Twenty-five years ago the President of the United States issued his famous declaration that the country was at war. Following the murder of thousands of his countrymen, George W Bush announced that ‘this enemy attacked not just our people, but all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy. We will rally the world. We will be patient, we will be focused, and we will be steadfast in our determination.’

The ‘War on Terror’ had begun, an awkward name for what President Bush had accidentally called a ‘crusade’ five days after 9/11. It’s not ideal to embark on a mission without being able to name your enemy and the War on Terror - which everyone understood to be a War on Islamist Terror - did not turn out to be a great success.

What should have been a punishment raid on the Taliban turned out to be a nation-building exercise that defied history or anthropology. That was at least understandable, considering Afghanistan’s role in the murder of thousands of Americans. Less so was the adventure in Iraq, targeted at a regime unconnected to the atrocity, and which led to all sorts of unintended consequences: the replacement of a secular regime by sectarian gangs, the increasing power of theocratic Iran and the near destruction of the country’s Christian minority. The chaos in Iraq would also inspire a wave of suicide bombings in the West, including in London.

Unintended consequences occur because of the variety of actors and factors involved, but also because humans react in sometimes irrational ways. One of the now-well known unintended consequences of 9/11 was a sharp rise in passenger fatalities – among drivers.

This makes it very hard to predict future events, and journalists and commentators are notoriously bad at doing so. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was widely expected that American Muslims would suffer persecution, or at the very least unbearable stigma and isolation. That Americans would learn to hate Muslims. In fact, their opinion of Muslims improved, across the political spectrum, and immigration from that part of the world steadily increased - so that today the American Muslim population is more than twice as large as it was in 2001. The same thing happened in France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, although in this case returning to its baseline not long after.

9/11 may have changed the world, but it didn’t change public opinion.

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The 1821 Greek War of Independence. The Portuguese Civil War, also known as the Liberal Wars. The First Carlist War. The Uruguayan Civil War. Crimea. The Shimonoseki campaign. The Cretan revolt. The Boxer rebellion. The First World War, Russian Civil War and Second World War. The War in Vietnam (1945-6). The Korean War. Suez (the less said, the better). The 1991 Gulf War. Kosovo. Afghanistan. The Boko Haram insurgency. The Libyan Civil War. And the War in Iraq (not the main one, but the 2013-2017 conflict with ISIS).

That country, of course, is France, which since the Battle of Waterloo has been Britain’s closest ally, a remarkable record of military co-operation considering that for the previous 130 years the two had done almost nothing but fight each other. France and England were also famously at war for long stretches of the Middle Ages, beginning in 1337 and then tailing off after 1422 when the records dry up.

Despite this, blood has been shed by friends, perhaps most notoriously with the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, with the loss of almost 1,300 sailors. Faced with the prospect that the ships would fall into German hands, Churchill felt that he had no choice but to make this ‘hateful’ decision.

A low point in relations which added to French bitterness towards their allies, the attack is depicted in the recently released Charles de Gaulle biopic, a two-parter that has already taken France by storm, with 5 million tickets sold. The first film, Resistance, opened in Britain last month, with the second instalment arriving next week.

The film has been widely praised, in particular for the performance of Simon Abkarian, who captures de Gaulle’s courage and unflappability but also his vulnerability and prickliness. It also depicts his qualities as a family man, and his faith. In God, but just as much in France.

Resistance has a powerful message: even when the odds seem overwhelming and hopeless, it’s never over. De Gaulle is exiled to an alien land, unable to speak the language, isolated and despised by most of his countrymen. He’s reduced to living in meagre accommodation, and without supporters; the film invents the comedy character of a Polish plumber-turned-secretary to illustrate that he would have accepted anyone. Yet he overcame and helped to rescue his country, through courage, energy and an unshakeable belief in his country. He’s a hero with a sacred cause, and for British audiences it may present a new angle on our great civilisational story.

Arriving in London, de Gaulle gives his famous radio broadcast of June 18, urging that the flame of resistance must not be extinguished. Few people actually heard the speech, certainly fewer than later recalled, and as Julian Jackson wrote in his biography A Certain Idea of France, on which the film is based, almost no one had even heard of the general, and many thought that his name must be a pseudonym.

Dejected and abandoned, at one of his lowest moments de Gaulle walks out of his London flat to see dozens of Breton fishermen who have sailed from their homes and sworn to fight for him, just as every able-bodied man from the Île de Sein did indeed turn up at Free French HQ in London after hearing his address.

If the main focus of the film is the character of de Gaulle, and his often comically difficult relationship with Churchill - played by the superb Simon Russell Beale - an attractive theme is the redemption of French military honour. This is paid for with the heroic sacrifice of the Free French at Bir Hakeim in the North African campaign, where they held off a far larger German contingent.

As Jackson recently argued in Engelsberg Ideas, the battle’s depiction is not a distortion, for it ‘is a film about the Free French. For de Gaulle, it was the first time that his men had been able to fight directly against the Germans since 1940. This David vs Goliath moment was massively important for the international prestige of de Gaulle’s movement. A pinprick in the wider history of the war, it was in some sense the France Libre’s Stalingrad.’

It was certainly refreshing to watch a historical film and know that there wasn’t going to be some outrageous Hollywood anti-British distortion. Indeed, the film may even be accused of being unduly harsh on the Americans, whose government is shown to be dismissive of allies who have endured the Nazis for far longer than they have. But then, one might ask, how else could a Gaullist film see the world?

At one point, towards the end of Resistance, the Free French leader warns Churchill that his country is turning into a vassal of the United States, a point that won’t be lost on many British cinema goers. This is a view which has become ascendent among a younger generation of conservatives in this country, much cooler towards the Great Satan than their parents. While there is much contention about what ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ may entail, a scepticism towards the ‘special relationship’ is fundamental, and with it a sense that the General was correct about our vassalage.

The film could hardly avoid echoing contemporary concerns, especially when, as Jackson points out, director Antonin Baudry previously worked as a diplomat and civil servant for the French foreign ministry. He served under foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, who in 2003 had made a speech in New York opposing the Iraq War, a time when the Simpsons joke about ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was taken up unironically by American journalists. The French were proved right about the adventure; Britain was humiliated.

The jibes preceding the Iraq disaster played on a more established stock joke about a Gallic lack of military prowess, and a very lame one too. France has historically been the most belligerent country in Europe, from the time of the Franks to the age of Napoleon. Jokes about French tanks that only have a reverse gear are part of the love/hate relationship that characterises British attitudes to the French, but it is their very glory as a military power that makes any victory so worth marking. It is also the case that for a certain type of Englishman, of which I am definitely one, French military grandeur and pomp is enchanting.

After the death of French Resistance hero Daniel Cordier in 2020, Dan Jackson (no relation) wrote about his funeral at the ‘austere grandeur’ of the cour d’honneur in Les Invalides, attended by President Emmanuel Macron.

Here, ‘under an unsmiling bronze statue of Napoleon (itself made from Russian and Austrian guns captured at Austerlitz), a grand republican liturgy was conducted with Macron as the chief celebrant. To the slow beat of the black-clad-drums of the Garde Republicaine, Cordier’s tricoleur-draped coffin was borne into the square by ten officer cadets of the St Cyr Military Academy, whose vivid Second Empire uniforms and pantalon rouge recalled the glories of the army of Napoleon III, from the Malakoff to Solferino, and the countless fallen of Guise, and the Marne in 1914, when officers “thought it chic to die in white gloves”.’

Jackson described ‘the whole spectacle — and the nearby tombs of Turenne, Bugeaud, Foch and Leclerc’ as ‘a rebuke to the tedious Anglocentric view that French military history is merely a litany of defeats. The deeds of Cordier and his confrères in redeeming the ignominy of 1940 are a refutation of that calumny alone. As was the record of those who fought under the Cross of Lorraine, from Bir Hakeim and Monte Cassino to the French First Army that crossed both the Rhine (capturing Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) and then the Danube in 1945.’

No other country can do military grandeur with quite the same style or élan, nor get the tone quite right. While we’ll all be pleased that Germany is now rearming at a steady rate, and will play an increasingly crucial role in protecting European democracy, for some reason their whole military look still doesn’t quite have the same inspiring vibe.

Earlier this year it seemed that France was emerging from the Gulf crisis as the military protector of Europe, maybe dare I say it leader of the free world. Maybe this is to project my own hopes, but at any rate their Instagram content was very impressive, and that’s a start. Certainly, almost the entire French Navy was on the move, while Britain’s military is now completely emasculated.

I’m aware that everyone in France seems to hate Macron, but on the international stage he comes across as impressive, and his speech at the time - ‘To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful’ - reassuring to those who want a strong France. What made it even more French was that the speech was made at a nuclear submarine base, after which the assembled worthies sung La Marseillaise. It’s enough to make a grown Englishman cry.

Just a reminder that I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months starting later in September: payments will automatically go on hold, so if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not pay anything during this period.

Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

I wouldn’t call the book ‘urgent’ because I usually take that to mean ‘worthy scolding by an ideological ally’; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.

James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.

‘Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.

‘We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).’

Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. ‘The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities,’ he writes: ‘I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry).’

Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s ‘the phones’). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

‘Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.’

Having collapsed at the end of antiquity, literacy rates began to show an uptick from the 12^th century, initially in the urban centres of northern Italy but then rapidly rising with the invention of printing; even then, however, the nascent books trade overestimated how keen the public were, and he recalls the case of ‘two hapless Roman publishers who wrote to Pope Sixtus IV at the end of the fifteenth century asking for help because they had printed 20,000 books in a fit of over-enthusiasm and were unable to sell any of them.’

Then came Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading the Bible - in Sweden the Lutheran Church even banned the illiterate from marrying - and the Enlightenment, of which Marriott is a great fan. This produced both a republic of letters among our continent’s intellectual elite, but a much broader spread of empathy, enabling many people to see beyond the categories of social class, sex or race, into the soul and mind within.

‘In a book you can find yourself paying close attention to someone you might have very easily dismissed had you encountered them in real life. The wealthy male readers of Pamela spent hours with the innermost thoughts of a serving girl, a kind of person many of them would not have given so much as a second thought to had they encountered her in the street.’

Likewise, with readers of Olaudah Equiano’s memoir The Interesting Narrative, now able to see life through the eyes of a slave in a way that was transformative: ‘what it was like to be stolen from one’s home by slave traders, packed onto a slave ship and sold like an object.’ In as much as reactionaries felt a ‘moral panic’ about the dangerous effects of reading, Marriott thinks they were right: literacy would indeed undermine a hierarchical society and bring about a more egalitarian, democratic spirit.

Marriott identifies the peak of literacy sometime in the early to mid-20^th century, and ‘by 1944, a survey found that “nearly two-thirds of skilled workers and almost half of unskilled workers grew up in homes with substantial libraries”.’ Yet already the great change was coming. In 1948, only 1 per cent of American homes owned a television; by 1954, over half did. Britain was a bit behind, but the idiot box began to take off after Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953, fondly remembered as a great communal event because so few people owned a set. Soon, however, television would become the least communal of activities

‘All of life seemed to be reorganising itself around television’s centrifugal attraction. In living rooms across the world, armchairs and sofas were shifted around so that they no longer faced each other (as they had in most houses for most of history) and were directed instead towards the corner that contained the screen.’

Social life turned inward, and television had a zombifying effect on many; Marriott notes that ‘in 1956 when a technical error delayed the broadcast of ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a third of the audience had simply continued staring blankly at their empty sets until programming resumed.’

Television came to ‘devour’ our leisure time, and by 1995, as Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, 40 per cent of it was spent staring at the screen. While Putnam was writing about the United States, its effects were seen everywhere; in the Netherlands, which possesses some of the best data, the introduction of television saw a decline in the average time spent reading, from five to three and a half hours a week between the 1950s and 70s.

The number of channels exploded with the arrival of cable television, and the number of brain cells fell. Western countries began to see the ‘reverse Flynn Effect’, across-the-board IQ declines, and a natural experiment helps us to identify the culprit:

‘Because Norway is a long, narrow inaccessible country of mountains, fjords and forests, the roll-out of cable TV was staggered by region. Not everywhere got cable at once… This, plus Norway’s policy of military conscription for men, presented an interesting opportunity for social scientists. By measuring the compulsory intelligence tests taken by all military conscripts the economist Øystein Hernæs was able to map the effect on test scores of cohorts of soldiers as cable TV arrived in their areas. What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability”.’

And then things only got worse, in 2007, with the arrival of the smartphone. As Marriott points out, television has its ill effects, but it also produces something recognisable as art, and requires some degree of concentration. And whereas most people like television, they often hate their phones, seeing the terrifying power they hold.

If your household is anything like mine, it will feature parents repeatedly nagging their children to ‘get off your phone’, only for them to reply: ‘but you’re on it, too!’ (It’s for work, I lamely reply.) Indeed, many adults struggle to limit their use of these maddeningly addictive devices, which the average person checks 144 times a day; Marriott’s own battles are comical.

‘In my early adulthood I must have spent hundreds of futile and faintly tragicomic evenings attempting to improve my reading by hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards. I have shoved in into the stale and musty depths of laundry baskets. One particularly desperate (though I also thought, rather ingenious) strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture thus making it impossible to retrieve without laboriously hunting for it. I went through a phase of locking my phone up like an evil genie in a “smartphone prison”, a sort of miniature safe with a timer.’ Nothing could stop him succumbing to the Ring’s great power, until he got rid of the device and bought a ‘dumbphone’ instead.

The impact on writing was not initially apparent. As late as 2017, a short story in the New Yorker was read by a million people and became the subject of widespread discourse. Just nine years later the very idea seems absurd, and far more attention is given to the likes of ‘James Donaldson, the world’s most popular YouTuber and in the apt description of the writer Mark O’Connell, “the Mozart of the attention economy’’.’ His videos ‘take the form of stunts or accelerated miniature gameshows’ with titles such as ‘I Spent 50 Hours in Solitary Confinement’ or ‘Would You Sit in Snakes for $10,000?’

For those who can’t manage 30 minutes, there is always TikTok, ‘which has justly been described as the “crack” of the smartphone. It has been estimated that the average TikTok user may scroll through as many as 260 videos in the space of about half an hour.’

As our attention spans have declined, ‘statistical analysis shows that even pop songs are becoming simpler and more repetitive’, while television dialogue has become less complex, all subtext or insinuation gone as characters spell out the plot to attention-depleted audiences.

Marriott admits that ‘making this kind of argument is apt to make you sound like a reactionary bore — the kind of armchair-bound windbag who would have droned on about cultural decline all the way through the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell. I acknowledge that some readers have already made up their minds that this is precisely who I am and what I am doing. But it’s worth pointing out that the idea that culture is becoming more simple or stagnant and repetitive is not one of history’s recurring moral panics.

‘As the journalist Adam Mastroianni has neatly pointed out, for most of the twentieth century people tended to worry about the exact opposite problem: that there was too much novelty and too much pretentious difficulty. Traditional ways of doing things seemed to be continually, terrifyingly being exploded or reinvented or displaced. Art, literature, philosophy and fashion simply could not stay still.’

Today, even scientific studies are becoming ‘less disruptive’, according to one prestigious journal, ‘increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.’ The culture is becoming more conservative in a way that oral societies tend to be – repetitive, static, lacking innovation.

As literacy has declined, politics has become stupider. Reading Hansard from the 1970s, and comparing it to the level of Parliamentary debate today, is a painful exercise. Classical allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage; speaking times continue to shrink as MPs compete in the attention economy.

Marriott contrasts Harry Truman, who ruled America during the peak of literacy, with the current incumbent. Truman ‘was the son of a livestock dealer in Independence, Missouri. And yet as an earnest and bespectacled schoolboy he spent great tracts of his time in the local library. “Watched over by a plaster bust of Benjamin Franklin,” Truman made his way past all the familiar landmarks of a twentieth century autodidact self-education: The Bible (which he claimed to have read through twice by the time he was twelve), Plutarch’s Lives, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato’s Republic, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Eventually, he read every single one of two thousand volumes stored in Independence’s library — including all the encyclopaedias. It’s an inspiring story but not at all a unique one.’

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is so averse to reading that aides recall that he cannot even make it through one-page memos; his speeches are notably repetitive and characterised by taunting and braggadocio, a reversion to the norms of the oral age. He is an almost Homeric figure, perhaps the first post-literate western leader.

In the new media ecosystem Marriott sees a reversal of the Enlightenment, epitomised by the likes of Candace Owens, who has ‘more followers on YouTube alone than the entire subscriber base of the New York Times’, a ‘one-woman nonsense machine’ who declares that ‘Stalin was Jewish, science is a “pagan faith” and the French Revolution was started by Jews to “bring down Christian empires”.’ He acknowledges, however, that at least she is no longer a flat earther although, as she has stated, ‘I’m not a round earther either’.

‘Well, it’s a start.’

For Marriott, ‘there is nothing inevitable or eternal about modern civilisation in all its desirable complexity and comfort’, nor is it written that it may survive ‘a world filled with demons, anti-vaccine conspiracies and “ways of knowing”’. Democracy followed the rise of literacy, and it may struggle to function in a world where the analytical way of thinking that comes with reading is alien to many voters.

While much of the most unenlightened rhetoric comes from the populist Right, the more mainstream cultural Left is terrified of appearing ‘elitist’, a charge often made to Marriott in interviews. To which, his only answer is: yes, I suppose.

‘Many of us are suspicious of hierarchies of cultural value,’ he writes: ‘To suggest that it is “better” to spend your day reading War and Peace than watching TikTok carries the dangerous ring of elitism. I was once reprimanded by a writer in a British magazine for my “belief that some writing is simply ‘better’”; a view, I was told, that is “inherently damaging, and marginalising”… A recent report issued by Britain’s most important cultural funding body, the Arts Council, warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’

It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20^th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy. As reading has declined, so the social gap has widened: iPad children tend to come from the poorest backgrounds, while many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access, and screens at the dinner table have become very non-U. Hierarchies grow starker when elites fail to promote high culture.

Yet the most startling thing about this book is how far even the nominally well-educated have fallen, so that ‘by the end of the twentieth century a college graduate born after 1969’ read less than someone born before 1950 with a basic level of education. Indeed, ‘nowadays many rich and highly educated people are much less well read than many members of the least privileged classes had been in the middle of the twentieth century.’

To me, that is the most salient and worrying trend: that people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture. I suspect that the crisis of faith in our institutions is driven not just by a sense that they are corrupt or biased, but that the people running them are not very smart. The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.

I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months starting later in September: if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not pay anything during this period, so please don’t end your subscription, otherwise I will have to go back to pushing trolleys at Sainsbury’s.

I’m taking the time out to concentrate on longer writing projects, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I will also be travelling around Britain a bit, although I’m still vague about dates; as I mentioned a few months back, this will include Birmingham, Leicester, the Manchester and Leeds areas, so if you’re from those parts of the world and want to meet, let me know.

I hugely enjoy writing a substack, but I think a break is probably necessary from time to time. In the distant past East Asian administrators would sometimes leave their positions to spend time contemplating in a monastery, a tradition which Lee Kuan Yew sort of followed by taking a sabbatical at Harvard (where he learned the valuable lesson that American elites believe all sorts of wacky stuff about the world).

I will post a few more articles before the pause, including a couple about Lee and Singapore, as well as the decline of literacy (I highly recommend James Marriott’s new book on the subject). I will also publish that long promised Ask Me Anything post, so if you have any more questions, you can send them by email, by messaging on substack, or in the comments, or via direct message on Twitter, or WhatsApp, Signal or carrier pigeon. (Not LinkedIn, though).

Over the summer we holidayed in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, which was lovely, apart from the endless queuing at borders, often for two hours at a time. Considering that they all speak the same language, have these countries ever considered joining into some sort of federation?

The last time I visited Dalmatia was in 1989, aged 11, too young to understand the danger the country was now in. This time around I read Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia, which describes first-hand the horror that followed. He recalls the menacing bonhomie of Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić when he went to interview him at his headquarters in Knin, close to where I was staying.

It is mid-morning, but as is my wont from the first morning following my arrival in a town like Knin, I am suffering from a slight hangover. Mladić, never quite able to discard a roguish smile, commands a minion to fetch coffee and refreshment. A few minutes later, the minion pours a coffee while Mladić distributes his homemade rakija. As he does, one of my companions, also still coming up for air from last night, issues a polite refusal. The general is momentarily perplexed and then humorously angry. For a moment, he booms, “I thought you were going to refuse my homemade, which is very funny because nobody refuses my homemade.” Our hangover is thus forced into oblivion. We raise our glasses and down what is undoubtedly one of the best homemades I’ve ever swallowed.

Mladić died last week, while serving a life sentence for war crimes; he and his compatriots committed terrible atrocities during the conflict, although the Serb enclave he inhabited was then effectively ethnically cleansed (having said that, please don’t start arguing about the Balkans in the comments - it will never end, and I don’t have strong opinions either way).

The coastline is beautiful, the sea perfect for swimming, but visiting inland Mostar was a particular highlight. The city attracts huge numbers of visitors from both the west and the Middle East, some of them enjoying a cheeky beer away from the view of the mosque. It must have the highest rate, per square metre, of Instagram girls anywhere on earth, all aiming at the perfect pout from the iconic bridge. If town planners followed my idea of basing architecture designs on Instagram usage, much of the world would look like the Bosnian city.

Mostar was famously damaged in the fighting between Muslims and Croats, and while the bridge has been replaced, many of the buildings are still empty shells riddled with bullets. It was lovely to hear the call to prayer as I ate delicious Turkish-influenced food on the terraces, pondering whether to start my future travelogue with ‘where east meets west’, but the surrounding area feels like it has quite a Northern Ireland vibe, with flags and graffiti making it clear whose villages it is.

I watched the first De Gaulle film this week, a two-parter that has taken France by storm. I absolutely loved it, finding it both moving and at times very funny, in particular the relationship between the French and British leaders, played superbly by Simon Abkarian and Simon Russell Beale (mostly in French). But then, I am extremely sentimental about French patriotism and military dash, like many of my countrymen. I think this all stems from my parents forcing us to watch Casablanca as children, where they cried throughout the scene where ‘La Marseillaise’ is sung in Rick’s Café. Vive La France!

It’s coming home

The lamest xenophobic joke in the world involves the theme that the French are ‘surrender monkeys’ and inept at war, bizarre considering that they are historically the most belligerent people in Europe. Why do you think all our military terms come from French? It’s because they successfully conquered England and formed a violent aristocracy for centuries.

On that subject, the Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in London and opens to the public next week. I saw the tapestry - strictly speaking, an embroidery - in Normandy in 2022, but if you don’t manage to get a ticket, there is a replica in Reading.

Most likely made in Kent, the tapestry remained in obscurity in Bayeux cathedral until its discovery by historians in the 1720s. It was twice almost destroyed during the Revolution, first by soldiers who wished to cut it up in order to cover an ammunition wagon, then by local zealots who planned to use it as confetti in some demented ‘festival of reason’; a courageous local official intervened and saved it.

Later, Napoleon became interested, seeing as it portrayed a successful conquest of England, and had it brought to Paris. Interest in the tapestry continued to grow and in 1816 Charles Stothard, a draughtsman for the Society of Antiquaries in London, was commissioned to make drawings and write a commentary. This he did; he also stole a bit and took it home, this chunk ending up with the Victoria and Albert Museum, who handed it back in 1871 (however, by that stage, the segment had been replaced so it was never sown back in).

The tapestry contains many strange scenes. Where William takes Harold to the hall in Rouen, below them is a naked man wielding a tool and working on a wooden object, perhaps a coffin. In another, a woman named as Elfgifu appears with a priest placing a veil on her, and beneath them is another naked man with an erection mimicking the priest’s action. It’s some sort of in-joke which will remain lost forever.

In the 1880s a group of British women, led by one Mrs Elizabeth Wardle, set out to make a replica for England, but because sexual mores had changed somewhat in eight centuries, one of the naked men had his genitals removed, and the other had some underpants helpfully put on.

Since the last round-up, I’ve written about the problem with prosecuting people just for supporting Palestine Action. I wrote about how social cohesion would be helped by not allowing violent men to be at liberty (it was later revealed that large numbers involved in the Henry Nowak disturbances had been reported for domestic abuse).

I wrote about the Greatest Norwegian, Harald Hardrada (free), and about the relative improvements in airline safety vs public safety. I appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast talking about Ann Widdecombe, and I wrote about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (also free).

I wrote about the Riddle facing new prime minister, and speculated as to why Manchester and Liverpool both have such strong musical traditions. Some of the replies make the plausible argument that in Manchester’s case it’s simply down to Tony Wilson, an interesting example of the Great Man of History theory.

It’s notable that, as much as I loved heavy metal as a teenager (okay, I still do), Birmingham has produced nowhere near as much popular music; maybe its car domination reduces the development of an urban music culture, and that’s just another downside we can blame on the automobile menace. (You can’t be a proper commentator until you can shoehorn all social ills into one of your pet obsessions).

On a similar note, I wrote about the historical North-South divide in England (free), and the overwhelming economic pull of London. I wrote about aircon during Britain’s intense heat wave, and apparently more deaths were recorded in Wallonia during the peak of June’s heat wave than on any day during the pandemic. I know that I have a slight tendency to pessimism, but I do find this all fairly alarming, especially after seeing wildfires in Croatia. And before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, yes we all cycled to the Balkans, obviously. Anyway, let’s hope those electric aeroplanes can be expanded rapidly.

I wrote about the fraying of the social contract, global migration in the 2020s, Ben Mcintyre’s Colditz, and the link between communication revolutions and the political variety.

I also wrote about Denmark, a country I hugely admire (free), although I should also give a shout-out to the marvellous Norwegian countryside. The view from the Oslo-Bergen train on its final approach really is heavenly.

Finally, August was dominated by the Jason Arday affair; in my piece I mentioned Marie Sophie Hingst, the German blogger who faked a Holocaust memoir, but she was not alone: many ‘misery memoirs’ turned out to be fraudulent, including two other Holocaust tales, one of which had the improbable story of a child being raised by wolves. From what I remember, many other books in that genre turned out to be rather expansive with the truth, so Arday’s story can be placed in that tradition.

People handle this sort of humiliation in different ways, but in an age where public shaming is the preferred method of moral enforcement, rather than any internal guilt mechanism, shamelessness is a bit of a superpower. The ability to ignore unwelcome attention and not abide by fickle and inconsistent public morality is an incredible strength; that in part explains the success of Donald Trump.

Elsewhere

Alice Evans on what Indian women made of life in Victorian England, and how much freedom their sisters had. She also wrote about non-western travellers and their views of how European treated women.

Fred Sculthorp on CourtNewsUK.

For instance, who can forget the recent story that broke courtroom containment concerning the pair of illegal migrants from Afghanistan, who raped a woman by knifepoint as she and her boyfriend lay stargazing in a park in Barking? Here’s another: “son murders mother in Haringey” would barely bat an eyelid as a headline. But what if you found out that after he had beaten her to death, he continued to paint her toenails, turned the decomposing body in the master bedroom into a dedicated shrine and used her credit card to see Tina: The Tina Turner Musical?

Many of you will have followed the discourse about ‘Woke 1’ being crazy, so it’s worth resharing this classic NS Lyons post about why it hasn’t gone away.

Henry Jeffreys on why alcohol is civilisation. I think the idea that bread and cities are a by-product of people trying to make beer, rather than the other way around, is very plausible. He also wrote about one of the greatest things in the world – French supermarkets. Vive Carrefour! Vive E. Leclerc!

Roger Moorhouse talks about life on board U-boats on the Subject to Change podcast. Riveting stuff, and terrifying. Perhaps the worst job in history.

Derek Hopper on how Thailand resisted colonisation.

In 1868, Mongkut extended invitations to British and French officials to observe a solar eclipse. This was a grand affair with pavilions and accommodation prepared for the attendees, the goal of which was to showcase Mongkut’s commitment to science. Mongkut accurately predicted the timing and location of the eclipse using a combination of traditional Thai timekeeping methods and Western astronomical techniques. According to some stories, his calculations were so precise that they trumped those of the French astronomers present.

The Siamese court knew what to perform to whom. France had long considered science to be the true marker of civilization, while Britain championed international law and free trade. Mongkut demonstrated Siamese civilization through measures that European powers used to justify colonization elsewhere

Will AI discover animal language? I’m sceptical, but a very interesting idea.

The new cancer vaccine looks very interesting. Jonathan Leaf writes about it here.

Nine out of 10 of Britain’s bestselling paperback novels feature the murder of a woman.

I only recently learned that Americans are still using purple hearts minted for the invasion of Japan. It’s why I didn’t find Christopher Nolan’s last film, Oppenheimer, that compelling, and felt that Harry Truman was the real star.

Alan Macfarlane, author of the immensely interesting The Origins of English Individualism as well as The Savage Wars of Peace, is a big social media figure in China.

How to build tunnels like Norwegians.

And how to act generously like Swedes: ‘In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin developed the modern three-point belt, and on August 13 of that year, the company sold the first car fitted with one, a PV 544, to a customer in Sweden. The invention is credited with saving more than one million lives, and Volvo later opened the patent to every competitor, rather than charging for it.’

I wrote about land acknowledgments last year and completely missed that the Goethe Institute did one for the ancient Slavic tribes of what is now Berlin.

A thread of prominent university architecture departments. Yep, as you’d expect.

A nice way of visualising Columbus’ voyages, literally into the unknown.

Finally…

Neil O’Brien on German idioms and terms, among them:

Verschlimmbesserung: an improvement that actually makes things worse

Fremdschämen: the cringe you feel on someone else’s behalf when they embarrass themselves.

Kummerspeck: “grief bacon”, the weight you put on from comfort-eating through emotional distress.

Torschlusspanik: “gate-shut panic”, anxiety, often about life milestones, that time is running out and the doors are closing.

Kopfkino: “head cinema”, the involuntary film your imagination screens for you, usually anxious or embarrassing scenarios playing on a loop.

Have a great day - and don’t forget to not unsubscribe!

Britain has always been famous for its comedy and political stability, an image we’ve done much to shed in recent years. As Fred Sculthorp wrote in a characteristically excellent report on Clacton in Essex, the country has become strange and unrecognisable in many ways, and not just due to demographic change. Fred was covering the recent by-election, which Nigel Farage called for the not very coherent reason that this would clear his name over allegations that he didn’t register donations. All the other parties boycotted the seemingly pointless contest, leaving comedy figure Count Binface to win over a quarter of the vote.

Binface, who has a manifesto full of ‘wacky’ proposals, is in the tradition of Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Party, but the tone is different, as is the target. For many on the Right, he’s a court jester who exists for the amusement of the political class, the ‘living avatar of Bloody Bonkers Brilliant Britain’, as Mary Harrington put it. Yet, as James Marriott argued, you don’t need to oppose the centrist-vibed politics to find Count Binface tiresome.

It has often been remarked that this tendency to unseriousness is connected to post-imperial decline. A nation that can’t be taken seriously shows itself superior to the world by laughing at it. I tend to agree. Certainly, self-deprecation often betrays inner unease. Britain resembles a star athlete gone to seed uncomfortably making jokes about his weight.

Worse, our national humour is increasingly laced with an unconvincing strain of smugness. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously over here in Britain!” is the message. “What must they make of this in America!”, someone will invariably chortle at election-time footage of a cabinet minister sharing a platform with a man in a fox costume. (Being funnier than an American is dubious grounds for self-congratulation.) I suspect that what we imagine looks like eccentric good humour to the rest of the world seems rather more tragic from the outside.

For the Pimlico Journal, Binface is pure nostalgia, a comfort blanket that allows people to avoid the reality that it’s no longer the 1990s and London doesn’t look like a Richard Curtis film. Peter Cook once said that ‘Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’, and my instinctive objection to this whimsical style - what one writer lovingly called ‘silly sausage Britain’ – is the air of helplessness in the face of very serious (but not hopeless) decline. This is not a game of cards, this is your life and mine.

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I now have three teenagers, the very idea of which makes me feel ancient, despite my good looks only improving with age. I’m very keen for them to work as much as possible, a feeling which obviously only grows stronger during the endless six weeks of the summer holiday, when one sees how much spare time teenagers actually have.

It’s not easy, as anyone with children that age will know. The number of teenagers in work has declined by almost 150,000 since 2023, while youth unemployment has peaked to levels last seen in 2011; close to a million people in the 16-24 age bracket are not doing anything. These are the so-called NEETs: not in education, employment or training

Commentators are often tempted to invent complex and counter-intuitive explanations for social phenomena, but in this case the major reason is quite obvious and boring: it’s very expensive to hire them. The Daily Telegraph quoted Alan Milburn, the former health secretary now leading a government review of Britain’s ‘youth worklessness crisis,’ who ‘agreed that higher taxes and Labour’s Employment Rights Act had helped fuel a “climate of difficulty” for employers trying to create entry-level jobs.’

In 2024, in her first budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased the rate that employers must pay in National Insurance for each worker, and also reduced the threshold from £9,100 to £5,000. While this mostly affects older workers, she also increased the minimum wage for 18- to 20-year-olds to £10.85 an hour, a 26 per cent rise, with a similar hike for those in the 16-17 age group. In total, over the past three years, the minimum wage for workers aged 18-20 has gone up by 33 per cent in real terms.

The Telegraph quoted restaurateur Tom Kerridge, who lamented that his business used to employ lots of 16 and 17-year-olds, but it was now too expensive to do so: ‘I always think it’s so hard to get into those first jobs when you’re very young, and I think they’re very beneficial. And we do see that often people come in, just do a couple of hours a week, and then they get the bug.’

Anecdotally I’ve heard similar stories, from employers in the hospitality industry. Successful businesses are bombarded with requests for work from conscientious, high functioning teens, and while they would love to recruit more, they can’t afford the artificially high wages.

I’ve argued before that the less academically inclined should be allowed to enter the workforce at a younger age, but the economy would also benefit from more young academic high-fliers working part-time in their teens. Daisy Christodoulou recently made the point that people who are better at school also tend to be better at practical work; it is also true that if you’re intelligent, diligent and conscientious, you’re likely to end up performing high-skilled and complicated tasks, but you’ll also be better at low-skilled, menial work. The top decile of 14-year-olds, the future straight A-students, could easily perform most unskilled, non-dangerous jobs as well as the average adult.

High-functioning teenagers make very desirable employees, the only section of the workforce with both positive traits but few options. Low wage employers aren’t concerned about skills, because almost everyone is ‘skilled’ enough to do the jobs they require. Instead they care about reliability; they just want someone who will turn up on time and not cause problems. The downside of employing graduates – a signal of reliability - is that they are often only looking for a temporary fix, and are likely to leave soon when something better comes along. Academically gifted teens, who aren’t yet on the career ladder, are better investments.

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Our reputations are hugely important, in some ways the most valuable thing we possess, and sudden public humiliation can see their value drop to nothing. A recognisable form of public humiliation has been a danger ever since printed media has existed; in 1765, Voltaire anonymously exposed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a self-described moralist, for having fathered five illegitimate children who he had placed in a foundling hospital, an effective death sentence.

Rousseau’s home was stoned by an angry crowd as a result, forcing him to flee Switzerland, his reputation in tatters. The Social Contract author, a notably self-pitying character with a persecution complex, struggled with what we’d now call ‘mental health problems’, and in our own age would have been able to leverage that to attract public sympathy, but this was less effective against 18th century mobs with pitch-forks. The gaze of unwelcome publicity has always been hard to bear.

Before the decline of the newspaper industry, the British tabloids could be extraordinarily cruel in their treatment of celebrities, or sometimes just ordinary people whose private lives had been exposed, with very little justification at ‘public interest’ except that it provoked prurient arousal. The threat of reputational destruction has become even more stressful since the advent of the internet, which reduces our ability to reinvent ourselves; it’s no longer tomorrow’s fish wrapper, but a permanent record.

Social media, by recreating the claustrophobia of the ancestral tribe but on a horrendous scale, also places huge psychological stress on those who have become the object of unwelcome attention, and who receive disproportionate punishment for supposed wrongdoing. In the 2010s, many were tormented for the smallest of infractions, indeed in some cases merely because of what they said or believed. ‘Cancelling’, whether for genuine misbehaviour or misspeaking, equates to the loss of reputation. Because shame evolved as a mechanism for social control within small groups, so public shaming before millions of newspaper readers, or billions of global social media users, always feels disproportionate.

This was what faced Jason Arday, the central character in a now-epic news cycle that began with a substack post and has run and run, its latest chapter seeing the US State Department issue a warning to a Flemish University.

It is obvious that, having been exposed, Arday was under immense psychological stress. His reputation was in tatters, and he faced problems that must have been heightened in his terrified mind; the sort of terrors that later always seem overblown. It must have been a torment, and in retrospect typical of the suicide risk that Leaf describes.

He wasn’t the first. In a recent piece for UnHerd, Samuel Rubinstein highlighted the case of German blogger Marie Sophie Hingst, who wrote a Holocaust memoir about her grandparents. In her blog, ‘Read On, My Dear, Read On’, Hingst ‘wrenchingly described how every year, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, they would sit in the darkness, waiting for all those relatives — 22, to be exact — who never came home. She kept in her pocket the yellow star which her grandmother had worn at Auschwitz. Hingst’s family was also blighted by a more recent tragedy: her mother, Rachel, had committed suicide. Hingst herself, however, led an altruistic life. She spent some time working at a hospital in an Indian slum. In Germany she ran sex education classes for Syrian refugees. She was thoughtful, sensitive, and interesting. People wanted to hear her story, and she enjoyed telling it.’

Of course they did; the only problem was that it was all made up. She never did any of those things; none of her family died in the Holocaust, and none of the names she listed were real people. She wasn’t even Jewish. After being exposed by Der Spiegel in 2019, Hingst killed herself a month later, aged just 31.

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Truth and justice are synonymous, or related, in the human mind, and it is actually quite unusual to care about truth in a literal, scientific sense, irrespective of the social consequences. It is a characteristic found in nerds, and especially those on the autistic spectrum; only a small number of people obsess about the objective truth, and they often repulse the rest of society as a result. For most, a sense of pravda is more important, as is the approval of peers, and they also tend to question the intentions of people making dissenting claims. If you’re seeking knowledge which might disrupt social harmony, you’re probably a bad person with ulterior motives, and your arguments will be mentally screened out by people who don’t wish to expend energy on issues that don’t concern them.

It is only with the advent of universities that we developed institutions committed to finding empirical truths, and only relatively recently that open inquiry was permitted in sensitive areas; Catholics, Jews and Nonconformists were still excluded from Oxford and Cambridge until the 1870s, while most Ivy League colleges were originally established along sectarian lines.

In recent years there has been a notable return to older concepts of quasi-religious tests in academia, and a key driver in the upheavals within American universities during the 2010s was a search for pravda over istina. This resulted in more than 200 professors losing their jobs, more than during the Red Scare (admittedly from a far larger pool). Many were ruined simply for questioning the prevailing wisdom, and in some cases the hysterical drive for justice drove people to suicide. It was merciless.

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Gensfleisch had one last idea, however; for many years, coins had been made by a process called punchcutting, which allowed for machines to mass produce identical designs, and the German wondered if he could do the same with written texts. After five years of work Gensfleisch, or as he was better known, Gutenberg – he had adopted his mother’s maiden name, since his father’s meant ‘gooseflesh’ – made his breakthrough. In 1448 came the first printed book, and five years later a printed Bible.

Printing marked the end of the medieval era - the same year as that Bible appeared, Constantinople fell to an Ottoman force armed with cannon, ending the thousand-year eastern Roman Empire, while the century-long war between France and England, which began with longbows, ended in a hail of gunfire. It also came to transform Europe, allowing ideas to spread beyond the priesthood to inform a growing, literate middle class. At last, people were able to inform themselves about the world, understand how others saw things, and open their minds.

Of course, that wasn’t quite true; among the earliest and most popular printed books was Malleus Maleficarum, which warned of the dangers of witchcraft, and one effect of printing was to popularise growing hysteria about hexing, leading to the great witch hunts of the 16^th and 17^th century. As with so many horrific things we think of as medieval, like torture and bad teeth, this was more typically early modern. Printing also helped incite intense religious hatred, with numerous tracts demonising the other side of the culture war that erupted after Luther’s protest. Millions died in the conflicts that followed.

If 1453 marked an important transition, so did 2007, with the launch of the iPhone, the creation of another genius of German descent, Steve Jobs. Just as a clear line can be drawn between the first printing press and the conflict that overcame Europe a century later, so the invention of smartphones would spur the intensification of the culture war in the 2010s, most of all through the progressive-dominated social media site Twitter.

As with printing, social media helped promote the same sense of outrage and polarisation, and in many cases was linked to social unrest. As early as 2018, the New York Times was citing a study in Germany which found that towns with more Facebook activity also had more attacks on refugees, while the paper also linked the network with violence in Sri Lanka and Burma.

Much old media anxiety about Facebook was obviously driven by bitterness that the site had destroyed their ad revenue model; after all, newspapers and cable news channels have done their fair share to incite the public, and while the right-wing Fox network was perhaps the most egregious example from television, the New York Times did more than any other paper to intensify the culture war, driving the conflict over gender and whipping up anti-white rhetoric, self-righteously framed in the language of social or racial ‘justice’.

Yet while Facebook was viewed with suspicion as the forum for the discontented masses, Twitter radicalised the young elites, arguably a more dangerous social phenomenon, culminating in the disturbances of 2020.

This was not so much a cause for anxiety, so long as it was the correct form of radicalisation, but with Elon Musk’s acquisition the site has become a concern for politicians. Indeed, I don’t think it’s implausible that some western European countries will try to ban or in some way strangle the ridiculously renamed ‘X’ in the coming years, viewing it as a threat to the social order – even though, or perhaps because, it is the most representative of social networks. It’s indeed a true public square, and that is what worries the authorities - but it’s also true that they have quite reasonable gripes about this revolutionary and democratic form of communication.

I ended my paid subscription to Twitter, or X, about a year ago. I’d like to say it was out of some noble principle about inflammatory language, but it was mainly because the site began suppressing Substack links in 2023, although this eased off towards the end of 2025. Twitter used to supply about 20 per cent of traffic to my substack, but that fell to about 1 per cent or sometimes even 0 per cent. Even when the great khan Elon Musk retweeted me on one occasion, and the follow up tweet in the thread was a link to a substack article, it brought almost zero traffic.

For a writer, social media is primarily of use for self-promotion. Substack subscriptions are how I make a living, and since I’m writing for money rather than attention, there seems little point in sharing articles there. Some people like the fame you get from social media, but being a shy narcissist rather than the grandiose type, I don’t personally. As the old Chinese curse goes, may your name be trending on Twitter.

This seemed like a mistake on Musk’s part, whether it was done for sound business reasons or a spiteful desire to exclude rivals. Journalists, whether you loathe them or hate them, were the elite of Twitter, and making it pointless for them to share their work on the site is counter-productive. Many therefore left out of principle, which in turn was self-harming; it’s almost like that notion teenagers get that if you refuse to turn up to a party, your absence will be too much for the people who upset you. Instead, people just forget about you.

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Today Colditz is a name which evokes a certain idea of that conflict, our central civilisational story, passed down through films, television, novels and the amusingly bloodthirsty children’s comics that were still popular even when I was growing up. The tale behind the fortress, which was selected to hold difficult or valuable prisoners, is perfect material for Ben Macintyre, who has mastered the art of character-driven, engaging histories filled with drama and jeopardy. No summer holiday is complete without one, and I especially remember enjoying his SAS: Rogue Heroes one summer in the south of France, an increasingly tattered paperback that went through everyone in the villa over a week and became the main subject of conversation.

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle is similarly packed with of tales of derring-do, with something of the public-school adventure story about it too, that tradition which runs from Tom Brown to Harry Potter, except that the errant boys in question are occasionally shot. It’s also a curious insight into European relations, Colditz being a United Nations in miniature, housing French, Belgians, Dutchmen, British and Commonwealth, Poles and Yugoslavs, and later Americans.

Each nation was confined to separate quarters, and while the Germans tried to keep them apart, they eventually gave up. ‘National rivalries persisted, but some were rather surprised to discover how much they had in common,’ Macintyre writes. ‘The Poles and the French are excellent fellows,’ one British inmate said: ‘They are all of the difficult-prisoner type, but difficult prisoners make interesting prison companions.’

The Polish contingent was led by General Tadeusz Piskor, sent to Colditz for refusing to shake the hand of a German camp commandant, and the prison’s head of security wrote that ‘the Poles seethed with hatred for us.’ They weren’t the only ones, since the fortress had been especially marked for difficult prisoners and deutschfeindlich – those considered unfriendly to the Germans.

The British and Poles especially got on, and Macintyre describes how on one occasion ‘the British were settling into their new quarters when they heard a scratching at the door, which swung open to reveal four smiling Polish officers carrying several large bottles of beer’. They had worked out how to use the locks, and ‘a small party now took place, conducted in fractured English, with snatches of French and German, the founding ceremony of an enduring Anglo-Polish alliance in Colditz.’

From the start, the British and Poles had together worked to build a tunnel under the canteen, ‘a genuinely communal effort’ in which ‘a team of forgers and tailors set to work making civilian clothes, fake passes and maps for the twelve designated escapers’, a mix of British and Poles. A German sentry, bribed to look the other way, had informed his superiors, but it would not be the last international effort to escape from the great fortress.

While most nationalities rubbed along, and ‘everyone liked the Yugoslavs’, the French ‘were aggrieved that the Poles got on better with the British; the Poles felt that the French had failed to put up sufficient resistance to Nazi invasion; the Belgians resented being thought of as more or less French; the British simultaneously admired and distrusted the French, knowing that many remained loyal to the puppet Vichy regime in unoccupied France.’

In many ways the camp lived by a strangely chivalric moral code, which belied the all-out war of extermination raging around them. Officers gave their word, or parole, that they wouldn’t try to escape, a custom that dated back to medieval warfare; they were also allowed to borrow tools on the promise that they wouldn’t use them for that purpose. Some officers were able to enjoy parole walks under guard. No one ever broke their word. At the same time, everyone was trying to escape.

The man in charge of preventing that, security officer Reinhold Eggers, was a stern but sympathetic character, who ‘retained all the attributes of the old-fashioned Prussian headmaster: an orderly, fastidious disciplinarian, as brittle and stiff as a stick of chalk, but even-handed, unflappable and insistent on good manners. A man of principle, he strongly disapproved of using violence against inmates, except in self-defence.’

As with many of the older German officers, men from a more civilised age, Eggers had a great fondness for British culture. His dissertation was on school reform in Victorian England and he’d organised an exchange in 1932 between Johann-Gottfried-Herder-Gymnasium in Halle and Cheltenham Grammar school, where he spent several months enjoying British culture (and beer).

Eggers liked to wander into the British quarters and talk about his time at Cheltenham, but he was always looking for clues suggesting escape plans. The French called him Tartuffe, after a famously hypocritical character in a Molière play, which he took as a compliment, signifying that he didn’t show his true feelings. The other jailers all acquired nicknames; Martin Schadlich, ‘an indefatigable sleuth’, was La Fouine, ‘the weasel’ to the French, and Dixon Hawke to the British, after a fictional detective. The guards were called the ‘ferrets’ and given such names as Bigbum, Dopey, Pieface, Tiger, Cheese, Snuffler, Eggs, Auntie and Bastard. ‘Goon-baiting’, winding up the guards, was a daily goal.

At Christmas 1940 the Germans gave their prisoners wine and beer, while Eggers was sent real coffee beans, ‘the last of it I saw for years’, he later recalled. He wrote that ‘The Polish officers were top in morale at the end of that year 1940, although they had been in our hands for over fifteen months. The French were still solemn after their defeat. The British were digging themselves in.’ Macintyre adds: ‘They were also exploring how to dig themselves out.’

The most persistent escapee was Michael Sinclair, a colonel’s son who had been captured in France aged just 22; having read modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was fluent in German and also a talented amateur actor. On one occasion, in September 1943, Sinclair had attempted to escape by dressing up as one of the senior guards, with an Iron Cross made from zinc from the roof, his headgear forged out of a RAF cap using felt and string, the pistol holder cardboard. Eggers was amused enough by the attempt to keep the uniform as a souvenir; despite his repeated attempts at escape, the Germans liked Sinclair and nicknamed him the Der Rotefuchs, ‘red fox’, as a term of endearment. Eggers dubbed him the ‘Great Escaper’ and admired his persistence.

Another British officer keen to get out was Airey Neave, who had been especially disappointed by his war so far. After Eton and Oxford, Neave had hoped for military honour or at least a heroic death but ended up in a searchlight battalion. In the battle for Calais a stray bullet, perhaps British, bounced off the pavement and hit him in the chest, missing his heart by half an inch. He collapsed and an hour later awoke to find ‘a huge man in German uniform and a Red Cross armband put[ting] me gently on a stretcher’. The author notes that ‘Neave was taken prisoner having fired only one shot, at a spotter plane, and missed’.

The most famous prisoner was Douglas Bader, the literal poster boy of the Royal Air Force. ‘He was supremely brave, able to inspire others to feats of courage they never dreamed possible,’ Macintyre writes, ‘but he was also arrogant, domineering, selfish and spectacularly rude, particularly to those he considered of lower status.’ Bader was a deeply resentful men, and ‘at public school he was once beaten up by Laurence Olivier, after he bowled out the future actor in a cricket match. He masked his loneliness with bluster, aggression and exhibitionism.’

In 1931 he was in a Bristol Bulldog biplane and attempting a low roll over Woodley Aerodrome in Berkshire when his left wing clipped the ground and the plane somersaulted. Pulled from the wreckage, Bader would have died had a civilian not held onto his severed femoral artery; he was also lucky in that he got to hospital just before Leonard Joyce, the pioneering surgeon, was set to head home. Bader survived, but his legs were both amputated. Afterwards he wrote laconically in his diary: ‘crashed low-rolling near ground. Bad show.’

With his prosthetic legs Bader was able to drive a modified car, play golf and cricket, even dance, but the RAF would not let him fly despite his repeated requests. They relented with the onset of war, and during the battles of France and Britain Bader distinguished himself, developing new ambushing techniques using the sun to his advantage, and shooting down 20 enemy fighters.

By early 1941 he was the first sanctioned poster boy, photographed alongside his Spitfire, pipe in fist, ‘the very incarnation of determination to overcome the odds’. Forced to bail out over occupied France in August 1941, he was treated courteously by the Germans, who even invited the RAF to send replacement legs - ‘Operation Leg’ was duly launched when a British bomber was given safe conduct to fly over Saint-Omer and drop a new prosthesis. After two escape attempts he was sent to Colditz, but even here he was ‘deluged with requests from local bigwigs who wanted a chance to see him’.

Yet the private man didn’t match the public persona. Bader treated ground crews with ‘withering superiority’ and they detested him. In Colditz he was allocated a ‘diminutive spectacled medical orderly’ from Renfrewshire called Alex Ross, who had to carry his spare legs. Ross never recalled him ever saying please or thank you, and later said: ‘I know he was a very brave man, but he could also be a monster.’

Remarkably, Bader also demanded a part in the escape plans, and raged at the committee when they pointed out the obvious flaw: ‘Do you realise that the government at home would rather me back than all the rest of you put together?’ The escape committee sent a message to London suggesting a light aircraft on the autobahn to rescue him, and amazingly ‘MI9 did not dismiss this barmy idea out of hand. The government wanted Bader back in Britain, and many in Colditz would have been happy to see him go.’

Yet the British had little initial success in escaping, and Frenchman Alain Le Ray was the first to make it out, on April 11, 1941. Having mugged someone along the way, he would have faced the death penalty if caught, and near to the Swiss border was chased by German border patrol and ended up doubling back and hiding in the undergrowth by a railway station. After a guard blew his whistle, Le Ray jumped over the tracks in front of the train, climbed onto the front, curled up between the headlights and clung on, his feet angling inches above the rail. He had spent just 46 days in Colditz.

The French scored another home run with Pierre Marie Jean-Baptiste Mairesse-Lebrun, ‘cavalry officer, aristocrat, Olympic show jumper, polo champion, holder of the Légion d’honneur and the Croix de Guerre’ and ‘by some distance the most elegant prisoner in Colditz.’ With his impeccable uniform, deep set eyes and swept back hair, one British prisoner remarked that he ‘gave the impression he was at his best in the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Élysées’. He had even designed a civilian suit out of expensive flannel pyjamas sent from Paris, while his cravat was Givenchy.

Two weeks after spending 21 days in solitary for trying to escape, Mairesse-Lebrun was among a group being marched to the enclosure for daily exercise; for an hour they played leapfrog, until one Lieutenant Pierre Odry went to the urinating ditch by a wire, turned around, cupped his hands, allowing Mairesse-Lebrun to sprint towards him and soar ‘gracefully over the top of the wire’. He raced towards the park wall as sentries opened fire.

After three months walking, he got to the Saxon city of Zwickau, stole a bike and headed down the autobahn ‘bare-chested in the sun, like a German on holiday’. On the opposite side, he noticed troops were heading to the eastern front - it was June 1941 and Barbarossa had just been launched. After knocking out a German officer, the Frenchman went wandering through the trees until he saw a girl carrying a pail of milk. ‘Don’t be afraid’ he told her ‘I’m a French officer. Am I in Switzerland, or Germany?’

‘But monsieur, I am Swiss. You are in Switzerland’.

Back in Mairesse-Lebrun’s cell, the Germans found a packed suitcase with a label attached. ‘If I succeed, I would be grateful if you would arrange for my personal possessions to be sent to the following address… May God help me!’ Incredibly, they did, and his elegant prison wardrobe soon arrived at his home in Provence.

The castle was a society in miniature. The German guards even had their own in-house journal Das Abwehrblatt (Security news), featuring articles about escape attempts and how to stop them. Eggers became a regular contributor.

Among the prisoners, Colditz especially came to mimic the British class system. The officers set up exclusive clubs, with names like the House of Lords or the Kindergarten, and there was a poker club full of ‘White’s Club types’. The Old Etonians were especially clannish and even went to the toilet together, while Colditz even had its own branch of the Bullingdon Club, the ruckus Oxbridge society famous for smashing up restaurants. There also was a lot of public school-type humiliation, including a bogus medical examination with officers dressed in fake German uniforms, who ordered newcomers to drop their trousers and told them they had venereal disease.

At one point there was even a rebellion by the British orderlies, who went on strike and declared that ‘they would take orders from no one but the Germans’. While the revolt eventually fizzled out, ‘it left a residue of mistrust. For Eggers, the incident offered a fresh insight into the British class system, and an opportunity that might be exploited.’

The British were also notably cold to Birendra Nath Mazumdar, at the time the only Indian officer in the British Army. One of them, Harry Elliott, even accused him of spying and was punched as a result. Despite Mazumdar’s support for Indian independence, he refused German attempts to turn him – for all his dislike of the British, he had sworn an oath.

There were also deepening divisions between the British and French, which soured in July 1940 following Mers-el-Kebir, and also among the French themselves, divided between the Vichyites and Free French, some of the former displaying a large poster of Petain in their quarters.

By the end of June 1941, the French contingent included 80 Jewish officers, among them Robert Blum, classical pianist and son of former prime minister Leon, and Elie de Rothschild from the famous dynasty. Some senior French officers demanded that Jewish compatriots be segregated, and the Germans were happy to oblige; they were moved to an attic that was immediately nicknamed the Ghetto.

‘Many of the British were astonished and appalled to discover that some of the French shared the anti-Semitism of the Germans,’ Macintyre writes, especially Neave, who wrote how ‘the behaviour of their fellow officers in a fascist prison camp seemed to me outrageous.’

‘To demonstrate solidarity with the Jews, the British ostentatiously invited them to dinner in their mess. Neave gave the first political speech of his life to the assembled Jewish prisoners in the Ghetto, denouncing the racial discrimination’. The address was ‘received with applause’ and every week afterwards he attended ‘splendid suppers cooked by an expert Jewish chef’. Even Eggers was embarrassed by the affair.

By the end of July 1941, the prison had 500 officers, half of them French, with 150 Poles, and around 60 British. There now arrived 68 Dutchmen, among the 15,000 soldiers captured after their surrender the previous year; most had been freed after signing a pledge to take no further part in the war. These were the ones who had refused.

The Dutch were Eggers’ favourite. ‘They were model prisoners. They had no orderlies of their own, but kept their quarters clean themselves. Their discipline was faultless, their behaviour on parade exemplary. They dressed smartly at all times.’ As Macintyre put it: ‘The Dutch, in short, behaved as the British ought to.’

But Eggers soon discovered that they were just as hostile and dedicated to escape, ‘highly organised, and particularly adept at picking locks. Many spoke German. Their uniforms were almost identical, in shape and design to those of the Wehrmacht, a similarity that would prove exceptionally useful. The politeness was a front.’

Lieutenant Hans Larive was an especially capable Dutch officer and skilled at getting information out of people. Questioned by the SS, he had managed to make his interrogator let slip that there was no border control in one part of the Swiss frontier, the Ramsen salient. The Dutch shared this information with the international escape committee; they had also generously allowed other nationalities to use their tunnel, hidden under a manhole. ‘Larive’s accidental discovery of the unguarded backdoor into Switzerland, gleaned from a foolishly talkative SS officer, would prove to be the single most valuable item of escape equipment in Colditz.’

On August 15, 1941, Larive and another Dutchman, Francis Steinmetz, hid under a manhole cover while a fellow officer pretended to escape through a wire, shouting at the distance to create the impression that the two men were already on the run. After nightfall they sneaked out, heading to Dresden and then Nuremberg, pretending to be immigrant workers. They hid in a graveyard only to find it full of couples, so they pretended to join in, ‘making loud smacking noises to imitate passionate kisses’.

The two Dutchmen reached Switzerland and from there headed to London where they were debriefed by British intelligence and to their astonishment introduced to Queen Wilhelmina, ‘a small, dumpy woman, sixty-one-year-old, and badly dressed’, to whom they gave a message of loyalty from her officers in Colditz: ‘After the audience, we turned into the next bar and had a stiff drink.’

Boredom and despair were the worst enemies of the Allied prisoners, and hours between meals and roll calls were worn away in what one inmate describes as a cycle of ‘smoking, sleeping and self-abuse’. The lack of women was an obvious problem and worryingly, Padre Ellison Platt noted, books by Oscar Wilde and Frank Harris, purveyors of ‘perverse sexualism’, were being handed around. A few French officers were openly gay and demanded ‘Quels sont les garcons?’, but ‘the British did not share that attitude. Still, Padre Platt worried that ‘homosexualism has occupied an increasingly large place in contemporary prison humour’.

Some, remarkably, were able to find opportunities with the opposite sex: Czech pilot Cenek Chaloupka, nicknamed ‘Checko’ by the British, was a notable Lothario who had won medals with the Czech, French and British air forces; he used to point at them and joke that ‘this is for loving a blonde, this is for loving a brunette, this is for loving a redhead’. During his stay he developed an attraction for 19-year-old dental assistant Irmgard Wernicke, and the feeling was mutual. He feigned dental emergencies to see her, and a fellow prisoner said that ‘Checko managed to get to the dentist five times, by smashing a few teeth so badly on rocks that they needed a series of treatments’. The things men do for love.

There was also despair. One officer tried to castrate himself. A Canadian airman became obsessed with releasing his wife from their marriage and slit his wrists. He begged the guards to shoot him; eventually he cut his throat with a broken bottle and was moved to a psychiatric ward.

The Poles got through it by making illicit alcohol, mixing sugar and yeast with ersatz jam, mashed fruit and vegetables. It was left in a warm cupboard to ferment for six weeks, ‘being distilled with a rustic Liebig condenser constructed from stolen toilet piping, to produce a clear alcohol of 120 degrees proof’, then flavoured with whatever was available. This ‘Jam Alc’, nicknamed ‘Glenbucket’, resulted in ‘blurred vision, vomiting, nightmares, black teeth, a swollen tongue’ and violent headaches. Left overnight, it would eat through an enamel cup.

On New Year’s Eve, 1941, the prisoners sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and then the various national anthems until they ended up in tears, especially the Poles (conforming to national stereotypes). Then 200 prisoners formed a vast conga line.

By now the French had 10 home runs, the Dutch four and Poles one. The British, like the Belgians, had yet to achieve any, despite 35 attempts, but this was soon broken by Neave, who escaped with Dutch officer Anthony Luteyn in the middle of a theatrical production. The two men spent several hours wandering around Leipzig, where they took refuge in a stuffy cinema and watched newsreels of Rommel’s victories, joining with the audience in singing ‘We Are Marching Against England’. At one point on their journey, an SS officer in spotless uniform summoned them to his train carriage and asked ‘are you Jews’? Certainly not, replied Luteyn, we are Dutch. Later they were interrogated by two Hitler Youth armed with truncheons, who were asking too many questions; the escapees were ready to kill them, but the adolescents were convinced by their explanations and cycled off.

Luteyn and Neave reached the border with Switzerland, at a deserted village where they saw a night guard with a gun over his shoulder. Neave recalled that ‘my heart was beating so I could hardly breathe’. The guard unslung his rifle, revealing the long green coat and pointed hat of the Swiss army; he gave them a broad smile, and ‘with shouts of joy we flung ourselves upon him’. The three men clasped each other and ‘danced in the snow, pirouetting first one way and then another. The guard shouted merrily, as if he was the most delighted man in the world’.

The technology involved in escape plans was extensive, and Eggers was especially impressed by the French tunnel, ‘which extended for 44 metres from the top of the castle to close to the ravine, with electrical flashing lights, a pumped ventilation system using tins joined together as ropes, and a track and trolley to remove debris.’ Even in prison, no one can beat the French when it comes to infrastructure. Their quarters were also superbly maintained, and British POW Dick Howe said that ‘the French have a flair for comfort and convenience’.

Sometimes, however, the tunnelling didn’t go quite to plan. Count Philippe de Liedekerke, an aristocratic Belgium Army major who would later escape, had joined the British SOE and parachuted into his occupied homeland three times before his capture. At one point he was having his morning bath in the castle when a brick flew out of the wall and landed on his stomach, followed by ‘three sweaty, dusty, half-naked Frenchmen’.

Then there were the gizmos. Actor Desmond Llewelyn was a prisoner in the officers’ camp at Laufen in Bavaria, and must have handled some of the gadgets which also turned up in Colditz. The character he made famous, ‘Q’ from James Bond, was a fictionalised version of ‘Clutty’, or Christopher Clayton Hutton, who invented escape kits for downed airmen, including maps printed on silk with permanent ink that could be folded inside chess pieces or boot heels. Of 35,000 Allied troops who made their way to safety either from captivity or being shot down, about half were carrying one of Huttons’ maps.

MI9 sent escape aids into packets sent by family members, and also received help from various British companies. John Waddington allowed real cash to be included among Monopoly money sent to prisoners; Wills the tobacco company customised tins with escape kits.

British military intelligence were also helped by the prescence of Julius Green, a Jewish dentist from Glasgow. The inmates loved ‘Toothy’, or ‘Toothwright’ as they called him, and lacking gas for pain relief, Green used humour as the best way of preparing his patients. Not everyone appreciated the humour, however.

Green didn’t know why he had been sent to Colditz, and while it might have been because he was Jewish, it was also perhaps that he had once told a German interrogator that the British had discovered a revolutionary way to send messages, ‘by crossing carrier pigeons with parrots and giving them verbal messages’. The man had credulously reported this to his commanding officer and was unamused when told it was a typical British joke.

It was just as well that he had been sent there. Green called himself ‘a devout and practising coward, a short-sighted, flat-footed dentist with a tendency to overweight’, but this was camouflage, Macintyre writes. Green was working for British intelligence, having been approached by a subaltern while in another camp, sending messages back after gathered information from patients, including bombing targets.

If he was caught, there was only one outcome, and indeed as the war turned against the Nazis, their inhumanity escalated. On October 18, 1942, Hitler issued Kommandobeffel, commando order, a breach of the Geneva Convention, stating that any allied commandos found out of uniform were to be executed. Any German officer who failed to carry out executions would be punished. Around the same time, the survivors of Operation Musketoon, British commandos captured in Norway, were sent to Colditz before being transported to Berlin where they were murdered by the SS.

For some the castle, run by the German Army rather than one of the more fanatical organs of the Nazi state, was a refuge. Lieutenant Kat Silverwood-Cope, discovered in Warsaw and accused by the Gestapo of spying, had been locked up in Pawiak prison, ‘a place of unspeakable cruelty,’ until the Army interceded and likely saved his life by having him sent to Colditz.

Eggers at first refused to believe the officer’s description of Pawiak, where he described ‘the most dreadful things: Jews pushed down under manhole covers into drains full of dirty water and left to drown; dogs set on prisoners… prisoners beaten and hung by their wrists’. For the ageing German officer, it was a shocking revelation: ‘It was the first information that I had personally had from first-hand sources, of what to me had till then been only rumours’.

Macintyre writes that ‘Eggers was a prig, but he was neither a heartless man nor a stupid one. A small worm of doubt burrowed into his soul: not only could Germany lose the war; she might deserve to.’ Yet when some officers refused to salute the Germans and a Belgian Lieutenant was sentenced to death, the punishment was commuted by Hitler of all people – not someone normally known for his clemency.

For some, there was hope of leaving. Mazumdar was taken to Berlin to meet Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the pro-German Indian Legion, but still refused to go against his oath to King George. Seeing that a colonial POW camp would be easier to escape from, and largely shunned by his British comrades, he went on hunger strike and successfully made the Germans concede his demand to move.

The British who had mocked him now greeted him as a hero; Harry Elliott, who had once accused him of spying, now apologised and extended an invitation to stay with his family after the war. The escape committee gave Mazumdar a present of an ‘arse-creeper’, a rectal tube used for concealing items, filled with German banknotes, ‘a gesture of racial solidarity that was heartfelt, if somewhat unusual’.

Just as he hoped, Mazumdar soon escaped from the camp in France by jumping off a train, but was caught by the Gestapo. He assumed that he would be shot but was taken to Frontstalag 153, near Chartres, alongside other colonial prisoners, guarded by Algerian troops working for the Germans.

Back in the camp, meanwhile, Alex Ross was approached by one of the friendlier German officers and told: ‘Good news, Ross. You’re going home’.

‘No, you’re bloody not,’ Bader told him. ‘Look here, Ross, you came here as my lackey and you will stay with me as my lackey until we are both liberated. That’s that.’ Then he stomped off; Ross couldn’t believe how selfish he could be.

Mazumdar undertook a second escape after cutting his way through wires, along with a Sikh cavalryman called Daryao Singh. The two Indians, who must have been rather conspicuous in Nazi-occupied Europe, trekked 900 km over six weeks, helped by French peasants along the way, who offered them food and shelter, eventually crossing into Allied-occupied Italy.

While the two Indians were able to slip away, Sinclair’s seventh attempt at escape saw him get as far as the Dutch border, where he was stopped because the guard thought that he didn’t look German: ‘He told us that my face and hat had aroused his suspicions as they did not look Teutonic.’

The nature of the prison began to change when the Dutch contingent left in June 1943, the entire population turning out to wave them off. The French and Belgians were sent to Lubeck camp a few weeks later, the French handing their secret radio over to their British comrades.

Colditz now became a British prison, and the hierarchy of rank grew stricter. ‘The Dutch Hawaiian band, the French cuisine and the Polish choir were gone. The informal cultural osmosis between nationalities was over, as was the fruitful Anglo-Dutch partnership and the daily babble of diverse languages in the inner courtyard. Padre Platt noticed that as an all-Anglo prison, the place seemed more cliquey, with “small friendship groups, complete in themselves and almost exclusive.”’

Eggers, a cosmopolitan and cultured man working on behalf of a xenophobic and thuggish regime, lamented ‘the end of Colditz as an international camp’.

Eggers now longed for the war to end. Secretly he was listening to BBC, but he and other officers were under orders to ‘keep up appearances no matter what the morale of our men and no matter what the news’. He had other reasons to lose hope: in May 1943 his only son, a 23-year-old Luftwaffe pilot, was shot down and killed. Eggers told no one and kept up his duties.

On 8 August 1944, a new order was issued that escapers would be shot on sight, yet by the autumn there was also a ‘strange new gentleness between some of the guards and guarded’. The ‘goon-baiting’ died out, and Eggers and the others found that the British now treated them with kindness. Rudolf Denzler, a Swiss intermediary, noticed that ‘as the war worsened for the Wehrmacht, fewer incidents took place and a spirit of comradely consideration developed.’ Many officers of the regular army had resigned themselves to defeat, but some die-hard Nazis said they would shoot the prisoners if the war looked lost.

A final tragedy came on 25 September 1944, when Sinclair made a dash for the wire. The NCO on duty knew Sinclair and ‘greatly admired’ him. The Germans didn’t want to shoot the Red Fox, and the guard pleaded ‘it’s no use, Herr Sinclair’. He kept on running.

Ten prisoners were permitted to attend Sinclair’s funeral and Kommandant Prawitt provided a Union Jack and a wreath. The Germans played ‘Abide With Me’, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, the British national anthem and the Last Post.

No prisoner had escaped more often or spent so long inside Nazi territory, yet Sinclair never tasted freedom. Afterwards, ‘there were few recriminations against the Germans. The guards had fired reluctantly, after due warning, and certainly without intent to kill’. Macintyre even wonders if Sinclair was trying to get himself killed: ‘He had been born into a military family of rigid conformity for whom dying in battle, as his brother had already done, was the ultimate mark of manhood’.

‘Reinhold Eggers had spent years trying to stop the Red Fox from getting away. He was profoundly moved by Sinclair’s death, and reached back into Nordic mythology, and his own scholarship, for an adequate way to express his feelings: “If there is indeed a Valhalla for the heroes of whatever nation if the men who go there are men of courage and daring, if their determination springs from one true motive alone and that motive is love of their country – then in our own German tradition, Valhalla is the resting place of Lieutenant Mike Sinclair.’

At 11.30 on 14 April 1945, control of Colditz passed to the prisoners, much to Eggers’ relief. Some 1,400 confiscated objects were returned, while American Colonel Charles Schaefer, under sentence of death for obstructing a guard, was released.

The men began sowing flags to fly on the ramps. The Germans began to pack. The recently arrived Americans convinced them they had more to fear from diehard Nazi fanatics than their former prisoners, so the guards continued to patrol, a charade to fool the watching SS. The Army agreed to hand over the keys to the arsenal, on the condition that the prisoners only use the weapons if the SS attack; they duly abided by their promise.

The commandant was also handed a sheet of paper signed by several officers, which read: ‘In consequence of the correct behaviour of Lieutenant Colonel Prawitt and his officers in handing over the camp, no reprisal measures will be taken… every protection will be afforded them and their families, the NCOs and men will be released as soon as possible.’

Macintyre writes that ‘the document had no legal status and made promises that could not be guaranteed. At most it was a gentleman’s agreement, a last gesture of military decency in a prison that had always prided itself on being run by gentleman, for gentleman…. The inmates were acting as if they were still prisoners, while actually protecting their jailers against both the SS and the advancing American troops’.

Colditz was liberated on April 16, by which time many escapees had already had notable careers. Alain Le Ray had become chief of de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior; Mairesse-Lebrun joined the Allied landings in Provence. Airey Neave went on to become a Conservative MP, playing a pivotal role in Margaret Thatcher’s rise before his assassination by INLA terrorists in 1979. Six years before that, another inmate, Pat Reid, made an appearance on This is Your Life, where the surprise guest was Reinhold Eggers.

Poor Alex Ross, having endured both Colditz and Bader, finally returned home to Scotland. Soon afterwards, he received a phone call and picked up to hear the famous airman’s voice. Finally, he thought, he had called to express his gratitude.

Instead, Bader barked: ‘Have you got my legs?’ Ross politely explained that they were only allowed a single suitcase and there wasn’t enough room to take them back.

‘You’re a cunt,’ Bader replied, and hung up.

Some 14 per cent of Hondurans live there, too, about 1.6 million people, a third of whom came during the same period.

In 2022 alone, 1.4 per cent of Bhutan’s population moved to Australia.

Around 1 per cent of New Zealanders also move there each year.

But twice that many arrive in New Zealand, mostly from east Asia.

At least one in 20 Romanians have settled status in Britain.

Around one in 500 people in Ireland are Pakistani arrivals from the last two years.

One in twenty people in Canada are immigrants from just one year in the 2020s.

Around a quarter of Cubans have left in the last five years.

The Indian population in Lithuania has grown six-fold since 2020.

So many have arrived in neighbouring Latvia that cricket is the fastest growing sport.

In Malta, foreign nationals comprised just 3 per cent of the population in 2005, but 35 per cent today.

So many sub-Saharan Africans have made a home in Morocco that people there post nostalgia videos about the good old days and warn of a ‘great replacement.’

The number of Nepalese workers in Romania has nearly doubled in just two years, reaching almost 40,000.

Serbia is to issue 100,000 work permits this year, almost all from the developing world, with countries such as Egypt and Ghana expressing an interest.

Belarus’s dictator has proposed inviting 150,000 Pakistani labourers.

Up to 5,000 East Timorese now live in County Tyrone.

The whole world is on the move.

The term ‘Boriswave’, used to describe the migration surge following lockdown, first arose online in right-wing circles, and despite attempts to make the term impermissible, it eventually became mainstream, even among Labour politicians. People of all political persuasions have come to use the phrase; it’s hard to taboo a term out of existence when it describes such a notable and seemingly inexplicable change, and such curiosities as the appearance of Tamil shop staff in rural Wales.

The numbers behind that change are eye-watering. In the year to June 2024, Britain issued 547,000 work visas, 530,000 study visas and 84,000 family visas, plus 813,000 extensions for those whose permits were soon to expire. Family visa awards alone went up by a third. This was driven by a dubious understanding of economics, and it’s most likely turned out to be a net negative for the country’s finances, many of the new arrivals being low-skilled, low-earners. Most of all, though, it was driven by a strange naivety about migration flows and how they actually work.

Yet for all the anger directed at the Conservative Party, Britain wasn’t alone, and in 2023 one third of OECD countries experienced their highest ever immigration totals. Lockdown accelerated global movement, in part because western governments panicked about wage inflation, but also because increased communications technology furthered the horizon of migrants. Whether it’s a simple mobile phone, WhatsApp or TikTok, tech increases an individual’s likelihood to move, by creating both a greater familiarity with the West and also a stronger link with the homeland for those who have moved, so reducing the homesickness factor. Gone are the days when Irish emigrants would have an ‘American wake’ before setting off, the likelihood being that they’d never see many relatives again. Yet many policy-makers remain stuck with an essentially nostalgic view of the process, when global migration in the 2020s is like nothing else before. The whole world is on the move.

The central fact of migration is that it is heavily path dependent, an idea laid out many years ago in Paul Collier’s Exodus. The number of people willing to move, in a world where travel is relatively cheap and safe, where wages are far higher elsewhere and established communities have already settled, is vast. This has already been illustrated by the natural experiment of North Cyprus, an unrecognised state in which citizens have the right to move to a richer country (Britain), and in which citizens of a poorer country (Turkey) have the right to move to. As a result, more Turkish Cypriots now live in Britain than in Cyprus, where they are outnumbered by Anatolian Turks.

This also has enormous consequences for the countries migrants move to, which start to resemble the country they moved from, and also suffer from increased social and political stress. To quote another great thinker who has tackled the immigration issue (me), in a world of open borders ‘people would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.’ I wrote that in 2022; it’s arguable that we’ve seen this process accelerate just in the last four years.

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Almost two-thirds of people think that Britain’s social contract is broken. A majority believe that diversity is eroding our national identity, while a third think that some sort of communist revolution is needed. My sense from reading history is that this didn’t turn out too well on previous occasions, but it’s hard to dispute that there are reasons for public discontent.

Most people will be aware of a popular meme that first appeared in 2020, called the Social Contract, which illustrated a system designed to make a young taxpayer support old people, welfare recipients and immigrants. Poor ‘Nicolas, 30’ pays for everything and gains nothing in return. The meme was in existence for a few years before becoming the subject of various comment pieces in 2024; it’s now gone into the annals of meme history, but it was popular for a long time because it succinctly expressed an obvious truth - that the social contract has broken three unwritten rules.

A social contract should distinguish between citizens and foreigners, it should reward hard work and punish freeloading, and it should serve as a compact between the generations. Instead, it has become a Ponzi scheme which allocates resources based on supposed need.

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Indeed I think it’s probably the best country in the world, and I was glad that Britain was among seven neighbours which stood behind the little kingdom as it faced threats over Greenland. I even came close to putting a flag in my Twitter bio, but luckily the feeling passed. In that spirit, I’ve crafted a Buzzfeed-style listicle of reasons to love our friends from across the North Sea.

Denmark is the least corrupt country in the world. Danish diplomats at the UN in New York always pay their parking fines, which is often used as a test of how corrupt a political culture is. It’s the same with the London Congestion Charge, which is routinely ignored by most embassies, with pretty much every country having unpaid charges - except Denmark and Finland.

Denmark is such a high trust society that mothers leave their prams outside restaurants, with their babies inside (which I didn’t see, admittedly). People in most other countries find this baffling, which is why Anette Sorensen was arrested on holiday in New York in 1997 after leaving her 14-month-old girl in a stroller. It’s also far more common for children to walk the streets unaccompanied there.

On top of this, a quarter of Danish children aged between 7 and 14 have part-time jobs, something which is hugely important for later social development.

Denmark is the second happiest country in the world, according to those studies which I don’t really believe, usually because they place the Finns at the top. One reason for this may be the Danish tendency for what in Britain would be called the ‘mustn’t grumble’ mentality – which itself is a good thing.

Certainly, Danes are among the most optimistic people in Europe right now, although admittedly that’s not hard.

Denmark has given the highest proportion of its GDP to Ukraine since 2022.

Denmark is also second in the Atlantic Council’s Prosperity Index.

Although unable to resist, the Danes famously behaved with great humanity under Nazi occupation, managing to ferry almost their entire Jewish population to the safety of Sweden.

Denmark is a world leader in wind power – almost half of their energy now comes from renewable sources.

England and Denmark share a national epic, Beowulf. That is because, of course, the ancestors of the English arrived from Denmark and northern Germany, reinforced centuries later by the rather unwelcome arrival of the Vikings.

During their stay here the Danes added to our vocabulary, adding such words as scream, clasp, anger, bang, berserk, gruesome, hit, screech, scuffle, scream, slaughter, take and skull. It gives some indication of the richness of life that the Vikings brought with them.

The Danes conquered England in 1016, but it seems likely that some Danes fought on the English side at the Battle of Hastings 50 years later, sent by their king, Harold Godwinson’s cousin. There were also hundreds of ‘settled Danes’, the descendants of Vikings who lived in the Danelaw and were evolving into Yorkshiremen.

Although less combative than their Viking ancestors, they’re still a virile people, and today Danish men provide almost half of all non-British male ‘reproductive material’ imported into the country.

Denmark also provides 74 per cent of the insulin used by Americans.

The Danes are behind the 21^st century’s wonder drug, Semaglutide, probably the stand-out drug of the decade due to its huge success in reducing obesity as well as many other conditions. Its health benefits seem to be immense, and people who took the drug were also 33 per cent less likely to die from Covid, and 19 per cent less likely to die prematurely of all causes. The drug, under the brand name Ozempic, also seems to be associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s.

Semaglutide may be one of those rare drugs which drastically changes the face of society, quite literally, and it’s even suggested that the drug is saving airlines huge amounts of money because people weigh less. Novo Nordisk, the company which produced Ozempic, overtook the Danish economy in total value in 2024.

Injection moulding was first developed in the 19^th century but it was only during the Second World War that its use exploded. Soon after the conflict, furniture maker Ole Kirk Christiansen bought an injection moulding machine for the use of his small toy company, Lego, from leg godt – play well. Those of us raised in the 1980s will remember it as a big part of our childhood, but in recent years has grown to gigantic proportions. Millions of parents with depleted bank accounts and sore feet have the Danes to thank.

Denmark, being a sensible, moderate, grown-up nation, has a sensible, moderate, grown-up approach to immigration, unlike the extremists who rule most of western Europe.

This is downstream of their culture of frankness and honesty, and free speech: Denmark has had laws protecting free speech back as far back as 1849.

After Argentina invaded the Falklands, Denmark was one of five EEC countries to immediately agree to sanctions, although the other four all joined soon.

Denmark also had the highest casualty rate among American allies in Afghanistan, losing 43 servicemen in the war to avenge 9/11.

Eli Knudsen was the only Allied soldier to have died defending Greenland in the Second World War, fatally wounded in an exchange of fire with the Germans. A Danish sledge patrol was later captured, but two Danes managed to escape, along with a prisoner, and reported the German location to the Americans, who bombed it to smithereens.

In How To Be Danish, Patrick Kingsley wrote about Denmark’s 70 folk high schools, which are attended by about one in ten adults, of all ages. Indeed it’s not uncommon for people to die of old age while enrolled, which Danes apparently consider a good death. Perhaps there is some sort of social democracy version of Valhalla where those who died in the middle of adult education go to.

The Folk High School was the brainchild of Danish national hero Nikolai Grundtvig, who coined the concept of folkelighed, or what historian Knud Jespersen called ‘mutually committed community’. Jespersen wrote in A History of Denmark that ‘The key concepts in this were folkelighed, tolerance, openness and liberal-mindedness: the means were enlightenment and committed dialogue.’

Woke Denmark was the first country to abolish the slave trade, in 1792, although slavery itself wasn’t phased out until much later.

In 1989 Denmark also became the first country to legally recognise same-sex partnerships.

Copenhagen was recently rated as the world’s most liveable city.

It is also one the best cities for cycling, up there with Amsterdam, and as with Amsterdam, this was a conscious decision taken in the 1970s when car use was at its highest point – as were road deaths. They started with car-free Sundays, and after people saw how much it improved city life, they built hundreds of miles of segregated cycle lanes and now the majority of people cycle to work. We had a lovely ride around the city centre.

Danish teenagers drink more than any other country. As many will have seen in Another Round, a charming, heart-warming film about four middle aged men descending into alcoholism, Danish teenagers celebrate their exams with booze ups- the studenterkørsel - in which they celebrate by riding around in lorries, dressing up as sailors, and drinking loads of beer.

The Danes have the second largest homes in Europe, and the and the most number of second homes. If you’re into continental house porn on Instagram, you’ll have noticed how cheap they are.

Despite the Reformation and secularisation, the Danes maintain a calendar that was lost in England. They hold celebrations on Sankt Hans, as well as Fastelavn (Shrovetide), when they hit a barrel filled with sweets, Store Bededag (Great Prayer Day), held on the fourth Friday after Easter; and Mortensaften (St Martin’s Day) in November, when they eat duck (as is common in much of continental Europe).

There are usually flags involved, as the Danes love their flag. They apparently spend more per capita on flags than everyone else, and every birthday is celebrated with one; when we went to the excellent Kronborg restaurant in Copenhagen last week and mentioned that it was my son’s birthday, the waitress brought out a little Danish flag for the table, having apologised that there were no English ones available.

The Danes are notably impressive at building infrastructure. Perhaps most famously, because of the popular Nordi noir crime drama, the Øresund or Öresund Bridge, depending on which Scandinavian diacritic you prefer, links Denmark and Sweden both by road and rail. They’re also building a new high speed train between Copenhagen and Hamburg via another tunnel.

Land reclamation is another speciality, and when housing became sparse in Copenhagen, they decided to build a new island in the city. Indeed, while Denmark lost 40 per cent of its land to Prussia after the war of 1864, according to Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People, ‘by 1914, Denmark had effectively replaced the hectares it had lost to Germany with fresh, farmable arable land.’ If only the French had adopted this approach rather than whining about Alsace-Lorraine.

The secret to Denmark’s success is their high trust and sociability, and Booth also wrote how, ‘according to the Danish think tank Mandag Morgen, they belong to more associations, clubs, unions, societies and groups, and have larger social networks, than any other nationality – 43 per cent of over-sixteens belong to something or other… There are 83,000 local and 3,000 national societies and associations in Denmark – on average every Dane belongs to three. Over a third belong to a sporting club or association. These range from your common-or-garden leisure-orientated groups – the Bittern Spotters Club, say, or the Danish Flødeboller Association – to the still-powerful trade unions, which have a combined membership equivalent to a quarter of the population.’

This trust is possible because the people are honest. In a 1996 experiment conducted by Reader’s Digest, where wallets were left around various cities, only in Denmark and Norway were all forty returned. Danish television channel TV2 tried recreating the experiment several years later, at Copenhagen Central Station, but had to give up as people kept on picking them up and running after the journalists to hand them back.

They also have good taste, and in a 2016 survey of attitudes to other countries, Danes rated Britain as their favourite of 34. They also placed the United States as their sixth favourite, but alas I’m afraid that has probably fallen a bit. Still, as far as we’re concerned, the feeling is mutual. Tak!

This has created the sort of dystopian scenes only imagined back in the 1990s, made especially chilling when combined with the storming of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta by tens of thousands of migrants. Both man-made climate change and migration represent a threat to Europe’s stability, but each side of the political spectrum has often shown a blind spot to a problem that is only going to accelerate. I recently wrote about global warming in Europe, and I may have addressed the issue of immigration in one or two previous posts, I can’t remember.

It didn’t come home

I love the World Cup, and not just for the football, but also the sense of humanity gathered together representing their nations. I wrote about how we often take wider meaning from sporting success, so that just because a country is good at football it doesn’t mean it isn’t going down the pan. Indeed, just before this current crisis unfolded, a New York Times column was suggesting that Spain’s victory was indicative of a country that was pulling ahead by bucking the Europe-wide turn against migration: ‘As other countries turn their backs on immigrants, Spain is also drawing attention, and praise from liberals, because of its government’s efforts to encourage immigration.’ Those efforts don’t seem to be entirely successful.

I also wrote about Scotland’s cultural pull, and how we English will never be loved in the same way. If I ever wanted to receive a warm reception while holidaying in France, I’d have to put one of those ‘Ecosse’ stickers on the car.

This cultural pull was illustrated by the arrival of the Scottish National Party’s newest MP, who received some mockery for ‘code-switching’ between English and Scottish accents. This is fairly common among people who have moved between dialectic regions, and to a certain degree unconscious: Lara Bird did at least grow up in Scotland whereas Compton Mackenzie, the novelist who co-founded the SNP’s predecessor, was born and raised in England and educated at St Paul’s in London. But, as I wrote in a follow-up piece, nationalist politicians here have not necessarily delivered very successful policies (funny that).

Among the other MPs recently elected to the Common was a man called Andy Burnham, who has since made himself king in the north. Burnham’s establishment of a court in Manchester, in a business park straight out of The Office, is a nice Retvrn to tradition, to the days when the king travelled around the country dispensing justice, and plague. The cost of these travels could be enormous, and often bankrupt the local gentry forced to host them. Indeed Parliament often met outside of London, converging on York, Nottingham and Leicester at various times, until the last provincial meetings took place in Oxford in 1681.

Aris Roussinos suggested that ‘Parliament should follow Burnham’s peregrinations around the country like the court of a medieval king, assembling in various Travelodges as state business requires.’ An alternative interpretation, one suggested by reader Aidan Barrett, is that this is the United Kingdom in its 4th century stage; the elite has accepted the new religion, and now the emperor is moving the capital elsewhere.

One of Burham’s first promises was to end rough sleeping, although he has failed to do so in Manchester and I’m not sure he or anyone in his government is ready to face some uncomfortable truths about why western cities are all plagued by the ‘unhoused’.

Homelessness is a prime example of how second-order effects have deadly consequences. The Government recently repealed the Vagrancy Act, meaning that the police will no longer be able to arrest someone for loitering, although the law was barely enforced anyway. There are already tent cities all over our major cities, and this will make it worse, another example of how lawmakers do not understand, or care about, basic second order effects - so long as they are seen to be compassionate.

Someone with a lot of experience of this subject, former Met special constable Ned Donovan, wrote a piece about the problems of housing the homeless. Many of the solutions to homelessness involve doing things which progressives find distasteful: for example, over half of London’s rough sleepers are from overseas, but Tory government attempts to fly them home were blocked both by courts and uncooperative Labour councils.

Indeed, Heathrow Airport recently unveiled an eastern European Roma Big Issue seller advertising the country to newcomers, which some might not consider as something to boast about - as Will Solfiac wrote about back in 2023. The Euston Road, where many tech companies have set up, now has a giant predominantly Roma homeless encampment, just to make all the Californians feel at home.

The Heathrow advertising is also an illustration of how the country’s cultural elites are deeply parochial, and have no comprehension about what the rest of the world values about Britain. Honestly, I’ve lost track of the number of Chinese and Japanese tourists who’ve told me that they come to London to see beggars from eastern Europe.

A Boy Named Q

I recently wrote about another Scottish politician, Green Party MSP ‘Q Manivannan’, who was allowed to stand for office despite having only limited leave to remain and not having the right to work.

Srivatsan Manivannan is a ‘transgender Tamil immigrant’, who now calls himself ‘Q’ and identifies as non-binary, describing himself as ‘passionate about more caring politics rooted in the working class, the queer, and the solidary’. Currently engaged in a research project called ‘Archiving and (Re)imagining Caregiving as Peacebuilding in Third World Social Movements’, at the time of his election he was also crowdfunding £2,000 to pay for his visa, apparently too impoverished to pay for it himself.

And, of course, it turns out he owns a £200,000 house back in India. Once you notice how many progressive activists and politicians are Global South Aristocrats, you see them everywhere. Just watch any footage from the Oxford Union and invariably it will be someone whose family wouldn’t even touch the lower orders, or still owned slaves around the time of the Beatles’ first LP, lecturing the West about its human rights record and racism.

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For whatever reason, in the early 19^th century the Wests headed north, to Lancashire, and the flourishing port of Liverpool, by now the country’s second largest city. They were among millions making the same journey, especially to the belt between the Mersey and Humber rivers; Manchester’s population grew 25 fold that century, during a time when the city and the surrounding region produced 60 per cent of the world’s manufactured cotton.

This created an anomaly in which most of England’s major urban centuries were much further north than has historically been the case. In the 17^th century, before the industrial revolution, eight of England’s ten biggest towns were in the South; Lancashire in particular was a relative backwater, yet would soon be home to two of the most important cities in the world. By the mid-19^th century, six of England’s 10 largest cities were now in the North, while only four of the top 20 were in the south. The biggest loser from this population shift was East Anglia, the most densely populated part of the country in the later Middle Ages, and which now saw an exodus of people and wealth. Norwich, for centuries England’s second city, became the epitome of provincialism.

Britain’s first mover advantage in creating the industrial revolution was both a blessing and a curse, and by the early 20th century many of those industries were in relative decline. The economic gap between north and south began to open dramatically with the Great Depression, which led to the first attempt at regional subsidies, although without much success. Indeed, industrial policy aimed at helping the north only helped to wreck Birmingham’s chances.

Data on European regional wealth in 1900 and 2015 shows the extent to which the north of England has fallen, from one of the continent’s richest regions to one of its poorest. That somewhere like Bradford could have been one of the wealthiest places in Europe now seems inconceivable. The region also suffers from the curse of coal problem, whereby former coal-mining regions are left permanently poorer, often inhabited by an industrial proletariat who lacks the skills to function in a post-industrial economy; Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins have also suggested that decades of brain drain make it harder for the region to recover.

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England’s regional differences are notably smaller, and while filled with much variety itself, few doubt that the North is a distinct entity. British history is determined by its two geographic features, with the north and west of the island having ‘older, harder rocks and hillier terrain’, in Robert Bartlett’s words, compared to the flatter and more fertile south and east. But the history of England in particular is also defined by two rivers.

Even thirty-five miles inland the Humber is a mile across, and any army marching from the south had to pass a relatively small corridor between treacherous tributaries and the Pennines, the mountain range that forms a spine down the north of England. This reduced the numerical advantages that southern armies always possessed, and made it much harder for the authorities in Westminster to exert control here than in the Midlands.

The north-south divide actually predates England, and even the Romans distinguished between the semi-Romanised Britanni of the south and the belligerent Brittones of the north. The Britanni probably came to speak a form of Latin like their cousins in Gaul, who had similarly become Romanised; the Brittones mostly still spoke the native Brythonic language. This linguistic divide is one theory as to why Old English took root despite questions over the relatives numbers of Anglo-Saxons.

The Angles of the North shone brightest to begin with, Northumbria home to one of the great early renaissances following the collapse of the West. Here the newly converted Germans produced such works as the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the book that gave the people their name.

The Golden Age didn’t last, and unfortunately the Humber River which defined the region was also vulnerable to invaders from Scandinavia. The northern kingdom fell to the Norsemen in 865, and it was left to the West Saxons to defeat the invaders and unite all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms six decades later, conquering a region that was now heavily Norse in character.

The kingdom of Wessex emerged in the rich wheat-growing soils by the banks of the River Thames, a body of water which has always been intimately linked to the continent - and was long ago a tributary of the Rhine. The Romans had established Londinium at the most downstream point on the river at which a bridge could be built and, having wrestled the region back from the Vikings, Alfred of Wessex refounded the city in 886. As with its Roman predecessor, Lundenburh soon outstripped all rivals and by the time that a Parliament was first established there in the 13^th century it was far larger than any rival.

London was always going to dominate the south, but its authority over the lands north of the Humber might not have been so assured. Tom Holland, author of a biography of Athelstan among other things, has suggested that a united England was not inevitable and that the Scandinavian dominated north was already distinct enough to have developed into a different country (with perhaps the region north of the Tees, which avoided Viking conquest, becoming part of greater Lothian).

It’s certainly possible, and even after English unification rebellious northerners declared ‘that their country has been wont to have a king of its own and to be tributary to none of the south Angles,’ as a contemporary chronicler put it. A king in the North, so to speak. Northumbrian identity remained distinctive, and in the Middle Ages, when there were a number of violent university riots, students from the north and south sometimes organised brawls.

Throughout the medieval period English kings rarely spent much time in the north, and the territory close to the border remained largely in the hands of the House of Percy, while the monarch focussed his attention on the continent. This was where the threat mostly lay, but it was also where the money was, and London owed its relative wealth to it position close to the rich markets of mainland Europe. This ‘blue banana’ stretching from northern Italy to the Rhineland and Netherlands, has economically dominated Europe for close to a millennia. So while much of the north of England’s current travails are blamed on deindustrialisation, historically it has been notably poorer than the south, something noted for almost a thousand years.

Alexander Rose wrote in Kings in the North that when the Percy entourage travelled to London, ‘the Northerners were poorer and rougher, and it showed’. Northern soldiers had ‘outmoded armour; even the earl’s warhorse was a feeble creature compared to the splendid steeds favoured by Southern magnates.’ Earl Percy’s own mount was valued at between £20 and £25, while the southern Earl of Salisbury had mere knights riding £50 horses. In Europe, as a general rule, the closer you are to the Rhine, the wealthier you are.

The Percys – the inspiration for House Stark in George RR Martin’s northern retelling of the English national story - were among the leading players in the War of the Roses, which despite the name was in some ways more of a conflict between north and south than Lancashire and Yorkshire.

By 1460, with order having broken down across the country, the pro-Lancastrian Percy family effectively ruled the North as an entirely separate kingdom. After Henry Percy raised a local army, all of whom would have followed him rather than the southern king, and descended towards St Albans, a chronicler called the Prior of Croyland reported that ‘the northmen… swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England… paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forth from their holes’.

Songs recall the danger of northern men violating southern women and of ‘the lords of the North’ coming to ‘destroy the south country.’ East Anglian squire Clement Paston told his brother John: ‘In this country [county] every man is willing to go with my lords here, and I hope God shall help them, for the people in the north rob and steal and are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief.’

The southern-dominated Yorkists won this battle, although one of their number, the future Richard III, spent most of his youth in Yorkshire and was probably the only English monarch to speak with a northern accent. As king, he was also the first ruler to make an attempt at regional devolution with a Council of the North, among many progressive innovations of his reign, and yet all everyone remembers is the nephew-murdering. Richard’s death was greeted with despair in York, and he remained popular in the region among Ricardians convinced of his innocence.

Because of its strong trade links with the continent, the south-east of England was also influenced by political ideas emerging across the North Sea. Even before Henry VIII’s great matter, Protestantism had taken hold in London, Cambridge and Norwich, and the coming religious wars would have a north-south dimension, with the north and west remaining more Catholic, even before the large-scale arrival of Irish immigrants.

The Reformation in England was largely a top down affair, and certainly pushed against the will of local people in the north and south, who often had their cultural heritage ransacked to boot. The dissolution of the monasteries even led to the Lindisfarne Gospels being taken from Durham Cathedral and placed in London, where it remains, the North’s version of the Elgin Marbles.

The most famous Catholic uprisings, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and the Rising of the North in 1569, reflected the popularity of the old religion in this region. Strength of numbers and wealth meant that the South won this battle, although the North’s best years were ahead of it. Indeed, already that decade coal production by the Tyne was accelerating, the first signs of a transformation that would make the wider region the birthplace of the modern world.

Maybe, as one of the Stone Roses (I forget which) once said in an interview, it’s the weather. Because of the rain that characterises life in historic Lancashire, there is nothing to do except either play music or something else I won’t repeat. Maybe it’s just population density, and large cities produce a higher per capita number of musicians, but I would be surprised if London beats Manchester on this metric. Birmingham certainly doesn’t, as much as I loved head-banging in my teens.

Whatever the source of Manchester’s musical talent, it has certainly played a part in the city’s recent economic renaissance. As Dominic Green wrote in The Wall St Journal ‘Manchester was once a working-class industrial powerhouse. After the mid-1970s, it reinvented itself as an indie music mecca: Buzzcocks, Joy Division and New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and of course the hooligan nostalgia of Oasis, whose “Wonderwall” accompanied the England team’s traditional flameout at this summer’s World Cup. Manchester’s postindustrial musical boom made the city cool again, as a cultural counterweight to London, and laid the groundwork for the property boom that Mr. Burnham calls Manchesterism in action.’

Manchester’s cultural power has grown in recent decades, not just thanks to music but to football too, and its two monstrous global brands. Now it has achieved a form of cultural supremacy with the coronation of mayor Andy Burnham as Prime Minister, a man whose political brand is essentially Kevin and Perry walking like Liam Gallagher.

Burnham launched his 2024 mayoral campaign at the Salford Lads Club – famously associated with The Smiths – and began his leadership of the Labour party by dancing to New Order, a band whose origins lie in the Sex Pistols’ famous 1976 performance at the Manchester Free Trade hall, attended by over half a million people according to later recollections.

He now becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade - and we are to find out whether this one will solve the Riddle. For Burnham it was that Britain took ‘a series of wrong turns in the 1980s… political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.’ Promising to look to Germany and its federal model of redistribution, Burnham quite explicitly appeals to the North in a way unlike any predecessor, following three party leaders who all lived within a few miles of each other in the boroughs of Camden and Islington.

In a Guardian interview in 2010, Burnham said that the ‘bloke’ from ‘Corrie’ would play him in a biopic; chips, peas and gravy were his favourite food and ‘gobshite’ his favourite word. His favourite smell? ‘The streets around Goodison Park on a match day.’ On a more recent occasion he listed his favourite films as Goodfellas, The Big Short, Brassed Off and Pride: a film about the evils of the financial services industry, a film about gay rights and a film about a northern brass band.

Burnham has taken the professional northerner routine to the next level by landing a job in London and refusing to move, pledging to remain in Manchester even as he rules the United Kingdom - the first prime minister to avoid Downing Street since the acutely paranoid Harold Wilson, who believed the secret services were bugging his office (which they probably were). It seems like the ultimate rejection of Thatcherite Essexman Norman Tebbit’s exhortation to ‘get on your bike’; he’s not just refusing to relocate to get a job, he’s refusing to relocate after getting the top job in Britain.

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Reading the Odyssey and Iliad left a lasting impression, I would say a lasting fascination with ancient Greece, although I tend to go through cycles of interest. The most recent came in 2024 when I saw Mycenae for the first time, an experience which I found unusually moving. I could close my eyes and imagine I was in the hall, listening to the poets and feasting on lamb, as they seemed to spend most of their time doing.

The film-watching public have a similar cycle. Every generation a renewed interest in the ancients will be revived by a blockbuster, followed by a succession of increasingly dreary imitations, until everyone loses interest again. The last Sword and Sandals Cycle was triggered by Gladiator in 2000, the perfect action film, after which came the mediocre Troy and Alexander in 2004, and then, in 2006, 300, which worked as high-camp comedy. It looks like we might be starting a new cycle with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which is, dare I say it, epic.

Turning ancient epics into film is a difficult task, and the Odyssey famously so, containing as it does so many confusing narrative threads. Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn writes that Homer ‘has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are reported within other lengthy conversations.’ In Book 19, when an elderly housemaid bathing the feet of a disguised Odysseus recognises a scar, ‘the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the day of the hero’s birth, before circling back to the present.’

This is obviously the perfect challenge for Nolan, the creator of excellent but baffling big screen productions such as Memento, Inception, and my favourite, Interstellar, a flawed masterpiece which also recounts a lost hero trying to find his way home. Nolan is also a veteran war director, Dunkirk displaying his fondness for embedded flashbacks, while his most recent, Oppenheimer, focussed on the morality of killing. Here President Harry Truman stole the show by dismissing the scientist’s anguish and telling an aide: ‘Don’t let that crybaby back in here.’

There weren’t many crybabies back in Homeric Greece, no Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life, as another 20^th century figure put it. The Trojan War is challenging to turn into a film, not just because of the scale involved and the inevitable risk of camp and corniness, but because the characters are so unlikeable in the the original. Indeed, one joy of the classics is the insight it gives into a culture that was very alien, and in many ways repulsive. It’s not our culture, and our worldview is instead shaped by a different eastern Mediterranean civilisation.

Even the Fifth Century Greeks are strange, let alone their Homeric ancestors. In our classical civilisation A-Level course we learned that ancient Greek attitudes to women were essentially Taliban-like, their view of sexuality repulsive both to traditional Christians and to modern progressives; as for their notions of human rights, the other Greeks disapproved of Sparta’s system of racial slavery, but only because their victims were Greeks.

Stranger still is their religion. As portrayed in the epics, the gods are cruel and unbelievably petty, their relationship with the mortals entirely transactional. And as men create gods in their own image, the Greek warriors are also an unappealing bunch, in particular the domineering, arrogant Agamemnon and the psychotic Achilles. The only Greek I felt for was poor Ajax; he did his best, but the gods just hated him.

Only the Trojan Hector elicits sympathy, and the most moving part of The Iliad comes in Book Six when the hero bids farewell to his wife Andromache before facing Achilles; I remember being especially chilled by his wife’s warnings about what the Greeks will do when they take the city. Watching the Nolan film with my children, I was mildly relieved that the sack shows the Greeks killing the Trojan women, whereas in reality a worse fate obviously awaited them.

Depicting the heroic age even as later Greeks saw them would be too much for modern audiences and the Nolan film, as many have observed, is obviously a Christian interpretation.

Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker that, ‘rather than try to take the audience inside the ancient Greek mind-set, Nolan chooses a slimmed-down, almost naturalistic approach, tamed and tempered. Violence is rendered largely generic with quick-cut battle scenes merely hinting at gruesome deaths; sacrifice, seen only briefly, is surgically clean; vengeance is bloodless and horror-free, meted out very sparingly; tears drop with maudlin precision down a single cheek; and grief is expressed with the stiff-upper-lip silence of modern martial valour.’

Odysseus is much less the trickster, more like the ideal of a modern officer, portrayed by the all-American Matt Damon. The philandering with Circe is neutered, and he’s too dazed by drugs to understand why he’s spent seven years on a paradise island with Charlize Theron rather than, as I read from the poem as a teenager, because why not? This makes him more palatable but the cost, as some critics have pointed out, is that this Odysseus lacks the wit or banter that characterised the original. Yet it would be jarring to portray a Greek hero as the Greeks wanted; it is not our culture.

The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this, but casually boasts about sacking the odd city on his way home too, just as people in the ancient world generally tended to. When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul.

For all the criticism, a film that did not reinterpret the story through a Christian worldview would be repulsive. Indeed, the same can be said of other versions of the epic. including the 1954 Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas, where the hero laments that ‘many terrible things have happened to me, Telemachus, but none more terrible than to bring death into my house on the day of my homecoming.’

True to a Christian interpretation, the gods are largely absent in Nolan’s film, except for Athena, who talks only to Odysseus and may well be his imagination. After years stuck at sea and meeting one-eyed giants and witches, we’d probably all start talking to imaginary gods too.

This fits with a tendency for films to seek greater realism, with more attention to appropriate historical technology, dress and location. Of course, there is one exception to this trend – the casting of ancestrally anachronistic actors. Nolan’s Odyssey probably benefitted from the huge amount of pre-release controversy provoked by the casting of black actors (and, to a lesser extent, trans actor Elliot Page). Some of the commentary has been a bit hysterical, as these things tend to be, the most bizarre being Elon Musk calling Tom Holland – the historian, not the actor who plays Telemachus - a ‘cuck’ merely for suggesting that he enjoyed the film. As one wit put it, who would have thought that Helen of Troy could generate so much conflict?

I hugely enjoyed it too, even if my own view is that every actor has a range, and casting someone clearly outside of that can often be distracting. ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy. Casting the Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, well outside that range, is obviously deliberate, and as Mendelsohn told Tom Holland (the cuck historian), ‘it is clearly supposed to be a provocative choice,’ and it’s ‘disingenuous’ to pretend otherwise.

Of course, I’m sure many Greeks feel that way about blue-eyed actors playing their heroes too, but Homer is not just a Greek or even western story, but a universal epic retold for a global and globalised audience. The Odyssey is also fantasy, featuring fantastical giants, witches who turn men into pigs, and a cyclops; the casting in such a film is obviously less noteworthy than when a black actor plays a historic 11^th century English earl. Besides which, if the casting jars a tiny bit, it doesn’t make a huge difference to a spectacular and brilliantly-made film, and one that has made vast amounts of money. You can find some aspect of a piece of art ‘problematic’ and still not allow politics to ruin your appreciation. Enjoy the film, and ignore the haters.

The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame.

Admittedly that didn’t happen, and this conceit is arguably in keeping with the spirit of Homer, since pre-literate society would have been rather similar to our post-literate one, filled with boasting and invective, forced to listen to the same stories about fights over and over again. The age that Nolan depicts, like ours, is one experiencing a lurking fear of civilisational decline and of outsiders; in Ithaca and Sparta, Telemachus hears worried talk about the ‘people of the sea’. These menacing strangers are getting closer, and they will bring about the end of civilization.

The Age of Heroes ended sometime around 1100BC, perhaps only decades after the Trojan War, with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the start of the Greek Dark Ages. Across the known world the Egyptians, Hittites and Canaanites all suffered some sort of calamity, the result either of a natural cataclysm or uncontrollable raiding by the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’.

As the film progresses, and the story reaches its conclusion, this sense of impending civilisational collapse grows. When Odysseus tells his wife that songs will be sung about their lives, he mentions that it will be only to recall those of us who could still read (James Marriott will like that line, I imagine).

Civilisation is endangered, and so is the home. The Ithacans have obeyed ‘Zeus’s Law’ by helping the strangers in their midst, because they might be gods in disguise, but they have outstayed their welcome. A guest who comes to abuse this hospitality is an interloper, and a threat to the social order, and so long as they remain the young man of the house can never claim his patrimony or save his civilization. Much to ponder.

Many paid tribute to Widdecombe, a former Tory MP who enjoyed a second career as a television star on Strictly Come Dancing, and who later joined Reform to become their immigration and justice spokeswoman.

Among them were her old boss, former Home Secretary Michael Howard, with whom she famously fell out; her description of Howard, that ‘there is something of the night about him’, entered the English lexicon.

‘Ann and I later made up’, he wrote, and we ‘were able to come to terms with the events which by then had begun to fade into the past. The terrible circumstances of her death should not be allowed to overshadow the remarkable contribution she made and the extraordinary human being she was. She leaves a hole in our national life which will never be filled. She will be greatly missed.’

Journalist Michael Crick recalled how a former BBC colleague told him: ‘Of the hundreds of high profile politicians I dealt with as a floor manager Ann stood out as one who was unfailingly sweet and personable.’ And Sky’s Sophy Ridge wrote: ‘I interviewed Ann Widdecombe for my book on women in politics and a lot of what she said stayed with me. It’s easy to forget what a trail blazer she was.’ She noted how, after being nicknamed ‘Doris Karloff’, Widdecombe took to answering her phone with ‘Hello, Doris speaking?’

Perhaps the most moving reflection came from Brexit Party veteran Gawain Towler, who described how:

During that first campaign I found myself driving the country with my son in tow, then twelve years old. We arrived at one rally, at Fylde FC, four hours early, and the poor chap faced an afternoon of terminal boredom in an empty football club. The only speaker already there was Ann. My son was in awe. This was the woman from Strictly. She saw my predicament at a glance and waved him over, and for the next three and a half hours she played with him. She helped him with his homework. I would pop by every now and then to find the two of them engrossed in a book, or laughing uproariously, and at one point playing some strange version of visible hide and seek, the former shadow home secretary and a twelve-year-old boy, in the bowels of a lower league Lancashire football ground.

Widdecombe was certainly an archetype, and it’s hard to avoid the sentiment that she represented a vanished world. The Britain into which she was born was unimaginably different to the one she left, in such horrific circumstances. Even the prurient interest in her celibacy illustrates just what a different age she came from, before the great change.

Mary Harrington was accurate in describing Widdecombe as ‘Britain’s last battleaxe’, noting how once upon a time British ‘civil society was run by people like her. The daughter of a military man, raised between ever-changing military postings and a convent boarding-school in Bath, she embodied a stoical “buck up” attitude that was pervasive in imperial-age Britain, and lingered well into my childhood and youth: one in which private suffering was simply something to be borne.

‘All of 19th-century British civic life was dominated by women of Widdecombe’s stripe, from the National Union of Women Workers, the Mothers’ Union, and the Women’s Institute, to church groups, Sunday school classes, schools, charities, and social reform bodies. Unkindly satirised even in her heyday as “Mrs Grundy”, the Battleaxe dedicated her life to improving, organising, cleaning, educating, and uplifting the world around her, whether or not it wanted to be improved. But the Britain they ran is no longer the one in which we live. The reasons for its demise are complex, though the end of the British Empire, the arrival of TV and radio, the sexual revolution and, latterly, de-industrialization and the internet all contributed.’

Or as one Twitter account put it: ‘Ann Widdecombe embodied a basically vanished type of worldview and manner, one with a totally assumed sense of integrity, an avatar of an unsentimental Englishness belonging to rotund girl guide leaders and lay parishioners. Eccentricities and individualism, RIP’.

I think most people above a certain age will remember the Battleaxe; you were scared of them, and resented their disapproving tone, but as you grew up you came to see that it was driven by love and compassion. After a period of rejection, you also came to see the wisdom in their moral worldview. The problem today is that many people don’t grow up from that intermediate period; they’re stuck on stage 2 for their whole lives.

You also came to understand the layers within. As Niall Gooch put it, people on the left sometimes fail to ‘to understand the strengths and the subtleties of this sort of person; despite a rather strident and brisk exterior, they are (/were) often deeply kind and charitable in a quiet, unsentimental way.’

Widdecombe was a noted social conservative, the real deal, and at the same time a good friend to many gay men. She was driven by compassion, and voted against blood sports for that reason; as an animal lover, she took the correct British side in the Holy Land dispute – supporting neither the Israelis, nor Palestinians, but the donkeys.

Towler observed that:

None of this kindness was soft. It came from the same place as the convictions, a belief that people matter absolutely, that duty is not negotiable, and that sentimentality is what you get when feeling is not backed by action. She opposed what I did not oppose and held lines I would not have held, and she would have considered it a poor sort of tribute to pretend otherwise. She did not require agreement. She required seriousness. Grant her that and you had her loyalty for life, and her loyalty was a fortified position

She once said on a chat show sofa that “we get one go this side of eternity”, and the phrase carries more weight than the setting suggested, because she meant both halves. One go, and she used every hour, the Commons, the Parliament she helped Britain leave, the stage, the page, the donkeys in the Holy Land, the boy in a football club in Lancashire. And this side of eternity, because her faith was the bedrock under the rock, and she was certain that the tide which goes out is not the end of the story. She has gone to the judgement she never doubted, and I would not care to be the advocate opposing her.

She was a serious person from an age that took things seriously, before the country became soaked in overbearing irony and silliness. But you can be a serious person and still bring laughter to people’s lives.

Listen to the episode below…

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When a plane crashes, the aviation authorities sends a highly experienced group of investigators to comb the aircraft and look into every possible reason for what went wrong; once the fault has been identified, new safety systems are recommended to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Because a large number of people are scared of flying, and air crashes are peculiarly terrifying, so the industry suffers collectively when it goes wrong; there are huge incentives to avoid any repeats, and no vested interest powerful enough to prevent the investigators from carrying out their work. Aviation is one of the rare instances of an international body in which corrupt cultures come to behave more like honest ones, rather than the reverse. As a result, the rate of passenger fatalities has drastically fallen.

As Matthew Syed argued in his book Black Box Thinking, the airline industry offers a model of a ‘learning culture’, where everyone is incentivised to honestly admit mistakes – covering up is a far bigger offence. Syed suggested that airline protocol could be applied to the medical sector, education, the drugs industry and the criminal justice system in dealing with wrongful convictions.

I don’t know whether any system could ever be motivated in the same way as the airline industry, but it is interesting to compare how two areas of public safety have progressed over the years.

Despite what many people believe or remember, crime in Britain is considerably lower than it was in the 1990s. This is often taken as some kind of gotcha against conservatives, but in reality, thanks to CCTV and mobile phones, we live in a surveillance society in which it is essentially impossible to get away with murder.

Yet while both criminal justice and air travel have benefitted from huge improvements in technology, only one has seriously taken advantage. The English homicide rate has declined by about a third since the mid-1990s, although with a much older population, and crime is a young man’s game; in contrast, passenger deaths per million flights have fallen by almost 90 per cent. While offending is down from its peak, it is also still far higher than it was in the 1950s, even though detection technology has come a long way, as has trauma care.

The problem is not that Britain is some dangerous hellscape; it’s that its crime rate is much higher than it needs to be, and many tragedies would be avoided if the authorities did the bare minimum to ensure public safety. The majority of crime is committed by a hardcore of repeat offenders who are released back into the community, and whose crimes often escalate. Many are set free despite obviously being very dangerous, resulting in a number of absolutely shocking murders and rapes that an air safety-style approach would prevent. The difference is that the aviation authorities are properly incentivised; the authorities in charge of crime prevention are not.

Imagine if crash investigations were not motivated by a strong desire to ensure that people had faith in the product. Imagine if people were influenced by taboos or ideology related to air travel, such as, for example, a strange sacralisation of pilots. No one could dare to suggest that a pilot was at fault, or could even check a pilot’s qualifications, because that was seen as authoritarian or un-British or something. Maybe there was some convention agreed in the early 1950s and it would be unthinkable to change it.

Every time there was a pilot error, families of the crash victims would be pressured into making statements about how safe flying is; Eastenders would mysteriously come up with storylines about pilots being unfairly stigmatised. MPs would try to restrict social media because it made people scared of flying. The perception that this form of travel was unsafe was more like a narrative problem to be managed than a motivation to improve it. The cause of each disaster was downplayed, and so repeated.

Most of the time you’d be fine, of course, and technological advances would still ensure that the safety record improved. Every few months there would be a disaster somewhere in Europe or the US, as was the case when I was growing up, and members of the commentariat would point out that air crashes are actually down by a third since the 1990s; and you’d point out that, yeah, that’s true, but there was a crash only last month because they let a blind man fly the plane, and you know, I think that could have been avoided.

Where is the black box thinking when someone like Jordan McSweeney, with 28 convictions and a history of violence dating back to adolescence, is let loose to kill an innocent woman? Or Joshua Carney, freed to rape a mother and her teenaged daughter despite 47 convictions, and who will be out again in only a few years. What about the dozens of people killed each year by men released early on probation?

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