horrifying moment when it seems that the fragile bonds of sympathy that have developed between the characters will once more evaporate, leaving the madwoman to contend with her grief alone.

The ferryman hasn’t time to stop for long before making the return journey. The traveller is (as he tells us) continually on the move. Even the characters themselves will shortly revert to being monks and turn their backs on the story they’ve just brought to life. But the madwoman has nowhere to turn. She remains on stage and in our imaginations, calling for our sympathies. 

Britten’s first church parable does not offer us Christian consolation, despite its ending. It allows us to experience the rush of hope in the madwoman’s heart as her child is heard faintly singing. But the child’s benediction is not echoed in the music. The plainsong that closes the opera is exactly the same as the chant we hear at the beginning.

Are we to be left with this disturbing feeling of circularity? Perhaps. But perhaps a change has occurred in the audience’s minds. The effect of Curlew River is to heighten our sensitivity and enlarge our sympathies, not just for the plight of the madwoman but for the people she represents.

Curlew River will be performed as part of the Barbican Britten Festival in London on 14 - 16 November.

Curlew River is also the subject of a Radio 4 programme, produced by Isabel Sutton, on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30 on 19 November. The programme is a Just Radio production.

The Confidence Trap: a History of Democracy in Crisis from
World War I to the Present
David Runciman
Princeton University Press, 408pp, £19.95

Democracy is the prevalent form of government in the modern world, the norm to which it is believed all civilised states should aspire. But it was not always so. It began in Athens in the fifth century BC as, in the words of the Cambridge political philosopher John Dunn, “an improvised remedy for a very local Greek difficulty 2,500 years ago”. The Athenians, however, practised direct democracy in which the people made decisions for themselves rather than relying on elected representatives to make decisions on their behalf. Admittedly Athenian democracy was very limited: it was restricted to male citizens, with women and slaves excluded. Direct democracy still survives in a few small cantons in Switzerland, town meetings in the United States and, in an attenuated form, in some parish meetings in England.

In the modern world, representative democracy is the norm and the latter part of the 20th century seemed to witness its global triumph. That was a striking contrast with the first half of the 20th century. In 1926, there were just 26 democracies among the nations of the world and these came under threat after the Great Depression, which began in 1929. As a result of the impact of fascism and National Socialism, the frontiers of democracy were pushed back. In 1931, when Spain returned – temporarily, as it turned out – to parliamentary government, Mussolini declared that it was like returning to oil lamps in the age of electricity. In 1934, António Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, said: “I am convinced that within 20 years, if there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution, there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.”

By 1940, it was an open question whether democracy could survive in the west or, indeed, at all. After the fall of France, Churchill declared that if Britain were to fail in its resistance to Nazi Germany, “The whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age.” By 1942, there were only 12 democracies left. Yet, with the defeat of Hitler, democracy revived.

In the last two decades of the 20th century were further waves of democratisation: in Latin America in the 1980s and in eastern Europe, following the collapse of communism, in the 1990s – and also, though less noticed, in Africa, where 30 ruling parties or leaders have been ousted by voters since 1991. By the millennium, 120 out of the 188 members of the United Nations could be classed as democracies. It is possible that the Arab spring will herald a further wave of democratisation, although it is too early to tell.

Political scientists have devoted much time to analysing the transition to democratic rule and the conditions for stable democracy. They have sought, in Francis Fukuyama’s words, to discover how burgeoning democracies can “get to Denmark”, that country being, as David Runciman puts it, “perhaps the most livable society on earth, a prosperous, stable, experimental, law-abiding, well governed state”.

In The Confidence Trap, he sets himself an even more challenging task: that of analysing the crises facing modern democracies and how they have been overcome. His work is in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, perhaps the greatest book ever written about democracy, and of James Bryce, whose American Commonwealth, an attempt at a sequel to de Tocqueville’s work, Runciman rightly rescues from oblivion.

The introductory chapter of The Confidence Trap describes in a fresh and convincing way de Tocqueville’s conception of democracy. Runciman agrees with de Tocqueville that democracy is an opaque system, with its strengths – its flexibility, its powers of adaptation and improvisation – largely hidden from view. Previous advocates of democracy such as Tom Paine had argued that it was a transparent form of government: “Whatever are its excellencies and defects, they are visible to all.” De Tocqueville, by contrast, understood that it was the weaknesses of democracy that were visible and obvious, while the strengths were often difficult to apprehend. Democracy, he believed, often seemed less efficient than dictatorship but it was better at resolving crises.

Yet, precisely because democracies are so adaptable and know that they are adaptable, they allow problems to escalate. Confident that they will be able in the end to meet the problems, they defer resolving them. As the crisis over the budget in the US shows all too graphically, elected politicians are happy to squabble, comforted by the knowledge that the system remains resilient. Muddling through has worked in the past. Why should it not work in the future? So, in Runciman’s graphic description, “Democracy becomes a game of chicken. When things get really bad, we will adapt. Until they get really bad, we need not adapt, because democracies are ultimately adaptable. Both sides play this game. Games of chicken are harmless, until they go wrong, at which point they become lethal.” That is what Runciman means by the confidence trap. The confidence that we all have in the problem-solving capacities of democracy traps us into a devil-may-care optimism.

Runciman analyses the trap through a tour d’horizon of seven crises of democratic uncertainty: 1918, when the then US president, Woodrow Wilson, sought unsuccessfully to make the world safe for democracy; 1933, when another US president, Franklin Roosevelt, scuppered the World Economic Conference by taking the US off the gold standard; 1947, when Europe began again with democratic institutions and found itself called on to resist Soviet intransigence; 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis; 1974 and the oil shock; 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall; and 2008, the year of the financial collapse.

Runciman sees 2008 as a double failure. The voters failed to restrain politicians and public officials from financial excess; while the central bankers, who had been given independence from political pressures precisely so that they could correct the errors of those uninstructed in the mysteries of high finance, used this freedom, in Runciman’s words “to indulge their own prejudices”.

However, the chapters on the seven crises do not equal the book’s impressive opening. They amount to little more than a dusting over of fairly familiar episodes from 20th century history and on occasion lack perception. Runciman asks, for example, whether anyone foresaw the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989 and discovers few prophets. Yet, in the early 1950s, Churchill told his private secretary, John Colville, that if Colville lived to his “natural span”, he would see the end of communism in Europe, since the communists would be unable to digest what they had swallowed. Colville died in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Confidence Trap is less a work of research or scholarship than a commentary on events, strong on paradox and epigram rather than analysis and written in a somewhat rhapsodic style, which occasionally becomes wearisome. What, for example, are we to make of this? “Democracies tend to overreach themselves when they outlast or defeat autocratic rivals, because they assume the truth about democracy has finally been revealed.” True, perhaps, of 1918 but of 1945 or 1989? Runciman pontificates: “The sense of crisis is permanent in democracies and for that reason rarely definitive.” This sounds impressive but is it true? Was there a sense of crisis in Britain in the 1950s or the US in the Eisenhower era? Part of the problem of British democracy in the 1930s, confronted as it was by Hitlerism, was precisely that there was not a sense of crisis when there ought to have been.

Some of Runciman’s statements are quite vacuous. For instance: “Democracies turn victories into defeats. However, because they misapprehend what they have done, they also turn victories into defeats.” It was Sainte-Beuve who said of de Tocqueville that he had begun to think before he learned anything; perhaps the same criticism can be directed at some of those who seek to follow in de Tocqueville’s footsteps.

Runciman concludes by identifying four areas where democracies “have performed poorly over the past decade”: “They have fought unsuccessful wars, mismanaged their finances, failed to take meaningful action on climate change and seemed frozen in the face of China’s growing power.”

Nevertheless, as he recognises, democracies, in their rough and ready way, have been able to meet these challenges. They have done so not by imposing rules to constrain popular appetites, as gurus such as Hayek and Kennan would have wished, but by adaptation. The Confidence Trap is a paean to muddling through. To defeat fascism and communism, liberal democracy “did not have to deliver on its promises . . . It simply had to retain its promise, as something that it still made sense to believe in.”

I am not wholly convinced that Runciman has identified the main challenges faced by modern democrats and, in particular, democrats on the left. He does not confront the problem, which nearly destroyed democracy in the 1930s, of ensuring that it does not become powerless in the face of its enemies. How can democracies be induced to defend themselves? The problem, while not as acute today as it was in the 1930s, is nevertheless one that ought not to be evaded. While there can be little doubt that the recent Commons vote on Syria reflected public opinion, we cannot, as some on the left would wish, pull the blankets over our heads and opt out of all foreign engagements. The left must do all it can to help the liberal and democratic forces seeking to transform Iran and the Arab world and ensure that the Arab spring does not turn into a bleak winter.

The left must also combat the widespread feeling of disenchantment felt by so many democrats, especially among the young. In the west, we now find ourselves empowered in our roles as consumers and recipients of public services – but we have not been empowered as citizens. There is a striking contrast between the active consumer and the passive citizen. Democracies have not yet responded to the spirit of individualism released by the rebellion of 1968. While the rhetoric of the rebellion was neo-Marxist, it sought in reality a wider and more genuine version of the democratic ideal. The rebels owed less to Marx than to the ideals of participatory democracy of Rousseau and of Mill.

The main catchword of the rebels was participation and their basic message was a distrust of the large, bureaucratic institutions that had come to dominate modern representative democracies. In place of such institutions, they favoured direct election, party primaries, party reform, the recall, the initiative – instruments of direct democracy that would, so they believed, enable the people to hold their leaders to account. They foresaw that the era of pure representative democracy was coming to an end.

The real confidence trap, so it seems to me, is the tension in many advanced democracies between the inherited forms of democracy and the new ideological forces of modern society. The task of the left is to make the forms congruent with the forces. That requires a return to the original Greek conception of democracy as a system in which the people make more decisions for themselves – all the people and not just those who happen to be elected as representatives.

In June 1685, Colonel Richard Rumbold, an unreconstructed leader of the Levellers, was about to be hanged, drawn and quartered for his role in the Rye House plot against Charles II. In his last moments, he said: “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” That vision still lies at the heart of the democratic ideal, even if we remain far from realising it. The task of the left is to bring us nearer to realising it.

Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at the Institute for Contemporary British Long arm of the state: Chinese police in June History, King’s College London

The reports published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on family breadwinners and poverty are a wake-up call to a government hell bent on turning back the clock on child poverty and family opportunity.

The NatCen and IPPR reports for the JRF show the true depth and extent of those on the breadline, with many working families struggling to make ends meet as David Cameron’s cost of living crisis bites. The reports show that the risk of poverty is greater for children in couple families with one traditional breadwinner, with single-earner families comprising 30 per cent of the families with children in poverty in 2011/12. The reports show that 55 per cent of families in poverty have someone in work, a shocking indictment of a government allegedly committed to making work pay.

Under David Cameron many families are finding one income alone is not enough to balance family budgets at the end of each month. He has hit families with a childcare triple whammy of falling places, rising nursery costs (up six times more than wages last year) and cuts to support of up to £1,500 for some families. The JRF rightly highlight affordable, quality childcare as a key driver for tackling low maternal employment and boosting family income. Labour’s new agenda does just this.  

Labour in government made headway on these issues. The IFS has shown that during our time in office both absolute and relative poverty fell markedly. Increases in employment helped to raise family income alongside tax credits, the national minimum wage, support for childcare and investment in the early years.

David Cameron is taking us back to the future with prices rising faster than wages in 40 out of the 41 months he’s been in power. The Tory-led government is pushing families into poverty and many low paid women can only access poorly paid part-time jobs because of a lack of accessible and affordable childcare. Universal Credit will create further barriers to work for some second earner households and some women will actually pay to work if they increase their hours. Under Universal Credit, as soon as a second earner enters work, 65p of every £1 earned will be lost to withdrawn benefits. This could affect 900,000 potential second earners disincentivising work and perpetuating poverty and inequality.

Labour’s new agenda will make a difference for working families making work pay and helping parents balance work and family life. Giving parents a primary childcare guarantee to help them manage before and after school childcare will ease the logistical nightmare some face and give parents more flexibility to work. Labour will legislate so that parents can access childcare between the hours of 8am and 6pm through their local school. Extending the provision of free childcare for three and four year olds from 15 to 25 hours a week for working parents will help mums, and it is still mainly mums, to work part-time without having to worry about childcare costs. This is worth around £1,500 per child for hard pressed working families. Shared parental leave is important as well. It is crucial in giving women the choice and the chance to return to the same job and retain their earning potential, rather than taking time out of work after they have children which, for many, means they will never again have the same pay and status.

Affordable high-quality childcare, make work pay contracts for companies paying the living wage and better family-friendly policies are all part of the new agenda Labour is developing. Our new agenda is a sign of our intent for a better future for families and children.

Autobiography
Morrissey
Penguin Classics, 480pp, £8.99

Two days after Morrissey’s Autobiography came out, I went to see Johnny Marr play at the Roundhouse in London. In what is no longer a surprise but is still a treat, he performed a handful of Smiths tunes, the divebombing drama and release of “Panic” and “Bigmouth Strikes Again” demonstrating how this band towered over not just the atrophied pop of the mid-1980s but the timid independent rock, too.

Beer and elbows flew, my glasses got broken and there were tears on adult faces when Marr broke into “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want”, the Smiths at their most deliciously melancholy. What everyone misses now – but was obvious at the time – is that the Smiths were not simply the wallowers in sadness they have been caricatured as but also bitterly funny and exuberant. The music that they played said everything to us about our lives.

“It is the song of the unresolved heart,” is how the singer-lyricist describes his musical ideal in Autobiography. “[It] is so disconnected with sorrow that the sorrow turns in on itself and becomes triumph.”

That heroic spirit and inverted lust for life are hard to find in Morrissey’s memoir, a dense, witty but self-serving work released – presumably because publishers are the last people left for Morrissey to upset – as a Penguin Classic. Nobody should be surprised at this, as he issues his records on antique labels such as HMV and Decca. Just be glad that he didn’t demand to be published by Virago, Target or Left Book Club.

Autobiography relates Steven Patrick Morrissey’s struggle through “the schoolmasterly dullness of detestable poverty” in “Victorian knife-plunging Manchester” to epiphany through punk rock and the discovery of his (a)sexuality and self-actualisation with Marr and the Smiths. Then come the fallings-out – uniformly portrayed by Morrissey as “betrayals” – followed by an ugly court case over the Smiths’ royalties and the singer’s evolution from the droll and provocative two-up-two-down Oscar Wilde of The Queen Is Dead into today’s curmudgeonly figure.

The first third is incredibly funny, a Les Dawson-goes-Gormenghast vision of northern purgatory, with a belly laugh on every page. Young Steven’s teachers are presented as vengeful monsters who read newspapers as pupils attempt to hang themselves and salvation is only to be found on TV – “Could there be hope? Animal Magic offers none at all” – or black vinyl.

When one of his favourite records is played to his classmates, their “nits sway in rhythm”. The story of how he and the guitarist Marr find one another is told with a great warmth that sadly soon evaporates. Though the language is heavily over-egged with some vegan substitute or other, this is surely part of the whole Moz package. He would never write, “Coronation Street asked me to write a script,” if he can write instead: “The weekly crawl through northern morals needed a new knight of the pen.”

Yet his prose is also obfuscatory, as is his approach to facts. While he lionises his materfamilias, Nannie Dwyer, and his mother, Elizabeth, we learn more about Trafford Park Baths than we do about Morrissey’s father, a fist-handy ducker and diver who sounds rather fascinating but remains unnamed throughout.

Any autobiography surely has a duty to inform but evidently not this one. It skims over the career of the Smiths, neglects swaths of Morrissey’s solo work, has nothing to say about the core of his art (his lyrics) and issues a clarification of his sexuality – his two-year live-in relationship with the photographer Jake Walters – so obscure that it needed a clarification of its own after the book was published. In place of the detail that would have entertained fans and made Morrissey’s case to the unconverted, there is only charmless sniping against old enemies (Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, various traitors and malefactors) and a rising tone of self-pity. At times, one is put in mind of Father Ted Crilly’s lengthy scoresettling acceptance speech for the Priest of the Year award.

This self-indulgence reaches its limit in the yawning tedium of 50 pages on the court case in 1996 in which the Smiths’ drummer, Mike Joyce, retrospectively sued Morrissey and Marr for 25 per cent of the band’s earnings and Judge John Weeks found in his favour. “How can someone who is not creative pass judgement on someone who is?” writes Morrissey and it is this adolescent silliness that fatally holes Autobiography’s claim to be a Penguin Classic – or anyone’s classic.

The book fades out with a focusless travelogue of shows played and countries visited. Here, Morrissey enters quasi-erotic raptures over the bad-lad fans and tough-girl followers who constitute his final uncritical fan base. He has run out of things to say and can only be. This is fine if you are a Morrissey votary; less so for the general reader, who will perhaps best enjoy Autobiography as A Confederacy of Dunces with Ignatious J Reilly as the narrator instead of the subject: the citizen of a better world condemned to live among the gruesome likes of you and me, blind to the comedy of existence. Morrissey is a narcissist by confession and this book, initially entertaining but ultimately dispiriting, is his autohagiography.

Andrew Harrison is a cultural critic and former magazine editor

An Officer and a Spy
Robert Harris
Hutchinson, 496pp, £18.99

Robert Harris is a novelist of range and depth – he moves from the Soviet Union to the politics of ancient Rome through a prime minister manufacturing his memoirs and now to France of the Third Republic convulsed by the Dreyfus case. In each book, Harris has found a way of marrying history with intelligent fiction to produce thrillers that are both insightful and gripping.

In An Officer and a Spy, Harris gives us a portrait of one institution: the French army. There are skilfully composed characters, from successive ministers of war and the chief of the intelligence department to Major Henry, the second in command of the shadowy statistical section. Each is driven by devotion to the army, right or wrong, and tested by the horrifying thought that the Jewish officer from the Alsace condemned by a court martial and sent to Devil’s Island to serve his sentence may be innocent.

The narrator is Colonel Picquart, who is promoted to run the statistical department, thus becoming the youngest colonel in the French army. Convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt at the beginning, he slowly starts to realise his innocence. However, one by one, his colleagues try to block his inquiries, arguing that loyalty to the army is the supreme good in their lives. As one of them puts it:

Now do not be such an arrogant young fool and listen to me. General Boisdeffre is about to welcome the tsar to Paris in a diplomatic coup that will change the world. We simply cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from these greater issues by the sordid matter of one Jew sent to a rock, it will tear the army to pieces.

Another officer makes the point more crudely. “He ordered me to shoot a man and I have shot him,” he says. “You tell me afterwards, I got the name wrong, and I should have shot someone else – I am very sorry about that but it is not my fault.” And so, in different accents, say the rest of them. Eventually Picquart is posted to Tunisia. Only there does he find a sympathetic fellow colonel but that officer is so disillusioned with Paris that he declines to help. Although most in the military are not in the first instance moved by anti-Jewish prejudice – their driving motive is raison d’état– they are blinded by the knowledge that Dreyfus is a Jew. The army is determined to find a German spy in its ranks and Dreyfus is suited to the role.

As newspaper leaks multiply, the “Dreyfusards” gradually gather strength; they include Clemenceau and Zola, with his article “J’accuse”. At the same time, the name Esterhazy begins to appear in documents intercepted by the French authorities. Were there two spies or is Dreyfus innocent? Doubt spreads from one newspaper to another. It is too late to undo the past; the lies have not just been told but repeated.

Ultimately a warship is sent to Devil’s Island to bring Dreyfus home and he is acquitted. The years pass; Clemenceau becomes prime minister and appoints Picquart as minister of war. The last scene is an argument between Dreyfus and Picquart about the correct rank in which Dreyfus can be brought back into the army.

One question above all emerges when reading this book: would we in Britain have handled things better? My publisher, George Weidenfeld, tells a story about leaving Austria at the time of the Anschluss. As the British consul in Vienna stamped his documents, he told Weidenfeld, “You will be safe now. We once had a Jewish prime minister in Britain.” Technically that is incorrect, because Disraeli was baptised at the age of 12 into the Church of England. But in spirit, the consul’s point was valid. Despite all the barriers, prejudices and obstacles that British Jews faced in the 19th century, Britain somehow stoppedshort of the depths of institutional persecution that scarred Europe. There was cruelty but also an element of the comic opera in the way the English considered Jewish people in these years. When Disraeli stood for election at Shrewsbury in 1841, a man arrived on a donkey saying he had come to take him back to Jerusalem. There was no such humour in the treatment of Dreyfus in Paris.

In the novel, Harris describes fishermen bringing in the daily catch. This includes some turtles, their jaws tied shut with string – all alive but blinded to prevent them from escaping. They make a noise like cobbles being cracked together as they clamber over one another, desperate to find the water they can sense but can no longer see. This is the parable that runs through the story, as the French army suffers from a similar blindness.

“Disraeli: or, the Two Lives” by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20)

The Village Against the World
Dan Hancox
Verso, 288pp, £14.99

One consequence of the eurozone crisis has been a shift in British perceptions of southern Europe. The return of widespread poverty to countries previously seen as perpetual holiday zones has revived memories of the old continental divide between the industrialised north and the fundamentally peasant, agrarian south, where Greece, Spain and Portugal laboured under postwar fascism. So the publication of two new books about Spain, both from the serious end of freelance journalism, seems to be particularly opportune.

Yet neither book pretends to offer an analysis of that country’s current situation. Instead, Dan Hancox’s The Village Against the World tells the story of Marinaleda in Andalusia, a communist community of 2,700 people functioning – just – within the contemporary state. As Hancox shows, the experiment has real significance in raising Andalusian political awareness and as a model of how to redistribute agricultural wealth and control.

Local knowledge of individual rights and of the needs of Andalusia as a whole springs from the region’s historic and contemporary rural poverty. In the 1930s, on estates belonging to the family from whom the marinaleños would eventually win independence, “Starving labourers who attempted to plough the fallow land were beaten by the police.” In the 1980s, 50 per cent of Andalusian farmland was owned by 2 per cent of the area’s families.

One of the questions to which Hancox returns in his thoughtful, take-nothing-for-granted account is whether tough conditions necessarily produce resistance or whether effective action needs a charismatic leader such as Marinaleda’s mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo.

So this engaging book is as much a study of idealism in practice as it is of life in a highly unusual pueblo. Hancox lets us experience village routine without pretending to know more than he does or resorting to “funny because it’s foreign” clichés. When he encounters a heatwave, for example: “You try and sweep the dust off your patio, one marinaleña told me, and find yourself dripping sweat straight on to the floor you’re supposed to be cleaning.”

The respectful, intelligent writing places the villagers at the centre of their own story – and that story is fascinating. The Village Against the World discovers the near-feudal patterns of Andalusian land ownership, recounts the pueblo’s struggle with the local landowner and ends with questions about whether Sánchez Gordillo will continue to lead the village in years to come.

Marinaleda’s struggle first became widely known in the 1980s. In 2012, it was back in the news when Sánchez Gordillo led a series of symbolic raids on Andalusian supermarkets, “redistributing” goods to impoverished locals. These gestures of solidarity with the poor beyond its own community illustrate what Marinaleda stands for: a belief that the land “belongs to those who work it”, in “the sovereignty of food” and that food is “a right and not a business”. Its project is utopian, not locally self-interested; its resistance is not only to the state but to the workings of global capital. The village-owned olive-pressing factory, bars and outdoor theatre that Hancox visits are the fruits of a six-year campaign of land occupations, hunger strikes and battles of principle that finally ended in 1991, when the government granted the villagers 1,200 hectares from the duke of Infantado’s extensive estates.

Landowners also feature in Christopher Howse’s The Train in Spain: “Born in 1926 . . . the 18th duchess of Alba . . . inherited seven dukedoms, 19 marquessates and 23 titles . . . She attracted attention by her wealth, gusto and mischievous disposition . . . Her palaces and works of art were breathtaking.”

Howse isn’t interested in the cost of those “palaces and works of art” or the workings of Spanish society. Legends, architecture and the local history of the wealthy cram the pages of his tourist guide with busily researched detail. To some extent, this justifies the astonishingly brief introduction to the book and its raison d’être. “This is a book about Spain, not about trains,” the first sentence reads, before Howse, in the next, boards a “single-carriage train . . . in the foothills of the Pyrenees”.

But is it? This is not a study of how Spain became its contemporary self. It isn’t concerned with climate or citizenship, cultural life or economics. It doesn’t even reveal Howse’s passion for Spain: curiously, this travelogue omits the first-person singular. The omission produces stylistic distortion. When Howse and his companion eat in Sahagún, “Only a man and a woman were dining . . . They ate a plate of jamón, then a leg of lamb. There were kidneys on the menu, too.” It also seems to distort the book as a whole, making it feel oddly purposeless.

Slow travel is about quality, not quantity; flavour, rather than flavourlessness. Trains allow their passengers to see the context of a country’s great cities, the influences and resources that have produced local culture and Culture. The traveller sits right next to a country’s citizens instead of observing them from a hotel terrace.

Yet the coherence and chaos of contemporary life – and of the forces that shape it – are missing from Howse’s account. It’s as if he has forgotten that Spain is a society that exists for itself, rather than a cultural museum for outsiders. Perhaps he travelled first class.

Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poem. Her latest book is “Coleshill” (Chatto & Windus, £10)

The building blocks of Paul Klee’s art are building blocks. It might sound simple but it’s complicated – there are building blocks and building blocks. Every nursery floor is thick with burly wooden bricks – safe, blunt approximations; coarse, imprecise cubes that recall Donne: “At the round earth’s imagined corners”.

Now consider the building set – Bauspiel – that my wife bought 30 years ago in Berlin from the Bauhaus-Archiv. With its tiny components you can build a ship with two sails, a bridge, a creature, an arch. Each individual machined unit is deliciously slim, with sharp, elegant edges. And the colours are clean reds and whites, with sometimes surprising shades – a Colman’s mustard triangle, a light sage rectangle, each an escape from the clichéd range of children’s colours. The smallness is crucial.

In the autumn of 1929, Will Grohmann’s monograph on Klee appeared. Klee was 49. He said of an advertisement: “The name is in such big letters that I had a terrible shock.” His own signature is an exact exoskeleton of India ink, a carefully placed minuscule insect of crisp calligraphy. Of the 100 Klee pictures on show at Tate Modern, many are miniatures and none approaches those Rubens the size of snooker tables. The late pictures are bigger and weaker, the result of his scleroderma, a complication of measles that shrank and tightened his skin and that eventually killed him, having first deprived him of his pictorial nimbleness.

The building blocks suggest that Bauhaus constructivism was inspirational for Klee, who taught there from 1921 to 1931. In fact, he had already made his liberating discovery – in Tunis, in 1914, with the great painter August Macke and Louis Moilliet. (It is one of the disappointments of this exhibition that there are no examples from this crucial two weeks in which Klee discovered colour in blocks and declared himself a painter.)

He was hired by Walter Gropius because Gropius could see in Klee the accommodation of the visible organic world to the architectural abstract: “When we look around us today, we see all sorts of exact forms,” Klee wrote, “whether we like it or not, our eyes gobble squares, circles, and all manner of fabricated forms.” You certainly do after seeing this exhibition: the bridge across the Thames is pure Klee, a magic carpet of metal segments, speeding to vanishing point. (It should be no surprise that he painted a circular homage to Picasso and Cubism in 1914.)

In Klee, function meets fantasy. We learn from the Tate’s unusually helpful and interesting catalogue that when Klee was 50, his birthday celebrations included hiring a Junkers aeroplane to fly over his house and parachute down presents from students and colleagues – somehow an appropriate conflation of technology and whimsy, of magic and machinery.

As a teacher, Klee was popular with his students. He delivered his first lecture with his back to his audience while he drew with both hands on the blackboard: shyness not showmanship. (He drew and painted with his left hand, wrote with his right.) He could be an indefatigably finicky theoretician and students are flattered by the intellectual challenge of difficulty.

Bridget Riley, in her admiring preface to the 2002 Klee show at the Hayward Gallery in London, was unable to discover any coherence in Klee’s writings, as opposed to the paintings. I sympathise. Actually, Klee is clear enough in his main thrust: it is not the task of the artist to be “an improved camera”, accurately reproducing the visible world. The sign is more important than mimesis.

On the other hand, his attempts to explain simple fundamentals can be inspissated: “The optic-physical phenomenon produces feelings which can transform outward impressions into functional penetration more or less elaborately, according to their direction.” When I read this, I thought of Dr Johnson’s definition of “net” in his dictionary: “Anything made with interstitial vacuities.” Better to stick with “net”. Or say that pictures produce feelings. As a pedagogue, Klee was popular but chafed by his working conditions. There is a painting called Ghost of a Genius (1922), which looks like the selfportrait – a depleted soul with dead blue eyes who’d rather be painting than teaching.

Those building blocks – fundamental to Klee’s art – are saturated in colour both burnished and bright, richly harmonic. They are singular, sufficient unto themselves but they imply plurality and pattern – just as bricks join to build a wall.

The grid, the wall, is at the heart of Klee’s painting and drawing. Yet the pattern made by the units is always disrupted, bespoke, un-uniform. The variants are a matter of intuition, touch, genius. Theory, Klee wrote, “is fine but it has its limits: intuition remains indispensable”. There are many walls and an infinity of different bricks. For him, a grid can be almost anything: “the storm in the wheatfields was captivating; I’ll paint a ship sailing on waves of rye”.

Waves, ripples: a grid like a musical stave. Horticulture – a vegetable garden – becomes another natural grid, alternating peas and carrots and cabbages. His abstracts come together like quilts or fit together like flooring, like parquet, or a great wall of liquorice allsorts, sweet with delicious colours. Then there is the mosaic’s mini-brick as a model and inspiration, the isolated mark of the brush, touched into existence rather than stroked into being – and then the morph into pointillism. In Klee, the one bolts, seeds and becomes the many. If you look at a painting such as Reife Ernte/Ripe Harvest (1924), you see not corn but the orange-gold of ripeness in the background, a central grey wash of soil, and a set of signifiers; a primitive script that looks more like spermatozoa than corn. It isn’t in the least literal but it captures fertility perfectly.

Ripe Harvest isn’t in this show but one of Klee’s greatest pictures is. Pastorale (Rhythms) (1924)has a line of sky-blue at the top. The bulk of the painting is tempera on canvas on wood. Overall, it’s the colour of mildew. It is clearly related to the horticulture paintings, both by its title and its design. Into the thick tempera, between the lines, is scored a continuous series of pseudo-hieroglyphs – an x, an o, a plus sign, asterisks, a trellis of x’s, a candelabra sign like a fir tree, a sequence of gravestones.

It is like a tablet of invented writing, of repeated, unknown letters and shapes – a kind of Rosetta Stone, unreadable yet persuasive, the sign of a civilisation that has vanished, leaving behind only the ghost and promise of meaning; a whole cemetery of writing on a single tablet. It is as beautiful as Yeats’s most beautiful line, from “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes./What more is there to say?” Klee gives us the very vanished thing itself, miraculously, impossibly, still there, before our eyes, filling our eyes.

There are several technical innovations to admire. The first is Klee’s invention of the oil-transfer drawing. You cover a sheet with black oil paint and place it on a clean sheet of paper. Then you trace a drawing placed on the oil sheet so that the line is transferred. The line is transformed as it is transferred – becoming slightly ragged, like a scratch that has broken the skin. (Much later, Andy Warhol did something similar with a blotted line made by folding the drawing while it was still wet.) The technique means that the under-drawing is dirtied in places. These soiled patches dispel any hint of the academic artist; the drawings look “found” and satisfyingly primitive rather than composed.

Another innovative Klee technique is the fine watercolour spray at the edges of drawings. In Threatening Snowstorm (1927) we see a town in diagrammatic form, ground plan and elevation. The border of the drawing is a dramatic dusk of brown and grey-blue shrouding the geometric buildings. I daresay the title came last. No matter. The picture unanswerably reorders and reverses that sequence so it provides the perfect illustration, the exact equivalence of imminent snow.

In Sacred Islands (1926) the border is a shawl of faded blue that contributes immeasurably to the painting’s complete success. It is a purged masterpiece of tonal plainness – India ink and blue spray – and immense intricacy. Emerging from the blue border is a kind of architectural parquet, of inlay and dovetail. We know about those beautifully spare, suggestive Ben Nicholson pencil drawings of half a wonky cloister – a couple of lines, a wash of grit.

They are lovely but the Klee is something quite extraordinary – a Piranesian proliferation, a nuclear chain reaction of colonnades, of flights of steps, down and up and indeterminate, of arches, vistas, vaulting – of spandrels, of nonsense, of building that has bolted in a thousand different directions at once.

There is a Kipling story called “The Disturber of Traffic” about a lighthouse keeper, Dowse, whose deranged eye is helplessly held by any pattern, the result of years spent staring at “the streaks”, the tidal patterns of the Flores Strait near Java. As Dowse talks, “All the time his eye was held like by the coils of rope on the belaying pins, and he followed those ropes up and up until he was quite lost and comfortable among the rigging.”

Klee could be rapt by the waves in waves, the waves in wheat, the parenthetical maze of ripples inside an onion, the waves in the grain of wood. What holds our eye in Sacred Islands is the delicate width of the inked units, the counterintuitive, carefully controlled minimalism of the depicted chaos.

In View of a Mountain Sanctuary, 1926, Klee revisits and reworks the topos: here it is stalactites, fractured rocks, millefeuille mineral compressions, contractions and folds. The same India ink, effective enough, but without Sacred Islands’ compelling insanity of detail. Clouds (also 1926) has a dark-grey border and similar ink contour lines tormented into clouds and turbulence. In the end, the difference between the masterpiece and the other two very good pictures is what the hand happens to do – the inspiration, the genius of the fingers, the something chancy that is more than skill.

Another great picture here is Lowlands (1932), a watercolour on paper on cardboard. It, too, is one of several pointillist paintings. From a distance, it reads like a perfect piece of realism – the wet sands, a distant line of sea, a hangover of clouds. Drab, about as exciting as the tidemark in a bath. But close-to it is gripping, because Klee lets us see his working. In the middle of the picture is a single line of bright green dots – the sea – and below it black dots, then blue, then black. Each dot is small, the size of a liquorice cachou. Each is the same and each is different so the viewer has the perfect pleasure of repetition, similar to the pleasure we get listening to a duet where the singers are perfectly in tune yet recognisably different – identical twins you can still tell apart.

The whole picture is so minimalist in its means, you think of Steve Reich or Philip Glass or John Adams. The top and the bottom of the picture are washed with dirty water – water the brushes have been cleaned in. Only the bright green single line of dots is left untouched. The rest of the painting is fearlessly impure, filthy with actuality, lowering and exhilaratingly depressed. This single work is worth a visit and any entrance fee, which in this case should be called an entranced fee.

Craig Raine’s new collection of essays, “More Dynamite”, will be published by Atlantic Books on 3 December