The Critical Commentator

  Legal Aid Justice,  James Thornhill (1675/76-1734)  Photo Credit: City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC] Scotland Yard and other state bodies spent almost half a million pounds in public money on lawyers at the Westminster terrorist attack inquest while victims’ families were denied legal aid. The inquest was into the deaths of an unarmed police officer and four pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in March 17. The pedestrians were struck by Khalid Masood in a van and he then stabbed the officer to death outside the Houses of Parliament. …Now the sisters of PC Keith Palmer, the murdered policeman, have expressed their “utter shock and disbelief” that the state agencies involved spent almost half a million pounds in taxpayer money on legal fees. “It sends a clear message that the victims’ families’ quests for answers into the deaths of their loved ones is just not important. Protecting the establishment is far more important,” they told  The Times . Calling for immediat...

  People It is said that you can tell a man by his shoes. Bobby Misner, 23, is wearing a pair of scuffed $545 Yves Saint Laurent trainers with words such as “rich misfits”, “St Tropez” and euro currency signs scrawled over them. “They come wrecked,” he explains. “And then I draw all over them.” The Peacock Feather ,  Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Photo Credit: The Henry Barber Trust The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham [CC BY-NC-ND] If you were to judge Misner by his shoes alone, you might conclude that he is just another absurdly entitled out-of-touch rich kid who defines himself by his money – or rather his father’s money. In November last year he released a YouTube video,  Life of a Billionaire’s Son,  showing off his father’s private jet, superyacht and mansions, and it went viral. To date it has had nearly five million views. …I ask him why he feels the need to display his wealth on social media. He looks at me as if to check whether this ca...

  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 which I saw people who really couldn’t work any harder being relentlessly criticised in the media. I felt it was time we stood up and told people just how wonderful we are,” she...

  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 “networking” change our ideas of friendship? We can’t yet know. But the magical ancient chemistry will always matter. …observing real friendship is almost as uplifting as having them. It is th...

  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 tubing as an improvised catheter, fed it down into his surgical boot and coughed to disguise the squelching. The patient survived. “We were adrenaline junkies livi...

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% according to the latest figures from the market analyst Kantar. “It’s very surprising to me,” says Sam Chetan-Walsh, a political advisor at Greenpeace and cam...

  Letters on Death The Death of Burd Ellen ,   John Faed (1819-1902) Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]  Sir, Miriam Margolyes is right: there is a “conspiracy of silence”, and Britons struggle to talk about death and dying (“Harry Potter actress confronts fear of death”, Mar 11). However, there is also the growing subterfuge of the euphemisms “passed” and “passed away”. Sadly, people do die, it’s a fact; pass it on. (Dr Jim McDermott, Whitwick, Leics,  The Times , 13.3.2019) Sir, I recommend attending a death café, where all matters pertaining to death and dying are discussed in an open-hearted and lively manner and without euphemisms. (Ceri Wolfe, Witchampton, Dorset, The Times, 14.3.2019) Wine Consumption The Vintage in the Claret Vineyards in the South of France ,  Thomas Uwins (1782-1857) Photo Credit:Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]  I see (Report, 28 March) that the French are upset by the suggestion they should limit wine consumption to two glasses a day...

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 confront the next morning. In fact, when I occasionally stalk Grace and other influencers’ Instagram accounts for some light amusement, I pity their millions of followers. Poor suckers who believe that Grace’s “bo...

  People “The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life. This worship of celebrity …suffocated me…I don’t know what it means to sit quietly in a bistro, on a terrace, or in the theatre without being approached by someone.” (Bridget Bardot, in Tears of Battle: An Animals Rights Memoir.) Gobbledygook in Art The Sleepless Alliance resists the parasomniac dystopias of current political genealogies, as an exercise of non-fiction. Taking the position of the tangible dreamer, invited artists experiment with producing concrete future imaginaries, through fabulation, improvisation and resilient commonality…Inciting alliances and proposed wakefulness, the exhibition agitates for radical re-composition of existing relations, as it repeats the mantra – the future is not given. (Art exhibition, Pembroke College, Oxford, in Private Eye No 1492) Indeed. Cry...

 A unique aspect of the character of modern people - something that separates us from almost all other people who have ever lived - is that we view suffering as unusual. Not a part of the human condition but an affront to it. Witness the behaviour of the 21st century's affluent classes: their neurotic and elaborate evasion of even small degrees of suffering through therapy, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, esoteric workout routines, wild swimming and (more commonly in America) medication. The desired state is one of "wellness", a perfect peace of mind and body that is supposed to be not only sublime but normal. Suffering represents a kind of failure. While serious mental illness clearly requires professional intervention, the concomitant of wellness is the medicalisation of experiences that would once have been understood as non-negotiable aspects of being human, such as grief. The fourth edition of the standard American handbook of mental illness, The Diagnostic and Statis...