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Inside The Centre: The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk

Thinking back to the early 1960s, Bertrand Russell, the subject of another prize winning biography by Ray Monk, was frequently seen on black and white television declaring his concerns over Nuclear Weapons. He stated, Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. For nearly seventy years, mankind has wondered in the words of Sting, How can I save my boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy? As concerns about nuclear proliferation in relation to Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea escalate it is salutary to return to a thorough biography of the man, known as the father of the bomb, that felt a deep and urgent need to be at the centre and to belong, J Robert Oppenheimer.

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Oppenheimer’s father, Julius, a wealthy cloth merchant came from Hesse and was among the many German Jews to arrive in America in 1888. Oppenheimer visited his Grandfather’s home at the age of four and thought it a medieval village. A strength of Monk’s biography is his facility in evoking locations. In adolescence Oppenheimer was attracted to New Mexico where he had been taken by his English teacher, Herbert Winslow Smith, and fell in love with horse riding and the landscape. At Cambridge, however, he was particularly miserable and suffered a nervous breakdown following his attempt to poison his elegant supervisor, P M S Blackett. His recovery on Corsica was due apparently to a passage from Proust, providing much needed stoic calm before his exciting time at the beautiful university and centre of theoretical physics in Göttingen.

The portrait emerging from letters and documents that Prof Monk has so carefully sifted, is of a highly intelligent man who assumes a debonair persona, motivating others, well-read and proficient in several languages from classical Greek to Sanskrit. His interest in physics covered the chemical bond to astrophysics, from quantum electrodynamics to cosmic rays. In all these fields he made major contributions. He even discovered the possibility of black holes. Here is a man that bullies and inspires his research students and whose lectures are displays of his own facility spiced with a high degree of arrogance and hauteur at the cost of clarity to his audience. Impatient and incompetent with arithmetical calculations, he was ham fisted with experiments. Oppenheimer, a tragic figure with a highly developed knowledge of classical tragedy lacked a real sense of self.

Oppie, Pauli and Rabi on Lake Geneva
Oppie, Pauli and Rabi on Lake Geneva

Monk’s biography is particularly good at clearly explaining basic physics. Especially the confusions between different formations of quantum mechanics, the difference between the absorption of neutrons in various isotopes of Uranium and the confusion between weak and strong nuclear forces in cosmic ray showers. This was an extremely exciting time in physics and the eloquence of this multi-layered biography lies in painting in both the political background and the personalities of Oppenheimer’s associates, friends, family and lovers.

This variety keeps the reader engaged throughout, iIn particular with the insight which Inside the Centre affords into American values and attitudes. Racism and anti-Semitism was deeply ingrained both in social and academic circles, notably at Harvard where he had been a student. Oppenheimer’s great contribution was the establishment of Berkley in California as a vital international centre for theoretical physics. Becoming a worthy American citizen was always a central concern to him. Seeing a fairer society was important to Oppenheimer who had actively supported a docker’s strike. This would land him in deep trouble with the FBI and later with the McCarthy inquisition and despite his endeavours at Los Alamos, his security clearance was withdrawn.

Inside the Centre by Prof Ray Monk
Inside the Centre by Prof Ray Monk

There is a sense of drama in this book which keeps the reader involved. This is due to the historically momentous events involved but enlivened by the personalities Oppenheimer encountered. His radical brother Frank was an able experimenter. There is the bulky, garrulous and memorable figure of the Swiss, Wolfgang Pauli, depicted among the thirty photographs with Oppenheimer in a boat on Lake Zurich and Ernest Lawrence obsessed with building larger and larger cyclotrons, using ersatz equipment like an 80 ton magnet rusting after WW1 in a junkyard. The contribution of one woman, a pacifist, Lisa Meitner, exiled in Sweden, together with that of Otto Hahn on Christmas Eve 1938 explaining nuclear fission and the devastating amount of energy released clarified the possibility of the construction of a weapon.

In conversation with Einstein at Princeton
In conversation with Einstein at Princeton

Monk’s technique when detailing a particular event or person, allows that the reader may see it differently. The detailed footnotes and comprehensive biography makes it possible to follow up alternative explanations. This is particularly useful in relation to a conflicted individual such as Oppenheimer who felt ambivalent about many issues, some of which he must have kept very close to his chest. There is a certain liberal generosity about Monk’s technique. This is a very fine intellectual biography.

An interview with Oppenheimer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVCL3Rnr8xE

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How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser

In his introduction Professor Kaiser states that there are three ways in which the west coast hippies have benefited the development of Physics; they opened up deeper speculation into the fundamental philosophy behind quantum theory, they latched on to a crucial theorem of Bell, about what Einstein termed spooky interactions between particles at a distance. This might otherwise have been totally neglected. Thirdly they propounded a key idea which has become known as the no-cloning theorem. Kaiser tells a lucid account as might be expected from the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and department chief in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program. Incidentally he also provides an engaging insight into the American industrial-military complex and associated institutions like the University of California at Berkeley.download

After a brief survey of the thirties golden age of European physics, including the theories of Born, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and of course Einstein, we are introduced to the wacky and hirsute figures of Jack Sarafatti and his good chum, Fred Alan Wolf. This pair were to travel around Europe discussing theories, including the interrelation of consciousness and quantum physics. On the way we are introduced, sometimes with rather scrappy diagrams, to the concepts and key experiments that formed an important new area of Physics, quantum information theory. This has led to technological developments via special encryption that mean that data can be securely sent along optical fibres and is of great importance in finance and to the military. These are contexts where security of transmission is of paramount importance.

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The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Fundamental Fysiks Group founded in May 1975 contained many interesting and eccentric characters. Kaiser’s account of their work is sometimes as bending of the mind as is his description of Geller’s experiments with flexing spoons! Elizabeth A. Rauscher, for instance, emerges as a particularly interesting woman who had to wear tweedy dresses and have her hair cut short to gain serious acceptance in a male-dominated environment. Only 2 per cent of Physics PhDs in the States, were being awarded to women at this time. With a certain feistiness and interest in everything from multidimensional Universe explanations to crucial problems, as well as brain waves and psychic healing, she must have been a wonderful participant guiding the wilder dreams of the so-called Fysiks group. Two other major figures that the Professor reminded this reader about were Thomas Kuhn and David Bohm.

Kuhn’s work testified to a fruitful interaction between the Philosophy of Science and Physics itself. It emphasises that the development in knowledge often requires a huge change, one might even say a quantum leap, to which the prevailing orthodoxy presiding over the subject are resistant. In his account there is no smooth progression involved but a shift, a paradigm shift required to explain new experimental results. Kuhn had to defend his account against charges of relativism but it has the advantage of opening up the teaching of the subject and helping students realise that the study of Physics requires imagination and creativity. David Kaiser draws on these ideas and gives a lively account of the correspondence and vigorous exchange of ideas between the extraordinary Ira Einhorn who was eventually to be convicted of the first degree murder of his own wife and Thomas Kuhn.

Professor David Kaiser- The Author
Professor David Kaiser- The Author

David Bohm also possessed a brilliantly analytical mind and whilst by no means a hippie he shines forth as a deep, unconventional thinker who pondered the foundations of quantum mechanics. He came to Britain and finally taught at Birkbeck College in London, having been forced out of America by McCarthyism at its height. This was despite having made a huge contribution to the Los Alamos development of the Hiroshima bomb. In 1959 he demonstrated with his student Aharanov that a previously purely theoretical quantity, called magnetic vector potential, could yield a measurable experimental effect. Kaiser shows how he proved an inspiration to younger physicists and how he investigated Geller’s unusual phenomena. In addition to this work he was interested in the philosophy of mind and explaining consciousness. Kaiser deserves praise for weaving such original thinkers as Kuhn and Bohm into his narrative.

Bohm's Key Text
Bohm’s Key Text

According to Professor Kaiser another, way out figure that should be thanked for his accidental and unintended contribution in 1967 to developing this new area of Physics was Republican Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Upon taking office he cut the budget of the University in the state by 30 per cent in a drive to lower taxes. Such policies and later the realignment of Cold War policies in the Pentagon, led to a situation where Physics graduates had more time on their hands to explore the deeper roots of equations that had previously been used as mathematical tools in a pragmatic but unexamined way. Kaiser is as interesting on this although the exact interaction between the military and the hippies remains an undisclosed parameter.

This is an interesting book with copious background notes and some well-written passages. I liked the one about the modern ouija board made by Herbert from a supposedly random radioactive thallium source connected to a metaphase typewriter. Wheeled out in March 1974 on Houdini’s 100th birthday to make contact with him on the other side, it did manage to sputter out ungrammatically, aninfinitime.

Feynman's Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics
Feynman’s Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics

If you are an armchair hippy interested in aspects of ESPionage and the CIA, or laser beam splitters and paradoxical particle counters then a harmless trip with this book may well be for you!

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Death of a Pirate

If you are inclined to take your cues from the weekly reviews, as the witty poet Gavin Ewart once expressed the matter, you will doubtless find currently articles as varied as; Russell Brand predicting the imminent decline of the BBC, various interpretations of liberalism and how these struggle for expression in Coalition Government policy. There are concerns too about the legislation governing the internet and references back to the Sixties battles between, on the one hand,  the unbridled self-expression of the free market and, on the other,  the virtues of self-restraint in such matters as the re-examination of the Lady Chatterley trial, now  fifty years ago. An unusual and quite intriguing book, Death of a Pirate, about the development of intellectual property and piracy in radio touches on all these contemporary concerns in a dramatic way. It combines the history of modern broadcasting with a crime story and consequent trial.

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This is a book about the conflict between two determined but erratic men that ended in violent death. The victim was Reg Calvert, whose parents were travelling musicians who separated early leaving him to wrestle a living in various parts of the music business as an impresario and dance hall manager. He had acquired an illegal handheld jet blowtorch as an item for his own self-protection and for that of the bouncers and henchmen that he employed –usually on a non-contractual ad-hoc basis. Through ingenuity in a series of not very successful ventures he came to control the pirate radio station at Shivering Sands. This was situated on a shabby, rusty and disused ant-aircraft gun emplacement on sixty foot high steel legs just offshore at Whitstable. Becoming the base for RadioCity, Calvert it bought from screaming Lord Sutch. It effected the training of a generation of DJs. Although the structure was physically stable financially it was anything but.

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It also needed an effective transmitter-including an antenna- which was imported from Fort Worth in Texas under the aegis of Oliver Smedley then engaged in the financial revival of the station known as Project Atlanta. Smedley was altogether a different type. He hailed from a military background and had distinguished himself directing artillery fire in the summer of 1944. Smedley was not just a man of action; he was nearly 20 years older than Calvert and an ideologue for Hayek and unbridled private enterprise. Business machinations and the disputed ownership of the dilapidated aerial (which had comically fallen into the sea when first delivered, being hauled up by an unsafe lashed up crane, eventually recovered by a team of divers) led to Smedley launching a Combined Cadet Force type raid on the platform carried out by a motley crew of Kentish seamen. Smedley organised the capture of the platform and the removal of microphones and the home-made silicon crystal whose oscillations drove electrons up and down the rigged aerial and without this, of course the Calvert’s station could no longer transmit.

These actions eventually led to a highly distraught Calvert being driven down through the darkened hedgerows to the Essex home of Wenders Ambo where Smedley cohabited with his much younger secretary. Calvert’s entry was highly provocative, especially his intimidation of the girl, but scarcely excused his being shot at close range by the irascible Smedley, often inclined to rash action and this encounter was indeed quite unexpected. It was an incident that was to have repercussions for the future of the broadcasting industry.

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Strange encounters and a cast of intriguing characters, including spooks and criminals, make this factual account read like an engaging novel. The settings vary from Dean Street where many seedy business deals were cut to the untidy front rooms of amateur experimenters, laced with wires and triode valves strewn about the place. There are the grand offices of the BBC and the rusting hulks of the early pirate vessels. Prof Johns captures every aspect of the thrill of the early experimenter and scenes of espionage in conflict with the Nazis for control of the ether. The narrative tells of the thrill of the first listeners to the exciting broadcasts from Radio Luxemburg. It relates the propaganda and transmissions from within the narrow borders of the intriguingly independent and strategically positioned state of Liechtenstein. Sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland and with unstable neutrality, its windy heights became crucial to the battle of the airwaves and the control of populations.

A professor of history at the University at the University of Chicago, Adrian Jones provides a thorough and invigorating account. He has briefly outlined the impact of the technical developments from the early problems of feedback interference to the invention of the transistor. In summarising the ideological battles of the information age, he draws memorable pen-portraits of the austere Reith and the flamboyant technical wizardry of P P Eckersley, not to mention the aptly named Plugge. It was Plugge who created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation by buying airtime from radio stations such as Normandy, Toulouse and Ljubljana.

To conclude Adrian Jones has written a well researched and clearly referenced work that demonstrates the connections between technical developments, listeners, broadcasters, academics and political factions. He shows clearly how the pirates provided the music and relaxation that the population, just after the austerity period, really wanted. He is particularly interesting on an academic called Ronald Coase who advanced arguments about the unfairness of the BBC claiming a cultural monopoly. So in addition to telling a tale with journalistic flair his book is also an introduction to cultural history and social change. It is, in this sense, a demanding book which however thoroughly repays close reading. As might be expected, there is a clear list of references and web material for readers to further their own research.

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Another review of this book may be found at:-http://www.offshoreradio.co.uk/citybook.htm

and more info on London Pirate Radio at http://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/london-pirate-radio-maunsell-sea-forts/

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Education Under Siege: Why There is a Better Alternative by Peter Mortimore

Prof Mortimore
Prof Mortimore

Peter Mortimore’s thoroughgoing analysis of the absurdities of current educational practice and prescriptions for finding a far better alternative deserves a wide readership. It is not just an organisation which is under siege but as his personal anecdotes indicate, more vigorously than his rigorously argued statistics, people are suffering. Parents are anxious, teachers badly led and burdened with confused policies and worst of all pupils are pressurised from early infancy. Reading his book you might be forgiven for wondering a) why so many young students are being abused by such distress and b) as Cicero might have asked, Cui bono, to whose benefit? Professor Mortimore outlines the positive alternatives suggested by international comparisons especially with Scandinavian methods. He argues that their procedures are more effective, that support students and produce a fairer, harmonious society.

The strengths of our very varied system are examined in a fair minded, respectful and considerate manner. What we can hope to attain from our education system, theories of learning, what we can say about the many and varied aspects of intelligence and ability are all clearly outlined. As the references and citations are particularly clearly laid out, this section would be most useful to first year education students. The open-minded account will invite readers to critically examine his propositions. For instance, some readers might disagree with the emphasis on sport and consider if literature, imagination and the development of critical abilities might not deserve more emphasis. It is difficult though to argue against his case for good modern language teaching and sensible health education. Nor could anyone question the author’s proposition that schools must be enjoyable, encouraging and effective.

Whilst celebrating the rich variety of approaches and methods of schooling, it is not clear that this is best achieved by the plethora of schools in the current system. Studies show pupils unhappy and underperforming. In Mortimore’s very clear and useful chapter on this topic we discover the Grammar Schools, Middle schools, Faith Schools, Voluntary Schools etc. with which many will already be familiar. However, there are also Free Schools, University training schools, Studio schools and lots of even more baroque alternatives. If they are in your area! These naturally are not to be found evenly distributed around the country. There are easily ten different types of Secondary School and in some areas parents have to put down the names of their offspring for private tuition to access, if they can afford it, from the age of three or perhaps move house. How did this come about? Can it possibly help parents or their interaction with their offspring?

Ed Under Siege

Education was once the shared responsibility of teachers, who had the freedom to design courses and exams to help the children in front of them to make progress. Head teachers, Governors, Inspectors and in particular a reasonably funded Local Authority were also included. Over time the Secretary of State for Education has assumed stronger central control. Inspectors were removed and education became subject to the whims and dictates of individual Ministers.

The regulator became Ofsted, whose officers have indeed been accused of bullying their own staff, operating a system which is supposed to be independent and regulate intense competition between schools. In something like 50 years there have been 25 Ministers of Education. The inverted commas apply here because the job description has sometimes included Science, Innovation etc. The ministers have included a number of controversial figures from Hailsham down to Gove but few have had any experience in teaching itself.

Peter Mortimore argues that in Scandinavian countries devolution works effectively. As an experienced statistician, he quotes from careful international research such as PISA that such a mind-set is actually very successful in raising standards as well as promoting a tolerant, socially coherent society. Clearly, this provides economic benefits to these countries. A reader is bound to wonder how in Britain where some 7 per cent of pupils are educated privately, with something like ten times the resources in, for instance, textbooks, is ultimately to prosper. Our system appears to throw up large numbers of pupils that are disaffected, illiterate and mathematically ignorant.

Professor Mortimore has written a propitious summary of educational policy in this country. He joins the line of radical educationalists from the Resistance fighter Harry Rée, to the late lamented Ted Wragg. Without doubt he is passionate about education and indeed, his writing impresses most when he freely airs his formidable reservations about current practice.

Who might benefit from all this mess? Doubtless corporate lobbyists, as before did PFI investors, will hope to prosper from further privatisation of schools? Have the Finns and the Danes really resisted such blandishments? This book provides us with pressing arguments for breaking the siege of greed and imagining and striving for a better future.

The author addresses a Case Conference on these matters is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lz0ymmANn4

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Inventing the Enemy: Essays on Everything by Umberto Eco

Imagine a sumptuous Italian feast in the sunlit bathed ancient countryside near Milan. Next to you a gentleman talks and eats with furious energy. He tells of Dante, Cicero, and St Augustine and quotes a multitude of obscure troubadours from the Middle Ages. He repeats himself, gestures flamboyantly, nudges you sharply in the ribs, belches and even breaks wind. His conversation contains nuggets of information but in the flow of his discourse there is a fondness for iteration and reiteration. He throws bones over his shoulder and when he reaches the cheese course. Definitely, too much information on the mouldy bacteria! When you finally get up things the elderly gentleman has said prompts your imagination. You are better informed, intrigued and prodded to examine his discourse again and again, even if only to challenge what you have heard. Such are the effects of reading Eco’s essays in “Inventing the Enemy”.

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The first essay, discloses what your choice of opponent or indeed those you victimise says about yourself. Eco splendidly quotes from Cicero’s Orations against Catiline lecturing the Senate on his opponent’s seditious moral perversity. Within a few pages we read of Pliny, the Younger on his persecution of Christians, Odo of Cluny’s disgust with women and, time and again more poisonous invective against the Jews. The reader will recall Peter Porter or perhaps, Cavafy:-

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Since theology is never distant from Umberto Eco’s thought there is an echo of the unkindness mentioned in Matthew Chap45 v25” And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

This eclectic collection covers matters as varied as St Thomas Aquinas on whether Embryos have souls to this famous cultural critic’s latest thoughts on Wikileaks. The philosophical chapter comparing Absolute and Relativism is particularly interesting. Touching on questions about the nature of contingency, the verification principle, positivism and post-modernism Eco provides the reader, given an interest in such matters, plenty to stimulate the little grey cells. Significantly, he mentions how Pope John Paul II thought modern philosophy had become dominated by questions about the theory of knowledge rather than issues about the nature of being (ontology). The orphic resonances of Mallarmé’s symbolic communication, Kafka’s opinions on interacting with the Absolute, quoted by Elie Wiesel, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of the subtlety of art all get a mention. This is not an easy read; it is indeed something of an intellectual tour de force.

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The lengthy chapter concerning Victor Hugo, The Poetics of Excess begins by outlining Gide and Cocteau’s concern that the writer’s insufferable style is thoroughly bombastic. However, Eco is entranced by Hugo’s lengthy descriptions, his penchant for making lists and constructing unstable rough-hewn characters. Frequently Eco seems attracted by the ugliness and brutality that conveys the cruel forces of destiny which characterise Hugo’s highly romantic writing. Memorably, the guillotine on its rough wooden scaffold with its glinting sharp blade becomes a devouring beast. Umberto Eco concentrates on Hugo’s novel about revolution and reaction, [[Ninety Three]] where the lengthy lists of villages, crossings and homesteads provide the reader with a convincing panorama of the scale of the social upheaval. Redemption it seems to Hugo, quoting de Maistre, necessitates human sacrifice. Eco is explaining how in becoming more radical by 1870 and supporting the Communards he feels too he must justify The Terror. This engaging chapter with the portrayal of the Royalist Vendée, led by the clergy and by peasants who were chosen in each locale, cost more than 240,000 lives. The trendy professor convinces us of the necessity of reading Hugo’s inimitable contribution to the historical novel. Even attempting a few selected paragraphs in French would prove a rewarding challenge!

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Plunging deeper into this very varied collection, “Inventing the Enemy”, the reader becomes beguiled by Eco’s verbal fire display. The chapter on [[Imaginary Astronomies ]]delves into the curiosities of approaches, ancient and modern to explain the structure and shape of the firmament. First as a glorious tabernacle progressively he illustrates cosmologies linked with how man’s inventions alter too his conception of himself and society. Humour and irony are freely sprinkled through the text which leaps into convolutions that mirror the Ptolemaic system of epicycles of the planets that are described. The story is enlivened too by an engaging display of strange maps. By the end of these essays, the reader will have a sense of the strange, entertaining pleasure of Umberto Eco’s company and an introduction to the diversity of ingenuity and fun to be found among otherwise neglected archives.

Two other interesting links are this Guardian Review by Nicholas Lezard is at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/27/nicholas-lezard-inventing-enemy-umberto-eco

and an interview with Jeremy Paxman is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLblYsHc7uI

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A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa by A.T.Williams

Almost ten years ago on a Sunday morning back in September 2003, British Troops raided a hotel in Basra. It was a difficult period in the occupation, six months on from the U.S. led invasion. Temperatures were more than 50 degrees centigrade. Members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (QLR) took ten suspects in for questioning from a hotel in the vicinity of insurgent weaponry. The Iraqis were hooded, plasticuffed, forced into stress positions and subjected to karate chops and kidney punches by the British. Other men and officers watched, walked by or wondered at the stench that resulted from vicious punishment. After 36 hours of torture, a 26 year-old hotel receptionist lay dead by asphyxiation. His grossly disfigured body bore 93 individual injuries. There are now in the region of another 250 individuals, men and women, whose families are making legal claims to have been killed in further encounters with British patrols or prison guards.A Very

Concern about what had happened, rather than why, quickly went upward through the ranks after the event. Those initially reporting the death, showing concern included a TA Intelligence officer whose normal specialism lay in the Russian language and East-West issues. The personalities involved are carefully delineated including the able and ambitious CO, Colonel Mendonca and his adjutant, Captain Moutarde. The latter had to report the incident to the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police. The description of the roles and responsibilities various officers and how their reactions combines detail with the pace of a thriller. The ambiguous functions of the investigators, the RMP, are clearly explained and the high level of feelings were also fresh in the recent memories of all the troops in the wake of the six members of the police that died in the horrific attack on the Basra police station.

The Author A.T.Williams
The Author A.T.Williams

The response of Daoud Mousa, the father of the dead man, who had himself served in the Iraqi police force for some 24 years was initially trusting. He had been present when his son was arrested. His eventual discovery of his son’s fate in the very same buildings where Saddam’s forces had caused so many individuals to ‘disappear’ is heart-rending. This is but one example of how the events are thoroughly grounded in a long and difficult history similar to that between Iraq and Britain over the key resource of oil. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Mespotamia as it was then known was under a British mandate. The discovery by members of the QLR1 of the ill-conditioned graves of earlier Empire troops, neglected by the dictator, in Basra supplies another poignant instance of this sad past.

A.T. Williams who is a Professor of Law as well as a director of the Centre of Human Rights at WarwickUniversity is especially effective when writing about the legal procedures at the subsequent court martial in 2006. He describes everything from the blue-carpet and fresh polished pine walls of the Bulford Court Martial Centre with the collection of be-gowned criminal barristers looking as ominous as ravens. The collective noun for ravens, he reminds the reader, with more than a touch of irony is”unkindness”. The Iraqi witnesses have been pitched into an entirely different context and closely questioned about identity of their attackers even though they might have been doubly hooded.

The highly skilled team of defence lawyers for the seven defendants are trained to build a coherent argument. As Williams deftly explains, the focus is on establishing the guilt or innocence of the defendants. The witnesses were subject to techniques which do nothing to ease the psychological pressure upon the witnesses who had previously been grilled, beaten and kicked. This description of the trial is uncomfortable to read but the clarity of the writing shows that from the witness box this process feels like abuse over again. These talents explain why this book gained its author The Orwell Prize for Political Writing in May 2013.

Aba Mousa and his family
Aba Mousa and his family

In July 2008, the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay £2.83 million in compensation to Mousa’s family and nine other men, after admitting that the British Army had committed “substantive breaches” of the European Convention of Human Rights.

The Public Inquiry in 2011 was known as the Gage Report and called for by the Defence Secretary cost more than £12 million. This is discussed in the epilogue where the institutional knowledge of the BritishState that acts such as these are likely to happen is critiqued. This is especially true when final consequences of involvement have not been considered. This is not new; flogging and torture of the Mau Mau, callous brutality towards civilian populations in Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Oman raise deeply worrying concerns about our own institutions and our values.

More about the Orwell Prize at http://theorwellprize.co.uk/shortlists/a-t-williams/

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Russian Stories by Francesc Serés -A Review

imagesRP2This brilliant and varied collection of short stories is the product of a current academic interest in cross-cultural translation. Francisco Guillen Serés is a Catalan professor of Art History from Aragon. A Russophile, he has travelled widely to collect stories from those writing during the past hundred years of Russian history. These have been translated into Catalan and then into English. These unusual and delightful stories, some 21 of them written by 5 writers read fluently and engagingly. They form an informative tapestry of Soviet and post-Soviet life, moving back in time with the older, earlier writers like Bergchenko, who died in the siege of Stalingrad, at the end.  Ranging over mythic and symbolic tales to realistic portrayals of personal relationships; love Trysts in St Petersberg, ferocious bears in the deep heart of the Taiga to the perils of becoming lost in continuous orbit in space. All aspects are impressively recounted.

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In the preface Russian translator, Anastasia Maximova, sets the changing scene in an industrial suburb where she grew up in the 1990s. The esplanade in front of steel blast furnaces is littered with defunct statues of Stalin and Lenin about to be reprocessed. Unforgettable, is her description of the trucked in lines of heads made from incredibly tough alloys. These are so durable that a special technique must be evolved such that the heads must be drilled with holes, and then buried below ground where inserted explosive charges are necessary to blow them apart. Throughout these stories, such descriptions also represent hazardous transitions in Russian society, the effects on individuals are sometimes stultifying, often painful but also meliorated and transformed by generosity, friendship and kindness.

The first two authors, both of whom are women, born in 1967 and 1949 respectively, deal with personal issues against the backdrop of economic failure and authoritarian misrule. In Low Cost Life, Low Cost Love, Ola Yevgueniyeva writes of the sad and drab lives of the ground staff hostesses on the Russian airline, SAS outside St Petersburg. There is a feeling of being unable to attain the attractive standards of the more fortunate western European crews. Even the bus transport to the airfield has hard wooden benches and the roads contain bumps and potholes. This disappointed sadness creeps into relationships with men; low self-esteem leading to lowered expectation of their dates. A sorrowful but somehow poetic realism penetrates this writer’s stories. She writes too of resurgent nobility in St Petersburg’s great houses by the Neva which have survived the revolution, war and famine. In “The Russian Doll’s House” the ardent but impoverished Juri must wait for years distanced from the aristocratic and beautiful Mia. She must marry an oafish industrialist in accordance with her family’s demands. The story is written in a spell bounding, elegant style that brings out the tragedy of restricted, almost unrequited love.51DKTx6AjlL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX385_SY500_CR,0,0,385,500_SH20_OU02_

These stories have all been carefully chosen and reminiscent of the language and tradition in which Chekhov and Gorky once wrote. Indeed the book is dedicated to Mikhail Bulgakov. There are tragic-comic stories about the possibility that Elvis might have sung in Red Square, of the last lonely hours of an orbiting spaceman suffering the consequences of yet another system failure. Here then is a parable of a superpower in a state of freefall. The terrible ecological disasters of the Aral Sea and Chernobyl are treated. The latter portraying the return of an old, yet determined, couple to the dangers of an irradiated countryside and how their dutiful daughter is torn between fulfilling their wishes and what she thinks is their imminent demise.

downloadFrancesc SerésAs the tales pass backwards along the brutal path of Soviet history, misplaced idealism and naivety are revealed. “The Russian Road ”  long, hot and dusty finds the exhausted revolutionary Akaki returning the many versts to his home village. When he arrives he finds that among the peasants in the countryside little if anything has changed. His attempts to persuade folk there that in exchange for their potatoes they will receive a transforming new culture are met with astonished disbelief. Curious, thought-provoking and allegorical, Volkov’s “The War against the Voromians” tells of a peculiar area where there is a gravitational field anomaly. The inhabitants are subject to a corresponding increase in weight, have thicker necks and an affection for their homeland. They sadly become subject to state sponsored research and suspicion by the authorities. Population dispersal is forced upon these unfortunate Voromians, victims of external manipulation that seems to prevail in so many of  these accounts.

Kafka once wrote, “A book should become an axe for the frozen sea within us.” This collection, carefully selected, fulfils such a criterion. They have the transformative edge of original writing.

Further details at http://www.lletra.net/en/author/francesc-seres

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Book Reviews German Matters

The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook -Filmed with Keira Knightley and Alexander Skarsgård

Ruine der Volksoper, Hamburg
Ruine der Volksoper, Hamburg

 

The Aftermath is set amongst the devastated ruins in the fire-bombed city of Hamburg in 1946. The British have occupied the ruined city and Colonel Lewis Morgan, an officer and a gentleman, is charged with overseeing the restoration of order. However, Colonel Morgan must first deal with the human cost of the bombing including remnants of fanatic Nazis, the trummerkind – children of the rubble, and the starving civil populace. He also, in 1943, lost a child due to a Luftwaffe bomb and he must support his deeply grieving wife, Rachel, when she arrives after months of separation with their surviving twelve year old boy, the impressionable Edmund.

The drama is intensified when Colonel Lewis has to requisition a splendid villa for his own use and allows the owner, Herr Lubert, a German architect and significantly, a widower, to remain in the house with his own surly, indoctrinated daughter, Freda. There is also a retinue of domestic staff somewhat resentfully having to deal with a new English lady directing their activities. Morgan’s decisions look somewhat naïve but he feels he must set his men a positive example in forging the peace. Has he taken on the personal equivalent of ‘A Bridge Too Far’?

The novel begins with a German youth wearing a British helmet as he claws his way through the pulverised city heaps. He is dressed in an assortment of clothes pilfered and purloined from both the invading and defeated forces. The boy weaves his way with his wild gang of friends, the ferals, through the fractured cityscape. His face is dirty, his limbs are numb with the cold and he is hungry to the point of collapse. He represents the incipient future of Germany and is seeking to destroy the beast of the Nazi past.

In more comfortable surroundings, Colonel Lewes is allocated a house towards the ancient fishing suburb of Blankenese in sight of the winding, partially frozen expanse of the lower Elbe, situated in the grand and historic avenue of the Elbchaussee. His junior aide describes it as, A bloody great palace by the river. Originally, this belonged to the family of the deceased wife of the current owner; they were prosperous people who ran a number of flour mills. Lubert, the Hamburg citizen to whom the villa now belongs, is mourning intensely for his lost wife and appears a civilised man, an architect of considerable imagination. However, he has not yet received his certificate of clearance. This is the so-called Persilschein, which must show him to be free of Nazi connections. Lubert has yet to supply his answers to the 133 questions of the Fragebogen before he can obtain clearance from the Control Commissions Intelligence Branch. Will he be categorised as Black, Grey or White? What about his unhappy daughter, indoctrinated as a Hitler Madel and exploring her developing sexuality by bitterly taunting the English boy, Edmund, when he arrives with his own distraught and emotionally unavailable mother.

The Rhidian

The novel which Rhidian Brooks has written has three qualities to recommend it. Firstly it has a narrative with a cinematic pace to it, giving an irresistibly engaging insight into the troubled times immediately after the war. It is informative about events as various as the firestorm raids, the details of how officer’s wives socialised and did their shopping which is compared with the shortages and rationing under the Attlee Government back in Britain. It is compelling too on the process of démontage by which German war industries and other factories were destroyed partly in accordance with agreements negotiated with Soviet forces. This was not to prevent the building of the Berlin Wall and the division of Germany which, as is pointed out, takes place shortly afterwards.

Secondly, beyond this engaging portrayal on the military and political level, Brook has written a novel which is emotionally intriguing, sometimes uncomfortably so as it deals with the betrayals and unforeseen effects of individuals trying to struggle with painful feelings of love and loss in a period of mistrust and change. This is an honest attempt to show sympathy for individuals caught up in a whirl of actions with unintended consequences. A world into which Brook, the author, has a personal insight; his own Grandfather had been involved in a very similar situation to that of Colonel Lewis and family.

Ausgabe der Schulspeisung
Ausgabe der Schulspeisung

Finally this well-constructed novel is interesting for the manner in which it reflects upon contemporary concerns. Some of these relate to the honourable Army officer. There is, for instance, some measure of Christopher Tiejens about Colonel Lewis Morgan from Maddox Ford’s great novel recently adapted for television, Parade’s End. There is also a renewed interest in the culpability of the enemy and also some of the rough justice meted out in the initial phase of the occupation – subject too of the currently intriguing film, Lore adapted fromThe Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. This novel raises the question of how a defeated country might be re-established and the deeper personal meaning of loyalty, forgiveness and restitution. As we continue to ask ourselves if we have maintained and protected that fair society on which security might be built since 1945, this thoughtful book makes a sincere contribution to an ongoing debate.

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A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers, Chatto & Windus, 2010 by Michael Holroyd

Picture the crowded atelier of the renowned sculptor, Rodin or perhaps the dimly lit corridor’s of Lord Grimthorpe’s mansion. Perhaps you might prefer to frequent the brightly lit splendour of the balconies of the coastal villa at Cimbrione above the magnificent Gulf of Salerno. The inhabitants of such places led their tangled lives, sometimes enduring painful losses or by contrast, energetically inspired to passionate love affairs. In these stimulating environments we catch glimpses of the famous, like E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, sometimes accompanied by her close confidante, Vita Sackville West and then there was that tempestuous iconoclast, D.H.Lawrence. Many such lives were inspired by both landscape and lust, fashioned by each other’s creative energies and endowed with artistic talents of all kinds. Here we learn of talents and beauty that inspires artistic endeavour, like the many charms of Eve Fairfax. She, who after brief affairs was gradually forced into a stoic suspension which she recorded with thoughts from her friends in the pages of annotated diaries which became “A Book of Secrets”.

Michael Holroyd
Michael Holroyd

The Becketts were Yorkshire bankers and MPs who over several generations owned a series of estates and Gothic brickwork mansions. Ernest William, the second Lord Grimthorpe, was sent to Eton and by nature appears to have been, as Holroyd ironically remarks, a schoolboy that in some ways never quite grew up, though he did arrive at TrinityCollege, Cambridge in May 1875. Much about him is surrounded in mystery but his prowess with women soon became almost notorious soon after he reached London, a fact recorded by the writer George Moore describing him as ‘London’s greatest lover’. Ernest was to take the tours customary for young gentlemen around Europe on which he pursued in succession Eve Fairfax who was briefly his fiancée and then met his wife, Luie, a rich American whose story forms an intriguing digression, in Rome. After her most unfortunate death in childbirth, Ernest Beckett was to end up in the arms of Alice Keppel who was to embark upon a dalliance, as is well known, with the Prince of Wales. Besides these, there was a voluptuous Spanish American lady in Rome whom Ernest conveniently installed in Bayswater.

It was the melancholy beauty of the classical features of Eve Fairfax that also sent Auguste Rodin into raptures. Seeing her bronze head in the V&A, actually cast in 1909, first inspired Michael Holroyd to write this book, “The Book of Secrets”, referring to the elaborate memoir which Eve kept throughout her later life whilst attempting to come to terms with her past. In this she recorded her thoughts on mortality, occasional verses whilst frequently pondering the significance of those earlier amorous encounters with Ernest Beckett. Holroyd deploys his fluent elegant prose in describing Eve, her friends and this Edwardian tome, an eclectic and unique personal calendar, and also the letters which she received from various and unsuitable admirers. These appear to have included Rupert, Ernest’s younger brother, hence she concluded ‘All Becketts make bad husbands’.

Portrait of Violet Trefussis by Sir John Lavery 1919
Portrait of Violet Trefussis by Sir John Lavery 1919

Following through complex family trees, helpfully supplied, Michael Holroyd arrives at the passionate love affair between Alice Keppel’s daughter, who later became Violet Trefussis and Harold Nicholson’s wife, Vita Sackville West. Both had severe, imposing mothers and as children chased together around the corridors of Knole. Vita loved this place with its grand towers, high battlements and long gallery surrounded by spacious parks. Vita then came to stay at Violet’s castle at Duntreath in Stirlingshire. Vita was proud, independent, bi-sexual and fascinated by gardening; Violet appears more naïve, wayward and focussed strongly on her ruthless pursuit of Vita, the latter having had several lovers and relationships which were to include Virginia Woolf. These passions inspired Woolf to write of pageant and androgyny in ”Orlando.” From a literary viewpoint, both Vita and Violet were highly productive. Vita wrote ”The Edwardians”, ”All Passion Spent” and ”Challenge”. Violet wrote around a dozen works, several in French; she loved Paris. Holroyd talks about rediscovering these works and he shares this interest with Violet’s young Italian biographer, Tiziana at Cimbrone who charms Michael and so becomes an important figure in this layered narrative. Along with his description of the supportive care of Holroyd’s wife, Margaret Drabble, the author brings the reader into the present. The biography becomes a heart-felt personal memoir.

 

The Guardian reported recently, “Biography is a genre in crisis, according to perhaps Britain’s best-known biographer, the author of highly acclaimed works on Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw.” In particular literary biography, he feels has been superseded by the myriad forms of the internet and other popular entertainments.

Vita Sackville-West 1924
Vita Sackville-West 1924

Holroyd says that this is his last book. However, here he is once again energised by the whole process of searching archives and reconstructs the cultivated, privileged and mostly civilised society back to the early Edwardians. In measured, wry and sympathetic tones he takes the reader into the luxuriant and variegated gardens of the past. He finds time to discuss the role of imagination in the art of biography. In this finely written book he carefully spreads enlightenment as he carefully distinguishes between guesswork, probability and established facts.

There is a related posting at http://nttreasurehunt.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/vita-and-violet/

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Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom (Author), Laura Watkinson (Translator)

Nooteboom1“Whoever controls Berlin controls Germany and whoever controls Germany controls Europe” is a remark which attributed to Lenin. Until November 1989, the Berlin Wall, Die Berliner Mauer, bisected the historic city and divided its citizens from each other. Berlin was occupied, militarised and yet its people carried on with their daily lives amongst the ruins. Cees Nooteboom, a distinguished Dutch travel writer personally knew well something of the devastation of the past. He is old enough to have experienced, and at impressionable age, the Nazi Blitzkreig and occupation of Holland. A sensitive and susceptible person, he meditates upon the various strata of meaning, history, heroism and time itself. The result is a prose poem on a unique city that is condemned to be constantly developing, becoming rather than just being. As the art critic, Karl Scheffler, perceived in 1910, “Berlin ist eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein”

Nooteboom3

 

Nooteboom’s account starts in 1963, progressing through the events surrounding the fall of the Wall at the end of 1989, and finishing with a reassessment of the situation today. The text is liberally interspersed with black and white photographs. This evocative structure is somewhat reminiscent of the writings of W.G.Sebald with whom he shares an interest in nostalgia, memory and the past. Roads to Berlin is more than a travelogue, although he visits many German cities. A central concern is his response, as an onlooker to the tectonic political changes which resulted from the Velvet Revolution. Under continuous surveillance the author describes his feelings about driving along the autobahn through East Germany to reach the city. He captures the drabness of the surroundings and the tense atmosphere beside the wintry waters of the River Spree and the lonely bridges where escapees were fired upon. These call to mind Pinter’s film The Quiller Memorandum (1966), suppressed violence, the doleful constant scrutiny of the border guards of Ulbricht’s republic.

In 1989, returning to his lonely flat in the Western sector, close to the Wall, Nooteboom contemplates on television the start of the thaw. The broadcast comes from the tall aerial towering over the populace on the East. He studies the numbing images of political assemblies where a retinue of faceless men, the Politburo, shuffle behind the ailing Erich Honecker. Light falls on Gorbacev’s face whilst he delivers an official kiss to the GDR leader, everyone in the audience too are watching, struggling to understand what is about to happen. There are seismic changes elsewhere as thousands of East Germans are allowed to pass out of Hungary into Austria. Then Dubcek reappears with Havel on a balcony above Wenceslas Square in Prague and indicating that the whole edifice has collapsed. Nooteboom emerges from his flat and joins the celebrations in the Potsdamer Platz and crosses through the checkpoint, which is still occupied by uneasy guards as numerous Trebants travel west, he strolls  down the Unter den Linden above which a platform totters that barely supports people rejoicing. He also manages to attend galleries, plays and poetry recitals. These political changes are intermingled in his thoughts as he surveys the art and the mixed ironies of the fate of Mitteleuropa in an exhibition at the Walter Gropius Bau.

Nooteboom’s discursive approach is interesting and often reads as an eloquent memoir or diary. In places, because of his considerable interest in architecture, sculptures and ruins he sounds like a modern day Gibbon. The author of “Decline and Fall” has written of how he decided to embark on that great work as he mused amongst the ruins of the Capitol while barefoot friars were intoning Vespers. Nooteboom, brought up as a Catholic is sensitive to the chimes of the Angelus and writes evocatively about the empty dilapidated rally grounds at Nuremberg and discerns, “One voice screaming………, and all those ancient voices screaming back, an ancient chorus with a limited script.” He ventures to the Tuetoburg Forest, refreshed with Christmas Glühwein where he seeks out the towering statue of Hermann towering above his gigantic pedestal. The traveller, no mean historian, takes to task the mad classicist who erroneously named Hermann. He was in fact Armenius, who wiped out three Roman legions in A.D. 9 led by the wimpish Publius Varius.Nooteboom2

Cees Nooteboom’s work, which includes fiction, has been widely acclaimed and he has received numerous awards on the continent and whispered for a possible Nobel Prize. His discursive style demonstrates an erudite knowledge of cultural and philosophical references. Ranging from Goethe, von Moltke and Bismark to that controversial figure Heidegger he assumes considerable background knowledge. He does, however provide a useful glossary of writers and politicians. This cannot have been an easy book for Laura Watkinson to translate and as she commented recently,” I am translating a Dutch book about Germany, sitting at a computer in Berlin, turning Dutch words about Germany into English words about Germany. “The resulting text is demanding, thorough and quite invaluable to those who want the opportunity to inform themselves before contemplating what the future holds Central and Eastern Europe. Doubtless, this too has considerable bearing on our own lives.

Further details on following Nooteboom around Berlin at http://www.laurawatkinson.com/tag/cees-nooteboom/

He talks about another collection, discusses his new short story collection, The Foxes Come At Night, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0RGFEfA8PA