The Critical Commentator

                                          People We’ve had nearly a century of universal suffrage now and what happens is capital finds ways to protect itself from – you know – the voters. (Paul Staines, blogger and columnist in The Establishment ) A Bull (after Giambologna)   Antonio Susini (1572-1624) The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham [CC BY-NC-ND] * Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. (Harry Frankfurt, philosopher.)  Then it must be universal? * The comedian, Jeremy Hardy, who died in February 2019 used to joke that he wasn’t all that left wing. It was just that everyone else kept moving to the right. He told Jack Dee. “I’ve always been an old fashioned leftist-liberal but the country had moved so far to the right that I’...

                                                Books                         Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me – Kate Clanchy Catechising in a Scottish School, George Harvey (1806-1876) Photo credit:  Leicester Arts and Museums Service [CC BY-NC-SA] …She begins in a small town on the east coast of Scotland in the early 1990s, aged 24, when she has a temporary job in charge of 13-year-olds at Blastmuir High School. The year before she has taught chatty multi-racial London students; these almost exclusively white Scottish children will barely talk to her and are either abjectly naïve or too knowing. During a lesson about Aids they refuse to open a book on the subject. “Mrs Clanchy, we cannae read this. We dinnae want to catch Aids,” says one student. Clanchy adds, “It wasn’t a nasty jo...

                                                   People Jack Dorsey… eats one meal a day, fasts at the weekend and has been known to avoid eye contact for ten days straight. All this, he says, to improve his mental “wellness”. Mr. Dorsey, 42, starts his day with an ice bath at 5am. “Nothing has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold,” he told the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. “I feel like if I can will myself to do that thing that seems so small but hurts so much, I can do nearly anything.” To test his endurance Mr Dorsey sometimes alternates three-minute cold dips with 15-minute sessions in a barrel sauna at 104C. Meditation, John Collier (1850-1934)  Photo Credit: Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service [CC BY-NC]  Then comes an hour of meditation, which he describes as “extr...

                                               People Woman Reading in the Reeds, Saint-Jacut-de-la-mere ,  Jean-Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] …Molly Case joins their ranks [medical memoir authors] next week with a powerful account of her life as a cardiac nurse, How to Treat People . …Case first caught the public eye six years ago as a student nurse, aged 24, when she performed her poem Nursing the Nation in front of a packed auditorium at the Royal College of Nursing’s annual congress. Her electrifying recital, with its battle cry “Hear us goddamn roar”, received a standing ovation and has been viewed almost half a million times on YouTube. …What got her up on her feet that day at the RCN congress? “I was frightened and demoralised, going into my second year of training for a profession in wh...

                                                  Friends The Two Friends (Les Deux Amies) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] …a Facebook “friend” may be no more than a nodding acquaintance who would hardly look up from their phone if you were on fire. Yet the word can denote someone closer than family: some eastern languages have passionate expressions translatable as “I’m another you” and in Gaelic you hail a “soul-sharer”. An Armenian academic splendidly posts that in their language it means “a human being for the sake of whom you can divorce a beloved wife, burn your money, give your life”. …One obvious test of real friendship could be that you drop everything and step up fast and willingly in a crisis. …Will our culture of extreme but shallow connection and the ghastly but widely approved concept of “net...

                                              Books The Knife’s Edge – The Heart and Mind of a Cardiac Surgeon - Stephen Westaby. The Reader Alfred Emile Leopold Joseph Victor Stevens (1823-1906) Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] Stephen Westaby, as a trainee at Cambridge, got the nickname “Jaws” because of the speed with which he could amputate a limb. …In the first volume of his memoirs Fragile Lives he describes being plucked from the pub to assist in repairing an aorta torn in a road traffic accident. “The problem wasn’t so much the amount of alcohol – we were used to that – more the volume of urine to pass during a four hour operation…There was no way I could maintain concentration with a bursting bladder, but I didn’t want to lose face by asking to leave, like a whimpering schoolboy with his hand up in class.” Westaby used rubber...

                                         Bottled Water Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges,   Spencer Gore (1878-1914)  Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art  For all the innovation and choice that define the food and drink industries, if you want to make money, you could do a lot worse than bung some water in a bottle and flog it. A litre of tap water, the stuff we have ingeniously piped into our homes, costs less than half a penny. A litre of bottled water can cost well over a pound, especially for something fancy that has been sucked through a mountain. Yet the bottled water market is more buoyant than ever, defying the plastics backlash inspired by stricken albatrosses on the BBC’s Blue Planet, and a broader, growing sense that something has to change. Sales in the UK were worth a record £558.4m in the year to last November, an increase of 7% acc...

                                                     People Phoebe Hills, 20, is a philosophy student at the University of York. 5 AM,   Ernest Procter (1886-1935)  Photo Credit: Jerwood Collection [CC BY]  “Considering that I’m a student, a group who famously have no money, I sure do a damn good job of spending it. The loan comes in at the beginning of term and it’s like a generous gift rather than real money that I will start paying back in a year’s time. I wish I could say that I’m part of my generation’s wellbeing craze and that my money goes towards Grace Fit UK gym wear and fancy bottles to hold my lemon water (as all Gen Z-ers know, it’s a brand run by the British Instagram star Grace Beverley). Unfortunately, it goes on booze and clubbing, leaving a hefty dent in my bank account that I’m in no fit state to confron...

                                          Teachers …A teacher friend of mine had staff room colleagues called Miss Pounder and Mr Bacon. It was one of his pupils who suggested that they should marry, combine their names and call their son Arthur. (John Felton, Private Eye No 1492) Chiding , Leon Emile Caille (1836-1907) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY- NC-ND] * Teachers, on top of their already impossible workload are to be held accountable for failing to spot warning signs of violent crime. As usual, when matters of child behaviour are concerned, the last people the Government seem to consider are the parents. They are the most important element in the matter of bringing up children and should bear all, or most, of the responsibility for their proper upbringing. The Home Secretary cannot be so naïve as to believe that violence and criminal behaviour is...