New NEW YORKER

Amelia Lester, 26 Year Old Former Fact Checker, is the New Managing Editor of The New Yorker

The New Yorker has hired Amelia Lester, most recently an editor at the Paris Review, as their new managing editor.
Ms. Lester, 26, a Sydney native who graduated from Harvard, used to be a fact-checker at The New Yorker and checked all-star writers Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer.
She's replacing Kate Julian, who is moving to Washington, D.C., where her husband just got a job.
In other transacational New Yorker news: Charles Stanley Ledbetter, the New Yorker's receptionist who was kicked out of his job after Conde Nast fired 13 remaining editorial receptionists earlier this month, will be taking a job in the magazine's fiction department.
Editor David Remnick has the luxury of making these moves without worrying about what McKinsey consultants think about them. Mr. Remnick is exempt from meeting with the McKinsey folks who are now in their sixth week at 4 Times Square.

Getting Older

Here's an innovative way to lower health care costs: Set everyone's biological clock back 20 years. Senior citizens of 75 will enjoy the strength and stamina they had at 55, meaning they will need far less medical attention. The energetic elderly will remain productive members of their community later into life, which could also ease the strain on Social Security.

Granted, this sounds like an unusually wonky episode of The Twilight Zone. But three decades ago, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a landmark experiment that suggested reverse aging needn't be relegated to the realm of science fiction. Her revealing study, the many follow-ups it spawned and the implications of their findings are the subject of her fascinating new book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

It's a brightly written work — Langer has a knack for metaphors — that deftly challenges an array of assumptions we hold about health. She reminds readers that many definitive-sounding diagnoses are in fact best guesses, and that no study, however elegant and persuasive, can truly tell us the best course of treatment for any particular patient. Physicians, she counsels, should be thought of as "consultants." Ultimately, we know our own bodies best.

In a sense, this is a book about the limits of empirical knowledge. But as Langer sees it, the ambiguity that inevitably accompanies medical research can be profoundly liberating. If we can't be sure that a diagnosis — or a widely accepted truism such as "memory loss is inevitable with age" — truly applies in our case, we're less likely to stick ourselves with a self-limiting label. "While many of our experienced disabilities may be a natural part of aging," she writes, "many are instead a function of our mindsets about old age."

The ingenious counterclockwise experiment was conducted in 1979. Langer and her students recruited two small groups of elderly men to spend a week living in a secluded New Hampshire monastery. Those in the control group spent the seven days reminiscing about the past, while those in the experimental group effectively re-entered the past. Their environment was designed to convey the impression they were living in 1959. They watched movies, listened to songs and read magazines from that era and discussed "current events" such as the first U.S. satellite launches.

"Both groups came out of the experience with their hearing and memory improved," Langer reports. (It appears our bodies respond to being intellectually and emotionally engaged.) But members of the experimental group experienced more dramatic benefits. They were more likely to improve their scores on an intelligence test; more likely to show improvement in joint flexibility and dexterity; and more likely to look younger, as judged by a group of outside observers who compared before-and-after photos. Also, their fingers were longer. Since their arthritis declined in severity, they were able to extend their digits past the point they could a week earlier.

A fluke, perhaps? Well, Langer offers plenty of other data suggesting a strong link between self-perception and health. My favorite involves a group of hotel maids who reported their long hours and family responsibilities didn't give them time to exercise. They were then told that their work, with all its bending and scrubbing, in fact involves quite a bit of exercise. So informed, they lost an average of 2 pounds over the next four weeks. Langer, who has spent several decades studying the effects of mindfulness, notes the women were paying renewed attention to activities that long ago became routine and mechanical. That, she suggests, is the key: If you're noticing the precise condition of the carpet rather than daydreaming as you vacuum, chances are you'll push the machine a little bit harder.

Langer defines mindfulness not in the sense of meditation and detachment popularly associated with Buddhism, but rather as being aware enough to notice subtle changes in ourselves and in our environment. The health implications of such alertness are obvious: If we notice small shifts in how we feel, we can address problems before they become acute. She argues we will also begin to realize that the distinction we make between being "sick" and "well" is often arbitrary and usually unhelpful, in that it prompts us to bounce back and forth between willful ignorance of our body's workings and helpless dependence on a medical professional.

Langer wrote a best-selling book on mindfulness in 1990, and this latest volume may also climb the charts: A Hollywood movie focusing on the counterclockwise experiment, starring Jennifer Aniston as the research psychologist, is scheduled for release next year. No doubt the renewed interest in Langer's research reflects a widespread fear of aging among baby boomers, many of whom will resonate to her ideas. How many have the discipline to follow through on her recommendations is another question. Living a fully engaged life in which we constantly question not only society's assumptions about aging but also our own ingrained beliefs is a bit more involved than getting a Botox injection.

Nevertheless, policymakers and health educators need to be exposed to these concepts. (Her chapter about the consequences of language used by doctors should be taught in medical schools. Does anyone really feel better when told their cancer is "in remission"?) Langer persuasively suggests it is no coincidence that a society that worships youth and considers the elderly somewhat embarrassing is bankrupting itself with health care costs. If pop culture and the mass media equate being old with being weak, helpless and irrelevant, why wouldn't the elderly feel feeble?

So the fountain of youth may in fact be the flood of chemicals in our brain that processes both internal and external messages about old age and dutifully passes them on to our joints, blood vessels and vital organs. Perhaps it's time to start noticing these cerebral downloads and disregard the disempowering ones. Personally, I'm planning to pop in a tape of When Harry Met Sally into the VCR and celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. It turns out 1989 was quite a year.

Ron, Peggy and Ted

It was the summer of 1985, a year after the second Reagan landslide, and there was a particular speech coming up that was important to the president and first lady. It was a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which at the time was relatively new and the only presidential library that didn’t have an endowment. The event was at Ted Kennedy’s house. The senator had asked the Reagans to help out. The families had struck up a friendship a few years before; in 1981 the Reagans had been delighted by Rose Kennedy, whom they had hosted for her first visit to the White House since her son Jack was president.

And so, June 24, 1985. I had worked on the speech, to my delight—JFK had been a childhood hero—and Reagan went off in a happy mood, waving his cards at Pat Buchanan, the director of communications. "I bet you love my speech, Pat!" he said as he bounded out of the West Wing.

And this is what Ronald Reagan said of John F. Kennedy, on a warm dark night in the floodlit garden of Ted Kennedy's home in McLean, Va.:

"It always seemed to me that he was a man of the most interesting contradictions, very American contradictions. We know from his many friends and colleagues, we know in part from the testimony available at the library, that he was both self-deprecating and proud, ironic and easily moved, highly literate yet utterly at home with the common speech of the working man. He was a writer who could expound with ease on the moral forces that shaped John Calhoun's political philosophy; on the other hand, he betrayed a most delicate and refined appreciation for Boston's political wards and the characters who inhabited them. He could cuss a blue streak—but then, he'd been a sailor.

View Full Image

Associated Press

Sen. Edward Kennedy talks with President Ronald Reagan as they look over an American Eagle that graced President John F. Kennedy's desk during a fundraising event for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library "He loved history and approached it as both romantic and realist. He could quote Stephen Vincent Benét on Gen. Lee's army—'The aide de camp knew certain lines of Greek / and other things quite fitting for peace but not so suitable for war . . .' And he could sum up a current 'statesman' with an earthy epithet that would leave his audience weak with laughter. One sensed that he loved mankind as it was, in spite of itself, and that he had little patience with those who would perfect what was not meant to be perfect.

"As a leader, as a president, he seemed to have a good, hard, unillusioned understanding of man and his political choices. He had written a book as a very young man about why the world slept as Hitler marched on, and he understood the tension between good and evil in the history of man—understood, indeed, that much of the history of man can be seen in the constant working out of that tension.

"He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country. It is a matter of pride to me that so many young men and women who were inspired by his bracing vision and moved by his call to 'Ask not' serve now in the White House doing the business of government.

"Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president, because I didn't. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it's true: When the battle's over and the ground is cooled, well, it's then that you see the opposing general's valor.

"He would have understood. He was fiercely, happily partisan, and his political fights were tough, no quarter asked and none given. But he gave as good as he got, and you could see that he loved the battle.

"Everything we saw him do seemed to show a huge enjoyment of life; he seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump aboard and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey, it's unthankful not to. I think that's how his country remembers him, in his joy.

"And when he died, when that comet disappeared over the continent, a whole nation grieved and would not forget. A tailor in New York put a sign on the door: 'Closed due to a death in the family.' The sadness was not confined to us. 'They cried the rain down that night,' said a journalist in Europe. They put his picture up in huts in Brazil and tents in the Congo, in offices in Dublin and Danzig. That was one of the things he did for his country, for when they honored him they were honoring someone essentially, quintessentially, completely American.

"Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy's death, five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then, and his thousand days in the White House.

"And sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school, and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book, that nothing is every lost in that house. Some music plays on.

More Peggy Noonan

Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns.

And click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace.

"I have been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, 'And another thing, Eleanor.' Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a fellow saying, 'Bully! Absolutely ripping!' Walk softly now and you're drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room, where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter.

"I don't know if this is true, but it's a story I've been told, and it's not a bad one because it reminds us that history is a living thing that never dies. . . . History is not only made by people, it is people. And so history is, as young John Kennedy demonstrated, as heroic as you want it to be, as heroic as you are."

***

The Reagans tried to say hello to all the many gathered Kennedys—"That was Jack," Jackie Onassis said, to the president's delight—and a lovely thing followed, which is what Ted Kennedy said. The next morning he poured out his gratitude in a handwritten letter. "I only wish Jack could have been there too last night," he wrote. "Your presence was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership Mr. President." He signed it, "With my prayers and thanks for you as you lead us through these difficult times."

And so grace met grace, and a friendship that had already begun deepened. On Wednesday, the day after Ted Kennedy died, Nancy Reagan gave a telephone interview to Chris Matthews on "Hardball." "We were close," she said of their friendship, "and it didn't make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat." "I'll miss him very much," she said. "I'm sure we'll all miss him."

Edward Moore Kennedy, 1932-2009, rest in peace.

Keynes

Lunch with the FT: Robert Skidelsky

By Lionel Barber

Published: August 28 2009 15:14 | Last updated: August 28 2009 15:14

For much of the past 40 years, Professor Robert Skidelsky has devoted his life to one man: John Maynard Keynes, the economist, civil servant, speculator and co-architect of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system. Occasionally, he might have wondered where his dedication was leading him. Not now. The global financial crisis has tested to destruction the belief in rational expectations and efficient markets, and Keynes, the arch-pragmatist, is enjoying an Indian summer.

We are meeting at Rules, a venerable English restaurant (est 1798) in Covent Garden, London. With its period cartoons and elegant portraits, Rules seems the type of place that Keynes might have frequented in his heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Sadly, the world’s authority cannot confirm my hunch.

“Keynes was not a club man. I don’t know whether he ate at Rules.  I’ll have to check my papers ... ”

Lord Skidelsky, 70, is deeply tanned – he’s just back from staying with his old Social Democrat friend Lord Owen in Greece – and his clothes are understated: a navy blue jacket, white shirt and a light brown chequered tie. He has just produced a new book on Keynes, a supplement to his three-volume biography completed in 2000.

There are numerous questions on my checklist, not just about Keynes and his relevance today but also Skidelsky’s public tirades against economists and the teaching of economics at university. But first I want to delve into Skidelsky’s background, a remarkable story in its own right.

Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky was born in Harbin, China, in 1939. His parents were British subjects of Russian ancestry, Jewish on his father’s side, Christian on his mother’s. His father worked for the family firm, LS Skidelsky, which leased a local railway line and the largest coalmine in Manchuria.

“The paradox is that the Skidelsky fortune, which was considerable, was lost twice over, first of all by the Bolshevik revolution, although they did get out $6m in cash, which was a terrific sum in those days,” says Skidelsky. “But then my grandmother, who was in charge of the money because her husband had died, decided to increase her fortune round about 1929 by gambling on the New York stock market on the margin – you were allowed, I think, 10 or 15 per cent then – and lost everything, bar bits and pieces.

“My father, who had been, I suppose, looking forward to a comfortable life as a playboy in western Europe, went back to Manchuria – this was after the crash, the Great Depression in 1931 or thereabouts – in order to work in the family coal business, which was still flourishing. That’s where he met my mother and I was the result of that.”

In 1941, when war broke out, the Skidelskys, including four-year-old Robert, were interned by the Japanese but were released some months later in a prisoner exchange. The family returned to China after the war, just as Mao’s communists seized control of Manchuria in 1947. “It was”, Skidelsky admits, “a spectacular piece of bad timing.” Two years later, they gave up hope of reclaiming their property and returned to Europe. He was sent to Brighton College.

ROBERT SKIDELSKY ON THE PAST 10 YEARS

‘I was too weak to be a leader, too strong to be a follower’

In the past 10 years my life has broadened out in various ways, chosen and unchosen. The most important development, autobiographically, has been the deepening – or possibly resumption – of my links with Russia. I have for some years now been on the advisory board of Lena Nemirovskaya’s Moscow School of Political Studies. I have devoted considerable time to learning Russian, a language my parents discouraged me from taking up in childhood when it would have been much easier for me to do so.

The benefit of the extinguishing of my hopes of a political career was that it enabled me to finish volume three of Keynes far quicker than I would have done otherwise.

I left the Conservative party for the Cross Benches in October 2001. Reflecting on my lack of success in politics I concluded that I was too weak to be a leader, too strong to be a follower. Although I am independent-minded, it is not true that I am incapable of being a “team player”. I think I would have been a good minister, and regret my failure to gain an insider’s knowledge of the working of governments.

A new twist to my life came in 2001 with my appointment as a non-executive director of Stilwell Financial, a holding company which owned Janus, a large American mutual fund. A review essay I had written in the New York Review of Books of Francis Wheen’s life of Karl Marx attracted the attention of its chief executive, Landon Rowland. He immediately invited me to join the board. I believe this could only happen in the US. In the UK nothing I have ever written or done has suggested to anyone that I might be suited to money-making! I am now a non-executive director of Janus Financial Company and of Sistema Joint Stock Company, which owns the Russian telecoms company MTS. I have also served as chairman of the Greater Europe Fund, a Jersey-based hedge fund.

These different worlds have continued to fertilise my writing. My business experience gave me an insight into the financial system, crucial in writing my latest book, Keynes: The Return of the Master, an account of Keynes’s ideas set in the context of the global economic recession. My flirtation with politics informed another short book, completed in 2008, about Britain in the 20th century.

I am working with Vijay Joshi, Fellow in Economics at Merton College, Oxford, on a book on globalisation and international relations. It will aim to sort out the sense and nonsense of globalisation, and consider how far contemporary economic and political logics point in the same direction. These are themes which link my various intellectual interests in a most satisfactory way.

This tale of woe is halted by the arrival of a waiter. I order potted shrimp, followed by steak and kidney pie. Skidelsky orders pea soup and grilled liver. I ask whether this topsy-turvy childhood encouraged him to study the interwar period and the Great Depression. “Well, that was the period that crucified our family, but it was also virgin territory. History at Oxford [where he gained a place after Brighton College] stopped at 1914.” At Oxford, he became fascinated by the relationship between politicians and the economic slump in Britain, which became the subject of his PhD thesis.

It was an interest that rapidly became an obsession, driven by his friendship first with his Oxford contemporary Max Mosley and then with the whole family: Oswald (the former Labour cabinet minister who later formed the British Union of Fascists) and his wife Diana (née Mitford).

Skidelsky says he still sees Max Mosley, now clinging to his job as head of Formula One motor racing after tabloid revelations about his sexual antics. Then, lowering his voice, he speaks of his own “calf-like” love for Max’s mother and his fascination with Oswald, a “brilliant, charismatic man” who resigned from the government in 1930 calling for a break with orthodox economic policy to combat high unemployment.

Skidelsky saw him as a figure of history rather than demonology, and in Oswald Mosley, the biography he published in 1975, described his subject as “a hero”. However, the book cost him tenure at Johns Hopkins University in the US and at Oxford – though he did, finally, win a permanent post at Warwick University in 1978. Why was he, I ask, so indulgent toward Mosley, with his fascist views and his anti-semitism, given his own Jewish background?

“Half-Jewish,” he says, gently correcting me. “I believe strongly in loyalty but I was also drawn intellectually .”

Skidelsky now views his obsession with Mosley as a “false trail”. At any rate, it was replaced with a new interest-cum-obsession, this time with Keynes. “He was the real thing: [he had] a high intellect and a sense of balance. He was Eton, Cambridge, and HM Treasury, with a country place [Tilton, East Sussex, which Skidelsky leased for 20 years while completing his biography]. He was a member of the intellectual aristocracy. He was an insider and an outsider.”

Skidelsky clearly envies Keynes’ ability to have been part of the Establishment but also one of its most trenchant critics, especially at such seminal moments as the government’s decision in 1925 to return to the gold standard. The theme of insiders and outsiders will recur during our two-and-a-half hour lunch.

I ask Skidelsky whether he was naïve in failing to anticipate the criticism of his Mosley biography. Perhaps, he replies. His decision to embark on the definitive study of Keynes was a riposte. “I said to myself, ‘I will show the buggers.’ ”

Now, however, Skidelsky wonders aloud whether he lacked courage. “Not physical courage because I never had a chance to fight; more moral courage. I was too eager to please and, when there were fundamental disagreements, I was always looking for a compromise.”

Just as our conversation is turning confessional, the waiter arrives with our main courses. Skidelsky pauses and says: “May I ask you a question: was it necessary to be an economist to be editor of the Financial Times?” I temporarily choke on my (excellent) steak and kidney pie. There is no pre-condition for the editorship, I tell him, beyond displaying an interest in and understanding of the “dismal science”. The answer satisfies him.

Skidelsky does not appear to like economists very much, I say. “Not true. But there is an imperial benevolence about them; they are not interested in people, they are very impersonal. I cannot imagine having a bosom friend who is an economist.”

But when we turn to Keynes, Skidelsky’s face lights up as he describes the many-sided genius. “He was a wonderful writer on economics, the best there has ever been. Some people say a better writer than a thinker. Wrong. He used a rhetorical logic, à la Aristotle.”

To illustrate his point, he compares the writing of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, two early 19th-century English scholars of political economy. “Ricardo liked to avert his eyes from the temporary to contemplate the long-term equilibrium that is evolving; Malthus focused on temporary disturbances which could have huge costs. Keynes agreed.”

Skidelsky, himself a fine writer, recites one of Keynes’ most famous quotes. “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy a task ... if they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”

Like the Queen, Skidelsky believes economists missed the danger signs ahead of the financial crisis. They were preoccupied with sophisticated mathematical models – a serious weakness, he says, in academic teaching of the discipline – and they were over-confident in self-regulation of the market.

He blames this mindset on the revival of anti-Keynesianism in the 1970s when government intervention in the economy made way for supply-side theory of tax cuts and labour market deregulation. But Keynesians, too, were guilty of overreaching: they assumed the state was capable of fine-tuning demand to mitigate the effects of the economic cycle. Today, Keynesianism has reasserted itself through multi-billion pound government interventions to stimulate the economy and recapitalise the banking system. Skidelsky is no statist but he says the crisis has exposed serious weaknesses in economic policy, from the Bank of England’s inflation targeting (“They did not have the tools”) to the Labour government’s belief in light-touch regulation.

The waiter arrives with a dessert menu. We both opt for sorbets. I return to Skidelsky’s own politics, suggesting, playfully, that he has been as politically promiscuous as Keynes was sexually. “Promiscuity takes several forms,” he replies; “I like the French slogan: ‘Yes to a market economy, no to a market society.’”

He refines his position. “I don’t think I [have] moved very far, even if I moved farther than some. I have always been in the centre, not an extremist, though one break towards extremism was support of Mrs Thatcher.” Surely it is unfair to cast Mrs T as an extremist. “Well, no. And I did not declare my support for her.”

A mildly embarrassed silence follows. Skidelsky goes on to describe his journey from Labour to founder member of the Social Democratic party in 1981 to Conservative peer in 1992 but now sitting on the cross benches. In the run-up to the 1992 general election, with the SDP dissolved, prime minister John Major was looking for endorsements. David Owen, SDP co-founder, was top of the list but Owen wanted to join a government of all talents rather than signing up as a Tory. By Skidelsky’s account, part of the deal was that Skidelsky would receive a peerage.

Owen, he says, held out the prospect of a front bench role for his friend and a future ministerial post. But “God’s fifth column” – a Skidelskyian phrase for fate – sabotaged that ambition. In fact, he sabotaged it himself, joining a committee on education reform chaired by the minister John Patten, only to resign after a year: “I said I would not serve on an advisory committee if my advice was never taken.”

Skidelsky served as a front bench opposition spokesman on culture and treasury matters between 1997 and 1999, but then stepped out of line again, denouncing, in a Sunday newspaper, Nato’s bombing campaign in the Kosovo war. William Hague, then Tory opposition leader, sacked him. Surely, the sacking could not have come as a surprise. “Good question ... my article triggered hundreds of letters. But I did not say this out of moral courage. If David Owen had said, ‘Cool it,’ I might have done.”

There is a disarming honesty about the professor. The charge of naivety rankles but he is more interested in the tension between political calculation and principle. “I am not a calculating person. That is why I like Keynes, who said, ‘If the barometer is high and the clouds are black, don’t waste time on a debate on whether to take an umbrella.’”

Calculation, he says, is overestimated as a guide to rational conduct. Thus he is critical of Tony Blair (a tactician with an appetite for power) and admiring of the former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, a man of principle whom Skidelsky believes could have been Conservative leader had he compromised on his support for Europe.

I am conscious that it is getting late. Skidelsky apologises. “When you get older you have a tendency to babble ... At 70, what does life hold in store?”

In fact, the professor does have plans: two books on globalisation, including a history of the Skidelsky family. The second will offer a fresh perspective on his chosen period and his own life as an outsider who, thanks to Keynes, came in from the cold.

‘Keynes: The Return of the Master’ (Allen Lane £20) is published on September 3 and is available at www.ft.com/bookshop (tel 0870 429 5884) for £16 plus p&p

Lionel Barber is editor of the FT

..................................................

Rules
Maiden Lane, London WC2

Asparagus and green pea soup (cold) £7.50
Morecambe Bay potted shrimp £11.95
Grilled liver & bacon with spring onion mash £19.95
Steak & kidney pie with runner beans £17.95
Bottle of sparkling water £3.75
Sorbet x 2 £15.00
Pot of peppermint tea £3.15
Coffee £3.15

Total (including service) £92.70

Alexander

Polarities do neaten up a narrative, and the messier your narrative, the more tempting they become. If your business took shape when wide-shouldered goons crowbarred open the shipping crates of your competitors and dumped the contents (and sometimes the competitors) into the Gowanus Canal, ten to one you’ll feel the urge to spotlight a starry-eyed struggling team of plucky entrepreneurs, fighting valiantly against the Great Depression, or the Turks, or an asteroid, or whatever. The guys who cooked up the Christian mythos were, shall we say, inspired – they had the Lord of the Universe get Himself born in a manger to a pair of nobodies (although they hedged their bets a bit by adding a drop or two of House of David royal blood to the proud parents), because parthenogenesis is sloppy enough as it is – choirs of angels are practically de rigeur.

The great power of Rome had squalling, God-awful beginnings, as the men and women who later cleaned it up knew quite well. A loose confederacy of malarial villages cobbled together as many strongmen as they could and began preying upon as many weaker villages as they could conveniently reach. Heads were bashed, babies spiked, and a century or two later, with a great deal of luck, Rome began to cohere into a national identity and started to slather pancake makeup over everything in sight. The ruthlessly displaced Etruscans became the ethereally withdrawing Etruscans; the effective, hardheaded Tarquin line of rulers became the corrupt Tarquin tyrants who had to be overthrown in order for destiny to breathe deep.

In reality, Rome very early perfected the subjugation of sloppy individuality to an increasingly lockstep march toward the Big Goal, and that approach hadn’t really been seen in the Western world before on such a relentlessly expanding scale. City-states, nations, economies, and especially armies melted before this approach as Rome perfected it – there were defeats, certainly, setbacks, but even at the early stage, the oncoming waves seemed inevitable – more Roman frigates, longer Roman roads, taller Roman aqueducts penetrating deeper and deeper into hinterlands, and most of all more Roman soldiers, a perpetual march of bodies in armor; wearing down the stubborn made the subtle shift to warring down the proud once Virgil got his poet’s hands on it.

The one-sidedness of that narrative starts to look decidedly unheroic – most certainly in need of polarities to perk things up. Romans not only invented fascism as we understand it today, they also invented fascism’s handmaidens, propaganda and historical fiction. They looked back upon the brutish, ugly story of their beginnings and invented repressive monarchs, virtuous virgins, lone warriors against numberless hordes, and benign goddesses overlooking peoples’ nuptials. The war with rival empire Carthage, already formidably large-scale, became epic, and writers found a Heaven-sent dichotomy in contrasting solitary, charismatic, tactically brilliant Hannibal with the plodding, circumspect, monochrome gallery of Roman legionaries and their cost-cutting, risk-avoiding commanders. Hannibal was actually one Carthaginian commander among many, and there are strong arguments to be made that he wasn’t often as insightful as his fellow generals. But for the Romans (as indeed for all of history’s big winners), it wasn’t enough that they eventually won all three Punic Wars – they had to control the story too. As Hannibal’s solitary genius and tactical brilliance was subtly amplified by storytellers, the steadfast endurance and humble perseverance of the Romans who eventually beat him got amplified right along with it (the Federal government during the American Civil War would do the same thing with Robert E. Lee and achieve the same effect with Ulysses S. Grant).

But once they start controlling things, controllers aren’t happy until they control everything, and surely this as much as anything explains why the Romans latched so tightly onto the story of Alexander the Great. There was no story from the past the Romans couldn’t finesse to the advantage of their self-regard, but in this case, there was no story – because unlike Hannibal (and the Tarquins, and the Etruscans, and everybody else), Alexander looked west to the fledgling little nationality forming on the banks of the Tiber and calmly decided it wasn’t worth his time. Roman historians (our old friend Livy foremost among them) were convinced that this was a narrow escape for Rome: against the might of Alexander’s army (and the magic of his luck), the Rome of 325 B.C. would have been defenseless.

‘Defenseless’ was intolerable to the Romans, who set about right away fitting this world-conqueror with feet of clay heavy enough to sink him in, well, the Gowanus Canal. We have only a handful of ancient literary sources for Alexander’s life. None of the dozens of contemporary lives survive, except as tantalizing echoes in later works – and the vast majority of those later works, major and minor, are Roman. When we think of Alexander, the figure we’re thinking of is a Roman construct, tailored to Roman tastes and suited to Roman needs. The most critically respected of these accounts is by Flavius Arrianus (who wrote under the rule of Hadrian, for a Roman reading public), the most widely read is by Plutarch (who wrote under the rule of Hadrian, for a Roman reading public), and the most Roman is by Quintus Curtius Rufus, whose full-length biography of Alexander is the only one to come down to us from antiquity even remotely intact.

It lacks, among other things, its first two chapters (’books’), so not only is Curtius’ account of Alexander’s boyhood and youth missing, but so too is Curtius’ presumably florid introduction and dedication – and this is more bothersome than you might think, because it makes dating the work a suddenly tangled proposition, and it makes identifying Curtius even more tangled. Lacking a dedicatory epistle dating the work somewhere specific, scholars for centuries have had to comb through the text itself for clues as to when it was written. The best of these clues comes in Book 10, when Curtius digresses from talking about Alexander long enough to praise the emperor – the princeps who has just recently rescued the Romans from “a night we might well have thought our last” and restored order to the discordia membra of the state. Since Curtius has already named the princeps in his dedication, he doesn’t bother to name him here, but the clues are ample enough to sustain several guesses – Augustus, solidifying peace after decades of civil war? Claudius, taking the reins after the assassination of Caligula? Vespasian, rescuing the country from another bout of civil war and the “Year of the Four Emperors”? It turns out there’s a Curtius Rufus in the historical record at every potential period of composition, so none of these possibilities (and there are others) can be ruled out until those missing first two chapters come to light.

In the meantime, we can glean certain things about our Quintus Curtius Rufus just from the way he writes (zealously partisan classicists – a redundancy if ever there was one – maintain they can glean the exact day to the hour he composed his book from the way he writes, but their arguments only convince – and fail to convince – other rabid classicists and need not detain us here). He’s got a certain world-weary fish-eye for governmental administration – he’s usually very good at conveying the operational feeling of the impromptu empire the young conqueror and his men were building as they went along. And he’s not nearly as credulous as he pretends to be – everywhere in what we have of his book, there’s a wry light flickering behind even his most wide-eyed anecdotes. And most of all, this Quintus Curtius Rufus was given extensive training in formal rhetoric: his book is chock-full of beautiful invented speeches, perfectly counterbalanced figuratives, and self-consciously ornate literary gimmicks. All through his work, there are echoes of Livy – not just in the fanciful oratory (and, alas, the often slipshod technical accuracy), but in the consistent making of a point.

The Family of Darius before Alexander by Veronese, 1565-7. National Gallery, London

Which brings us back to polarities, since Quintus Curtius Rufus’ point always involves fortuna – the concept that Alexander’s reckless audacity (temeritas) was his besetting vice, and that as his self-discipline gave way to it more and more, he tempted fate by literally tempting the Fates to remove or reverse his fortuna, that unbeatable luck that had allowed him to conquer the world. In making this point, QCR might be channeling a Greek idea (even high school kids have heard of hubris), but he’s doing it to give a quintessentially Roman kind of comfort: we might be plodders, but we’d have beaten Alexander because unlike him, we never get too full of ourselves (anyone who’s ever seen an Italian mother wallop her adult son up the side of his head will know the deep roots of this comfort) – and even if we hadn’t been able to beat him, he’d have beaten himself in good time. QCR makes this point explicitly in Book Three, right after the famous scene in which Alexander isn’t miffed at all that King Darius’ captured mother mistakes Alexander’s friend Hephaiston for Alexander:

Had he been able to maintain this degree of moderation to the end of his life, I would certainly consider him to have enjoyed more good fortune than appeared to be his during his drunkenly victorious march through all the nations of the world from the Hellespont to the Ocean. For then he would surely have overcome the defects he failed to overcome, his pride and his temper; he would have stopped short of killing his friends at dinner, and he would have been reluctant to execute without trial men who had distinguished themselves in battle and had conquered so many nations along with him. But good fortune had not as yet overwhelmed him: while it was on the increase, he bore it with self-control and reserve, but when it eventually peaked, he failed to control it.

This is the Roman Alexander in miniature: a great conqueror, gradually undone by sycophancy, decadence, and over-indulgence. It’s a familiar arc, certainly, but QCR tweaks it for his Roman audience by underscoring the essential effeminacy of Alexander’s Eastern conversion, the increasingly despotic way he treats his former boon companions. QCR never misses an opportunity to make or at least hint at this pattern. His Alexander – and again, his Alexander is the archetypical Roman Alexander, which is our Alexander for good or ill – starts out well, remembering the sacrifices of his mighty father Philip of Macedon, honoring his native gods, treating his loyal Macedonian soldiers and officers with respect, presuming on nothing. But gradually he becomes drunk on his own successes (QCR observes that since his outrageous gambles almost always worked, nobody could get anywhere calling him rash) and sought more than fortuna was prepared to allow him. At one point Alexander consults some Scythian savants on the fate of his rule, and QCR makes a point of telling us that what follows is only his transcription of what they said – uncouth as their phrasings might appear to us now, he says, this is the most accurate version his researches were able to uncover:

“Had the gods willed that your might match your mania, there would be no stopping you. You would touch the east with one hand and the west with the other, and reaching the west you’d look first for where the Almighty’s sun was hidden. Even as it is, you covet things beyond your reach. From Europe you head for Asia; from Asia you cross to Europe. Then, if you defeat the whole human race, you will be ready to make war on woods, on snow, on rivers, on wild animals. Big trees take many years to grow, but it only takes an hour to uproot them – don’t you know this? It’s a stupid man who looks only at their fruit and doesn’t measure their height. Beware that, while striving to reach the top, you don’t fall down right along with the branches you’re climbing. The lion, too, is sometimes the carrion of tiny birds, and iron is eaten by rust. Nothing is so strong that it’s beyond attack, even by the weak. After all, what do we have to do with you? We’ve never set foot in your country. May we not live in our deep forests entirely ignorant of who you are and where you come from? We will not be slaves to anyone and likewise seek no mastery.”

The point of the elaborate disclaimer of accuracy (it’s not common for this author) is to assure the reader that they aren’t being lectured, that our historian is merely showing us all the signs of accumulating bad fortune that Alexander himself might have heeded, had he been in control of his baser desires. That pose, where the writer is the bearer of hard lessons rather than a carping scold, is as old as literature itself (the Biblical prophets, for instance, always said it was God who told them to rain on everybody’s parade) and not exactly unknown in today’s market for reheated polemic, and in QRC’s day (whichever day that was), it was catnip to the Romans.

Perhaps feeling a bit retroactively threatened by this legendary young conqueror from the past, they wanted to read that his mighty efforts fell apart, that he himself was eventually reduced to fortune’s fool. They wanted scenes where even his loyal officers and rank-and-file soldiers ultimately refuse to endorse his ambition, and QRC provides. We don’t know that any of this happened, and we certainly don’t know how it happened; that’s important to remember. Even while he was alive (in fact, the whole time he was alive, even from childhood), Alexander was being used as one or another kind of morality tale by virtually everybody who wrote anything about him – we have as our main sources of his life some of the morality tales woven by the Romans, but all we can view with appropriate suspicion these stories about a headstrong prince become suddenly decadent on Persian flatteries. It’s true that Alexander halted his eastward progression, and the Romans (none more so than QRC) want us to believe this was a moral rather than a logistical thing. Perhaps the sharpest example of this is the so-called Revolt at the Hypasis River, where Alexander for the first time reveals to the army his grand plan of eternal conquest – not a return to Macedon at long last, but a pushing onward, to the great Ocean stream, from which they could all sail home. The great classicist Peter Green, author of the only truly indispensible modern biography of Alexander, summarizes the dynamics of the situation in refreshingly specific terms:

Alexander was not a man to be deterred by mere geographical considerations. If he could lure the army forward one river at a time, with Ocean a glittering goal always just over the next hill, he might yet attain his end. Such a confidence-trick depended entirely on his knowing more than the army about local conditions, and this he usually did. But at the Beas there were no more hills to deceive his men, only a vast expanse of plain stretching away eastward, and beyond that – visible on a fine day from Gurdaspur, where Alexander probably reached the river – the great rampart of the Western Himalayas. No more potent incitement to mutiny could well be imagined. A diplomatic lie had been nailed, once and for all, by the brute facts of geography.

When confronted with that mutiny, QCR’s Alexander throws what in modern parlance would be called a hissy fit:

“I am abandoned, forsaken, delivered up to the enemy. But even alone, I shall press on. Expose me to rivers, to wild animals, the all those barbarian tribes whose very names seem to make you afraid, no matter. I’ll find other men to follow me, though you all desert me. The Scythians and Bactrians will stick with me – recent enemies who are now my friends. Better to die than to be dependent on the whims of others! Go back home! Go ahead and desert me, and do it proudly! I’ll find some way to win the victory you think is impossible – or else I’ll die trying, but die with honor, at least.”

This is the ultimate break, QCR implies, the most fundamental invitation any commander can give to bad fortune – this ungrateful scorning of men who’ve fought and died for their leader (like most Roman historians, QCR forgets that it was the Romans who invented the mind-staggering military punishment of decimation). Small wonder this life of Alexander crowds up with conspiracies and assassination plots the further along it goes; the implication is that once Alexander stopped living decently, decency called for him to stop living. At least, these are the words QCR puts in the mouth of Hermolaus, leader of a plot meant, as he puts it, to kill a corrupt Persian monarch, not a virtuous Macedonian king:

You wanted Macedonians to kneel before you and worship you like a god! You betrayed the memory of your father Philip, and if some fashion elevated a god over Jupiter, you’d despise Jupiter too! We are free men – are you surprised we can’t endure your vanity? What can we hope for from you, if even innocent men must face death, or worse than death?

It’s possible that by this point in his world conquest, Alexander really did fancy the idea of Persian-style absolute monarchy over the hillbilly egalitarianism of his native Macedon. We lack the written records to say for certain, but men have been known to become thus corrupted. But even if such contemporary records survived – even if Alexander’s own copious dispatches and letters survived – our Quintus Curtius Rufus would have been undeterred. His Alexander was a bright paragon brought low by uncontrolled pride – a perfect polarity to present to friends, Romans, and countrymen who might be tempted to disdain their mother’s cooking. And that posing, petulant Alexander is the boy we’re stuck with, until somebody better – and perhaps even less believable – comes along.

NOVELS (NOW)

A good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It's what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it's also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them. Plot makes perverts of us all.

It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us "The Age of Innocence," "Ulysses," "A Passage to India," "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," "Lady Chatterley's Lover," "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Sound and the Fury." Not to mention most of "In Search of Lost Time" and all of Kafka's novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between "The Professor's House," "The Great Gatsby," "Arrowsmith" and "An American Tragedy." (It went to "Arrowsmith." Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century's worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

But let's look back for a second at where the Modernists came from, and what exactly they did with the novel. They drew a tough hand, historically speaking. All the bad news of the modern era had just arrived more or less at the same time: mass media, advertising, psychoanalysis, mechanized warfare. The rise of electric light and internal combustion had turned their world into a noisy, reeking travesty of the gas-lit, horse-drawn world they grew up in. The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie. The novel was a mirror the Modernists needed to break, the better to reflect their broken world. So they did.

One of the things they broke was plot. To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don't tie up neatly. Events don't line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to. Ask a veteran of the Somme whether his tour of duty resembled the "Boy's Own" war stories he grew up on. The Modernists broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception and chronological sequence, to make them look more like life as it's actually lived. They took in "The Mill on the Floss" and spat out "The Sound and the Fury."

This brought with it another, related development: difficulty. It's hard to imagine it now, but there was a time when literary novels were not, generally speaking, all that hard to read. Say what you like about the works of Dickens and Thackeray, you pretty much always know who's talking, and when, and what they're talking about. The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters. The motto of Ezra Pound's "Little Review," which published the first chapters of Joyce's "Ulysses," was "Making no compromise with the public taste." Imagine what it felt like the first time somebody opened up "The Waste Land" and saw that it came with footnotes. Amateur hour was over.

But we don't live in the Modernists' world anymore. We have different problems. We've had plenty of bad news of our own. Some of which has to do with the book business itself—sales of adult trade books declined 2.3% last year, compared with 2007. Should we still be writing difficult novels? Isn't it time we made our peace with plot?

After all, the discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience. The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le's "The Boat," one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn't include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the "Twilight" series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You'll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they're lazy and can't hack it in the big leagues. But that's not the case. They need something they're not getting elsewhere. Let's be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because "The Hunger Games" doesn't bore them.

All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in "Inherent Vice" he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

From a hieratic, hermetic art object the novel is blooming into something more casual and open: a literature of pleasure. The critics will have to catch up. This new breed of novel resists interpretation, but not the way the Modernists did. These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure. Difficult, in a word. This is different. It's a revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks.

ENRON -- on stage

EnronRoyal Court Theatre, 17th September-7th November, Tel: 020 7565 5000
Also on the theatre: Mary Fitzgerald’s web exclusive article on the Edinburgh festivals
This is turning out to be one of best years in London theatre for ages. Significant dramas about climate change, racism and political disaffection are hitting the stage with almost unseemly regularity. Suddenly, at a time of political anxiety and economic recession, the theatre has renewed its ancient function as a sounding board in society.
The most notable success of all is Enron, a thrilling new play about the collapse of America’s seventh largest corporation in 2001. Combining the talents of Britain’s hottest new stage director, Rupert Goold, with a long overdue return to large-scale epic adventures in the Jacobean and Brechtian styles, Enron proves that there’s no business like big business in show business.
“It’s an exciting time,” says the 38-year-old Goold, who runs Headlong, the touring outfit that developed Enron at the Chichester Festival Theatre (where it was seen in July and August) and the Royal Court in London (where it opens this September). “People want to see their lives coming back at them. We wanted to do something complex and contemporary, and also something of high theatrical voltage, to catch this current mood.” Twenty-eight-year-old playwright Lucy Prebble, whose father ran a multinational software company and whose siblings both work for big consultancy firms, first pitched Enron as a musical but, says Goold, “with all of her lyrics the show would have lasted for ever, so we never got the music written.”
As it is the show runs for almost three hours, but it passes in a whirl of acidly satirical scenes, imbued with the giddy physical excitement of the deals and bluffs. The traders sit at illuminated desks like regimented figures in a dance piece; the stage is hung with celestial neon-lit pipes; the banking Lehman Brothers are portrayed as a comic double act crammed into one large pinstriped suit; Arthur Andersen, the doomed accountancy firm, is a mute ventriloquist’s dummy. Later on, three blind mice stalk a stage populated by large-masked vultures.
This expressionist approach is totally different from the kind of puritan aesthetic that governs most political theatre. We have had countless courtroom dramas and “verbatim” plays at the Tricycle in Kilburn—on subjects as diverse as the Nuremberg rallies, the internment camp at Guantánamo Bay, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as elegant political diagnoses by our leading contemporary playwright, David Hare. But Enron does something else. It restores a sense of buzz and excitement to our theatre that goes beyond the confines of the subsidised arena where Hare’s plays are presented (admittedly to an engaged and appreciative audience). A leading British banker, now retired, who saw the play in Chichester, told me that Enron was absolutely accurate in terms of the crazy energy and tunnel vision people had at that time.
More importantly, he said, while our own British banking institutions used to be able to stand back and look at things dispassionately, even morally, they have been increasingly moving to the American model so horrifically presented in Enron. And what Enron does is personalise the tragedy of capitalism in the character of Jeffrey Skilling, formerly the chief executive of Enron—and now serving a long prison sentence. The ruthless Skilling, played by Samuel West as a geek with personality problems who transforms himself into a sharp-suited untouchable, is a genuine tragic anti-hero: a Macbeth of market manipulation in criminal la-la-land as he brings California to its knees with power cuts in order to sell on electricity at massively inflated prices.
This kind of character creation, a modern Shakespearean monster, is rare in the theatre these days. But, significantly, it’s the second such this year: already at the Royal Court we’ve seen Mark Rylance play a Falstaffian naysayer and drug-pusher in Jez Butterworth’s Wiltshire pastoral, Jerusalem, in which the rural alternative life of myths and legends fights back against creeping urbanisation. Like Enron, it’s a play for today with knobs on.
Both these new plays take British drama out of the fringe closet and into the mainstream. Goold, who has no particular axe to grind about anything—except making his work both as popular and radical as he possibly can—was worried for a time that Skilling might run away from him and become a right-wing monster. Surely, I put it to him, that would not have mattered much: there’s not a lot to like about any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, is there? “Ah yes, but you see you have to love them a little, even if you don’t like them,” he replies, “and I didn’t want Skilling to become someone you couldn’t love just a bit.”
It’s likely that a more straightforward sense of outrage will inform David Hare’s new play at the National Theatre, The Power of Yes, in September. Here, according to the subtitle, “a dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis.” To this end, Hare has talked to bankers and traders, as well as victims and politicians. Goold has talked to no one very much—Lucy Prebble did all the research—but he does have a younger brother in the money business. As he explains, “My brother Toby was a banker with Citigroup until he was fired at Christmas and was unemployed for three or four months. Now he and his team have found new positions with Bank of New York Mellon in their London offices. But I’m more interested, really, in unleashing the theatre-ness of this subject, and I wanted to make sure that it was going to be understood by a non-specialist audience.”
Enron’s collapse has already been the subject of a documentary film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), based on the bestselling book by two Fortune magazine reporters, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. But Prebble and Gould go beyond mere documentation, not only in the figure of Skilling, but also in the secondary theatrical monsters of the cigar-chomping, golf-loving Enron owner Ken Lay (Tim Pigott-Smith), who died of a heart attack while awaiting sentence; and the chief financial officer Andy Fastow (Tom Goodman-Hill), the amoral, satanic accomplice who led Skilling to the mountaintop and showed him the promised land.
Goold’s recent productions include a brilliant revival of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart, set in a white-tiled kitchen where blood gushes out of the taps and victims are dispatched in a clanking metal lift; and an acclaimed re-imagining of Pirandello’s 1921 landmark tragedy of illusion and reality, Six Characters in Search of an Author. This dynamic compression of plays ancient and modern into their metaphorical elements is a process characteristic of his work for some years now. In 2002, he staged Milton’s Paradise Lost—the greatest English theatrical poem outside of Shakespeare—at the Northampton Theatre Royal. In 2006, he and his constant dramaturge Ben Power put on a rewriting of Marlowe’s Faustus, completely modernising the setting into an art gallery where the exhibits were the work of the Chapman Brothers. There’s no shyness about blazing away at the big subjects in Goold’s work, and he has a sort of genius at making unruly, difficult projects appeal to a mainstream ticket-buying audience: he’s an intellectual showman.
The commitment of Goold’s Headlong to the Enron project also echoes Caryl Churchill’s 1987 play Serious Money: an exciting theatrical response to the “big bang” financial reforms of the 1980s that is in many ways Enron’s model. Complete with songs by Ian Dury, Serious Money anatomised in good old leftie fashion the Tory years of concupiscence and pillage among the corporate raiders. Churchill prefaced her play with a reference to Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers: or The Stockjobbers (1693), thus making a link with the Restoration comedies that followed the Jacobean model. In the Shadwell extract, there was a premonitory flash of a nation on the rampage for shares in public enterprises and the leisure markets—not hotels and fashion, but performing monkeys and rope acts.
In Serious Money, every single character is marked by greed and corruption, from the chairman of Albion Products to the Peruvian businesswoman who sheds her holdings in the mines when the price of copper plummets, abandoning the workforce to their fate. There’s an unexplained suicide and a landslide election victory for the Conservatives—“five more glorious years”—as the loadsamoney bandwagon rolls inexorably onwards. The context of Enron is obviously very different, and Prebble introduces not only news reporters and lawyers, but also victims at ground level and even Skilling’s little daughter, who releases a refrain of “Why?” into the ether that he is tortuously unable to deal with.
There’s a sense of apocalyptic finality and exhaustion about Enron, too. Churchill’s play operated in a mood of almost helpless but theatrically vibrant opposition. Enron, on the other hand, represents a majority feeling about what happened. “A lot of the play happens inside a bubble that burst,” says Goold, “but there are always more bubbles. Part of me is clear that it will happen again. Andy Fastow, somebody said to me the other day, will probably be out of prison in time to attend the first night at the Royal Court!”
The play is already being talked of in terms of awards, and producers in New York are going crazy to claim a piece of the action. “One great irony,” says Goold, “is that theatre producers in London to whom we showed the play early on said they simply couldn’t risk getting involved. The other great irony is that now we have a very successful play about hubris, a hit show born out of disaster, just like Mel Brooks with The Producers.”

Writing

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.
We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Civilisation

When we discuss it and think about civilisation though, we are more likely to talk of the lost ‘glories’ of Mayan civilisation or at best Ancient Greece and Rome (though not without making a sneering reference to their slave-based economies) than we are to call ourselves civilised. Or we discuss how climate change will destroy civilisation and we hear how maybe that would be a good thing since the world is apparently vastly overpopulated with a greedy and destructive humanity. We listen to Maurice Strong, first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), saying: ‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’

Why this low opinion of civilisation? It is partly because we operate with a very one-sided view of what it means to be civilised. We tend to see it only in terms of culture (and usually elite culture at that), the arts or personal behaviour, and we forget or dismiss the more practical side of it, the side that has to do with material as well as spiritual prosperity.

One of the strengths of the philosopher John Armstrong’s new book In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea is his identification of the importance of the material side to civilisation. Where the sheen has been taken off the idea of civilisation, it is precisely on the side to do with the material aspects of life. But what that leaves behind - the spiritual side - becomes equally tarnished if it is left to stand on its own; it becomes mind without body, quality without quantity. We must produce as well as consume to create meaning in our lives; if we do not, we become decadent.

For example, the crowning of the city of Liverpool as European City of Culture in 2008, almost as a reward for its economic devastation, and the current hopes placed by the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in Britain’s creative industries are contemporary examples of this decadent separation of the material from the spiritual and cultural.

But civilisation - Western civilisation in particular - has been under attack for well over a hundred years now, longer if we go back as far as the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. The post-Second World War Frankfurt School argued that civilisation has a tendency to self-destruction, that reason grows to take dominance not just over nature but over humanity itself, that reason led to fascism, and that in the end we can only take solace in art. Civilisation is dismissed by many as, at best, a relative good with all civilisations being equally worthy. Others have a particular problem with Western civilisation as nothing more than cultural imperialism. Perhaps most tellingly, the environmental critique argues that human civilisation is no longer sustainable and is nothing more than an act of barbarism against nature.

In this context it is refreshing to find someone who is prepared to stand in defence not only of civilisation, but also of material prosperity. The attempt to do so in these times is so difficult that Armstrong comes across in parts as almost otherworldly. It is so rare to read someone willing to use words like ‘wisdom’, ‘good taste’ and ‘refinement’ that one wonders if Armstrong has either missed the past 150 years or is hopelessly naive. Nonetheless, he makes a very useful stab at laying out what he thinks civilisation is and why it is so important for us.

Armstrong identifies four views of civilisation and examines them in turn: civilisation as belonging to a particular culture and society; as a certain degree of political and economic development, as material progress; as the art of refined and tasteful living; and as spiritual prosperity. The first of these is well known from Samuel P Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations: the idea that each civilisation provides those born into it with certain ways of being, laws and social norms: this is civilisation as Kultur. We know though that merely belonging to a civilisation is not enough to make one civilised in a strong sense. We recognise degrees of civilisation within a people as a whole. A civilisation, for example, which operates prisons for huge numbers of its people hardly fits our ideas of what civilisation really means. Belonging is not a sufficient condition of civilisation, although it is surely necessary.

Armstrong sees this as a problem of the separation of quantity (official civilisation and widespread social norms reach most of the people) and quality (the deeper attachments in a few to the best in all civilisations). The trick is how to bring quality, the best on offer, to the widest number of people. Armstrong follows Matthew Arnold in arguing: ‘The work of civilisation is to speak to the ordinary self of its longing to become the best version of itself.’ We must take the best of each civilisation to make ourselves better. This means giving people the freedom to develop love for ideas, objects and other people, not simply regulating them.

If we agree then that civilisation is not a relative cultural concept, but something common to us all, the best of humanity, then maybe it is to be located in material progress, as Adam Smith had it: in the division of labour, increasing efficiency and reducing costs that allow us to accumulate possessions, wealth and technological advances. Armstrong points out that the problem here, of course, is that we do have spiritual as well as material needs. We ‘are physical creatures with minds that aspire to abstract ideals: beauty, goodness and truth’.

We often hear worries that increasing material prosperity actually leads to a decline in spiritual prosperity - whether because of growing inequality and hence envy and violence, or through the struggle to keep up with the Joneses. In other words, material wealth leads to alienation. Being rich doesn’t make you happy, as we hear so often these days.

Civilisation, though, has to be a marriage of material prosperity and prosperity of the soul. For Armstrong, Goethe is a key exemplar of what he means. He traces in his earlier book, Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World, how Goethe rejected Romanticism, had little time for those who wanted to make reality out of their poetic dreams, but instead wanted to make reality poetic. He tried to live well in an imperfect world, to be human without God and without replacing him with Nature, to create ‘a marriage of depth and power - which is a good definition of civilisation’. He doesn’t want to ditch material prosperity, but, if you like, wants to bring good taste and enjoyment back to consumption. He wants to find a way in which we produce what we want to consume. That is, for the quality of demand to keep pace with the quantity of supply.

Why is it though that this gap between quantity and quality, between reality and our ideas, exists? As Armstrong puts it: ‘The core problem of Western civilisation is that material prosperity has increased rapidly while spiritual prosperity has not increased to the same extent.’ As individuals, we have our weaknesses, of course, and as a society we are not organised for the benefit of all. One of the reasons why we despair of civilisation is that we see so much barbarism on display and not so many examples of the sophisticated pursuit of pleasure, the art of living. If we simply accumulate more and more stuff - piling it up like some modern Midas - we hardly exhibit civilised behaviour. We are not bringing refinement and taste to our possessions.

What Armstrong is talking about here is the need to give meaning to the process of accumulation: a library of unread books bought only for show might count for him as meaningless accumulation. A library of well-used and well-loved books, though, is an example of how material things and possession can lead us on to higher things, can serve to ‘raise people from mass to elite culture’. Not by dismissing mass pleasures with contempt, but by recognising them as addressing the same concerns as elite culture, but in a less developed and insightful way.

Elite culture does not mean the snobbery, airs and graces of the rich and powerful. The famous art historian Kenneth Clark tried to ‘define civilisation in terms of creative power and the enlargement of human faculties’, not in terms of ‘leisure and superfluity’. Civilisation is essentially a public, open and democratic concept. In terms of architecture it is the portico, the colonnade, the loggia and not the castle, palace or stately home. It is the Parthenon not the Tower of London, St Mark’s Square not the gardens of Versailles. It is more about letting someone out from a side street into busy traffic than it is about owning a Gainsborough.

Decadence, on the other hand, is consumption without creativity or production and leads to fatalism and defeatism, ultimately to a loss of meaning in our lives and in society. When we fund our consumption on tick, on mortgage equity, we accumulate without purpose and lose sight of the what for.

Armstrong ends with a definition: ‘Civilisation occurs when a high degree of material prosperity and a high degree of spiritual prosperity come together and mutually enhance each other.’ We consume in a refined way and that same refinement encourages production. While the definition may be good, albeit dualistic, and his unwillingness to jettison material prosperity laudable and brave, he sees our current problem as being the ‘greater strength of the pursuit of material prosperity, which has attained a degree of magnitude that outruns the spiritual resources of our time’. He aims for ‘the development of spiritual prosperity in such a way that it can hold its own against the material drive’. We live in a global economy but we are not happy.

Here Armstrong runs the risk of becoming truly naive or sounding like a self-improvement manual. He suggests that we find ways of making doing good profitable. That doesn’t mean that he thinks making profits is morally good. Instead he wants us to be paid for being noble and intelligent. Nice, but no cigar. Business is not about teaching people their real needs and then delivering them: its about making profits by whatever means necessary. And it is not about to get into bed with the humanities to refine our tastes.

Where Armstrong goes wrong is in terms of a massive underestimation or simple failure to recognise the degree to which the pursuit of material prosperity is now seen as morally bad. We have no shortage of voices telling us to look to our spiritual wellbeing: to be happy because we are poor. We have next to no one pointing out that - certainly in the developed countries - we have not been producing enough for a long time now, have not been moving humanity forward fast enough in a material sense and it is because of that reason more than anything else that the spiritual side has fallen behind. It has been 40 years since we put a man on the moon; Concorde, the nearest thing we had to fast international travel, is grounded. We have lost faith in our ability to produce and are forced to choose between barbarism (accumulation to no end) or decadence (consumption without production).

Only one alternative at the moment moves us beyond this stark choice, but would destroy civilisation: the green argument that we must both produce and consume less in the interests of nature and the planet. This is to render us meaningless. If we produce and consume the minimum for survival then existence becomes worthless. If we get over civilisation, we become natural beings only and not natural human beings. In an age of austerity we must make the argument for both quantity and quality. We must demand more growth and production, not blindly, as ends in themselves, but in the context of asking ourselves: what kind of world do we want to create for ourselves and what kind of lives do we want to lead?

Clark saw civilisation as the history of ‘life-giving ideas’. For example, that means asking why the Renaissance is important to us more than it means knowing a lot about the history of the Quattrocento. This creation of meaning is what allows civilisation to renew itself. It means understanding, for example, that ‘nature is violent and brutal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But New York, after all, was made by men’. And so we can ask why and what next for the great idea of civilisation.

Angus Kennedy is a member of the organising committee of the Battle of Ideas festival.

Bags

Look, can I be totally honest? I know, I know, it’s not usually my style, but today I’m going to be honest and what I want to honestly say is this: I may be a little in love with Anya Hindmarch, the handbag designer and creator of that ‘I am not a plastic bag’ canvas shopping bag. Now, am I as surprised by this turn of events as anyone? Christ, yes. I am not even into handbags and, as a rule, am wholly scornful of the women who are. Some days, sneering at women who are into handbags is actually all I do. (And it’s more tiring than you might think. I’m exhausted by the evening.) But I just don’t get those who are obsessed with ‘designer’ bags, spend fortunes on them, and even go on waiting-lists for the ‘must-have’ bag of the season. Must have or what? Your legs will fall off. A handbag can never be as must-have as a hip joint, surely? So I did not expect to fall in love with Anya Hindmarch, nor did I expect to actually buy one of her bags, but here’s a thing: I did both.
I’d like to say I don’t know what came over me, but I think I do. I met Anya, I had lunch with Anya, I walked with Anya to her Sloane Street store and because I was with her, and she’s lovely, and so gracious, I just wasn’t as petrified as I would have been otherwise — smart shops usually scare the living daylights out of me. I keep fearing someone from security will tap me on the shoulder and ask: ‘Madam, are you lost? Were you looking for Poundland?’ But without that terror — ‘Out the way, out the way, coming through with Anya Hindmarch...’ — I could see that a wonderful handbag might be a fine thing. And her handbags are wonderful: all buttery, baby-soft leathers and glass-like patents but, never having looked close-up before, it’s the craftsmanship and attention to the teeniest detail that gets me: the mini-leather tassels attached to the zip-pulls, the dinky internal clip for your key; the beautiful linings; the delicious smell of real leather which, perhaps not astonishingly, smells quite different to the smell of faux leather from a market stall. I feel the first stirrings of desire. I try on every bag in the shop, more or less, and then think: ‘Goddamn it, I am going to have one of these bags.’ I chose the ‘Chantry’, a patent tote in the most astonishing Yves Klein blue, reduced in the sale from £345 to £170, although when I take it to the till Anya tries to give it to me as a gift. Naturally, I protest. ‘Anya’, I say, ‘if I’d known I wasn’t paying, I’d have picked a much more expensive one. Give me one of those £1,000 bespoke Ebury’s, and be quick about it!’
But I do insist on paying and I do love the bag even though I’m ruined and know I’ll never be able to go to Poundland again. Even if they opened a more upmarket sister chain, Twopoundland, I probably won’t be able to go to that either. It’s like always going to Rhyl for your holidays and then one year going to the Maldives. How can you ever go back to Rhyl? But enough of all that. Let’s move on. After all, I’ve got a new bag to go and stroke, so it’s not like I’ve got all day.
OK, I first meet Anya at Il Vaporetto, a Venetian restaurant in Belgravia where she has the chopped steak and I have the salmon fishcake — very ladies-who-lunch. Il Vaporetto is her local. ‘I live just two streets away,’ she says. ‘and I do love local. You can bump into people.’ She lives with her husband, James Seymour, a director of her company, and their five children. He was a widower with three children when she first met him, they had two more, and the kids now range in age from 20 down to six. We grumble pleasantly about being mothers.
‘My 20-year-old is home from university and he’ll say: “What’s for supper?” Probably a completely reasonable request, but he is 20,’ she says. I say I will cook, but I’m a resentful cook. Sometimes I can shred a lettuce just by looking at it. She says she now doesn’t cook at all. ‘The thing about cooking,’ she says, ‘is that I can’t multitask in that way. It’s all got to be ready at the same time. I can’t drive and talk either. When I first met the three kids I remember making supper for them. I thought, “I can do this”, and I made such a disgusting meal — the pasta stuck to the side of the pan — and they said sorry, it’s inedible. I can’t even do pasta.’ Come on, anyone can do pasta. A monkey with its head on back to front could probably do pasta. But if your husband was ‘really, really good at cooking’, as James is, wouldn’t you leave it all to him? I know I would. Anya, I salute you.
Anyway, she is 41 and extremely pretty with blonde hair and blue eyes and is wearing, today, a Marni dress teamed with wedged sandals. She can’t do high heels, she says, or lipstick. Me neither, I say. We agree it’s a wonder we even remember to put clothes on the bits in between. She is carrying one of her own clutch bags, while I have brought a Fendi beaded bag borrowed from a friend because I did not want to bring shame on the house of The Spectator by bringing one of my Poundland jobs or one of those rejected bags from four seasons ago, as always available from TK Maxx. I am still wholly scornful at this point, am still struggling to comprehend, so decide to put it to Anya straight: Anya, I ask, what is it about women and handbags? Please, please, please enlighten me but don’t make me beg, as that would be embarrassing.
She says she thinks it’s because a bag can have a tremendously transfor-mative effect. She remembers being given a Gucci bag by her mother when she was 16 and ‘it made me feel incredibly grown up and sophisticated. Even when I was wearing slobby clothes, it made me feel grown up and sophisticated.’
I can sort of see that, I say, but I’m not sure I totally buy it. How about the Louis Vuitton bag, the ones covered in the L and V initials? If you have a real one you look like a dumb fashion victim with too much money, and if you have a fake one you look like a dumb fashion victim who also happens to be a poor chav. It’s a lose-lose situation, as far as I can see. You look dumb either way. She says: ‘It’s just not your tribe, is it? And it’s not my tribe. The thing about that product, which is brilliant, is that as well as being tribal and mood-altering it’s also a way of showing your state of wealth.’ Like a Rolex? ‘It’s saying “Look at me, look what I’ve got.”’ She does not think her bags are like that. She knows that this season’s ‘it’ bag is generally next season’s ‘isn’t’, but hers, she hopes, are long-term investments; hers are heirlooms, to be handed down from mother to daughter and so on through the generations. So what, I ask, about Posh reportedly spending £1.5 million on all those Hermès Birkin bags? ‘That,’ says Anya crossly, ‘is really, really silly.’
Still, many bags are, at least initially, celebrity-driven purchases and Anya certainly has her celebrity fans. Madonna carries her bags, as do Scarlett Johansson and Angelina Jolie, but when it comes to the most exciting person to ever own one? ‘Well,’ she says, ‘the Queen has one, which is rather nice, and Margaret Thatcher has one.’ She gave Lady Thatcher a bag — ‘a navy one’ — as a gift when invited to meet her. And what was she like? ‘She was still incredibly sharp, with these steely eyes, and she can still cut right through the nonsense, but you also got this sense of a lonely figure, sitting alone in her drawing room for most of the time. She’s this astonishing combination of strength and fragility.’
She is a fan of Thatcher, having started her business during the early Thatcher years. ‘I remember everyone feeling down and then Maggie got in and it all changed. Shopping centres were being built, and along came a new generation of entrepreneurs like David Ross and Sophie Mirman.’ She has business in the blood, was born in and brought up in Danbury, Essex, with a businessman father who was in plastics — ‘I think he invented the plastic flower pot’ — and who now sits on her board. Crikey, I say, he must have loved the whole ‘I am not a plastic bag’ shtick. She says, smilingly: ‘Yes, we did have quite a few debates about that.’ She then says she is not against plastic bags. ‘They’re actually a brilliant invention. They’re light, they’re strong, they’re cheap, but just don’t waste them. It’s the waste. When you throw something away there is no “away”. It’s going into landfill.’ The £5, limited-edition tote, produced in 2007 in collaboration with the social change movement We Are What We Do, caused near-riots when it first went on sale, so I guess It Did What It Should. But near-riots?
‘We kind of piggy-backed the formula I hate,’ she says, ‘which is the “it” bag phenomenon.’ Make it hard to get? ‘Yes. It was about scarcity, and the right people wearing it, plus getting a designer bag for £5, which is quite potent.’ And if you hadn’t made it a limited edition, if they had been freely available, no one would have wanted one? ‘Exactly.’ It is spectacularly manipulative marketing but goddamn it, she did make not using a plastic bag fashionable, which has to be good. And it did a lot better than my own invention, the ‘I am not a canvas bag’ plastic bag, which wasn’t intended as a limited edition but became so once my marker pen had run out. Still didn’t shift very many, though.
Her business began when she was 18, during what was meant to be a gap year in Italy, but turned into something else when she noted an over-the-shoulder drawstring duffel bag all the cool Italian girls were wearing. ‘I took the bag home and showed my friends and family and they all loved it.’ Eventually, she sold 500 through an offer in Harpers & Queen, and made £7,000, ‘so it was “sod university”.’ And then, I ask, you started designing your own bags? ‘Yes,’ she says. But how did you know you could do it? She says she didn’t. ‘But I didn’t know I couldn’t do it either.’
She now has 51 stores globally and, in a peculiar kind of way, is enjoying the recession. ‘It gets the adrenalin going,’ she says. ‘London had a paralysis moment in November/December where I had people in my office asking if we should take our money out of the banks, and I remember thinking: “Christ, if everyone does that, it’s the end.” But now London is completely buzzing, and our sales are up on last year. It’s inflated by the exchange rate so the other Europeans, the Americans, and the Japanese have all benefited. Also, people who have mortgages are sitting pretty right now and paying very little, so there is also all that going on.’
After lunch, it’s off to her Sloane Street store where she takes my virginity, bag-wise. How was it for me? Lovely. Anya is kind, warm, gentle and didn’t laugh at me once. She also tries to give me the wallet that matches the bag. ‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ I say, before quickly snaffling it up. One can’t have integrity all the time. It can be almost as tiring as sneering.