Pilgrimage

 I try to make a point of visiting the grave of Rosemary Tonks each summer. Today it provided a good reason to get out of the house. Bus to Emsworth, pleasant walk back to Warblington. Especially good to look upon some water, salty and probably polluted though it may be. The wireless said it's not going to rain until Autumn. Proper communing with oneself, the lines of Rainyday Woman inappropriately revolving in my head as what began as a modest little lyric takes on greater proportions and significance and, unforgivebly self-absorbed, I wonder whether to put my own poems into an order of perceived merit to see how high it stands. And to see where the cut-off point comes where the Selected Poems would reach down to. I'd call it Collected but it would be quite strictly chosen. Which poem would be the unluckiest of all and be the first not to get in. 

The idea of an autobiographical note would be even more vain for a poet of my uncelebrated status. Thom Gunn did such a thing because he thought somebody else would do it if he didn't. And then, many years later, somebody did - in great detail probably far beyond what Gunn had thought likely. But the great advantage of not being noteworthy is that such a thing is not required. As far as the poems go, it's just the poems. If I wanted somebody to study me I'd go to a psychiatrist.

--

It was Orwell who wrote that writers are 'vain, selfish and lazy' and there is something akin to Larkin in his English austerity. Both socially out of their depth at Eton and Oxford respectively, their writing has a candour that doesn't always equate to honesty but it's writing so there's no need for it to be entirely honest.

I think one of the big issues with Orwell is the Socialism. He has traces of the anti-semitism that have more recently been found alongside such ideology and he has snobbery which may or may not be an unfortunate bi-product of the sort of elitism that values worthwhile work. His involvement with the poor looks laudable on the surface but may contain a sort of fetishism. To his credit, like Auden, he was committed enough to the cause to go to Spain in the 1930's but the big umbrella term, Socialism, covers a lot of ground. Keir Starmer and Arthur Scargill both expressed themselves as such. It is clearly well-meant thing but it appears in many forms. 

My first experience of it was really how, at election time, council estates would have Labour posters proliferating whereas 'better' areas would be Conservative. Oh, how I wished that they would all listen in church or in assembly at school and the well-off would vote Labour to help the less well-off and the disadvantaged would stoically accept their lot, be embarrassed to vote for help and do something about improving their position if they wished to.

Not Conservative was, and remains, the obvious thing one must be to be righteous but then one went to university and witnessed the righteousness of the left first-hand and was put off all those beloved fragments of Bolshevism almost for life. 

It's not an easy course to navigate, one's way through Socialism even if one instinctively think it is right. I will continue to follow Orwell's particular difficulties with it, in D.J. Taylor's account, always aware that about fifty years ago, I noted in the special book of quotes I kept that it says in Keep the Aspidistra Flying,

Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.  

 

They are tremendous books of quotes - Shakespeare, Joyce, Roger McGough, Carole King, Bob Dylan, The Beano and more. It is now that one appreciates not having thrown such things away. 

Romsey Abbey

 I got lucky only two nights before the event, finding that Angelina Kopyrina was playing in Romsey Abbey today.  An ideal day out at this sparse time of year. By now it goes without saying that the familiar Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Rach Sonata no. 1 are tremendous, especially played by her but at least until her next new repertoire, I've said all I can think of to say. But I can review Romsey, not to my knowledge having been there before.

There lots to like about it. In the relaxed centre was someone wearing a Gustav Mahler t-shirt. As I went into the Oxfam bookshop, Celebrate Summer by T. Rex was playing. The abbey is relatively modest but provides a spacious concert space in its nave. Following my recent reading of Catherine Nixey's account of how Christianity came to rule so much of the world, I was interested to see John Chrysotom featured in a stained glass window. Perhaps, though, its main claim to fame is the grave of Lord Mountbatten.

There's more to such buildings than grandeur although all the interior is grander than outward appearances seem to promise. Whether it was due to Angelina or not, Romsey rustles up a good-sized audience and, travel being not significantly more onerous than Chichester, I might be monitoring what goes on there in future.  

 Not necessarily a place 'proper to grow wise in' but Larkin doesn't say that such places are. He says 'someone...once heard' it was. It's always a good idea to deflect such thoughts onto somebody else even if one needs to invent an anonymous fictional character to deflect it on to. And I'm not convinced that the likes of Ethelflaeda, the first abbess, in the C10th are good people to be admired without question but they are  exotic and have been dead a long time and that gives them a strange glamour.

The Library Tour

 If it's not quite the Bodleian, I'm quite satisfied with my library. Not for the first time I conducted a short guided tour for a guest the other day. He liked it a lot, the way it takes over the whole house. I wonder how far it is to a bigger collection of poetry books. It could conceivably be only a couple of hundred yards round the corner to where Tony lives, though.

This latest tour was all too brief as I was careful not to want to bore my visitor with arcane collector's items but now I keep seeing things and wishing I'd shown him them.

The great thing for me, living among them, is that my tour is not a matter of being shown things as exhibits but re-reading them. I've not bought a new book for some time because I've not seen anything listed that demands reading so I make use of the stock. There would be no point in keeping them if I didn't do that. If books are great value to read them once they become of infinite value when one can read them, or refer to them, any amount of times from thereon in. How much does it cost to go to a cinema to see a film once? I don't know. It must be twenty years since I've been.

Revisiting Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age followed on from A.N. Wilson's Jesus in going back over what might be closer to the truth about Christianity after all the upbringing and being surrounded by its culture that is so inculcated in us that we find it hard to dispel. One can suspect Catherine of zealotry as much as I suspect myself in her compilation of evidence against the rise of this vast aberration but it is the idea of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' that is in the way of taking her point. One only wants to approach her work with the same scepticism that one considers the religion because even if she is preaching, as it were, to the unconverted, I'm not looking to have my prejudices confirmed, only for lesser known evidence in my favour.

John Chrysotom, the savage preacher, and Shenoute, the gaunt ascetic, are two heroes of the book, so crazy in their devotions one might call them 'hell-bent'. Catherine re-diagnoses the extreme devotions of early monks in modern terms as 'depressive' rather than pious. And the story in the end is really about how Christianity replaced Classical culture no less effectively than Greek and Roman culture had come to dominate Europe, systematically wiping out a huge percentage of its writing and art in the process.

--

And so, the next book to catch the eye was D.J. Taylor's 2004 biography of George Orwell.

While the essays might have been unchallenging to do for 'A' level nearly fifty years ago when we could more usefully have done Yeats, he is not quite so easily pinned-down on any political spectrum that is left between left and right. He didn't try very hard at Eton, served hos own interests and possibly could, being there on a scholarship with his parents, who couldn't have anyway, not paying fees. For all that we might have thought of Orwell as leftist but anti-Soviet, he makes for a mix of class distinctions and serious doubts about the limitations of socialism, which we always knew. I just wonder where his sympathies would lie now and I honestly don't know. 

Hereward the Wake

 Hereward the Wake is an unlikely hero of mine, not so much for his rearguard action against the Norman conquest in the area of Ely but for the filthy steam engine we used to see going under Perry Road bridge in the 1960's, pulling the fish train from Grimsby.

But now I identify with him in a more significant way. I, too, stood for as long as I could against the inevitable and had to give in eventually. There have been a few occasions on which

I might have benefitted from having a mobile phone but I liked not having one. Time moves on, though, and eventually one is revealed as being wilfully difficult by not having such a device and however much one reasons that we got by somehow without them in 1971, they have become all but compulsory. So now I have the simplest such thing one can buy and even that has a camera on it.

I had expected a difficult afternoon setting it up, not the 3 easy steps it blithely lists on the wholly inadequate leaflet provided. Whereas such instructions might be easy for those with a certain level of tech savvy, for me it was the equivalent of them being told to simply translate a few basic sentences into Latin. Two hours went by and I was locked into an inescapable circle of getting nowhere so I went by bus and foot to the nearest Tesco Mobile place where the helpful bloke fixed me up with all I need at no great expense.

I'd give you the number here so you could ring me up but I'm not in love with it and don't want to encourage it. Who would have thought that such an admittedly cheap and ingenious little thing would so soon be one of the Bare Necessities. I don't want to be the sort of person for who it is but, once in a while, it seems like I am.

I have admitted defeat with as much good grace as I could summon up. I take more pride in how long I held out, determinedly if not quite as fiercesomely as Hereward. 

Pride isn't it, though. I'm deep into a second reading of Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age that convinces anybody who wants to be convinced what bad things Christianity did in achieving the status that it in due course did but at least they had pride on their list of deadly sins. It's a similar orthodoxy I've been so unwillingly, if less violently, pressed into. Some of us are not naturally inclined to do what everybody else does.

It's a long time now since Danny Baker said on the wireless that it was him, Frank Skinner and some other celeb that got by without mobile phones. I think they might not have lasted as long as I did. And Prof. Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Marxist Literary Theory, didn't even do e-mail. I was in sympathy with them, whose books I have, whose work I enjoyed. I will still be reading books on the train rather than gazing at this debilitating accoutrement.

It might be a while before it seems to me that texting you is the appropriate way of making contact. I don't mind at all arriving at an age old enough to not want to understand how younger people get by. I'm happy to have understood T. Rex and David Bowie when generations before me didn't.  

Garfield Sobers

 It's been a long time since the last obituary here. The qualifications required to be remembered are arbitrary. I either think someone is worthy or I decide against.

It's possible that I saw Garfield Sobers play at Trent Bridge circa 1966 v. the International Cavaliers of a Sunday afternoon but I remember Gamani Gooneseena and, I think, Basharat Hassan better. On that occasion, the ball was retrieved by a small boy in the crowd- me- after boundaries not once but twice within a couple of minutes and returned to one of them. Sadly, we got home to find that my grandparents had not been watching this televised game and so there was never any witness to my only telly cricket appearance.

Sobers is twelfth man in my All Time XI because the criteria for selection is me liking them rather than being grim enough to pick the best players because I want to win but, yes, he would be an obvious pick as the greatest all-rounder ahead of batter and specialist cover point, Derek Randall, or perfect gentleman amid the apartheid issues of the 1960's, Basil D'Oliviera, if winning was what it's all about. And Sobers entirely fitted with the ethos of playing cricket properly, not in the gritty often Australian way of sledging, abuse and machismo but by simply being better at it.

I don't remember Sobers as any sort of fast bowler because he was medium pace by the time I saw him but one remembers very well the occasion of his six sixes in an over at Swansea. The last of them went out of the St. Helen's ground. Whether it actually landed in the road where Aunty Joyce lived is in some doubt and could be apocryphal but one doesn't easily dismiss any chance of a connection with such a story.

Quite why Sobers chose to join Notts is hard to fathom. Maybe, like me, he had sympathy for underdogs. The bottom three counties in the league then were perennially Notts, where we lived; Glamorgan, where we went on holiday and Gloucestershire where we moved to. I'm not sure how much he helped. Notts were to become a cricketing power in the 1980's with the more pragmatic Clive Rice aided by Richard Hadlee but Sobers brought a bit of class if not silverware.

His numbers in test cricket stack up impressively against any Botham, Kapil Dev or Imran Khan one wants to compare him with and stories of his off-field excursions are not outdone by any Keith Miller, David Boon or other such party animal. Not highly paid for being the best at the sport he was performing in by today's standards, he chose to blow much of those earnings on horse racing and so was never rich but was supported by jobs from the Barbados government.

The most impressive thing, for me, is how, having been the very best at what he did, he said he would have rather have done something else- golf !!!

I can see his point, financially perhaps, but there must be a limit to what one would do for money and golf wouldn't be one of them for me, especially if you are only going to throw it away anyway. It was a life well-lived, blessed with outrageous talent. I don't think he had much to complain about. There's more to it than piling up cash.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The climax of The Dewy Morn is more political than personal, the triangle of Martial, Felice and Godwin seemingly only having been constructed to make a point more important to Jefferies. The squire, Cornleigh Cornleigh, is presented as such a useless article, alongside his steward, Godwin's, venal devotion to duty, that one can't help suspecting Jefferies of overloading our sympathies unnecessarily but, more subtly, the tenant farmers are presented s their own worst enemy in their subordination and respect for a system that exploits them to the limit.

As in a Hardy novel, motivations run deep and over long periods and Godwin's nine year infatuation with Felice is as crucial to his animosity towards Martial Barnard as his martinet application of the terms of tenancy on the estate. Mary, Felice's maid, is an innocent victim not unlike Hardy's Marty South in The Woodlanders and such a plot building to its final dramas is worthy of the Dorset man even if Jefferies delineates good and bad in such absolute terms. In as far as the diatribe on the condition of the rural poor will allow, we are left with a happy ending.  

That  was a few quid well spent, books already being by far the best value entertainment one can have and further Richard Jefferies will be pursued in due course.

--

The temperature outside is perfect. I hardly wanted to come in but it's nearly time for Sounds of the 70's. The return to comfortable conditions, especially with quiet reigning, is as welcome s the end of toothache or the restoration of other normalities usually taken for granted. And, one book finished, a return to Dr. Johnson and his tremendous sense was most fitting.

I had heard it suggested that his Lives of the Poets were dubious. I thought, well, literary criticism was a different thing in the C18th. Fashions change. One day we might be less impressed again by Paul Muldoon's ludic outlandishness.

So, I read a bit of Johnson on Abraham Cowley.  The problem, stated in several different ways, is summarized in how,

by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange; and that writers fail to give delight, by their desire of exciting admiration. 

Johnson's preconception of what constitutes 'nature' might be getting in the way of appreciating the ingenuity but he has a point if he thinks that cleverness on its own isn't enough. I don't think he's far wrong and, of course, criticism is there to be taken or left as much as the primary texts are.

But I progressed to the Selected Essays, 500 pages of highlights from The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, produced prolifically from 1750-60. It can be opened anywhere and it is brilliant, often melancholy in its implications but wise to the consolations of philosophy. Returning to any of those seven Best Books in the House has not so far disappointed and I'm thinking I got that shortlist right.

For the most part he is in pursuit of happiness or at least wondering what is the point. And that is the point. Much of it lies in being active or absorbed in life rather than dilatory but observing the folly of others helps a lot, like,

others...lie down to sleep and rise up to trifle, are employed every morning in finding expedients to rid themselves of the day, chase pleasure through all the places of public resort, fly from London to Bath and from Bath to London, without any other reason for changing place, but that they go in quest of company as idle and vagrant as themselves.  

It's not the highest state of satisfaction to despair that others lead more pointless lives than you do but their example can be learnt from. Avoiding their behaviour reduces your own chances of the encounter with what Sartre would identify two hundred years later as existential angst. There might be ironies involved, though, in how the likes of Johnson and Sartre were concerned about it whereas those so 'passionately' following the fortunes of England - and, especially, Scotland- in the World Cup attribute meaning to their vicarious belonging to such a cause and believe themselves to belong to something.

Paradox, Negative Capability, whatever it is - we are all on one side of it or the other. 

Auden, poem

 I'm not- at least yet- saying this is any good but it's only a few minutes since I said I might or might not sometime see about writing the poem about Auden that I dreamed about about ten hours ago. I just thought I'd see what happened during the Pinot Grigio.

I reckon I can still do it given an idea worth having. 

Auden 

The cigarette he sucks is surrogate
for something more than likely sexual,
the eyes can summarize a likely mate
like something due to be intertextual.
At a European outpost, someone
holds a nervous gun. At home his mother
wonders whether the shooting has begun
while preparing dinner for his brother.

The lines that might look careworn are in fact
a rare affliction or a gift that came
to him as queerly as a lovers’ pact
that turned out, as one might have thought, the same
as everyone else’s do – electric
at first but too soon too habitual
to seem more than the sort of magic trick
that might or might not happen to us all.

(revised 17/07)

Dreaming of Auden

 Nothing quite as boring as other people's dreams, is there. They are clearly the sub-conscious trying to sort out its baggage and anxieties, whether in obvious or symbolic ways, and while it's obvious that other people would dream about their obsessions, it's fascinating when we do so, so vividly, about our own.

This morning, in the last stages of R.E.M., I was back in Linden Huddlestone's sixth form class, circa 1977, and he had set us an exercise to write a poem that was a 'character study'. I immediately decided to write about Auden, sure that I could do it and knowing he had an interest in him. In the way that dreams mix up timescales, I probably wasn't aware that Mr. Huddlestone was an Auden admirer and I wouldn't have known enough about him to write the poem I might now, then. But that's neither here nor there.

I made a few notes of lines to put together to make my collage portrait and was confident I could make it work. But not necessarily before the end of the lesson when we might have to read it out or hand it in. But I was so sure I could do it that I thought I'd be fine saying, no, I haven't finished yet but I'll give it to you tomorrow and it'll be great. 

That was until I mislaid the notes I'd made and was desperately trying to reconstruct them. In real life, more than 30 years ago, I lost a poem, reconstructed it from memory, and then found the original and saw that they weren't very like each other. I was half re-making the fragments of the poem in a bit of a panic, knowing I'd miss the deadline and have to rely on my promise of a teenage masterpiece when I woke up.

The idea of the poem was still sharp enough for me to make approximations of a couple of lines once awake but I didn't write them down. They've all but gone now. I could go back to the start and undertake the exercise all over again. Or I could try to remember the idea for a poem I had the day before yesterday which seems to have gone completely. Either way, if anything came of them I'd put them here but don't come rushing back in expectation. It's rare for poems to realize the idea of how good they'll be. The best are those that somehow turn out to be something different in the process of making them and are better.

The Dewy Morn

My recent return to Coate Farm and the Richard Jefferies Museum found two copies of Amaryllis at the Fair in not very good condition and no copies of Bevis so I came away with The Dewy Morn. 

The title comes from a poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1598, attributed to Shakespeare at the time, open to some doubt now. It concerns the fortunes of Felice Goring, her infatuation with Martial Barnard and the wicked ways of the squire's steward, Robert Godwin who has no sympathy for the tenants on the estate.

The first few chapters elaborate at great length on how Felice's great natural beauty is one with the beauty of nature. If it seems overdone then it is a tribute to Jefferies that he can write so much on the subject to make his point so abundantly clear. She is full of love without having an object for it but she finds one in Martial, which seems to me one more of the profound things that Jefferies is capable of that make him a writer so worth reading in spite of his perceived faults. Restless Human Hearts contained many wonderful passages without, perhaps, being a great novel. Felice is compared to a woman's face the narrator had seen at a window,

Upon that face waiting had had set its seal unmistakably. She was waiting- she had been waiting years. No end to waiting. 

She plots to gain the attention of Martial,

Has anyone thought for an instant upon the extreme difficulty of knowing a person?

... People's entire destiny depends upon those whom they know. One's friends lift one or depress one to their level. 

But, maybe even better than that,  

Is it best to have a strong imagination, or to be entirely without it? 

Surprisingly, from the author of fiction, 

An imaginative mind creates for itself a beautiful world; but upon entering into practical life, at every step, first one and then another portion of the structure is shattered till the entire fabric falls to pieces. Dust under foot and bitterness to the taste are all that remain; a void heart, a hopeless future, a weary present.  

It's a melancholy reflection from a very writerly writer of the type that broods long enough on such things for them to be self-fulfillingly melancholy. Except, given a few more pages, this argument in favour of the practical life turns out to be by way of introduction to Godwin who has no notion of anything but the practical and that is what makes him a monster.

The book is to become a tract on the socio-economic condition of the rural poor who are closer to the land they work on than those who own it and, effectively, them. Published in 1884, ahead of any progress made by Socialism, there were plenty of writers making similar points but now that Socialism has come and maybe gone, one wonders at the partial success it had.

The Dewy Morn survives its slow, overly poetic beginnings to confirm Jefferies as an admirable writer if a flawed one. Not subtle, maybe not brilliantly clever but one that it is easy to be in sympathy with. The empathy with nature is idealistic and it is easy to see him as a lonely misfit in a society based on commerce, business and profit. Such a writer is maybe all he could ever have been so good for him that he was and that he is so fondly, if not widely, remembered as such. 

The Renaissance Choir in Southsea

 The Renaissance Choir, Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea, July 11

There is no higher accolade I can give than my Concert of the Year award and having chosen the Renaissance Choir with much of the same programme last year I thought there was little left for me to say this year. On the other hand, the occasion was their 50th anniversary and Peter Gambie's penultimate as conductor and so it ought not to go unremarked.

The choir wasn't exclusively Renaissance for long and in recent years have ventured into the avant-garde with great success considering what an intrepid undertaking that is. Thus Jackson Hill's bewitching A-ki no ko-e followed hard upon the cool, smooth lines of the Graduale from Victoria's Officium Defunctorum. Having thought I wasn't going to write about it, I took no notes, didn't spend all my time searching for 'les mots justes' and was an unusually passive witness almost at a loose end, it felt like.

But everything was of interest, not least the anniversary commission, Ian Schofield's Songs of Hope, setting words by Maggie Sawkins, an ideal illustration of Peter's words in the very useful book provided, The Renaissance Choir: 50 years, about how they,

sing with passion when necessary, with delicacy when appropriate. 

Split between the two halves of the concert, its stand-out passage was Our song is where it starts- fuller and richer as if that was where it had been building towards.

Byrd's Ne Irascaris is a glorious lament and Byrd something of a choir speciality. One is readily wrapped in its textures, and theirs, before I wonder whether one should just luxuriate in those or ponder such academic questions as whether the pattern of notes at 'Jerusalem' is the same as that in,  And then, if it is, whether it constitutes theft or homage. Three questions prompted by one word in a text. Some might say academics think too much at the expense of enjoyment.

But nothing really compares with or prepares one for the sublime Allegri Miserere, with soloist Jenni Halliday. It can't be helped that it can only have its initial thrill on its first hearing but hearing it a second time was a major reason for attendance being essential. Music at its best aspires to this condition of something beyond knowledge and very few things achieve it so compellingly.

The second half regathered itself through more Victoria, some kindly Eric Whitacre and the second half of Songs of Hope before the contemporary Miserere of James MacMillan, bringing the penitence forward into a new austerity of great depth. The standing ovation flickered and was kindled here and there before spreading to become all inclusive, almost certainly with elements of appreciation for the 34 years of Peter Gambie's direction in it.

I'm not one for the herd instinct but am glad to join a good cause. I'm much happier expressing support for the Renaissance Choir than joining those dressed in obbligato football shirts. Nobody else along Albert Road was wearing a Josquin des Prez t-shirt but I contend that he wrote better songs than those Eng-er-lund anthems. I don't mean to be all haughty about it and I expect the incoming musical director has plenty of ideas of her own but I don't see much Josquin listed in the choir's history and a Renaissance Choir that doesn't sing his music would be like the story of 1960's pop music without The Beatles.

Either way, she inherits a choir in tremendous form pulling in sizeable appreciative audiences. It's quite a prize to have won in what must have been a competitive process to see who sets its future direction.  

The Complete Works of Bach

And so there it is, then. Just within the year of having bought the 172 discs, all of them have been played, if not quite every note heard as I left the room for a few minutes. I finished this morning with some most enjoyable flute sonatas with dogged bassoon keeping up the bass line, and then keyboard arrangements of concertos by other composers. I think halfway through the year it was announced that some further fragment attributed to Bach had been discovered but the definite list of the complete works, lost and/or found will forever be beyond us and so one can't worry about that.

Perhaps it's inevitable that there's a feeling of, is that it, then, like there would be if one read all literature, knew all there was to know or witnessed the whole universe. It wasn't infinite after all even if at times it implies eternity. And, in such a reductive, begrudging mood, one might have to say Bach is reduced rather than increased by the idea one has 'heard it all'. Of course, it's not been inwardly digested. I never did get to the end of John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven which becomes a survey of the cantatas more than anything else. One lifetime wouldn't be enough to grasp it all so thinking that one has in any way covered Bach would be a silly mistake. 

But perhaps some of the mystery has been taken away. One was familiar with most of the best bits. As with reading 'all of literature', one would find great things one didn't know about but one does know Hamlet, John Donne, Anna Karenina, Dr. Johnson. One would become accustomed to the mannerisms and ways of doing things of anybody and Bach benefits from a sense of impersonality more than most. The more convincingly one can slip the surly bonds of personality, the 'greater' and more eternal one can appear to be, if indeed escaping them is desirable.

So, other composers will now get more of a look in again and I can check back through these postings for BWV numbers noted along the way for things to play again. 

Racetrack Wiseguy on the World Cup

 Horrific exploitation of readily-duped supporters who have been conditioned into a state of bad faith passionate engagement it clearly is but I'm torn between how much of a critic of the once-much-loved World Cup I'm prepared to be and how much a dissenter from the once-almost-unassailable orthodoxy of Marxist analysis. One wants to be both but the usual liberal dilemmas apply and it's a bit of each.

It's an absolute piece of cake, though, to re-invigorate the turf account. Not on the horse racing turf but on the football turf of the Americas in summer. I was on the lookout for an obvious group game win to pile into at odds on to generate some ammunition. I'm glad I did enough research into Brazil to find that Pele & Co have retired by now and it isn't proper Brazil anymore. While a few 'dead certs' went in, other good things did not and one wants to be risk averse when one false move puts one in the minus for the year and I'm not used to that.

But, working through the draw and how it all pans out after it began to look like some other old, much-vaunted old names weren't much good, it seemed that there wasn't a lot in Argentina's way to the final and only Spain were a danger to France. Patriotism, 'the last refuge of a scoundrel' according to Dr. Johnson, does one no favours and I'm glad I don't suffer from it. 

France to beat Argentina in the final paid 22/1 only a few days ago and the other way round it was 25/1. Nothing but the entirely expected has happened to either of them in the meantime but those prices have collapsed and I can already take a modest profit from having invested.

But you'd think there was more to be had, that we can wait until just before the semi-finals and then cash out one or both bets or maybe even field against Spain.

So far, it feels like taking candy from a baby but I haven't snatched it off them yet. I'm waiting for my moment. One mustn't leave it too late in case they suddenly swallow the lot but one doesn't want to go too soon because there could be odds of more than 20/1 to be landed.

It's not that that keeps me awake at night, it's other things and I don't mind being awake at night. I'm enjoying being in this advantageous position. I've just got to make sure I don't blow it.

Library Discovery

My reading of Henry James ground to a halt halfway through The Ambassadors. I felt I needed to borrow the rubber stamp Larkin had made that he used on unsolicited poems he was sent, 'Why should I care?'

Sitting in my upstairs room, the second half of the alphabet of prose fiction is on my right hand side. Closest to hand is Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, very good to return to and maybe I approve of him more in prose fiction than in poems. But Treasure Island was worth picking up and I'm enjoying it very much. I knew how old it was but hadn't realized it was a Christmas present from 1967. It is inscribed to me from Aunty Joan and Uncle Andy, who do not appear on the family tree but were next door neighbours.

A 235 page novel is a big ask for an 8yo and I don't think I ever got further than its first two or three pages, which were a bit scary. I'd like to think Uncle Andy, and Joan who I don't remember now, would be glad to know I'm grateful, 59 years later. It's not my oldest possession but comes in not far behind my dog, Jock, who arrived at my first Christmas in 1959, and is roughly contemporaneous with my Astronomy books that tell me that Jupiter has 16 moons and Saturn 9. At least they were ahead of Galileo who thought Jupiter had 4.  

Jeffrey Turner - A House Called Paradise

 Jeffrey Turner, A House Called Paradise (Chestnut Press)

I am the privileged and grateful recipient of a copy of this limited edition produced 'for private distribution'. If it hadn't dawned on me years ago, when it should have, I'm beginning to grasp now that in the poetry world much depends on who you know. Now that I'm glad to benefit from sometimes knowing such people.

The Chestnut Press take special pleasure in producing these editions on fine paper, elegantly typeset and Jeff Turner is a poet they rightly regard as one whose poems are worthy of such presentation.

Flumen est Arar, Julius Caesar begins a passage in De Bello Gallico, before going on to explain that there is a river Arar that flows so incredibly slowly that it is impossible to tell with the naked eye in which direction it is flowing. Not all of that rote learning done to achieve 'O' level Latin fifty years ago was wasted. That line comes to mind now as almost appropriate to how Jeff's poetry works. It is luxuriantly slow-moving. It doesn't demand anything beyond patience but it certainly rewards close reading. It can't possibly have been poured out in a rush of inspiration. It must have been thought over, finessed and allowed to mature in a way that I'm sure those who enjoy fine wines or whisky would understand.

It is contingent, feeling as if it might be somehow formal or metrical but not being, exploring what might be only to find that the exploration was all there was, like,

                a track that stumbles on, uncertain

whether to find or lose itself. 

That is both a theme and the way the theme is expressed and, as such, a paragon example of how poetry at its best can extend beyond the shackles of the language it needs to escape from. Before too long, this pathway and the house called Paradise that it leads to are both the poem and an extended metaphor for life itself and,

We must take them at their word

And take our chance that this is paradise:

 

One is even impressed with four judicious semi-colons in a 45-line poem. A couple more might have made Jeff look like a campaigner for the preservation of a threatened species of punctuation but they become necessary, if not quietly radiant, in such considered writing.

But, reading as closely as I have, I've gone back several times to find how the mice evoked in the final stanza can be called 'they' when such a pronoun must surely refer to some entity previously mentioned. I go back to those that 'we take at their word', who before that 'meant to stay' and before that were 'whoever built it' and either Jeff has performed some syntactical legerdemain, it's poetry taking a bit of a chance or the poem has been loosed from its moorings. But,

There is no more, they are saying.

No further on to find

Beyond the memory of what never was.

 

Which leaves us none the wiser, then, but with some sense of having been somewhere and seen something. I told you it was about 'life'.  

Sara Deborah Timossi & Valentina Seferinova: Songs of Summer

 Sara Deborah Timossi & Valentina Seferinova, St. Peter's, Petersfield, June 27

Once upon a time I went all the way to the Handel House in Mayfair to hear the few minutes of the Biber Passacaglia in real life so it's not too much to go to Petersfield to hear some choice Ysaÿe. Such opportunities are rare. It's like being an ornithologist going off in search of a not-often-seen species of bird.

The magnum opus was really Mozart's Sonata KV. 454, though, first up and an ideal piece in which to witness the fine balance and understanding achieved by these two friends. I understand on no lesser authority than that of Alfred Brendel that Mozart is difficult because there's 'no hiding place'. As it happens, Sara and Valentina don't need such a thing. My first encounters with Valentina involved her explosive Romantic repertoire, like Joachim Raff, and so it's been hard to shift those first impressions of her but that little local difficulty is surely resolved now after the delicate opening Largo and the frolic of the Allegro with Sara's courtly etiquette embroidered in. The Andante was poignant as perhaps only Mozart can be, the gorgeousness completed with the sweetness and light Allegretto. People sometimes discuss which composers they'd most like to have met. I'm sure Mozart would have been memorable but he might have been a pain in the neck at times. As is often the case, it's the work we treasure irrespective of who wrote it.

The Danse Rustique from Ysaÿe's Sonata for Solo Violin, op. 27, no. 5, was as spectacular as could have been hoped. Surely not to be undertaken lightly as an example of the supreme virtuoso's masterpiece. Quite how the pizzicato notes were fitted in during the tour de force of bowing remained on the outskirts of understanding. Like the Bach Partitas that this music is surely related to, one wonders that the violinist does it with only the standard issue two hands. But Sara is a calm presence, doing it without the extravagant gestures that some either feel the need of or put in for dramatic effect.

Following our latest heatwave, conditions were perfect with the church doors left open and ultimate levels of comfort made for the ambience we might remember as being right for Songs of Summer and Romance. It was quite recently that some 'small-scale' Tchaikovsky was available in Chichester, not that he is ever knowingly small in scope. Valentina opened the second half with more such in a luxurious June from The Seasons, op. 37a, all en plein air and verdant before melting way. Lushness continued in the Three Romances, op. 22, by Clara Schumann, culminating in the rolling lyricism of the Leidenschaftlich schnell, the translation of which belies my interpretation of it.

Manuel de Falla's miniatures in Suite Populaire Espagnole expanded the variety of music further with some rich atmospherics. From the piano dance rhythms of El Pan Moruno, Sara's mute strings in Nana and into the dark heart of Polo, we were left to contemplate the possibilities of things not quite as civilized as Mozart but we also left contemplating consummate musicianship presented for the sheer pleasure of it.

Completing Bach and other stories

 It was July 8th last year when I found the Complete Works of Bach, 172 discs in a pristine, unopened box, in the Chichester Oxfam shop last year. £49.99, the bargain of the year.

I have seven discs left to play and so should finish the project in a year. Listening to them, or letting them play is one thing, writing it all is entirely another. I'm suspicious of the Hockney types from who art pours out and I like the frugality of Elizabeth Bishop but Bach had the recipe right. It's the cantatas that keep on coming and where there were pieces not knowingly heard before to be discovered. It was mainly the organ music that got left until last but even in among that, some of which sounded like doodling, there were memorable things to be had, like the inventive Passacaglia BWV 582 and the very taking setting of a Vivaldi Concerto, BWV 594.

The discs of Chorale Settings are not his fault, nor that the Well-Tempered Klavier was shared between organ and harpsichord. Bach was not in a position to write for the pianoforte but I think he would have if he had been. Thus, overall, it's not 172 discs of uninterrupted wonder but it's difficult to think of anybody else whose output contained quite so much or whose Top 6 needs to leave quite so much out, whose next six would be far ahead of anybody else's first. I hope I'm not overstating the case.

The piano Well-Tempered Klavier, Tatiana Nikoloyeva, must be in the Bach Top 6. Having had that, it might be hard to justify the partitas as well in the interests of variety. The solo Violin Partitas have to be in there. Possibly Rachel Podger. The Double Violin Concerto, Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. The Brandenburg Concertos with Harnoncourt. Which already only leaves us two remaining places for choral work. But, idiosyncratically and abandoning any attempt at a representative half dozen, I will have the keyboard Partitas, ahead of the Goldberg Variations, not by Glenn Gould, the Cello Suites where it could be Yo-Yo Ma.

--

Sliding down in my estimation after such a good start is Henry James now that I'm into the titles that got him his reputation. The recent heat hasn't helped when even reading seemed like an effort but especially an effort when one is less concerned about what happens to the people in The Ambassadors than one had been in the previous one. Henry James might have got unlucky by my overloading myself with his books too eagerly and too soon and then running into a heatwave but all I ever understood and his elaborate prose has become evident and if I can battle on stoically through the words of this book, I'll need to give him a rest before going back to him.

Keir Starmer

This is one way a worthwhile poem can get itself written. I'm sure there are others.

I have a lot of time for Keir Starmer. You shouldn't need to be charismatic to be Prime Minister. Attlee was the best ever and Boris the worst until they somehow found Liz Truss but that needs us to redefine 'charisma' as 'see-through vanity project with no concept of the truth'. Churchill said that an empty taxi drew up and Clement Attlee got out of it. A possible near miss of an insult although not as accurate as saying, 'a better Prime Minister than me got out'.

It was when R.E.M. The Great Beyond came up on Spotify that the first impulse to write something in tribute to Keir Starmer was joined by a way of doing it. It's useful for more than one thing to be going on in a poem. While it might be true to say 'the sky is blue', it doesn't make a poem. Once one's done something to explain how or why, there begins the possibility of a poem. It turned out that Keir was,

 pushing an elephant up the stairs,

  tossing up punch lines that were never there

Over my shoulder a piano falls

Crashing to the ground 

 

I liked Keir Starmer while always aware that he was a politician and thus, almost by definition, not entirely to be trusted. He had the right iconic hero among his reference points in Harold Wilson and, thanks to the disasters of the obviously outgoing Conservative administration, had the same sort of gimme landslide General Election win that Blair had, once he'd reformed the Labour Party from its inward, Corbynite paradoxes. 

I remember Tony Benn, decades ago, claiming that Labour only won General Elections on 'left-wing' manifestos. But, no, the presumed natural Labour constituency in the lower-paid and under-privileged aren't interested in political correctness, gender identity and Palestine. They haven't read Karl Marx and are more interested in a better world for themselves than one for everyone and so express their rebellion by voting for Farage and his ramshackle band of under-vetted, makeshift chancers.

 

Our electoral system provided Starmer with the most unlikely majority in the House of Commons, so overwhelming in seats but so unjustified by the popular vote and, more crucially, so unsupported by the rank and file of those seats once he had shifted from the 'leftist' attitudes he had espoused in order to get there to the Blue Labour attempts that he and Rachel Reeves undertook to actually balance the books.

Anybody in any sort of business is aware that one can't sustain a loss for long. A country is no different once it's so overly borrowed that its interest payments are taking all the money it would prefer to spend on- defence, NHS, Police, potholes and every other crisis one hears about to which the answer the expert advises is 'more government spending'.

Despite inheriting the 'years of Tory misrule', Keir ran into the 'headwinds' of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the unreliability of a gimcrack President of the USA who had so enthusiastically endorsed Boris but subsequently failed to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours as promised. But as much as anything he ran into his own backbenchers who hadn't thought they'd been elected to cut benefits and maybe the fatal flaw in the Starmer tragedy was that he got there under false pretences and so wasn't in a position to balance the books once it was his job to.

He might well feel aggrieved, though, having achieved a certain amount on NHS waiting lists, migration and a steady if not expansive economy. He was a vast improvement on his predecessors and got little credit for it.  

 

Tianyang Han in Chichester

 Tianyang Han, Chichester Cathedral, June 23

In the bleak midsummer, the heat might make some moan. Reluctant to though I am, I am not alone. Thus an hour in the relative cool of the Chichester nave is as welcome as those precious moments standing under a Tesco air-conditioning unit, even more so given a soundtrack much preferable to what they usually play. 

A significant part of the greatness of Brahms is tucked away in the late chamber music like the op. 118 Klavierstücke. It's not often that a programme begins with its highlight but the second of the six immediately provided the best tune, judiciously played, in all its teneramente consolation. 

The third and fourth are an excursion into quicker tempi before a return to contemplation in a possibly night-time Romanze and the luminous light-touch in the final Andante. 

More deliberately 'poetic' and descriptive, as explained in its title, one of the 24 Debussy Preludes evoked how The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air where it might have benefitted from leaving interpretation to the listener and I'd have found in it an unsettled but not restless subconscious. Then another of them, Minstrels, was rhythmically more various, more modern and short.

Three of the Six Rachmaninov Moments Musicaux then made me wonder if the Brahms was such a shoo-in for top billing. Not for the first time, Rachmaninov excels in live performance in the right hands, some way above where I'd rate him as a composer.

The No. 2 Allegretto burst into a swelling downpour of notes and suddenly revealed an entirely other side of Tianyang's virtuosity after the earlier subtleties. No. 3 was a solemn Andante cantabile before the Presto No. 4 was driven by a powerful left hand with torrents and drama in the right. Two people sitting next to me- who possibly knew her- lured me into a standing ovation almost by osmosis but I was easily persuaded after the programme had grown so impressively in its 45 minutes or so.

What I do on a regular basis at these events is report on them. It's journalism. Some generous types call it reviewing but I do it to celebrate rather than judge and I'd draw the line well before being raised to the level of critic. There have been one or two occasions when I'd prefer not to say anything and so haven't but I'm regularly made uncharacteristically Panglossian in the manner of Candide by the majority of music events. Almost optimistic enough to want to read Leibniz. But, as far as these frail critical faculties allow, I'm prepared to estimate that Tianyang was above the customary high standard of technique and musicianship and is one to follow.

And that makes for a good place to rest from jabbing at my own keyboard for a while. If the concerts aren't quite over before the dog days of summer, the reviewing probably is. We can but look forward to September when Autumn is ycumen in.  

Danny Driver at the Menuhin Room

 Danny Driver, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 20

Danny Driver is a regular performer at Wigmore Hall so his return to the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth's answer to it, must have made him feel reasonably at home. 

Medtner's Second Improvisation, op. 47, is fifteen variations on a theme that come usefully with titles that both help the listener navigate their way through and provide clues as to what is being depicted. Thus, the haunting stillness of the Song of the Water-nymph was followed by flighty Winged Dances, the reveries of Enchantment, the reverberations of the Roar of the Crowd and the mysterious In the Forest. Comparisons might be made with his contemporary compatriot, Rachmaninov, but he's not so lush or self-indulgent. In an gripping realization of the final movements, Danny sustained the last note of the Storm into the conclusion where one could hardly help but hear what was surely a pointed inversion of Beethoven's 'fate motif' left wide open to one's choice of interpretation, if such it is.

Alert to all aspects of performance, Danny commented on how the intimacy of the venue made for a shared experience as he was aware of the audience involvement, something that was confirmed by some rare standing ovation at the end. The discerning clientele there don't give away such accolades lightly.

Beethoven's Sonata, op.111, was the last of his 32. The abrupt fortes of the Maestoso were followed by dash and dazzle although my approximate timing suggested Danny took nothing off the 26 minutes of the Stephen Kovacevich recording and might have been a fraction longer. The Adagio was in part slow dance and had passages of sustained exuberance but is dominated by a feeling of transcendence, of last words that were intended as the culmination of the vast cycle even if he was nowhere near the end of his life. Alfred Brendel said, 'what is to be expressed here is distilled experience' and one has a sense of being refined beyond existence, a profoundness that perhaps nobody does like Beethoven did in a handful of mostly 'later' works. Portsmouth is unlikely to witness it played with any more gentle authority and not many other places will either.

If that was Beethoven's farewell to the piano sonata after such a great and ground-breaking contribution then we might use the hyperbole of a comparison with the occasion of Andrew McVittie's similar farewell to the Menuhin Room Series in the hope and belief that it is not quite as final as Beethoven's was. It was noted that it is taking a committee of three to succeed him. While he will be missed, he won't be gone entirely and the Series resumes in the Autumn on the fourth Saturday of each month.

  

Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler in Chichester

 Rebecca Hepplewhite & Caroline Tyler, Chichester Cathedral, June 16

The Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, is one of the pieces I've heard most often in live performance. Rebecca Hepplewhite was today the latest addition to the list of Natalie Clein, Pavlos Carvalho et al and a very fine one, relatively subdued and introspective compared to some, her relaxed sound rich and lonely in the big acoustic. 

Never heard before, though, was the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, arranged for piano by Caroline Tyler and played by her. It could almost have been a different piece, all dreamy and C19th Romantic and hardly Bach at all. Sacrilege, some might say, but one is accustomed to what one is accustomed to and after much of a lifetime with this music as cello music- once hearing it arranged for bass guitar, one needs more than one chance to appreciate it as anything else. Beautifully done, fascinating if not alarming to hear, I'm sure my initial reservations would be overcome in due course but leopards might need to learn to change their spots.

It was by way of a bridge to Rebecca and Caroline joining forces for the Rachmaninov Sonata, op.19, which by some inverse symmetry had the famous piano man writing for cello. While all four movements mixed their moods between melancholy and bursts of rhapsodic melody, the mournful opening gave way to misty distances before some restlessness in the Allegro second.

Caroline's sumptuous piano in the highlight Andante seemed to fade in sympathy with Rebecca's sorrowful cello, each climax receding like dimming light. Whatever mysteries it was evoking have only been enhanced by the illegible scrawl of the note I made about the finale before it ended more in celebration, redemption or sweetness and light. 

Not only impressive but making one think about esoteric questions. A long time ago, knowing no better, I bought a secondhand recording of a disc of Monteverdi arranged and conducted by Karajan. It was entirely inappropriate and I threw it away rather than keep it in the house. Bach arr. Tyler was still gorgeous music. He would have been interested not only to hear the pianoforte but what lushness Caroline made of his austere Prelude. He might even have wished he'd had the chance to do it that way.

Sounds of the 70's

 Shaun Keavney's doing a fine job, filling up Radio 2's Sunday afternoons so knowledgeably and so my Spotify playlist series will end with no. 5 soon. Shaun made a bit of a racket a few times this afternoon but he's more or less 'cool' and sound and can work a studio better than I'd ever do.

There was a makeshift manager once during some difficult times in a job I was in who kept saying he had 'the best job in the department' but he was transparently trying to spread a feel good factor across a fractious workforce. He had a dreadful, if well paid, job but couldn't be heard to say so.

It's not so with Sounds of the 70's and never would be with 60's either. One almost can't miss. Although, of course, many would. 

So, instead of overloading the front page here with too much 'Also appearing at...', here, in all their glory are the playlists from one who once did a live DJ set, aged 13 or 14, in a suburb of Gloucester, for the Girl Guides and Brownies with, so dangerously, cubs, scouts and other boys allowed in.

You wouldn't believe how easy- and how dispiriting- the dance DJ's job is. They responded very well to All Because of You by Geordie, hey, hey, hey, and so that got played 4 or 5 times. Not the worst record ever but one never went poor by underestimating what one's audience wants. However, 

 Pilot episode

2  3  4

 

The World Cup and other stories

 If I press the 'info' button on the TV remote control to get details on the Radio 5 coverage of the (Men's Football) World Cup, it says,

Several teams from around the world compete against each other in a prestigious tournament in order to emerge victorious and win the title. 

Strangely it assumes we know it concerns men's football. There might be an octogenarian don at Oxford, expert in Xenophon or Tacitus who was unaware, or maybe those heroic people in the Andaman Islands who murdered an intruder because they wisely don't want to know about the rest of the world but otherwise most people with cable TV would be aware of the above. So it's tempting to suspect an ironist at work at Virgin Media.

I once found a dictionary that defined 'kangaroo' as (something like), two-legged marsupial that progresses in a succession of flying bounds. It was Dr. Johnson but it should have been.

 

An idea I had to provide my empty turf account with some easy cash was to lay heavily into an odds-on dead cert in the early stages. Brazil were 8/13 to beat Morocco but I did some research. Brazil have been a bit of a mess recently, it said, and Morocco are no pushover. So I kept my powder dry, turned on the match half an hour in and found Morocco 1-0. And it's as good as winning the bet as it is not to do it when it loses. Better, in fact, at the odds.

Sadly my allegiance to Baby Doc Duvalier and Wyclef Jean's Haiti went unrewarded last night so my low level of interest in this capitalist rip-off has already waned from its low starting point. I read a preview that convinced me the final will be between Spain and Argentina, once we get anywhere near a stage that can be called the 'finals'. Perhaps I'll check in the newspaper in a few weeks' time to see if it transpires as such.

--

Meanwhile, still some fallout from the recent Evening with Philip Larkin, I dip randomly into the James Booth biography at bedtime and have just read Michaelmas Term at St. Bride's from his anthology of early fiction. If anybody said at the time - and I might have- that such a book was scraping the Larkin barrel then it was worth the scraping. I will be back into the sophistication of Henry James all too soon but, for enjoyment, would gladly stick with Brunette Coleman, Larkin's female alter ego and nom de plume in these just slightly suspect fictions of teenage girls that young Larkin clearly spent a lot of time on and made a good job of.

Like Jill, it is an Oxford novel about an ingenue in the rarefied atmosphere of class-ridden dreaming spires. Also autobiographical are the details of some jazz records, literary citations including mention of Edward Thomas's book on Oxford, and -using an Oxford comma there, more horse racing following the interest in the Oaks from the previous episodes about Mary's time at Willow Gables. Although Larkin was a cricket man more than one of the turf.

What appeals about the world of Larkin, beyond all the obvious things about one of one's favourite writers, is the refreshing austerity of his time. If austerity as a government policy has a bad name, one can look back on it as a bracing, healthy way of life unencumbered by 'doom-scrolling' and the like. There were books and there was music and they somehow got by in what might seem like a grey world but it was more subtly shaded than the overblown gaudiness of what we are offered now.

And the ubiquitous evidence of failing standards in education when journalists at respectable institutions like the BBC and Times Radio can report such things as 'South Korea coming from behind to win 2-0'. Presumably they had been 0-0 down. You can't take anything on trust from such reports. You have to work it out for yourself. They must have won 2-1.  

--

At long last, I've taken to using the machine that has the capacity to play cassettes to play cassettes. It's taken so long that its capacity to play CD's failed quite a while ago. But the first of the drawerful of elderly cassettes have so far come up tremendously well after decades of disuse. I collected all sorts of things from the radio, thinking that the medium would be there always and not be supplanted by CD, mini disc, download, streaming and all.

The Poetry Prom with Betjeman introducing the very rare occasion when Larkin read The Whitsun Weddings to a live audience; Sean O'Brien visiting Auden's northern mining landscape, that sort of thing. Now I only have to wait for the tapes of August Kleinzahler, possibly Paul Muldoon and I think there's Auden himself, to resurface. It's like archaeology up there but, like laying down a wine and forgetting about it, it's treasure worth finding. 

And truly, I say unto thee

And truly, I say unto thee, if there's a better book than A.N. Wilson's Jesus, then I haven't read it. Absolutely scintillating. I even considered acquiring The Apocryphal Gospels and The Dead Sea Scrolls, in paperback editions, to investigate further but without Andrew's insights and commentary it might not be so enlightening.

He makes the comparison with another thrilling area of biographical mystery and speculation, 

The feelings of the historian about Jesus must be analogous to his feelings about Shakespeare, who managed to achieve fame and wealth and notoriety in Elizabethan London, and who left behind him a body of literary work without parallel, but whose 'personality' remains almost invisible.

Perhaps it's the not knowing that make these two's lives - two of the most famous people that ever lived- so compelling but it's equally potentially irksome that so many myths are put in place to fill the gaps that are allowed to pass as general knowledge. I'm grateful to Andrew for the introduction to the word 'midrash', which is a Jewish term for 'filling in the gaps'. He cites a number of examples pertaining to Jesus that might appear to accommodate Old Testament prophecies after the fact but the job he does in unravelling the likely and the possible from the imaginative is brilliant.

Mary Magdalene and her friends found the tomb empty because other friends had moved the body to a preferred burial place. Subsequent sightings of Jesus, often shrouded in doubt, were of his brother, James, who took up the work that was to prove to be shortlived. Jesus preached only to make Jews better Jews, not to set up a new church. It was Paul that did that.

Another of Wilson's subjects, Tolstoy, is found to be less contradictory in his teachings. Jesus is portrayed as quarrelsome, difficult and unsuccessful in his lifetime despite the vast, misunderstood legacy he left. 

I've known plenty of sane, intelligent, well-intentioned people that genuinely believed, 'had faith in' the virgin birth, miracles and the resurrection who sincerely thought that those impossibilities happened. Even circa 1972/3, in our traditionally Christian school, such things as walking on water and the feeding of the five thousand had been rationally explained away but, as ever, people will believe what they want to believe and there ain't nothing one can do about it. I'm sure we all enjoy a bit of mysticism, a ghost story and the way the best poetry conjures something extra from the language but we all know, don't we, that there's no such thing as magic.

Wilson's book maybe ought to be regarded as the truest gospel.