My Best Books

In the second of our audio slideshow series on children’s illustrators, Raymond Briggs talks about his accidental career in children’s fiction, the joys of illustrating nursery rhymes and why Ethel and Ernest remains his favourite book

This annual celebration of the freedom to read draws attention to the dangers of censorship by highlighting actual or attempted book bans across the US. Take a look at the latest list of the top 10 books most frequently ‘challenged’

For years, he sat in this bare office, blocking out the world with earplugs – and nothing came. So how did Jonathan Franzen end up writing the Great American Novel, on the cover of Time magazine and read by Barack Obama on holiday? Ed Pilkington asks him

Last month, Jonathan Franzen became the first author in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Over a shot of him looking characteristically serious appeared the words “Great American Novelist”.

In his famous Harper’s essay of 1996, Franzen had bemoaned the magazine’s lack of literary pin-ups as evidence of the declining importance of serious fiction, so you might think he’d be in celebratory mood. Being Franzen, he isn’t comfortable with the label. “It paints a big bullseye on the back of my head,” he says. “I always hated the expression anyway, mostly because I encountered it in stupid or sneering contexts.”

He switches to a high-pitched mocking tone: “Still working on the Great American Novel?” Then adopts the barrel voice of a dunce: “I’m thinking of taking a year off to go to France and write a Great American Novel.”

The sneering began after Franzen expressed misgivings over the selection of his last novel, The Corrections, for the Oprah Winfrey book club, in 2001. It sold nearly 3m copies and established Franzen as one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but, thanks to his perceived snub to Winfrey, it also established his reputation as, variously, an “ego-blinded snob” (Boston Globe), a “pompous prick” (Newsweek) and a “spoiled, whiny little brat” (Chicago Tribune).

The fallout set back his writing by more than a year. This time, Franzen has toughened up. “Whatever happens,” he says, of his new novel Freedom, “it’s not going to get to me. It’s just not.”

In fact, the novel, which took nine years to write, has had an ecstatic reception by anyone’s standards. The Economist likened the book to Paradise Lost, while Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times said it was a masterpiece of American fiction. Barack Obama even read an early copy on his holiday in Martha’s Vineyard. “It must be getting past 50,” Franzen says. “I must be nearing the end of my productive career. People are starting to approve.”

We meet in Franzen’s spartan writing studio in New York’s Upper East Side. The tiny room, furnished with a battered old desk and greasy-looking mattress, resembles a monastic cell. The walls are bare except for a single decorative plate. There is a tiny kitchen with one small saucepan.

There is nothing rock’n'roll about Franzen, none of the champagne book launches or late-night escapades that mark the careers of, say, Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis. Compared with them, Franzen comes across as serious, professorial. When I bring up the recent “Franzenfreude” debate, a term coined by author Jennifer Weiner to describe “taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen”, he agrees with Weiner and author Jodi Picoult about the favouritism shown towards “white male literary darlings”.

“The categories by which we value fiction are skewed male, and this creates a very destructive disconnect between the critical establishment and the predominantly female readership of novels,” he says. “That’s inarguable.”

When talking, Franzen pauses to compose his sentences, sighing deeply. He rolls up his sleeves, scratches his arm, takes off his glasses and studies them, then looks into the middle distance. In his thoughtful demeanour seems to be an implicit criticism of the vapidity of today’s world. The challenge to seriousness posed by technology, for example, has long been a bugbear, and is voiced by one of Freedom’s central characters: “‘This was what was keeping me awake at night,’ Walter said. ‘This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV – there’s never any centre, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion bits of distracting noise… All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things, are dying off.’”

On Franzen’s desk sit a pair of earplugs that he wears when he writes, over which he places noise-cancelling headphones that pipe “pink noise” – white noise at lower frequency. His computer has had its card removed, so he cannot be tempted by computer games. The ethernet port has been physically sealed, so he can’t connect to the internet. While writing The Corrections, he even wore a blindfold as he touch-typed.

Franzen has written four novels, and each involved an epic struggle. The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) took him six years to write, Strong Motion (1992) five, The Corrections (2001) seven and Freedom almost a decade. Compared with the late John Updike or Philip Roth, who wrote books with conveyor-belt regularity, Franzen seems agonisingly blocked. What’s his problem?

Franzen pauses and lets out a sigh. “Every time I start a novel, I feel I’ve never written one before,” he says. “That was true the first time, and it’s felt true every time since.”

Pause, sigh. “I take a certain amount of pride in not being a professional novelist, in apparently being a lifelong amateur. I don’t want to be slick.”

It isn’t just that the latest novel took nine years to finish. It is also that, within that period, only a little over a year was spent actually writing it. He looks back on that year with something approaching joy. “Most of those months were heaven. I was miserable much of the time, but miserable in the happiest way.”

If being miserable in a happy way is his idea of heaven, imagine what the first wordless eight years were like. “I was drained by the time I’d done The Corrections. The tank was empty. In 2002, when I tried to get going on a new novel, just meagre little shreds would come out that mostly reminded me of bad Franzen.”

The Oprah furore that hit soon after has finally, nine years later, had its resolution. Last week Oprah had the grace to adopt Freedom as one of her book club titles, calling it “a masterpiece”. For his part, Franzen has had the sense to keep quiet about it. The whipping he received over The Corrections was his first experience of being publicly reviled, and he blames it on the prevailing mood of philistinism. “A mild problem between me and Oprah was seized upon by a culture that Republicans had whipped into a frenzy on the subject of elitism versus populism. It’s very hard to find a self-declared elitist; I certainly wasn’t one. But I looked more like one than anyone who was handy at the time.”

More than a year later, when he finally felt ready to try his hand at fiction again, he began an agonising trawl for new material. He leaps up from his chair and opens the desk drawer to reveal a pile of what must be at least 1,000 pages of typed manuscript. “All false starts,” he says with a strained smile. “It was so pathetic. Notes going round and round in circles. Days spent asking questions about certain characters in certain situations, trying to work out chronologies, logic trees burnishing off into infinity. Horrible, unreadable, intensely boring stuff.”

In 2007, he sold a proposal for a short comic novel that would be written in the first person. He signed up to an optimistic delivery date of 10 months and, because his writing cell wasn’t quite ascetic enough, decamped to Berlin to write in complete isolation. “I was hellbent on hammering out that book in eight months. Three months later I decided to set aside all fiction writing for a year.”

Did he ever think, during those eight years, that his fourth novel might never happen? “Oh sure. Weekly, if not daily. ‘I’m washed up as a writer,’ that sort of thing.”

There was no eureka moment, no point at which the story of the Berglund family suddenly presented itself to him. The character of Patty came fairly early on, from a fragment of a suburban woman’s autobiography that hadn’t made it into The Corrections, and from there the book began to take shape.

Freedom tells the story of Patty, her environmentalist husband Walter, and their children Jessica and Joey, an ostensibly happy American family who begin to fall apart. Patty is unsatisfied with the devoted Walter and lusts after his best friend, a hyper-sexed rocker called Richard, while smothering Joey with so much love her son feels obliged to rebel. Franzen tried setting it in New York, then Washington, but eventually reverted once more to his own home soil, the midwest. Patty makes a similar journey to Franzen’s own – from Chicago, where he was born, and St Louis, where he grew up, to New York – but in reverse.

“I’ve written four novels about midwestern families,” Franzen says. “That’s all I’ve written. Maybe I’m doomed as a novelist never to do anything but stories of midwestern families.”

Despite this recurring theme, and though he has been in two long-term relationships – both with fellow writers, first with Valerie Cornell to whom he was married for 14 years, and now with Kathryn Chetkovich – Franzen does not have children himself. In Freedom, Walter embarks on a mission to persuade young Americans to have fewer children. On the subject of his own childlessness, Franzen will say only that overpopulation is a problem he is “not unaware of”; though when commenting on others’ reactions to it, he points out that, “given a world of rather strikingly finite resources and a rather inflated and already unsustainable population, it’s an interesting thing to call a childless person selfish”.

As the novel developed, he says, he realised what he really wanted to write about were the no-go areas of his life; issues he had been avoiding for the past 25 years.

Like what?

“I don’t really like to talk about it, but the mother and son stuff in Freedom, and the dynamics of the long marriage, and the shame and guilt associated with those very primary experiences. I got married when I had just turned 23. Both shame and guilt on my own behalf, and a deep wish to protect private third parties, made that really unwritable stuff. Much of the unseen work in the book was overcoming resistance to writing about unwritable material.”

That sounds like therapy.

“I didn’t mean it as a therapy. But to say that you have been changed by the work on a book – by the process of getting the book to be writable – is not bad. In fact, if a writer can’t say that, I have a suspicion it’s not a book I want to read.”

He makes me underline that comment. “I feel I really said something I meant when I said that.”

In that case, how did Freedom change him?

His expression darkens. Another long pause.

“I can’t, I won’t answer most of that question, because some of the things are so personal. To take a very mild example, one of my projects with the book was to try and imagine what my parents’ life would have been like if they had been my age. That may be a natural process that has nothing to do with writing, but I have lost not only the last traces of anger at my mother, but also the capacity to remember why I was so angry.”

It took an unexpected tragedy to get Franzen finally writing again: in September 2008, David Foster Wallace killed himself. To say the two writers had been close would be to underplay the importance of their friendship. Franzen says there were aspects of the novelist’s life – the interplay of ambition and self-consciousness – that he would discuss with nobody else. When Foster Wallace died, Franzen was overcome not by sadness but by fury. “I was mad. I was mad. I got motivated by anger at him. ‘Well, goddamn it, Dave! I’ve got one advantage over you, and that’s that I’m still alive, and I’m going to show what I can do.’ “

He plunged himself into what he calls the “forgetfulness of writing”. “I was finally flying through the chapters. I would come home at two o’clock in the afternoon after five or six hours of solid concentration, and would just sit in a chair for half an hour and feel, ‘I don’t owe anybody anything and I don’t have to feel bad today because I just wrote 1,200 words.’ And that’s a great feeling.”

This time, he says, “I was very conscious of being done with satire, of no longer having an interest in wowing the reader with every sentence. I was trying to forget for a while – forget glittery, bejewelled writing, forget modernism, forget postmodernism – let’s just be with these four people.”

The novel may have been hailed a masterpiece, but Franzen’s ambition, he says, was simply to create characters that would engage the reader’s sympathy; all the language had to be was “adequate” to that task. “I can’t stress enough how that word was the rallying cry. Make it adequate! I didn’t want to bore the reader, but all it had to be was OK. It didn’t have to be great.”

Franzen has now embarked on a seven-week book tour, so it will be a while before he settles down to another bout of writing. This time, we may not have to wait another nine years. His fantasy for novel five, he says, is the Stendhal method of book-writing. The great French novelist spent years adventuring around the world, before returning and, in just 53 days, dictating The Charterhouse Of Parma.

In the meantime, he is promoting his latest book, whose title, Freedom – a word with an almost biblical place in the American vocabulary – is the one subject Franzen refuses to discuss. “The significance of the word in the book? Not going to touch it. I made a vow not to talk about it. I feel like, ‘There it is, reader, you think about it!’ “

All he will say is that the title shouldn’t be taken literally. “Unless you hear it ironically, it’s a tremendously pompous title,” he says. Then again, with almost violent emphasis, “You must hear it ironically.”

• Jonathan Franzen will be in conversation with John Mullan at Kings Place, London N1, on 5 October; go to Guardian Book Club for details.

The anxiety and drabness of the country during Heath’s reign is laid bare in this vivid book

“All that is solid melts into air.” Karl Marx’s description of the whirling dislocation and alienation induced by the first industrial revolution also seems a pretty fair summary of what many Britons felt in the early 1970s. Their old country suddenly had a new decimal currency, new postcodes, new telephone numbers, new county names – Salop, for crying out loud – and even a new prayer book. In Peter Nichols’s TV play Hearts and Flowers (1970), an old man at a funeral service stands to recite Psalm 23, only to find it unrecognisable. “These aren’t the proper words!” he whispers in horror.

There were few abiding certainties to which one could cling in an era of rampant inflation and mass unemployment, IRA bombs and football hooligans, petrol shortages and power cuts. Teddy Goldsmith, who founded the Ecologist in 1970, published the bestselling A Blueprint for Survival two years later, prophesying that food and essential minerals would run out within a few decades and “the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet” would occur “within the lifetimes of our children”. The Guardian likened the impact of the Blueprint to that of The Communist Manifesto. In March 1974, a young man placed a personal ad in the Ecologist for a girlfriend to “share the remaining years of industrial civilisation” and experience the “end catastrophe”. (As Dominic Sandbrook comments, in a typically wry aside, “it is hard to believe that he was a very jaunty date”.)

In the BBC’s apocalyptic drama Survivors, a pandemic wiped out most of the world’s population; those who escaped had to learn to live in a world without electricity, transport or running water. It didn’t seem all that different from the Britain of the time, in which strikes and stoppages regularly brought the country to a standstill. Tom and Barbara in The Good Life were already prepared, with their vegetable patch and chickens and pea-pod burgundy; Richard Mabey’s Food for Free and John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency offered guidance for those who wished to follow their example.

Subtitled The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-74, Sandbrook’s latest volume in his thrillingly panoramic history of the day before yesterday covers the period of Edward Heath’s premiership. Does it merit 700 pages? You bet. Heath was prime minister for three years and 259 days but it felt like a decade at least, packed with one crisis after another. The book’s main title is well chosen: between 1950 and 1970 a state of emergency had been declared just twice; in Heath’s three and a bit years, he declared no fewer than five.

He was an instinctive conciliator, at least in politics, even if in personal relations he was grumpy, insensitive and often astoundingly rude. It was his misfortune to preside at a time when the postwar settlement had reached the end of its natural life and confrontation was inevitable. The optimism of the 60s had dissolved: there was no more talk of a classless society or a Britain forged in the white heat of a technological revolution. A line from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks could serve as the epitaph for the Heath era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”

Heath lacked the bedside manner to allay public anxieties about these symptoms: strikes, street violence, terrorism, permissiveness and the calamitous effect of inflation on fixed incomes and pensions. Even the failure of England to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, eight years after winning the trophy, seemed to signify a more general malaise. “As is so often the case,” wrote the Daily Mirror’s sports pundit Peter Wilson, “we have been content to dwell in the past and rest complacently on past triumphs until events – and other nations – overtake and surpass us.”

Ted Heath yearned for business as usual, but these were not usual times. In late 1973, he reacted to the miners’ work-to-rule by declaring his fifth and final state of emergency, imposing a three-day week from 1 January. Noddy Holder and Slade tried to keep spirits up with their chart-topping chorus – “Here it is, merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun!” – but did anyone believe them? The Spectator predicted a military coup on the Chilean model. A city friend of the art critic Sacheverell Sitwell advised him to hoard his shotgun cartridges, “for there will be shooting”. Peter Hall, director of the National theatre, wrote in his diary that “out of the chaos we are going into, some simple and extremist group of the far right or the far left may very well break up our society and take over”.

Unable to bear the strain, Heath sub-contracted the running of the country to the head of the civil service, Sir William Armstrong, who promptly went off his rocker, babbling about the Red Army and imminent Armageddon. On learning that his chief civil servant had been taken to a mental hospital, the prime minister expressed no surprise. “I thought William was acting oddly the last time I saw him,” he said.

Looking on the bright side, uncharacteristically, the Daily Mail celebrated the three-day week as a chance for husbands and wives “to experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school”. In a delicious footnote, Sandbrook adds that it evidently worked for some couples: “I was born almost exactly nine months after the three-day week.” The fact that he scarcely remembers the 70s makes his achievement here all the more remarkable: he vividly re-creates the texture of everyday life in a thousand telling details.

Sandbrook notes that the 70s in Britain have become “synonymous with the colour brown”, which is certainly how I recall them: Vesta instant curries, Watneys Red Barrel, faux-velvet wallpaper, fawn-coloured nylon sheets. Yet this was offset by a gaudy display of flashiness and spivvery: Jason King’s moustache, Roger Moore’s lapels, Noddy Holder’s trousers, Slater Walker’s gleeful asset-strippers. (Even grim-faced Ulster diehards entered into the spirit. “Unusually for a paramilitary,” Sandbrook writes of the UDA’s Sean Duddy, “he maintained a double life as a drag artist named Samantha, performing in loyalist clubs in fishnet tights, a black wig, heavy mascara and scarlet lipstick. In his heyday, he was known as ‘the Dolly Parton of Belfast’.”)

The outrageously piratical style of Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho corporation prompted Heath to denounce “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism”. Anyone who thinks the “greed is good” culture started in the 1980s should look up David Edgar’s play Destiny (1976), in which an ex-serviceman is appalled when developers tear down his beloved antique shop. “You bastard!” he tells Monty, the denim-jacketed incarnation of the ruthless new capitalism. “No, not bastard,” Monty corrects him. “Selsdon Man… We make money out of money. We covet on a global scale. We got cupidity beyond your wildest dreams of avarice.” It might have been Tiny Rowland speaking, or Jim Slater, or, indeed, Teddy Goldsmith’s brother, Jimmy.

Selsdon Man was the mocking nickname applied to Heath in the 1970 election, portraying him as a Thatcherite avant la lettre. He was nothing of the kind. Nor, come to that, was Margaret Thatcher. As Sandbrook points out, she and Keith Joseph spent the early 1970s in Heath’s cabinet, nodding and smiling at his U-turns, “enthusiastically throwing around enormous sums of money”. Thatcherism, like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, was a story for which the world was not yet ready. Labour’s return to office in 1974 postponed the day of reckoning for another five years, until the election after the winter of discontent. Those final death agonies of the postwar consensus will be the subject of Sandbrook’s next volume, due next year. I can’t wait.

Francis Wheen’s book about paranoia in the 1970s, Strange Days Indeed, is published by Fourth Estate.

Britain today is more polarised than 10 years ago: the economic bubble has created both a new super-rich and a disenfranchised underclass. We need to return to our core moral values and find a new way of making a living, argues Will Hutton in this extract from his new book. Let’s start, he says, with fairness…

The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society. Yet while the country is now exhorted to tighten its belt and pay off its debts, those who created the crisis — the country’s CEOs and bankers, still living on Planet Extravagance, not to mention mainstream politicians — all want to get back to “business as usual”: the world of 1997 to 2007.

This is an affront to Britain’s deep sense of fairness – a belief that one should receive one’s due deserts in proportion to whatever good or bad one has contributed. This country waits in orderly queues, tries to abide by the rules and profoundly believes in fair play and the rule of law. Yet what is happening at the moment offends every canon of fairness. Most of the working population do not deserve the degree of austerity and lost opportunity that lies ahead of them. It was not their behaviour that created the biggest peacetime public deficit in history, the credit crunch and the business models built on the fiction that it could all continue for ever. Yet while they suffer, those who did cause the crisis have got away largely scot-free. They have exploited their luck and avoided any significant contribution to repairing the calamity they have wrought. No substantive reform has ever been suggested. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has suggested that an essential precondition for social closure is that politicians and bankers acknowledge and apologise for the mistakes they made. So far, any apologies and acknowledgements have been mealy-mouthed or half-hearted. There has been nothing to match the scale of the disaster.

Even if such repentance were forthcoming, the mistakes of the recent past, and the disfiguring unfairness that has so surrounded both the recession and the recovery, cannot be quickly forgotten. If the lessons are not learned, they will surely be repeated. The next financial crisis will be even larger, it might even overwhelm the state, and the public anger will be rightly awesome. Nor can any healthy economy and society in future be constructed on provenly rotten foundations. There must be change. It has fallen to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in coalition to attempt some, if not all, of the necessary initiatives that might change British capitalism – notably banking and political reform – but it is an open question how determined it will be before well-organised defence of entrenched and privileged positions by the financial, media and bureaucratic elites. Worse, its repudiation of Keynesian economic policies in circumstances that demand more Keynesianism than at any time since the 1930s threatens to overwhelm its best intentions. The consequences are a potential national calamity.

The unbalanced structure of economic growth over the past decade has fed straight through to a disastrous social geography, bypassing the least advantaged and rewarding the wealthy. Throughout the country the poor and disadvantaged live in ever more concentrated wards that are blighted by run-down social housing and over-stretched schools. Within a single regional health authority, those in the most well-off ward can typically expect to live for 14 years longer than those in the most deprived ward. The roll-call of the deprived is bitterly familiar: east London’s Hackney and Tower Hamlets, Liverpool’s Knowsley, parts of Manchester, Middlesbrough and Rochdale continue to reel from deprivation, while local authorities like Richmond upon Thames, Kensington and Chelsea and Forest Heath in east Suffolk power on. The New Labour government attempted to alleviate this polarisation through interventions such as Sure Start – a national network of children’s centres to support young families – investing in social housing, incentivising work, developing apprenticeship and trying to improve failing schools. At best, it achieved small gains and held the line; at worst, its initiatives were overwhelmed by the way in which the economy has developed.

Everywhere there is pressure to control and repress the social consequences of a two-nation Britain. Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age. Hysterical tabloid campaigns create mob justice around incidents of child neglect and sexual abuse. Of course, Haringey social services were terrifyingly ineffectual in the terrible case of “Baby P”; and the Soham murder case revealed the hopeless inadequacy of paedophile-checking procedures. But the atmosphere during both made the Salem witch trials look calm. Consequently, the results – a national system for monitoring millions of adults who are in regular contact with children and a crisis in recruitment for social services– are self-defeating and even irrational. The new coalition government promises to be more liberal. But liberalism surrounded by this capacity for hysteria is likely to be hard to sustain.

It has been the same story with respect to immigration, Europe and the early release of prisoners. Terrified of media censure, the Labour government became ever more authoritarian in response to newspaper campaigns against supposedly antisocial or deviant conduct. So there were populist clampdowns against drug-users and ever-longer prison sentences for offenders, while anyone who dared to question the effectiveness of such policies was shouted down or ignored. For instance, the Drugs Advisory Panel was crippled by resignations as one scientist after another became disillusioned that drugs policy was not being driven by evidence but by the prejudices of the tabloids. Conservative politicians are even more susceptible to the same forces and offer few principled, well-thought-through alternatives. The open question is how long their new partners in government, the Liberal Democrats, will be able to resist these pressures.

The economic bubble, which created a new class of super-rich, fostered social polarisation in other profound ways – the increasing value of skills, the importance of self-presentation and differential access to the wired world of the internet. Britain boasts a burgeoning super-rich sector: there are 47,000 people in this country with an average pre-tax income of £780,000 a year. Another 420,000 have pre-tax incomes of between £100,000 and £350,000. Nearly all of them are male, white and live in the south-east. There is a growing class of “knowledge workers”, who reflect the fact that the dynamic parts of the knowledge economy – hi-tech manufacturing, the creative industries, health, business services, education and ICT – need well-qualified and skilled people. But below them are 10 million adults who earn less than £15,000 a year. Few are knowledge workers, and their chance of self-improvement is minimal. Two million children live in low-income working families. Those at the top have enjoyed a world of excess. Financier- cum-retailer Sir Philip Green set the gold standard for conspicuous extravagance when he spent £4m on his son’s bar mitzvah in a specially built temporary synagogue on the French Riviera and £5m on his own 50th birthday party in Cyprus. His wife, Tina, got into the spirit of the occasion when she gave her husband a gold Monopoly set, complete with diamond-studded dice. Of course, the properties on the board represented those owned by Green himself. Financier Joe Lewis paid £1.4m for a single round of golf with Tiger Woods. Venture capitalist Ronald Cohen, adviser to Gordon Brown, excavated under his garden in London’s Notting Hill to build a £1m private underground swimming pool for his £15m mansion. The Financial Times’s “How to Spend It” section provides a window into incredible opulence: the December 2009 edition featured such “über-complex” watches as the Jaeger-LeCoultre Hybris Mechanica Grand Sonnerie (yours for 1.8 million euros) as well as a silk-brocade coat for £7,170. In September 2007 the sale of Damien Hirst’s extraordinary platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless pavé diamonds – titled For the Love of God? – to an investment consortium for $100m defined the top of the boom and the character of the age. The purpose of art had become the celebration of astronomical wealth as a luminously decadent death mask, corrupting both the artist – who was reduced to playing the money game – and any buyer who fell for the ruse. Money ruled everything.

Yet the knowledge that such ostentatious consumption is possible has a shadow effect on every British citizen. Individual human beings instinctively compare themselves and are sensitive to what the whole of society values. Anxiety follows when we cannot compete with others to achieve whatever confers status. Today, philanthropy or living according to a particular moral code does not confer status. Only money is able to do that. People start to question whether vocational career choices – in farming, teaching, medicine or science – make any sense when society rewards them so lowly while rewarding finance so highly. Material values start to crowd out altruism, philanthropy and restraint. Two incidents in September 2007 highlighted the new values. Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, who lost both legs after a landmine exploded in Afghanistan, was offered £152,000 compensation by the Ministry of Defence. The very same week, Eric Nicoli left his job as CEO of EMI – having failed to turn around the company – with a pay-off of £3m.

Members of the upper middle class increasingly live in gated communities or neighbourhoods where the price of houses is so high that ownership is available only to the very rich. It is a form of social apartheid. Social mobility has stagnated. The next generation of professional men and women will have been educated in ever-richer families. Private education as a passport to the upper echelons of British society has become more important: 55% of top journalists, 70% of finance directors and 45% of top civil servants were privately educated. Yet private schools educate only 7% of the total school population.

The political system and principal parties intensify the problem rather than relieve it because the latter are in thrall to populism and the 24/7 news agenda. Policy is driven by populist initiatives or managerial solutions, with the parties competing over who will be most effective at reducing the deficit, eliminating waste or coming up with the latest wheeze to tackle some social problem or other. Their decline as mass-membership organisations commanding strong identification and affiliation certainly predates the bubble, but that process has accelerated during it.

The interaction between diminished parties trying to appeal to the centre, a powerful populist media and Britain’s highly centralised constitution has been toxic to good government. Blair and Brown completed what Thatcher began – the concentration of power at the centre in order to control the news agenda. No 10 has grown into a new royal court, complete with courtiers and factions. Government press officers have grown by 10 times and now number 3,200, a total that the coalition government, for all its rhetoric, will struggle significantly to reduce. The spinning of a media that itself spins is inevitable, but it progressively undermines the legitimacy of politics. For its part, the House of Commons is now more in thrall to the party leaderships than ever before. MPs’ expenses claims for moat-cleaning, duck-houses and clock-towers – not to mention the occasional pornographic video – underlined the loss of democratic purpose and vocation among the foot soldiers of the political class. Tony Blair’s disregard for the House of Commons was complete: he dropped in for only 5% of the votes, and did not even stay to listen to the Iraq debates. Many laws are barely scrutinised before receiving the royal assent. Political reform has not so much invigorated British democracy as redistributed power from central to local elites in Cardiff and Edinburgh, and sideways to life peers in the House of Lords and judges. The opportunity for more ambitious reform has been squandered. All this is placing core British values in flux. If Britishness once meant a combination of kindness, instinctive liberalism, deference before well-understood social values, belief in fairness, respect for parliamentary democracy, inquisitive internationalism and an understated sense of national purpose, it is dissolving before our eyes. If anything, kindness and liberalism have become objects of scorn. The public domain is now dominated by the tabloid bully, the professional mocker, the seeker of celebrity and the xenophobe.

Worry and concern have replaced pride and faith in Britain and its institutions. One local politician captures the mood: “We don’t make anything any more, we don’t own anything any more. It’s an absolute disgrace. The country’s just knackered. People have given up hope. They don’t believe in anything, not in themselves, not in their neighbours, not in their history.” The speaker is Bob Bailey, former leader of the BNP on Barking council. His party’s policies may be a repulsive anathema based on the rank prejudice that alien foreigners are to blame for everything that is wrong with British society – and if they were ever implemented they would be a racist, fascist disaster. But the prejudice behind his sentiments speaks for a growing body of working-class opinion. British society may not yet be broken, as not only the BNP but the Conservative Party has claimed, in the hyperbole of the age. But it is certainly very wounded.

All three principal parties have begun to search for a moral voice, and “fairness” crops up increasingly in the language of all of them. Nick Clegg wants to hard-wire it into Britain’s DNA. The coalition agreement purports to promote it. Labour campaigned for a future that is “fair for all”. The political class has read the runes: fairness is the new moral mantra. So, at a minimum, we now need our economies and our societies to be fair. But what do we even mean by fairness?

We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich. Meanwhile, the poor, in their view – and that of a virulent right-wing media – largely deserve their plight because they could have chosen otherwise. The mockery of chavs is premised on the assumption that they could be different if they wanted to be. The poor could work, save and show some initiative. So why should we indulge them by giving them state handouts?

This lies behind the arrogance with which bankers still defend their bonuses, in spite of everything that has happened over the past few years. They are private contracts, insists Sir George Mathewson, former chair of RBS, in which the state has no right to interfere. They are necessary to retain the best, and thus the health of an industry from which the entire country benefits, argues Standard Chartered’s CEO Peter Sands. Their wealth is only fair.

When the Labour government announced a one-off tax on bank bonuses in December 2009, City and bank spokesmen warned of a mass exodus. The threat was that they would leave the country rather than pay a tax to contribute to clearing up the mess they had created. Such a tax was not fair, they said. There is no better example of the principle of fairness being grotesquely distorted. The bankers were using it simply as a rhetorical device to justify their unwarranted position as an overpaid financial elite.

This moral edifice must be challenged before any reform can be attempted. The principle of “just deserts” is a key part of our culture. We are not flat-earth egalitarians. But nor do we share the view held by the private-equity or hedge-fund partner in Mayfair that wealth is a signifier of personal worth in its own right. We believe it has to be earned, and we believe the rewards should be commensurate with the discretionary effort. Proportionality is a key value. Its trashing by those at the top of the financial and business community risks an angry populist backlash fuelled not by envy, as they airily claim, but by a visceral human instinct.

This definition of fairness is a radical idea. It is not egalitarian; it is demanding. It challenges the economic and moral questions that have been ignored over the last two decades – the tolerance of towering disparities in wealth and power and the blind faith in individualism and markets. It is why we now need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for British capitalism – to examine what happened over the last 10 years, apportion blame, demand atonement and use the lessons learned to build something better in the future. Open competitive markets that deny monopoly and offer proportional returns to productive entrepreneurs are the handmaidens of genuine wealth creation; monopoly and market rigging that reward the incumbent and unproductive are its enemies. Britain has too little of the former “good” capitalism and too much of the latter ” bad capitalism”, one of the reasons it incubated the forces that created the financial crisis. To repeat: fairness is the indispensable value that underpins good economy and society, and it will be the foundation stone of any sustainable new order.

Britain in 2010 is at a crossroads. It has to devise a new way of making its living in the world because the big bet on big finance, property and construction didn’t pay off. A wave of new possibilities driven by science and technology is creating fantastic opportunities, but if we do not seize the moment we risk becoming an economic backwater. Britain has to create a national innovation system by increasing investment in research, disseminating new technologies, building great young companies, promoting open access and competition, mobilising finance and revolutionising its approach to education, training and learning. In other words, it has to do nothing less than rethink its whole approach to capitalism in order to unleash a flood of productive entrepreneurship.

This will mean rethinking how ownership is discharged and companies innovate and grow. The City of London must be recast from top to bottom. It will mean creating a pool of workers who are prepared to accept more risk and actively manage their careers in an era of churn and change. The knowledge economy is the future, but this is not just about science, technology, digitalisation and the onward march of creativity. It is about helping the British to become authors of their own lives. It is a revolution of the mind.

The growth of public debt must be capped and Britain’s budget deficit reduced. This must be done quickly enough to reassure the financial markets that they are not financing a banana republic but not so fast that it devastates the economy by withdrawing public demand when private demand is already crippled (and when banks are nervous about accepting new risks).

Revenue must be raised – with the baby boomers contributing disproportionately – and the state reshaped so that the universal services as well as welfare provision for the disadvantaged can be maintained. Public sector managers and workers will have to contemplate change, inventiveness and responsiveness on an unprecedented level. The essential “publicness” and universality of services cannot be compromised, but everything from the armed forces to the NHS will have to devise ingenious ways to do more with less. In this respect, the early economic pronouncements of the coalition government were disheartening: too much emphasis on deficit-cutting, too few ideas about how to encourage growth and a lack of subtlety about how to manage an economy in the wake of a credit crunch.

Social polarisation must be halted and reversed. Britain cannot confront its challenges if great swaths of its society are disenfranchised and marginalised. Potential talent cannot be allowed to stand idle; potential opportunity cannot be squandered. Our ailing cities and neighbourhoods must be given their chance. We need to educate the mass of our people to a new level, teach them to use their brains in ways that their 20th-century predecessors never thought possible. This will then trump, or at least mitigate, the familiar cultural icons of class.

Fairness is the value that must saturate and animate the reinvention of British capitalism, our society and the reshaping of the British state. The current British political system and the British media are both in urgent need of reform. If British citizens are to become the authors of their own lives and the drivers of a national renaissance, they need reliable sources of information, genuine opportunities to participate in the political life of the country, and politics itself to possess the power to make a difference. Herd-like, populist, conservative media that disregard the impartiality of fact, do not hold the powerful to account, trivialise the quest for objectivity and, above all, trash plurality – the vital precondition for democratic deliberation – lets down the whole country.

Britain needs to embrace democracy rather than simulate it. Too much power is concentrated at the centre while there are too few checks and balances, too little fair representation of plural strands of opinion and not enough national deliberation and debate. National rejuvenation demands a vibrant democracy that empowers the government of the day to take on incumbent elites and monopolists and build a powerful, legitimate national narrative. Fortunately, the new coalition government seems to appreciate this, and has already outlined its commitment to political reform.

The rest of the world is confronting multiple challenges too. Growth must be progressively decarbonised to limit atmospheric concentrations of “CO2 equivalent” to 450 parts per million, a level that is believed to be consistent with a global average temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade. During the 2010s the foundations will be laid of an economy and society that must burn less fossil fuels and generate a lower carbon footprint. A start must be made on transforming the civilisation that was built on the car, the suburb and cheap individual mobility.

Britain needs to get its house in order, both for itself and because the decades ahead are going to be more turbulent than any since the end of the second world war. There are new centres of global economic and political power; new risks; and new, dangerous ideologies. Britain cannot be inward-looking, nationalist, Eurosceptic or conservative in this emerging environment. However, little of this registers in the popular consciousness.

If the 2010s are not to trump the 1970s as the bleakest most paranoid decade since the war, then there needs to be both a frank acknowledgement of what went wrong in the 2000s and an articulation of where the country must go next in terms of necessary investment, reform and change. Crucially, there also needs to be an appreciation of the values that must underpin all this. This old country, part of an old continent, has to the find the energy to remake itself. Denial and avoidance of unpleasant realities are fundamental human emotions, as common among armies after defeats as they are among bankers after a credit crunch. When George Orwell returned from the Spanish civil war, he could scarcely believe the late 1930s England that greeted him: “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers… the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London… the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policeman – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Today, England is in another deep, deep sleep in the aftermath of the financial crisis, hardly disturbed by the disaster through which it has just lived, let alone the challenges ahead. Yet the country needs rousing, and fast. The new coalition government, excited by being in office at all, has offered its negotiated programme of government – a remarkable first in British politics – as the means of waking the country. Of course, it contains some good policies.

But if this government is to preside over a transformation, the precondition will be a rediscovery and a reanimation of a core set of moral values that can unite it while giving edge and energy to all of our thinkers and doers. Above all, a wholesale commitment to fairness is vital. Fairness is the essential handmaiden of reform.

© Will Hutton

This week those hoping to become All Souls fellows will sit ‘the hardest exam in the world’. The notorious one-word essay question may have been scrapped, but candidates still have to sit the General Paper. We asked four writers who thought their exam days were long behind them to attempt one question in strictly one hour . . .
 
Blog: Could you set harder questions?

Mary Beard classicist

Would it have been better had some surviving works of ancient authors been lost?

Classical studies are driven by the ambiguities of survival. It is not a question of what we have versus what we do not have (the surviving books of Dio’s History of Rome measured against the lost books of Tacitus’ – no doubt infinitely sharper – history of the last days of Nero). Classics, as a subject, engages in the curiosities, problems and discontents of survival. It builds on the puzzling, changing identifications of works that are transmitted via the scholarly hands of the monkish middle ages, or those dug up from the sands of Egypt. It makes us face how little we know about what the “survival” (or “loss”) of literature means.

Sometimes it’s clear enough. Diogenes, the second-rate, second-century AD epicurean philosopher, ensured his own survival by having his thoughts inscribed on the wall of his home city of Oenoanda in what is now Turkey. There was little chance of destroying that. But usually “survival” is a trickier question. Take the short essay “Constitution of Athens”, now attributed to the anonymous “Old Oligarch”. Is this a work of the Athenian renegade politician Xenophon (with whose works it has been transmitted in medieval manuscripts)? Or is it a weird rightwing tract by a not very bright anti-democrat of about the same period – that is, the late fifth century BC? (Moses Finley always used to say that the modern pseudonym “Old Oligarch” was the problem here: it made him sound like an engaging elderly pub-philosopher, when in fact he was the closest the ancient word came to a fascist – with the exception of Plato.)

Or think, rather differently, of the archaic Greek poetess Sappho. A few of her poems survive, brilliant enough to define the history of love poetry for the next two and a half millennia (”Phainetai moi . . .” as the best one goes in Greek, copied by the Roman poet Catullus in “Ille mi par esse . . .”). But maybe Sappho’s reputation has been helped by what we no longer have. Most of her output was, we fear, interminable marriage hymns for the young ladies in her entourage. Lost, and well lost, perhaps.

To think more widely (and not to forget that the origin of Christianity was in the Roman empire), what difference has it made that the four canonical gospels have been canonised as such – so effectively consigning the variants to the scrap heap? The recently published Gospel of Judas gives a hint of a very different tradition, and one in which – as never happens in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – Jesus actually laughs (with all the theological complexity that that involves – does God laugh?). Survival, or not, has theological implications and a theological history.

But the key example is that holy grail of classical scholarship – a holy grail because no one can agree whether it is lost or not – the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics (written in the mid fourth century BC). The first book of the Poetics deals with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (the famous discussion of pity, fear and catharsis). The second book, or so we glean from other references in Aristotle, brought the reader back to comedy and to that tricky problem of laughter. The usual scholarly line here is to lament that this work did not make it through the middle ages. Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (”spaghetti structuralism” according to Slavoj Žižek, but fun all the same) dramatised the disappearance of the last surviving copy: literally eaten as a subversive tract by a gloomy “agelastic” monk, before his whole monastery goes up in flames. And recently such leading scholars as Quentin Skinner have mourned its disappearance: if only we had Aristotle’s essay on comedy, writes Skinner, we would understand ancient laughter.

But has it disappeared? And what counts as disappearing? According to Richard Janko, valiantly reviving a (nearly lost) 19th-century theory, the weird little treatise “On Comedy” in a 10th-century manuscript (Tractatus Coislinianus, now in Paris, once on Mount Athos) is actually a summary of this lost work.

So is it or isn’t it? Scholarship has not gone with Janko. The essay in the Tractatus is a very mediocre little tract, and most likely – so the orthodox view goes – a jejune compendium of Aristotelian thought by a none-too-bright Byzantine monk. It includes, for example, some very plodding ideas of what makes an audience laugh (”silly dancing”, is one prompt to laughter). But could we see it differently? According to Michael Silk (no admirer of the intellectual power of lost Aristotle) we might actually think that, in all its mediocrity, this mediocre work was a reasonable summary of some very mediocre Aristotle – altogether not worth saving. Let’s not lament its loss.

Who knows? But this should remind us of the perils of survival (as the question asks us to reflect). Sometimes the best may not survive (and classical nostalgia always suspects that we have inherited some dross while losing some gems). But maybe (and this would be a simplified version of Silk’s position on the second book of the Poetics) what we have lost was second-rate all along. Perhaps the history of the transmission of classical texts has been a pretty efficient sorting mechanism: the survival of the fittest.

In a way it was summed up towards the beginning of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. The play’s “hero”, AE Housman, Cambridge professor and celebrity classicist, is going down to Hades from the Evelyn Nursing Home in Cambridge. He is delighted to interrogate Charon, the boatman taking him across the Styx, wanting to find out more about what happened in Aeschylus’ lost play, Myrmidons. Charon looks as if he can deliver. But the joke is that he only tells Housman the lines that Housman knows already, preserved in later quotations and no surprise at all.

The allure of survival turned out to be the survival of what Housman already knew. It complicates the idea of choice and loss.

Geoff Dyer writer

Why are face transplants more controversial than liver transplants?

To get to the heart of this question it is worth examining the moment, in a sketch from the 1970s, when Tommy Cooper takes a seat on a train and looks up at the person opposite. We see, immediately, that it is Adolf Hitler. Cooper is a little uncertain – he knows it’s someone famous but is not sure who. “Hang on a moment, I never forget a face . . .” Then, after a pause: “That is a face, isn’t it?”

This is funny because we think that the problem is that he doesn’t recognise Hitler’s face, but in fact he’s is not even sure it is a face at all. Because he’s not sure it’s a face, however, does not mean that it could be, say, a liver. He means it’s a rather sad excuse for a face. But the question – “That is a face, isn’t it?” – contains a deeper question, the one recognised by Martin Heidegger who was a member of the Nazi party, the party started by Hitler to achieve world domination. The question is not what is a face (or liver) but what is “is” (”Was ist das ‘ist’?”).

In his different, less phenomenological way, Cooper insists that we do not take things at face value. One’s initial response to the question is that it’s obvious why liver transplants are not controversial. It is widely accepted now, in a culture of binge-drinking, that the liver as biologically conceived is not up to the demands of modern living. In the era of recreational drug use and happy hours and alcopops, the liver just can’t cope. It is not an organ that one has any sentimental attachment to. One could not, for example, imagine a bumper sticker with “I ❤ my liver”. The liver is just a dumping ground for toxins. Even by the standards of offal it’s a horrible little organ. I can still remember, at school, being served liver with those veins in it. I’ve never eaten it since.

But then – and this is where the Cooper joke forces us to confront things we take for granted – consider how much more disgusting it would have been if we had been served a human face. Or a chimpanzee’s face. But where to stop? Quite often we are served fish with the head on, and when we say “head” we really mean “face”. The cheeks are widely considered the sweetest part of a fish. It is also worth bearing in mind that, after a certain number of years in the trade, all fishmongers begin to look rather amphibious. There is, in other words, a concealed assumption in the question: that we are talking about the transplant of a human rather than animal face on to a human being. This is considered completely beyond the pale, even though infantry soldiers are popularly referred to as “dog faces”.

Of course the real problem is that the face is bound up with personal identity. In John Woo’s film Face/Off John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swap faces, effectively becoming each other. If they had just swapped livers it wouldn’t have made much difference to either of them; it would have resulted in a completely pointless film that would no doubt have flopped at the box office. George Orwell understood the way that one’s face is tied up with one’s identity when he said that by the age of 40 everyone has the face they deserve. Martin Amis updated this: everyone gets the face they can afford. This gets to the heart of the matter. Face transplants are still at an early stage. They are experimental and extremely expensive: what you see is what you get; or, more exactly, what you got is what you see. All of this will no doubt be solved as the technology improves and the kinks are ironed out. As that happens, demand will increase and prices will come down, and we will all be able to walk around looking like whoever we want.

Mary Midgley moral philosopher

“There was a time when people only wanted to sense the moon, but now they want to see it” (Goethe). Discuss.

This is just one more fascinating clue to the way in which the Enlightenment has shrunk and tidied up our European life-world. As the ethologists have told us, every species has its distinctive world, its Umwelt, the peculiar space in which it feels that it lives. A pigeon’s world is quite a different one from that of the peregrine that eats it. Neither of them could make any sense of the other. And because we humans vary so much in our cultures, we too live in a number of different life-worlds, which are constantly changing.

What Goethe was talking about was, no doubt, the explosive effect of Galileo’s telescope on the European world-picture. Seen through that telescope, Jupiter suddenly had moons, and what had seemed to be the slightly uneven silver disc of our own moon turned out to be as rough, as pitted and as messy as the surface of the earth itself. Notoriously, this drastically affected cosmology and religion, both of which had taken for granted a secure and perfect heavenly realm, in which the moon was included. But Goethe, I think, was talking about another imaginative effect which has not had so much attention.

What did he mean by sensing the moon? We don’t have his German word, but I take it he was distinguishing between taking in something directly as a whole and being able to sort out its different elements. David Copperfield sensed that Miss Murdstone didn’t much like little boys, and he didn’t really need a fuller analysis to tell him he was right. After Galileo, European inquirers were able to give the moon that detailed analysis, and they have eventually provided it with a pretty full street guide, filling in the Mare Imbrium and the Mare Tranquillitatis and all the rest of it. This is surely a splendid achievement. But is this process of increasing detail – of continually sharpening up the focus – enough? Does it need a wider background?

When people just sensed the moon, they were admiring that silver disc in the context of the heavens as a whole. They saw it reigning among the stars, being lost among shifting clouds and emerging from them, rising and setting over the earth. That variable heaven was for them a symbol of majesty, of the vaster background that gave a sense to their lives. As Kant put it in the Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

Today, it is not possible for many human beings to see that starry heaven at all because of the light pollution that covers our towns. Details of the moon, and the other heavenly bodies, are, however, brought to us in books or on television. If we wish, we can know infinitely more about them than our most learned ancestors could ever have dreamed of. Indeed, the Enlightenment has done a magnificent job of increasing our knowledge. The further job – which its original prophets glimpsed very clearly – of putting that knowledge in its wider context hasn’t been done so well. It is not a job for science but for wisdom. It needs more work.

Will Self writer

Is there something inherently coarsening about sport?

Montaigne said, “Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he doesn’t take life seriously enough.” Yet this remark, coming as it does from an essayist who elsewhere in his multifarious oeuvre confesses to great enjoyment of both parlour games and the chase, may strike us as an admonition aimed at the author himself. It seems to indicate that Montaigne saw his own sensibility as poised on a knife-edge between being submerged in the ephemeral trivialities of contingent competition, and the lasting importance of life properly engaged with.

We are all familiar in our own lives with the spectacle of the sports fanatic, or the compulsive games player, whose engagement with the wider world is mediated through the lens of their pursuit. In British culture it seems sometimes to be the casethat discussion of football has the character of an ulterior male language, running beneath the main course of communication in such a way as to suborn its function.

To hear men in pubs – or on trains, in offices, indeed anywhere at all – speak of this goal or that team selection is instantly to apprehend that what they discuss is not football per se, but rather life in all its conflict and variety; and that the proximate dispute about refereeing decisions may stand only as a proxy for misgivings about anything from the presence of British ground forces in Afghanistan to the wisdom of cutting government spending so far and so fast.

Men – and some women – watch football, dispute and debate football, and even occasionally kick a ball around, because it offers them a small-scale model of life, not necessarily because it distracts them from life altogether. Claude Lévi-Strauss observed in The Savage Mind that the virtue of a small-scale model is that it sacrifices the sensible in favour of the intelligible. Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one’s eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history – but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. Within the compass of football or rugby pitch; on the baize of a roulette or poker table; in a squash court and around a running track – all of these are confined arenas within which the application of normative constraints to the vagaries of individual character and the valences of individual aptitude can be assessed and, more importantly, projected. It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play – their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force – can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.

Surely it is this aspect of sport which makes it quite so beguiling for those that follow it. I stress, this is not simply a retread of the grotesque notion that the first world war was won “on the playing fields of Eton”. In what sense at all could that war be said to have been won at all? The compulsive application of sporting metaphor to the conduct of entrenched slaughter was just one of the figures within which can be discerned the extent to which mechanised warfare veered away from any social contract whatsoever. The famous “Christmas truce” of 1914, when British and German troops staged a football match in no man’s land, was utterly eclipsed by subsequent episodes when advancing British troops dribbled footballs in front of them after going over the top, the aim being to kick the ball into the enemy’s trenches.

Here, sport as a re-enactment – on a small scale – of the social contract is replaced by a lopsided metaphorical instantiation of sporting zeal. After all, what would it have been like for the British dribblers to have scored a goal, let alone “won” the one-sided match they were engaged in? It is in contexts such as these, where sport runs up against life situations that cannot be mediated by the same normative rules, that sport risks looking too facile and too juvenile to be anything but a coarsening influence on the lives and minds of people.

The “rumble in the jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the disasters at Ibrox stadium and Hillsborough – these are not, properly understood, sporting events at all: they are sociopolitical occurrences that have imploded into the small-scale models of life that sport offers. And it is when we see sports pundits, commentators and fans struggling to come to terms with such events that we feel most strongly the pathos of the sporting life, and the bewilderment of its habituees.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it. If I were to recast Montaigne’s aperçu it would be thus: “Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he may be incapable of taking life seriously enough.” In static and small-scale societies – one thinks of the ancient Greek city states, or of contemporary traditional societies (if there are any such truly still existent) – there may be no necessary conflict between the seriousness of sport and the seriousness of life. Moreover, in as much as the former coarsens it may do so for a purpose: the ritualised forms of conflict employed by Native Americans such as the Cheyenne and the Sioux, prior to the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny, can be seen as just one example of the way sport and warfare merge seamlessly to provide a graduated response to the problem of collective male aggression. (And arguably, so-called football hooliganism in our society is another example of the same phenomenon; it’s worth noting that in both arenas the mounting of raids and the taking of scalps is crucial.)

I say “arguably”, because we do not live in a static or self-contained society, and it’s almost impossible to view local and amateur sport as an analogue of the social process. On the contrary, if sport in our culture exists on a continuum, it is one that ascends from the local kick-around pitch to such mighty boondoggles as the 2012 Olympic Games, or the farrago that was the England football team’s petulant failure at this year’s World Cup. The extreme professionalisation of sport and its internationalisation exposes the fallacious character of how the small-scale model of sport might operate.

In lieu of young sports players discovering how to conduct themselves in constrained playing environments, so as to be able to take their place in similarly delimited social and economic contexts, we have the spectacle (if it’s possible to imagine such a thing) of multi-millionaires refusing to train for their professional games unless they are allowed access to their computer games consoles. That this really did take place in South Africa confirms not merely an inability to take life seriously enough, or a coarsening of the individuals’ concerned sensibilities, but a deep and painful kind of stultification.

I cleave to the Montaigne quote with which I began this answer, but lingering in the back of my mind was a series of observations made by the protagonist of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. In all his years of observing sportsmen and women train, this character – the sportswriter of the title – has come to the conclusion that sport, even if it attracts intelligent people, succeeds ultimately in dumbing them down by the sheer force of the repetitive physical activities they are engaged in all day every day. As it is in complex late capitalist society, so it is in complex late capitalist sport: intense specialisation equals mindless repetition.

In conclusion: sport may not inevitably coarsen, but in the particular form of society we have it undoubtedly stupefies. But then, since most of us are stupefied anyway, why not play up! And play the game!

Blog: Could you set harder questions?

Kathryn Hughes on a clever and generous book about a neglected strand of English modernism

The modernism we know about, or think we do, was fierce and sharp-edged, all the better to scythe down the past and start all over again. During the interwar period, making things new became the mantra. History was a jumbled lumber-room of habits and beliefs that we would all do much better without: it had led, after all, to the carnage of the trenches. All those bits and pieces from previous centuries – the clutter, the junk, the sheer bulk of countless pointless objects – needed to be swept away. Homes, in the words of Le Corbusier, were to become “machines for living”, complete with kitchenettes and pull-down beds. And instead of watercolour landscapes and ancestral portraits on the walls, there would be an art composed of white circles etched upon white squares floating upon white paper. If there were to be any colour in this weightless world, it was to be found checked within Mondrian’s strict grids.

This, though, wasn’t the only modernism in town. In this brilliant book, longlisted for the Guardian first book award, Alexandra Harris sets out to show that English culture between the wars contained another strand, one she calls romantic modernism. Whereas high modernism wanted to lay waste to the material past in order to re-fashion it upon rational lines, romantic modernists had a soft spot for what had gone before. They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England’s crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

We have, of course, always known about this strand of mid-20th-century culture. John Betjeman and his church crawls, Beverley Nichols and his cottage garden, Edith Sitwell and her dressing-up box hardly count as lost objects. But at best these figures have tended to seem like extra limbs, dangling untidily from the main narrative of English culture between the wars. And at worst they have appeared just plain embarrassing, a reminder that some writers and painters simply failed to get with the programme (or, worse, didn’t realise there was a programme in the first place). One of the tasks Harris sets herself is to weave these lost modernists back into the main weft of British culture, rescuing them from their status as lovable eccentrics or – worse still – “national treasures”, granting them instead the dignity of an identity as self-conscious intellectuals trying to make sense of difficult times.

Harris’s second, and trickier, task is to show how many of the people whose high modernist credentials have always seemed impeccable were actually deeply drawn to the impure forms of the past. Her emblematic anecdote concerns Le Corbusier dining at the Reform Club. At one moment, perhaps when he thought no one was looking, the great moderniser was spotted sensuously fingering the Victorian mouldings of the club’s faux Roman-Renaissance columns. The man who wanted the thinking classes to live in white boxes turned out to have a fondness for curls and curves after all.

Not all of Harris’s subjects are quite so obliging when it comes to furnishing this kind of shorthand. Mostly, she is obliged to track her romantic modernists stealthily, noticing a glint in their eye when they make a detour to visit Stonehenge, read an Anglo-Saxon poem or express a sneaking regard for the folk tunes that Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion. Others, such as Cecil Beaton, require a more probing approach. In a particularly fine section, Harris describes how the photographer managed to fashion himself simultaneously as a silver-suited futurist and an 18th-century squire. In his decayed Wiltshire manor house, Beaton mocked up a Georgian fantasia by making over junk shop furniture with swags of cheap velvet. Weekend guests, including David Cecil and Augustus John, shuffled their identities in the ormolu mirrors and posed for period tableaux. History became something that could be invented rather than inherited, and was all the better for it.

Beaton is one of the many bit players who do sterling work supporting Harris’s thesis. There are, nonetheless, two figures whose journeys are considered important enough to find their way into her book’s subtitle: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Piper is best remembered these days for his love affair with England’s ancient churches. Harris, though, reminds us that he started in a different place entirely. In the early 30s he was an abstract artist with a capital A, balancing pure form and colour with the best of them. As a true believer in Roger Fry’s progressive manifesto, Piper looked to Europe for inspiration, imbibing and producing an art that determinedly floated above national boundaries. His future wife Myfanwy even edited Axis, the house journal for the aesthetic avant garde.

But something happened to Piper in 1934 – around the same time that Betjeman stopped pretending to be keen on new buildings. Having studied photographs of the English landscape taken from the air, he started to see and feel in three dimensions. Using collage, he built up his canvases with bits of torn newspaper and scrunched doilies. Blotting paper and music manuscripts were scribbled over with ink and gouache to recreate the untidy shorelines of Kent and Sussex. Brooding on what he had made, Piper came to the ringing conclusion that pure abstraction was “undernourished”. What was needed was a return to representation, not of the plodding weekend-painter variety, but in a way that acknowledged the presence of what he famously described as “the tree in the field”. From this point, Piper’s work turned to new and nourishing directions. His painterly investigations of Oxfordshire’s farm buildings and Wales’s Georgian ruins involved mapping a strikingly modern cubist sensibility on to the much older romantic tradition of Gilpin and Girtin. The result was deep pleasure for both eye and soul.

As Piper’s love of lichen and leaf-filtered light suggests, romantic modernism was happiest in the country. If a Domesday Book had been compiled in the late 30s, recording the inhabitants of villages and outlying farms, it would include most of the main figures of English arts and letters: the Woolfs in Rodmell, the Pipers at Fawley Bottom, EM Forster in Abinger, Stanley Spencer at Cookham, Beverley Nichols at Glatton. True, TS Eliot stayed mainly in the city, but from his Faber office he commissioned, improbable though it sounds, books on soil management. For while high modernism hung out in smoky jazz bars, romantic modernism tended to pile on the jumpers and sit round the kitchen table, scoffing a delicious stew composed of ingredients foraged from the hedgerows. When it took to the roads it did so with a well-thumbed Victorian gazetteer in the glove compartment or perhaps an edition of Gilbert White’s Selborne or Thomas Bewick’s British Birds. Not that it rejected all evidence of modernity. When new guides to the English landscape were called for, it seemed only right and proper that they should be sponsored by Shell-Mex. In yet another twist, Vanessa Bell, once the doyenne of French-facing art, undertook to paint the Sussex village of Alfriston for one of the petroleum megalith’s signature posters.

It would be impossible to over-emphasise what a clever book Romantic Moderns is. It is a kind one too, showing tactful generosity towards people and places, sights and sounds, that have tended to get written off as embarrassing or just plain wrong. Never has this seemed more important than now, as we work through our own complicated millennial feelings about the romance of the past. Thanks to Harris it no longer seems entirely shaming to admit to a secret Cath Kidston habit. Taking tea in the stable block of a National Trust property becomes a dignified activity, rather than something to pretend to find a chore. Harris’s elegant writing is beautifully served here too by Thames & Hudson, which has done her proud with thick, creamy paper and illustrations placed on facing pages, rather than dropped smudgily into the text or tidied away into an inconvenient centre section. The result is not just an important book but a deeply pleasurable one, too.

Kathryn Hughes’s The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

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From the Brothers Grimm to Jeffrey Eugenides and Alice Walker to Jane Austen, the children’s author chooses her favourite sibling tales

Bestselling children’s author Cathy Cassidy’s books include Dizzy, Driftwood, Indigo Blue, Scarlett, Sundae Girl, Lucky Star, Gingersnaps and Angel Cake. Her latest novel, Cherry Crush, is the first book in her new series for over-nines, The Chocolate Box Girls, about five very different sisters.

“I grew up in 1960s Coventry, addicted to daydreaming, drawing and story-making right from the start. My dad repaired cars and dreamed of big adventures and my mum looked after both me and my ill, elderly Irish gran, who lived with us. I shared a room with my gran, and it was she who taught me to love stories. She would tell me perfect tales of long-ago Ireland, an idyllic life in the country with sisters called Maggie, Delia, Lizzie and Nellie.

“Eventually I had a little brother, but I never did get a sister, so sister stories have always been endlessly appealing to me. In my friendships, I have often looked for something of the family as well, and have been lucky enough to find it. These days, I find that friendships, and the challenge of getting them right, are at the heart of every book I write.

“It was a challenge for me to write a series about five sisters, but one I have loved. The Chocolate Box Girls are my dream sisters: cool, quirky, arty and individual, full of hopes and dreams. Finally, I have five sisters of my own.”

1. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

This book had everything I wanted as a child: three cool, adopted sisters who have to cope when times get tough. I loved the ballet theme, in spite of having two left feet myself. Or possibly three, even. This book is about following a dream, and making it happen through sheer hard work – a message that is as clear now as it was back then. Brilliant.

2. The Twelve Dancing Princesses by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Jane Ray

I was hooked on fairy stories as a child – apart from annuals, a big grisly compendium of Grimm’s Fairy Tales was the only book I actually owned for years. All the rest were from libraries. I still love this story of 12 rebel sisters who outwit their parents and dance all night, every night. My current copy is illustrated by Jane Ray, whose gorgeous artwork is even more perfect than my imaginings.

3. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Doesn’t everybody want to live in a castle? I did, and I wanted my life to be exactly like those of Rose and Cassandra Mortmain: creative, eccentric, falling in love for the first time. Like Cassandra, I liked to “capture” the people and things around me with words and pictures, and these days I often think of Cassandra’s dad with his worst-ever case of writers’ block, being left in a dungeon to write!

4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I read many of the classics as a teenager, but this is one of the few I have returned to over the years. Five sparky sisters, but in another world – a world where manners, society and social standing dictate everything. Not just romantic but wonderfully real and believable, even now.

5. Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud

I love, love, love this book. Two little girls and their hippy mum in 1960s Marrakesh, this book poignantly, perfectly, captures the magic of childhood. Adults may be imperfect, impulsive, untrustworthy – but children can cope with almost anything when they know they are loved.

6. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

I love history – it’s all about stories, after all - but hadn’t read historical novels for a long time when I came across this. Philippa Gregory is the real deal: she knows how to balance fact with fiction, how to pull you into the story and leave you asking questions you have to know the answers to. Before reading this, I didn’t even know Anne Boleyn had a sister, and had no idea of how the two girls had been so used and abused by their family in the pursuit of power. Any woman who isn’t sure whether or not to call herself a feminist should read this – guaranteed to make it all startlingly clear.

7. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Four sisters and their evangelical missionary parents in 1960s Congo. As the girls grow up, they begin to see far more than their rigid, narrow-minded father ever will. This novel opened my eyes to a culture on the brink of turmoil – powerful and unforgettable.

8. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

Enchanting, eccentric, full of drama, feeling and emotion, this book is about friends (the Ya-Yas) who pledge sisterhood as young children and stay together through thick and thin. I love the childhood scenes and the searingly beautiful pictures they paint … this book has been passed around my own Ya-Ya sisters.

9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

This book shocked and hurt me, but it opened my eyes, too. Sisters Celie and Nettie are black women living in the US deep south in the 1930s. Bruised and broken by prejudice and poverty, they find strength and love in sisterhood and friendship.

10. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The story of five teenage sisters in 1970s Michigan … five sisters who each kill themselves as their family disintegrates around them. Narrated by anonymous neighbourhood boys, this is a fascinating, mysterious story that intrigues and confuses.

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