By Patrick Wright

On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be “the greatest show on earth”. First came the troops and the “military ironwork”, grinding past for a full hour. This was followed by a much longer civil parade in which the people marched by in barely imaginable numbers, beaming with joy at their elevated leaders who gazed back with the slightly “subdued” expression of still unaccustomed new emperors.

The spectacle with which China celebrated the fifth anniversary of the communist liberation was brilliantly organised, as Casson felt obliged to admit. He was less impressed by the admiring expressions worn by many of the other international guests: “Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and there in the middle – could it have been? – an MCC tie.” That particular specimen was Ivor Montagu, a cricket-loving friend and translator of the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein.

Sickened by the rapture of the communist regime’s ardent western friends, Casson quickly retreated to the shaded “rest room” beneath the viewing stand. Here he lingered among yellow-robed Tibetan lamas, sipping tea and exchanging impressions with other doubtful Britons: the classically minded and no longer Marxist novelist and poet Rex Warner, and AJ Ayer, the high-living logical positivist who would come home to tell the BBC that China’s parade had reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies.

Enraptured or appalled, none of these British witnesses appears to have regretted the absence of Stanley Spencer. The 63-year-old painter, so famously associated with the little Berkshire village of Cookham, had managed to escape the entire show – thanks, he later explained, to “some Mongolians”, whose timely arrival at the hotel that morning had provided the cover under which he retreated upstairs to his room.

It was the discovery that Spencer had been to China that persuaded me to look further into this forgotten episode. I soon realised that an extraordinary assortment of Britons had made their way to China in 1954, nearly two decades before 1972, when President Nixon made the stage-managed and distinctly operatic visit that has gone down in history as the moment when the west entered rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. Were these motley British visitors just credulous idiots, for whom “Red China” was another version of the legendary Cathay? That is what the 24-year-old Douglas Hurd and the other diplomats in the British embassy compound in Peking appear to have suspected of these unwelcome freeloaders. Or was something more significant going on?

Nowadays, the rapidly increasing number of British travellers to China think nothing of getting on a plane to fly directly there. Yet Spencer had good reason to feel “trembly” as he and the five other members of his entirely unofficial cultural delegation approached the runway at Heathrow on 14 September 1954. Though Britain had recognised China a few months after the liberation, it had yet to establish proper diplomatic relations with the communist-led government, and the embarking Britons couldn’t pick up a visa until they had reached Prague. That meant crossing the iron curtain dividing Europe. “Did you go under or over it?” one joker would later ask, making light of a passage that was actually more like falling over the edge of the known world. The travellers then had to fly across east Europe before heading across Siberia and then Mongolia – all the time relying on their hosts to finance, accommodate and entertain them, and also to provide the vibrating twin-prop planes in which they would hop to the far side of the world, landing every three hours or so to refuel.

On Saturday 24 April, the Chinese prime minister and foreign secretary, Zhou Enlai, flew into Geneva from Moscow. He came at the head of a large Chinese delegation to join France, Britain and Russia in a conference aimed at finding a settlement to the Indo-China war. Diverse western Europeans were transfixed by the sight of this urbane and highly competent man, smiling into the cameras as he berated America – which had refused even to take part in the conference – and demonstrating his abilities as a regional leader by negotiating ceasefires in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The flights to Peking began shortly after Zhou’s European triumph. From Geneva, as at the Bandung conference the following year, Zhou invited the world to “come and see” what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. And Britons were among those who headed for the airport, including an opening delegation sent by the Labour leadership, headed by Clement Attlee.

The cultural delegation, which comprised Casson, Warner, Ayer and Spencer, together with the geologist Leonard Hawkes and the young sinologist John Chinnery, followed later in the summer. Its membership had been decided by people close to the Britain-China Friendship Association, who were careful to come up with a group that could not easily be dismissed as communist fellow travellers.

There were indeed some pilgrims among the travellers, who saw what they and China’s presenters wanted them to see – docilely imbibing tea and statistics, smiling back at children in model nurseries, and sensing only a bright cooperative future in fields fertilised with the blood of murdered landlords. But the Attlee delegation was not like that. Its members had fought their own battles against communism in Britain, and they had been well briefed before leaving. They stood up to Mao over tea, deplored the regime’s failure to do anything about the booming birth-rate and also criticised the communist-led government for imposing an absurdly distorted idea of the west on their people. If China really believed that the masses in the west sympathised with communism, and were only held down by an evil ruling class, then they might blunder into another war.

Meanwhile, confusion as well as unexpected light followed from the visitors’ habit of applying British analogies to Chinese realities. Attlee himself praised New China’s still expanding network of cooperatives, seeing in them the principle of “voluntary action” that William Beveridge had insisted was the necessary attendant to the welfare state. The national secretary of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, Mabel Ridealgh, likened China’s extensive cooperatives to those of her own organisation and joined Castle in comparing China’s food distribution system to the Co-op in Britain.

Earlier post-liberation visitors had already set about Englishing the new Chinese scene. “It’s the same in Marylebone High Street,” the veteran actor Miles Malleson had remarked in 1953: he was thinking of New China’s appetite for dramas with a contemporary message. Basil Davidson had reserved a different English comparison for a communist group leader in the southern city of Canton. Aware of what the regime’s critics said about such watchful cadres, he insisted that she was “as much a spy on her 50 families as the chairman of my parish council, in rural Essex, is a spy on me”.

Hogarth was merely continuing in this line when he declared arriving in Shanghai to be like “pulling into Manchester from Sheffield”, while Hangchow (Hangzhou) was like “a South Coast English seaside resort whose better days lay at the beginning of the century”. He found a more original English line on China’s revolutionary art. Visiting the Lu Xun museum in Shanghai, he enjoyed the discovery that those stark woodcuts, designed to galvanise illiterate peasants into action against both the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary nationalists, were descended from leafy English scenes portrayed by such far from revolutionary artists as Gwen Raverat, Robert Gibbings and Edward Bawden.

There was a characteristically English way of looking at China’s notoriously bloody “agrarian reform” too. In 1949, Mao had famously proclaimed that the Chinese people had at last “stood up”, and Hogarth was happy to confirm that claim. His drawing of a “Shansi peasant” shows a man standing very upright indeed: clasping the wooden hayfork that rises next to his head, he stares back with a resolute expression that is neither cringing nor deferential.

Made in the field, as was this determined artist-reporter’s way, Hogarth’s drawing evokes an English analogy already employed by Joseph Needham, Davidson and other visitors – the English Diggers and Levellers of the 17th century, who had torn down fences and set to work digging up the commons land stolen from them under the new Enclosure Acts.

It was at once an evasive strategy and a concerted attempt to assert an English tradition uncompromised by a mutually hated British imperialism. Yet it was Spencer who raised the art of being English in New China to its strangest heights. Twenty years earlier, he had recorded the desire to write the story of his life as if it were a wandering “journey to China”, and he had no sooner landed at the airfield outside Peking than he started peering around in startled recognition: “As I drove along the roads from the airports to the towns it was almost comic to see these dreams of mine coming true on either side of the road.” Other delegates cringed as he harassed the guides at various historical sites with peculiar offscript questions, and tormented helpless waiters with requests for fish and chips. As for New China’s artists, Spencer had no prescriptions to offer about socialist realism. Instead he informed his audience at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that he was “possibly the most marvellous visitor to China they had ever had”.

Judging from the notes he wrote after returning home, Spencer made very short work of the Great Wall of China too. Indeed, he reduced it to the garden wall along which he had liked to walk as a child in Cookham. He had, as he explained, climbed up by the coal cellar and triumphed over many challenges as he made his way along its length: not the advancing Manchu army, but the leaning lid of the dustbin, the ivy that stretched over some sections, and the protruding branches of cherry, yew and fir that also had to be negotiated over that wall’s rather less than 4,000 mile length.

As for the future of this attempted rapprochement between Britain and “New China”, the optimistic “spirit of Geneva” evaporated soon enough after the last delegates came home, and the blocs quickly refroze. Yet that moment of hopefulness was not entirely without consequences. Trade between Britain and China was renewed over the years to come, diplomatic relations were established, and cultural exchanges did develop. The Bevanite perspective within the Labour party cannot be said to have thrived, but the insistence on maintaining an independent British stance towards Washington was alive in the 60s, when Harold Wilson refused to commit British forces to America’s war in Vietnam.

Of the British artists who went to China in 1954, neither Spencer nor Hogarth would ever return. Mathews, however, would try to maintain the dialogue even as China went through the suppression of the Hundred Flowers campaign, the collectivisation of the briefly “cooperative” economy, and the monstrously costly “Great Leap Forward”. He used his position as secretary of the Contemporary Art Society at the Tate Gallery to promote an exchange of exhibitions. Working directly with Chinese government agencies, he began by organising a survey show of British Graphic Art, which was taken to China by his fellow organiser and artist Richard Carline in 1955. He himself returned in 1960, accompanying an exhibition of recent paintings entitled Sixty Years of British Painting in Oils.

Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster. His highly acclaimed books include The Village that Died for England, Tank, and Iron Curtain. His latest books is Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China. The above blog post is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Guardian.

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By Philip Carter

This month is the 75th anniversary of the London version of the popular board game, Monopoly. To mark the anniversary, editors at the Oxford DNB wondered what a historical version of the game might look like. The Oxford DNB includes the stories of more than 57,000 men and women from British history, of whom nearly half had ties to the capital city.

So who would you have met if you’d made your way around a Monopoly board in the 1400 years since Mellitus (d.624), our first definite capital dweller and, incidentally, the first ever bishop of London? Throw a 3 and you’re rubbing shoulders with pugilist Daniel Mendoza on the Whitechapel Road, while a 10 has you ‘just visiting’ a London jail, alongside Elizabeth Fry. (Perhaps you’re there to see Dr Crippen, who spent his last days in Pentonville prison before his execution 100 years this month.) Another 3 gets you to the more salubrious Whitehall (the ODNB has articles on over 1700 civil servants); an 11 sees you on the Strand, developed for real by the 17th-century property tycoon Nicholas Barbon after the Great Fire. Shake a 7 and it’s the Water Works (how about Hugh Myddelton?) Follow this with a 6 and you can browse in Bond Street, perhaps stopping at no. 123, where the Italian confectioner William Jarrin set up shop in 1822. Posh Park Lane (126 residents) and swanky Mayfair (232) beckon, not to mention £200 on passing ‘Go’. But, oh no! a 4 and it’s ‘Super Tax, Pay £100’: welcome to the ODNB’s 54 accountants.

If you’d like to play on, you can. Online you can search the Oxford DNB by city, town, and street, as well as profession.

Dr Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the UK the ODNB is available free via nearly all public libraries and you can log-in at home by adding your library card number here. The ODNB is also available in libraries worldwide—leaving you a little bit more for that hotel on the Old Kent Road.

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In recognition of the US midterm elections, I decided to have a browse through Lend Me Your Ears: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations and share with you a few entries that have come from the American political world. Enjoy…

“I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and with nowhere to go but the White House or home.”
Robert Dole 1923-, American Republican politician, announcing his decision to relinquish his Senate seat and step down as majority leader.

“One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.”
Robert H. Bork 1927-, American judge and educationalist, from The Antitrust Paradox (1978)

“The American people have spoken – but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.”
Bill Clinton 1946-, 42nd President of the United States 1993-2001, on the US presidential election of 2000.

“We are a nation of communities, of tens and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labour union, neighbourhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”
George Bush Sr. 1924-, 41st President of the United States, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, 18 August 1988.

“No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace, is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
Alfred Emanuel Smith 1873-1944, American politician, comment on the New Deal in New Outlook, Dec 1933

“I suggested [in 1966] that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out.”
Huey Newton 1942-1989, American political activist, from Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it has about 18 million cracks in it.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1947-, American lawyer and Democratic politician, speech to her supporters, conceding the Democratic party presidential nomination to Barack Obama, 7 June 2008.

“The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a grey wharf-rat at last.”
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, American writer, from Journal (1853)

“On my arrival in the United States I was struck by the degree of ability among the governed and the lack of it among the governing.”
Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859, French historian and politician, from Democracy in America (1835-40) vol. 1

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By Alia Brahimi

The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.

Indeed, things haven’t worked out the way Osama bin Laden hoped they would.

Quoting such diverse sources as Carl von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap and Peter Paret, al-Qaeda strategists had repeatedly emphasised the pivotal importance of attracting the support of the Muslim masses to the global jihad. For Abu Ubeid al-Qurashi, the absence of popular support meant that the mujahidin would be no more than a criminal gang. ‘It is absolutely necessary that the resistance transforms into a strategic phenomenon’, argued Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, time and time again.

However, despite the open goal handed to bin Laden by the US-led invasion of Iraq and the increased relevance and resonance of his anti-imperial rhetoric from 2003-2006, he failed to find the back of the net. His crow to Bush about Iraq being an ‘own goal’ was decidedly premature. The credibility of bin Laden’s claim to be acting in defence of Muslims exploded alongside the scores of suicide bombers dispatched to civilian centres with the direct intention of massacring swathes of (Muslim) innocents.

Moreover, where al-Qaeda in Iraq gained control over territory, as in the Diyala and Anbar provinces, the quality of life offered to the Iraqi people was a source of further alienation: music, smoking and shaving were banned, women were forced to take the veil, punishments for disobedience included rape, the chopping of hands and the beheading of children. Brutality was blended with farce as female goats were killed because their parts were not covered and their tails turned upward.

In the end, bin Laden’s ideology, which relied first and foremost on a (poetic) narrative of victimhood, became impossible to sustain. Bin Laden’s project is profoundly moral. He casts himself as the defender of basic freedoms. He eloquently portrays his jihad as entirely defensive and al-Qaeda as the vanguard group acting in defence of the umma. He maintains that all the conditions for a just war have been met.

In reality, however, all of his just war arguments – about just cause, right authority, last resort, necessity, the legitimacy of targeting civilians – are based on one fundamental assumption: that al-Qaeda is defending Muslims from non-Muslim aggressors. As such, it is essential that (1) al-Qaeda stops killing Muslims and (2) al-Qaeda starts hitting legitimate western targets and the regimes which enable the alleged western encroachment.

The emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in January 2009 can be viewed as part of this end (much as the al-Qaeda-affiliated GSPC in Algeria formed in opposition to the moral bankruptcy of the GIA). Their publications favour targeted violence such as political assassinations and attacks within US military barracks such as that perpetrated by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood. Their most high-profile operations have been an assault on the US embassy in Sana’a, an attempt to assassinate the Saudi security chief Mohammed bin Nayef, and the bid by the ‘underpants bomber’ to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

In Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have internalised lessons from Iraq and are seeking to keep the population and the tribes on side. Their statements articulate the political and social discontent of the populace. The leadership seems to subscribe to bin Laden’s argument that violence must be used strategically and not wantonly. AQAP militants recently captured Yemeni soldiers fighting on the side of the government and, instead of beheading the prisoners, they set them free.

The jihad taking root in Yemen is more hopeful for bin Laden than in other outposts. In North Africa, ‘al-Qaeda’ exists principally as an Algerian phenomenon focused primarily on the battle with the Algerian state. The ‘al-Qaeda’ elements which remain in Pakistan have hitched their wagon to an especially virulent and puritanical ideology which focuses on slaughtering the Shia and any souls they deem insufficiently ‘Muslim’. Across the border in Afghanistan, and owing to their notoriously brutal and divisive tactics like indiscriminate suicide bombs and beheadings, al-Qaeda is no longer welcomed with open arms. Much of this extremism bin Laden himself has spoken out against.

AQAP represents a fresh chance for al-Qaeda. But bin Laden understands that al-Qaeda have much ground to make up in the battle of ideas. Al-Qaeda have been forced on to the back foot, mainly by their own failings. It is in this context of strategic failure that we should view the (thwarted) attempts to hit more ‘legitimate’ targets.

Alia Brahimi was born to an Algerian father and an American mother, and grew up in Algeria, Bahrain, and Cyprus. After reading Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, she gained an MPhil and then a DPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is now Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford University Changing Character of War Programme. She is the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror.

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By Elizabeth Knowles

When I began working for Oxford Dictionaries over thirty years ago, it was as a library researcher for the Supplement to OED. Volume 3, O–Scz, was then in preparation, and the key part of my job was to find earlier examples of the words and phrases for which entries were being written. Armed with a degree in English (Old Norse and Old English a speciality) and a diploma in librarianship, I was one of a group of privileged people given access to the closed stacks of the Bodleian Library. For several years the morning began with an hour or so consulting the (large, leather-bound volumes of the) Bodleian catalogue, followed by descent several floors underground to track down individual titles, or explore shelves of books on particular topics. Inevitably, you ended up sitting on the floor leafing through pages, looking for that particular word. The hunt could sometimes be frustrating—occasionally you reached a point where it was clear that you had exhausted all the obvious routes, and only chance (or possibly six months’ reading) would take you further. But it was never dull, and the excitement of tracking down your quarry was only enhanced by the glimpses you had on the way of background information, or particular contexts in which a word had been used. Serendipity was never far removed.

The purpose, of course, was to supply the lexicographers working on the Supplement with the raw material on which the finished entry in its structured and polished form would be based. Not all the information you gained during the search, therefore, would appear in the finished entry, and some of the contextual information (for example, other names for the same thing at a particular period, or even the use of the word by a particular person) was not necessarily directly relevant. But that did not mean that it often wasn’t interesting and thought-provoking for the researcher.

At the time (the late 1970s) research of this kind was carried out in what we would now call hard copy. Entries in the library catalogue might lead to a three-volume eighteenth-century novel, or the yellowed pages of a nineteenth-century journal or newspaper. It followed, therefore, that someone who wanted to research words in this way needed what I had the luck to have: access to the shelves of a major library. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, all that has changed. We still (of course, and thankfully) have excellent dictionaries which can be our first port of call, and we still have library catalogues to guide us. But these resources, and many others, are now online, allowing us to sit in our own homes and carry out the kind of searches for which I had to spend several hours a day underground. With more and more early printed sources becoming digitally available, we can hope to scan the columns of early newspapers, or search the texts of long-forgotten, once popular novels and memoirs. Specialist websites offer particular guidance in areas such as regional forms of English.

The processes for searching in print and online are at once similar, and crucially different. In both cases, we need to formulate our question precisely: what exactly do we want to know? What clues do we already have? A systematic search by traditional means might be compared with climbing a ladder towards an objective—and occasionally finding that the way up is blocked. There are no further direct steps. Online searching always has the possibility that a search will bring up the key term in association with something (a name, another expression), which can start you off down another path—perhaps the equivalent to stepping across to a parallel ladder which will then take you higher.

There has never been a time at which there have been richer resources for the would-be word hunter to explore, and there are no limits to the questions that can be asked—not just what a word means (or has meant in the past), or where it comes from, but questions such as who may have used it, or what other words does it resemble. Is it one of a set of words that interest you?

In writing How to Read A Word, it was enormously pleasurable both to recall the excitement and satisfaction of researching words, and to realize that modern technology has now made the possibility of such enjoyment part of the common experience.

Elizabeth Knowles became a historical lexicographer through working as a library researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, and then as a Senior Editor for the 4th edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993). She has been Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (7th edition, 2009), and her editorial credits include What They Didn’t Say: A Book of Misquotations (2006), and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (2009). Her latest book is How to Read a Word.

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By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late. Coming out of the entrance to the station, I nimbly side-stepped a beggar with a cardboard sign – sorry, bit of a rush, direct debit to Shelter, can’t stop – and hurried on my way to the cinema.

The film was Slumdog Millionaire: a nerve-shredding if ultimately cheering investigation into the hidden lives of the Indian slums. Coming out of the cinema, though, it was impossible to avoid the realiszation that equally vivid stories lay much closer to home. I retraced my steps to the tube station, and this time instead of brushing the beggar off I listened to what he had to say. It was a sadly familiar account of alcohol, a broken marriage, and homelessness, but as he told it the events took on a vividly personal colouring that was new and strange. He made me look again at what I thought I already knew.

The idea that what takes place under our noses can be hard to see clearly is hardly an original one; indeed, anyone who lives in a city soon learns to recognize the sensation of life being jolted out of its familiar routines, and assumptions being rearranged by new experiences. However, this idea took on a new resonance a few weeks later, when I was asked to edit a new selection of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s mammoth set of interviews with the street-sellers, beggars, entertainers, prostitutes, thieves, and all the rest of the human flotsam and jetsam that had washed up in the capital during the 1840s and 1850s.

Ask most readers – and not a few critics – who Henry Mayhew was, and the result is likely to be at best a puzzled stare. Though his voice pops up occasionally in recent work, from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’ to novels such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, for the most part he has become the Invisible Man of Victorian culture. And like H. G. Wells’s hero, usually he is detectable only by the movements of his surroundings, from Charles Kingsley’s jeremiad against the exploitation of cheap tailors in Alton Locke, to the strange echoes of his interview subjects in characters like Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House.

In some ways these literary aftershocks and offshoots of London Labour and the London Poor accurately reflect the work’s own generic hybridity. Opening Mayhew’s pages, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are encountering a writer who has one foot in the world of fact, one foot in the world of fiction, and hops between them with a curious mixture of uncertainty and glee. Sober tables of research are interrupted by facts of the strange-but-true variety: ‘Total quantity of rain falling yearly in the metropolis, 10,686,132,230,400 cubic inches’, or ‘The drainage of London is about equal in length to the diameter of the earth itself’. Even cigar-ends don’t escape his myth-making tendencies. Not content with calculating the number thrown away each week (30,000) and guessing at the proportion picked up by the cigar-end finders (a sixth), he continues by explaining how this ‘refuse tobacco’ is made into new cigars; ‘or, in other words, they are worked up again to be again cast away, and again collected by the finders, and so on perhaps, till the millennium comes’. It is a good example of what a contemporary reviewer meant by Mayhew’s ‘wonderful series of revelations suddenly disclosed in our own country, existing as it were, under our very feet’.

Together these sudden gear-changes of approach and style suggest that perhaps London Labour and the London Poor should be seen as a collaborative project, not just between Mayhew and the assistants who sought out his interview subjects and helped him compile his staggering tables of data, but between Mayhew and himself. It is a work in which the dispassionate investigative reporter met the bohemian artist about town, and the result was a piece of journalism that was sympathetic but wary, curious but respectful, sharply attentive to local details such as a walnut-seller’s brown-stained fingers, but also capable of explaining the social context that kept her in her place like a fly caught in a web.

In many ways she is still there. The longer I worked on this edition, the more I started to realize that Mayhew’s figures continue to live among us. For instance, his account of the cheap goods sold on street corners that carry ‘gaudy labels bearing sometimes the name of a well-known firm, but altered in spelling or otherwise’ will be familiar to anyone who has been tempted to buy a ‘Louis Viton’ handbag or ‘Guchi’ watch, just as the swindler who poses as a ‘Decayed Gentleman’ and sends out begging-letters will strike a chord with anyone stung by email spam.

From time to time, when I was choosing the passages that would make it into this new selection, Ralph McTell’s famous song would come into my head:

Have you seen the old man
In the closed-down market
Taking out the papers,
With his worn out shoes?
In his eyes you see no pride
Hands held loosely by his side
Yesterday’s paper telling yesterday’s news

So how can you tell me that you’re lonely,
Say for you that the sun don’t shine, and
Let me take you by the hand, lead you through the streets of London,
I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.

Mayhew made me see this old man, just as he made me see many of the other figures we may see more of once the recent UK spending review cuts start to bite. To pick up his book is to be taken by the hand and led through the streets of Victorian London. It is also to be introduced to the other London that so often seems unfamiliar to us: our own.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement, and has previously edited Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Great Expectations for Oxford World’s Classics. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature. You can watch him talk about his latest project, London Labour and the London Poor, here.

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By David Acheson

Why do so many people think they hate mathematics?
All too often, I suspect, the truth is that they were never let anywhere near it, but were fobbed off instead with something that was called mathematics, but which had none of the attractions of the real thing. In particular, they may have had no ‘big picture’ of the subject to help them along.

For what it’s worth, my own big picture of mathematics can be summed up in just six words: (i) surprising theorems, (ii) beautiful proofs and (iii) great applications.

While the subject started with applications to the physical world, mathematicians soon found beauty, too, in mathematics for its own sake, not least because of some of the elegant logical reasoning involved. My own personal view of mathematics at its best is in fact (i), (ii) and (iii) all at once, in one piece of work. That, in my view, is when you really open the champagne.

But above all, perhaps, it is the element of surprise that characterises much of mathematics at its best, and I got my first big mathematical surprise at the age of ten, in 1956. I was keen on conjuring at the time, and one day I came across the following ‘mind-reading’ trick in a magic book.

- Write down a 3-figure number. Any such number will do, provided the first and last figures differ by two or more.

- Now reverse your number, and subtract the smaller 3-figure number from the larger.

- Finally, reverse the result of that calculation, and add.

- Then the final answer will always be 1089, no matter which number you start with!

Okay, it’s not very ‘serious’ mathematics, but I have to tell you this: if you first see it as a 10-year old boy in 1956, it blows your socks off.

David Acheson is a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He is the author of 1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics, which aims to make mathematics accessible to everyone. On the way, via Kepler and Newton, he explains what calculus really means, gives a brief history of pi, and even takes us to chaos theory and imaginary numbers, but ensures that no one gets lost along the way.

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By Ulinka Rublack

I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.

We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which only now beset men as much as women. My friend too valued herself partly in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of bags, sunglasses, stilettos and shoes. She had modest breast implants and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In odd hours when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.

Yet, surprisingly, neither my friend nor her husband would seem very much out of place at around 1450. Men wore long pointed Gothic shoes then, which hardly look comfortable and made walking down stairs a special skill. In a German village, a wandering preacher once got men to cut off their shoulder-long hair and slashed the tips of the pointed shoes. Men and women aspired to an elongated, delicate and slim silhouette. Very small people seemed deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools. Italians already wrote medical books on cosmetic surgery.

We therefore need to unlock an important historical problem: How and why have looks become more deeply embedded in how people feel about themselves or others? I see the Renaissance as a turning point. Tailoring was transformed by new materials, cutting, and sewing techniques. Clever merchants created wide markets for such new materials, innovations, and chic accessories, such as hats, bags, gloves, or hairpieces, ranging from beards to long braids. At the same time, Renaissance art depicted humans on an unprecedented scale. This means that many more people were involved in the very act of self-imaging. New media – medals, portraits, woodcuts, genre scenes – as well as the diffusion of mirrors enticed more people into trying to imagine what they looked like to others. New consumer and visual worlds conditioned new emotional cultures. A young accountant of a big business firm, called Matthäus Schwarz, for instance, could commission an image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely note his waist measures. Schwarz worried about gaining weight, which to him would be a sign of ageing and diminished attractiveness. While he was engaged in courtship, he wore heart-shaped leather bags as accessory. They were green, the colour of hope. Hence the meaning of dress could already become intensely emotionalized. The material expression of such new emotional worlds – heart-shaped bags for men, artificial braids for women, or red silk stockings for young boys – may strike us as odd. Yet their messages are all familiar still, to do with self-esteem, erotic appeal, or social advancement, as are their effects, which ranged from delight in wonderful crafting to worries that you had not achieved a look, or that someone just deceived you with their look. In these parts of our lives the Renaissance becomes a mirror which leads us back in time to disturb the notion that the world we live in was made in a modern age.

Ever since the Renaissance, we have had to deal with clever marketing as well as the vexing questions of what images want, and what we want from images, as well as whether clothes wear us or we wear them.

Ulinka Rublack is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her latest book is Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, which shows how clothes made history and history can be about clothes.

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By Amy Mandelker

February 11, 2010

I am proofing the galleys for this new edition of the Maude translation of War and Peace when a freak storm with gale force winds takes out three towering pines on my neighbor’s property, topples a venerable oak crushing a friend’s roof, and downs trees and power lines all over Princeton township and beyond, leaving the southern part of the state deprived of electricity for several days. Working against deadline, I try proofreading by candlelight, which gives me an affinity for the actual experience in the soldierly encampments Tolstoy described. The men, retreating from battle with their wounded, walked on dark, unknown roads and reached a bivouac lit only by campfire. They had little light for dressing their wounds and mending their clothes and gear. The officers may have had oil lamps and candles in their tents, and so wrote their diaries and letters in penumbral twilight, with an eye to the candle height and the dripping of wax.

In the darkness of that temporary deprivation of electrical light and computerized text, I bent over the galley pages of the night scenes of young Nicholas Rostov, riding, wounded on a cannon, the blood of the soldier who had died on the cannon earlier soaking through his breeches. Fearful of missing tiny corrections needed in French accents and German diacriticals in the candlelight, I confined my work to the daylight hours, working next to a window to capture as much of the pallid gray light of early winter as I could. I realized how dependent I had become on a 14-hour work day and the desperate last option of an all-nighter (now out of the question). A few hours after the power failed, the local police phoned everyone in the township and advised us to remain indoors. Without electricity, I experienced a terrible sense of isolation, cut off from my usual sources of information, the internet and the radio. What was going on out there? Communicating with the world entirely by email, I no longer knew my friends’ telephone numbers except as single digits on speed-dial. After a few hours, my laptop and cell phone lost all charge and I was limited to the land line and a phone book I could not read in the dark. The evenings being entirely black, and the predicted length of the outage running to three or four days, I had to ration my share of candles (the stores, operating only on daylight, with the refrigerator and freezer sections closed down and swathed in sheets of plastic, were completely sold out of flashlights, candles and batteries). For those few days, I found myself forced to synchronize with the natural rhythms of day and night, as were the soldiers of the battlefield, who waited anxiously and sleeplessly for dawn to begin their military engagements, and yearned for the darkness of night when battle would be forced to cease for a time and they could return to their encampments to tend their wounded and repair their weapons and uniforms and send out the secretive sentries.

It has struck me that, in writing these blogs about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I am responding primarily to catastrophic events: the burning of cities, devastating earthquakes, states of emergency. The Russians have a special word for this type of catastrophe—“stikhiya”—encompassing the elemental, the random, the apocalyptic. Stikhiya sweeps away the routine and the quotidian, and yet, most of us will not personally live at the epicenter of devastation. Even when my own house is plunged in days of cold and darkness, after the all clear is sounded, I am alive and well, and can venture out and drive through the main streets of town to survey the aftermath of the storm. The scenes of fallen trees, scattered branches, downed power lines, damaged homes, and clusters of rescue workers clearing the wreckage, unroll slowly before my rain swept windshield. I am looking at an image framed, at the camera panning across disaster scenes in an art film.

Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace, available this October. You can read her previous blog posts here and here.

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By Roberta Bivins

As a historian who writes about the controversial topic of ‘alternative medicine’, I get a lot of questions about whether this or that therapy ‘works’. Sometimes, these questions are a test of my objectivity as a researcher. My questioners want to know whether I am ‘believer’, or a fan of alternative medicine, or have any stake in promoting or disdaining a given medical system. Other people are asking simply for advice: is it worth trying acupuncture, say, or homeopathy for a particular condition? From either angle, such questions ask me to take a stand on whether homeopathy is quackery, or whether I believe in acupuncture channels, or chiropractic manipulation.

My instinctive – if perhaps unhelpful – response to such questions is, more or less, to shrug my shoulders and reply that I don’t really care: the issue of therapeutic efficacy isn’t at the heart of my research on this fascinating subject. Instead, I want to know what lies behind the enduring popularity of alternative medicine, what is (or is not) really ‘alternative’ about it, and why so many of biomedicine’s current crop of ‘alternatives’ have been imported from very different global medical cultures. These are questions that a historian can answer. They are also questions that shed more light on the persistence of alternative medicine than would a yes or no answer about the efficacy of any given technique. After all, we know that once-respected mainstream therapies like bloodletting and purging enjoyed centuries of popularity despite being uncomfortable, potentially dangerous and (in light of today’s medical knowledge) ineffective. Even today, patients prescribed antibiotics for a nasty cold often report feeling better after taking them – despite knowing that most colds are actually caused by viruses, and thus immune to antibiotic therapy.

My position has not always been popular with my fellow authors writing on the topic. They are often passionately committed supporters or opponents of alternative therapies, and demand that I become one or the other as well. But history studies the interplay of light and shadow, not the boundaries between black and white. So I am happy to let the healers fight it out in the battle to prove or disprove the efficacy of their chosen treatments. My job as a historian is to remind them — and to remind us all as consumers — that even the most objective evidence remains historically contingent: no medical experiment can escape from its social milieu, since both its designers and its subjects are shaped by their own historical and cultural context and beliefs.

For example, in contemporary biomedicine, it is conventional to separate the mind and the body when designing a medical experiment: hence the rise of the double-blinded random controlled trial as medicine’s ‘gold-standard’ of proof. Yet physicians and researchers simultaneously acknowledge the impact of the mind on bodily processes. They call it the ‘placebo effect’. As understandings of the mind-body relationship become more sophisticated, it is possible that the blinded RCT will fall from favour, as a limited test of therapeutic activity which obscures an important variable. Such changes have happened in the past, as evidenced by the shifting balance between deductive and inductive reasoning in scientific experimentation since the Scientific Revolution, or the changing status of ‘empiricism’ in western medicine since the 18th century. Then again, it may not: history is not a predictive science! My point is that today’s objective truths are neither value-free nor future-proof.

More practically, it is also my task to point out that the arguments used on either side — for instance, ‘homeopathy is bunk; no trace of the medicinal substance remains in a homeopathic dilution’, or ‘biomedicine reduces humans to objects, and ignores individuality’ – are by now over a century old. Most of them, virtually word for word, can be found in any nineteenth century medical journal. Medical consumers were not persuaded to renounce their alternative therapies (or biomedicine) then, and they show little sign of doing so now. Alternative medicines remain the bane of medical scientists who despair of consumers’ collective ‘flight from reason’. Such medicines remain popular, widely used, and almost universally available. If researchers and scientists are convinced that alternative medicines threaten the public health and purse, they must move beyond simple denunciation, and seek the source of alternative medicine’s enduring appeal. What are contemporary medical consumers dissatisfied with, or rebelling against? How must biomedicine change if it wishes to establish therapeutic monopoly? My research suggests that medical consumers seek a medicine that reflects and responds to their experiences of health and illness, as well as observable anatomical, physiological, biochemical and even genetic data. Biomedicine’s nineteenth century step away from the experiential and towards the externally observable coincides with an enormous growth in the power of clinicians to treat and to heal – and with a parallel growth in consumer demand for more inclusive medical visions of their bodies in sickness and in health.

Roberta Bivins is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Her work focuses on the transmission of medical expertise between cultures, as exemplified by the transmission of acupuncture to the west, and by the medical experiences of non-western immigrants in multicultural Britain and America. She is the author of Alternative Medicine? A History.

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By Amy Mandelker

April 12-15, 2010

The earthquake in China. The school that collapsed, crushing students and teachers, was established and funded by the charitable organization for which my ex-husband works. He is a conservationist and social activist, and for several days following the first shocks, he is only able to contact one of his co-workers at the scene, who digs alone at the site of the school with his chilled, bare hands for an entire day. By evening he uncovers the dead body of a teacher.

The cold is extreme there. My ex-husband (with my agreement) cancels the monthly child support check in order to send what can reach the area—blankets, candles, emergency food and water. But the trains are blocked and cannot get through. He wants to leave his desk-work and go there himself, but as a resident alien working for a politically sensitive cause, he recognizes he would not be allowed through to the scene of the emergency.

My son, a college freshman, visited his father over spring break in March and they climbed in the Eastern Himalayas together. On his return, he described to me the devastation he had seen from the previous year’s earthquake in areas still only slowly recovering. He had visited the school and met the teachers there. At hearing the news, he accidentally misses several classes and appointments, forgetfully playing his violin, locked into a practice room, absorbed in his distress. It is beyond hard to be distanced and helpless, anxiously waiting for news, watching from afar.

The earthquake in China stuck after I had begun writing my blog about War and Peace, describing my first reading of Tolstoy’s novel the day that an earthquake struck my home town in the mid-West. I had written: “My first reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace was extraordinary because of the earthquake. I was 14 years old, and it was Saturday morning. I had propped up the enormous novel behind my cereal bowl, the pages pinned down by the creamer and sugar bowl. What was strange about what happened next is that I had been worrying all week about earthquakes and the possibility of one occurring in my home-town. In my science class I had learned that the state of Missouri sits upon an enormous fault and that, minor tremors having been few and far between, geologists were predicting that a seismic event on a large scale would occur in the second half of the 20th century. After alerting friends and family to our danger, and after having been laughed at, I had set aside my adolescent alarm by the weekend. Instead, I was now absorbed in the question of why Andrei Bolkonsky behaved so coldly and heartlessly to his lovely young, pregnant wife. I was too young to read between the lines to understand that he suspected her of having an affair with Ippolit Kuragin. Ippolit’s antics with the little princess’ shawl reminded me of Dopey in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: tripping over his sword, getting his arm caught in his sleeve and the princess’ shawl all tangled up, jabbering in the drawing room about coats of arms, I pictured him as an obvious idiot, drooling over Snow White in an infatuated way, certainly not a suitable candidate for an adulterous liaison.

This was when I noticed the milk in my cereal bowl starting to tremble and a light sound of jingling (which was the china in the cupboard) accompanied by the rhythmic, metallic ringing of the stem of my spoon tapping against the side of the bowl. I saw and heard everything without understanding. The floor under my feet was vibrating as if someone were running heavily through the house. At first I thought a large truck was driving down our street, but the vibrations and jingling of the china increased until the table was jumping away from me and the milk was spilling, sloshing over the sides of the cereal bowl. I understood then that the thing I had feared all week and finally dismissed as beyond probability was now happening. I ran out of the house.

The ground in the front yard was shuddering like loose skin on an elephant’s back if the beast had been shrugging its shoulders to topple a rider. The earth rippled like water. There was nowhere to run to. I dropped down on all fours and closed my eyes. The world was shaking around me. And then it stopped.” I had written this much about my first encounter with Tolstoy when the earthquake in China struck. And then, I hesitated to send what I had written to my editor. My childish experience seemed trivial and jejune in light of the enormity of the tragedy unfolding. I was reminded of my ex-husband’s dilemma ten year’s earlier, when we were still married and had a new baby. And I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. He was then working in conservation for the New York Zoological Society, on a campaign to prevent the destruction of the rain forest. He learned from my oncologist that a new drug, which might cure my cancer, was to become available only if we harvested in that jungle. Great principles, global concerns, and then the individual face of his family and the threat of one person’s death. I think that what is great in Tolstoy’s art is precisely this paradoxical experience of the overwhelming enormity and yet smallness of one person’s urgent needs and human fears against the vast almost inhuman face of great, national tragedies.

Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace, available this October. You can read her previous blog post here.

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By Jonathan Bate

 
My last three books have been a 670 page life of the agricultural labouring poet John Clare, a two and half thousand page edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, and a 500 page “intellectual biography” of Shakespeare in the context of his age. So how could I resist an invitation from OUP to write a VERY SHORT book! Mind you, it was a ludicrous proposition to introduce a subject the size of English Literature in a mere 50,000 words (I pushed them up from the standard 40k limit for the series by cunningly asking for 60k and splitting the difference…). But the series guidelines were very helpful: “The text should not read like an encyclopedia entry or a textbook; depending on the topic, it may be more comprehensive or more idiosyncratic in its coverage. Don’t be afraid to express a point of view or to inject some style into the prose. Focus on issues, details, and context that make the subject interesting; you should draw your reader in with examples and quotations. Give the reader a sense both of your subject’s contours and of the debates that shape it.” Good principles, which have made for a great series – so many people have said how much they like these little books.

So how did I set about the task? Being a Literary History Man, I began by looking for literary historical precedent.

In 1877 a chaplain to Queen Victoria called the Reverend Stopford A. Brooke published a primer for students and general readers called English Literature. By the time of his death, half a million copies were in print. 160 pages long and produced in handy pocket format, it is the Victorian equivalent of a VSI. Brooke surveyed a vast terrain, from Beowulf and Caedmon to Charlotte Brontë and Alfred Tennyson, with admirable tenacity and vigour, if a little too much patriotic uplift and Anglo-Saxon prejudice for modern taste. But his even-paced chronological march and his desire to give at least a name-check to every author he considered significant meant that his little book too often reduced itself to a parade of the greatest (and not so great) hits of English literature. Faced with a similar task to Brooke’s, and more than one hundred further years’ literary production to cover, I adopted a more varied and selective approach. I made no attempt to offer a historical survey of English poets, novelists, playwrights and non-fiction writers. Frequently I skip over generations in a step; I loop forward and back in time as I identify key themes.

I devote a good deal of attention to questions of origin. From where do we get the idea of literature as a special kind of writing? What could justifiably be described as the first work of English literature and when did the conception of a body of national literature emerge? Which practising novelist wrote the first self-conscious defence of the art of the novel? These are some of the questions I have tried to answer.

Sometimes, I slow the pace and tighten the focus, exploring, for example, a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear, an instance of the technique of “free indirect discourse” in Jane Austen’s Emma, a poignant stanza of nonsense by Edward Lear, a compositional change of mind on the part of Wilfred Owen, and Seamus Heaney’s preoccupation with prehistoric bodies excavated from Danish peat bogs. I make no apology for these moments of “close reading”: if the study of English Literature is to be true to its object, it must attend to particular words and phrases, verse lines and sentences, movements of thought and structures of writing. My sampling of passages, works, and forms of attention is eclectic – deliberately so, for there is no other body of writing upon earth more varied and inexhaustible than English Literature. That thought makes any attempt to write a “very short introduction” to the subject both deeply quixotic and peculiarly pleasurable.

No one will expect “coverage” from such a thing, but there are bound to be some reviews and reader responses along the lines of “I can’t believe that X didn’t get a single mention.” So who are the likely candidates for X? I first thought about this question as I was correcting proofs, and I came up with: medieval mystery plays, the Brownings and the Rossettis, H. G. Wells. I cunningly managed to squeeze in references to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Wells’s The Time Machine, but in the end decided that it’s a mug’s game to try to keep everyone happy. You see this whenever an anthology is reviewed – how could the idiotic editor have neglected such and such?

Anyway, it’s a very short introduction, isn’t it, so all I can do is apologise to the shades of the mighty dead whom I have neglected. In retrospect I wish I’d found space to write more about Alexander Pope, Lord Byron as both Romantic and anti-Romantic, the authors of the very best genre fiction (Conan Doyle, Le Carré), and some of the great underrated playwrights – underrated in literature departments, that is, not in theatres (I’m thinking especially of Coward and Rattigan).

As far as the living are concerned, I’ve been very selective. They can look after themselves. I made a particular point of not mentioning one very well known, indeed knighted, contemporary novelist because I’ve always found him overrated and unreadable. But otherwise, neglect of living authors can be solely ascribed to a desire to enthuse about dead ones.

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and a major author of many books including The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of the Age. Another of his books, John Clare: A Biography, won two of Britain’s oldest literary prizes, the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black. He has also written a one-man play for Simon Callow, The Man from Stratford. His latest book is English Literature: A Very Short Introduction.

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By Amy Mandelker

Moscow is choked with smoke from surrounding fires. I follow developments online, reading over the weekend that they have been digging trenches to cut off the path of the blaze before it detonates nuclear stockpiles. Moscow has burned before, as described graphically in Tolstoy’s great novel, War and Peace; the city was torched, historians tell us, by incendiaries who ignited and burned their great capital rather than succor the enemy. But in 1812, the city was evacuated by most of its citizens while now, my news screen shows endless images of people trapped in Moscow, trying to continue working and living in an asphyxiating cloud of crushing heat. Although Tolstoy also described those who remained in the city, in startling pictures of looting, rape, and street fighting, and sends his heroes hurtling impulsively into flaming houses to rescue babies, what seems more vivid, because it is closer to our own experience of spectatorship, is his account of Natasha, safely escaped into the countryside, gazing out the window at the glow on the horizon that is Moscow consumed by fire. Natasha is completely absorbed in her own problems, in the realization that the man she loves and rejected is dying in a bivouac next door to her family’s shakedown for the night. Her eyes take in the image, but her mind does not comprehend it.

So, too, we look through the windows that are our laptop screens, at video clips of Russians gagging on smoke, heat and pollution, and read the daily death toll, and yet, despite our momentary shock and horror, we must return more urgently to our immediate problems, car repairs, job searches, debt management, mortgage refinancing, illnesses and death in the family, emotional-fall out after a visit with an ex-spouse, a custody battle, a cancer treatment.

Those friends and colleagues who know me and my academic writing, will recognize my obsession with framed literary images in my choice of this scene of Natasha, gazing at the image of Moscow burning and framed by a window sash. This is one of my beloved literary passages where the story telling stops so that the author may frame a moment and an image. This was what I wrote about in my book, Framing Anna Karenina. When the author of an enormous, flowing narrative decides to stop the action in order to gain the freedom to present a still, the reason must be compelling enough to abandon the principle of “advancing the story.” Tolstoy is a master of the freeze-frame. In these moments, the action advances in those spectators in the text who, like the reader and audience, are viewing the image. Tolstoy’s flaming Moscow as a combustion of crimson and orange on a distant horizon is viewed first by a crowd of spectators: a group of peasants discuss and analyze what they see, strangely like art lovers in a picture gallery: “What is that crimson light, on the left?” “Look at the billows of smoke.” “Those black specks are the crows flying away.”

But Natasha gazes out the window at the city that was her home and stares unmoved at its immolation and destruction, just as earlier, she sat at the opera and saw only cardboard sets and embarrassing costumes. She is not moved by any show in a frame. She was the girl who wanted to break through the window frame and fly away into a glorious night. Is there something about the very action of watching itself, that desensitizes, and inures, blunts and numbs, distances our emotions from what we see?

Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace, available this October.

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By Alec Ryrie

My book started out as a bit of fun, trying to tell a rollicking good story. I did that, I hope, but I also ended up somewhere more controversial than I expected: caught in the ongoing crossfire between science and religion. What I realised is that you can’t make sense of their relationship without inviting a third ugly sister to the party: magic.

The links between science and magic are pretty obvious. Science, basically, is magic that works. A lot of things that look pretty scientific to us were labelled ‘magic’ in the pre-modern period: chemistry, magnetism, even hydraulics – to say nothing of medicine. The only real difference is that modern science has a rigorous experimental basis. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. But to the novice, all science is indistinguishable from magic. You try showing a magnet to an astonished four-year-old and asking them how you did it.

Of course, science and magic are supposed to be enemies nowadays. Scientists despise magic, but still read their children fairy tales. Modern pagans dislike ‘scientism’ but they love information technology.

Religion and magic have the same sort of ambiguous relationship. They’re obviously connected: both trying to bring humanity in touch with supernatural powers. And they hate each other: the Abrahamic religions, at least, have always seen magic as heretical if not diabolical, and the view the other way isn’t much more complimentary. But the line between the two is pretty fuzzy. The theory is that magic is about trying to manipulate supernatural powers (with the magician in charge of the process) while religion is about submitting to or petitioning those powers (with God in charge). In practice, that breaks down, as magicians seek transcendent experiences and priests promulgate infallible books or sacraments.

In Christianity, though, this kind of talk has a confessional edge to it. Protestants have always argued that their (OK, full disclosure: our) form of Christianity is less tainted by magic, while Catholicism is riddled with superstition, obscurantism and priestcraft. Writing this book convinced me that this is nonsense.

Yes, Catholicism is more ritualistic. But early Protestantism was up to its neck in magic too. How could it not be? The best minds of the sixteenth century all took magic immensely seriously. It’s true that Protestants were uneasy about the way astrology (say) was being used, but they found it easier to mock it than to prove it wrong. And when they do mock it they sound crude, like flat-earthers denying the moon landings, or creationists using what Richard Dawkins calls ‘the argument from personal incredulity’ to deny evolution.

The truth was that, in the sixteenth century, only a fool would deny that magic was real. The Renaissance was turning the world upside down, sending the Earth round the Sun; explorers were discovering whole new continents. As I say in the book:

In our own age, scepticism and disbelief seem intellectually sophisticated; in the sixteenth century, they seemed self-limiting and perverse. It was unmistakable that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been dreamed of in the old philosophies. Credulity, or at least a willingness to believe, was the only sensible way of looking at the world. And when you have adopted a new mathematics, a new astronomy, a new geography and a new religion, why balk at a new magic?

So I hope the story I’m telling in this book has a serious point to make. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to be a magician (heaven forbid), but to recognise that one of the reasons science and religion have been so antagonistic is that they have a third sibling: this is a family quarrel. And both of them could do with hearing their sister’s warning: that incredulity and credulity can sometimes be just as stupid as each other.

Professor Alec Ryrie is Reader in Church History at the University of Durham. His book, The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England, tells the story of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. The book is now out in paperback.

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By Robin Le Poidevin

Do we really need agnosticism nowadays? The inventor of the name ‘agnosticism’, the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, certainly found it useful to have a word describing his lack of certainty when he was surrounded by those who seemed to have no such doubt. But then he lived in a period of transition. Science, and in particular biology, appeared to undermine old certainties. On the one hand, churchmen were promoting the importance of unshakeable faith. On the other, there were philosophers advocating a materialist and anti-religious outlook. Huxley felt he couldn’t identify with either side. If the Gnostics were those who claimed to have access to a special route to religious knowledge, then Huxley would be an a-gnostic, one who does not profess to know. But perhaps agnosticism served only as a temporary stopping point en route to a more satisfactory position, a stepping stone from faith to atheism.

For Richard Dawkins, a scientist, writer and today’s perhaps most vocal atheist, we have already crossed that river. It was perhaps reasonable to be an agnostic in Huxley’s time, when it was not yet clear how science could answer some of the awkward questions posed by believers: How, if there is no divine designer, could intelligence have developed? What is the source of our moral conscience? Why was the universe so congenial to the emergence of life? Now we have some detailed answers, the idea of God is de trop. And so too is agnosticism, apparently.

What is Dawkins’ thinking here? First, the agnostic’s point that we can’t know whether or not God does not exist, is not a very interesting one. There are lots of things we don’t know for sure. We don’t know that Mars isn’t populated by fairies. Of course, we are not remotely inclined to believe that it is, but still we don’t have conclusive proof. Nevertheless, we don’t describe ourselves as agnostics about Martian fairies. Similarly, atheists can admit that they don’t have conclusive proof of God’s non-existence.

Second, not having conclusive proof does not make God’s existence just as probable as his non-existence. Moving from ‘not certain’ to ‘50/50 chance either way’ is what we might call the agnostic fallacy.

Third, a necessary feature of God makes his existence highly improbable, namely his complexity. Of course, the world itself is complex – unimaginably so – but then science has an explanation of this complexity in terms of a series of gradual evolutionary steps from simpler states. In contrast there is no evolutionary account of God’s complexity: his nature is supposed to be eternal. And that there should just exist such complexity, with no explanation, is highly improbable.

That’s a very plausible line of thought. The conclusion is that, unless you think you have overwhelming evidence for God, the rational thing is to be an atheist. But it rests on a questionable assumption. There is still room for an interesting form of agnosticism. Take a look at the third point above: that God must be complex, and so improbable. It is a part of traditional theology that God is in fact simple. Dawkins finds this incredible: how can something responsible for the creation of the world, and who has perfect knowledge of it, be less complex than that creation? There are, however, different kinds of complexity. A language is complex in one sense, in that it contains a virtually limitless range of possible expressions. But those expressions are generated from a finite number of letters, and a finite number of rules concerning the construction of sentences. A language may be complex in its variety but (relatively) simple with respect to the components and principles that give rise to that complexity. When the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz opined that God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds’, his view was mercilessly lampooned in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. ‘Best’ here, however, does not mean most agreeable, but rather where the greatest variety is produced by the simplest laws. And indeed it is a requirement on scientific explanation that it not involve needless complexity. Elegant simplicity is the ideal.

Perhaps God is like that: his understanding and capacities may be infinitely complex, but the underlying nature that gives rise to that complexity may be relatively simple. If so, then it isn’t a given that the probability of such a being is enormously improbable. And if God is not clearly improbable, then atheism is not the default position. Rather, agnosticism is. If, before we start to look at the evidence, the hypothesis that God exists is initially no less probable than the hypothesis that he doesn’t, that neither atheism nor theism has a head start, so speak, then we should keep an open mind, rather than be atheists until presented by overwhelming evidence for God.

So what is the point of agnosticism? That it stands for open-mindedness, for a willingness to consider conflicting perspectives, for tolerance and humanity. It may even be the basis for a religious life.

Robin Le Poidevin is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds. His latest book is Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, which sets the philosophical case for agnosticism and explores it as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

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By Gordon Campbell

In 2011 the King James Version of the Bible will be 400 years old, and plans for a protracted birthday party are in hand. In the UK the celebrations are being coordinated by the 2011 Trust, whose burgeoning list of events includes lectures, conferences, exhibitions and services on both sides of the Atlantic. Oxford University Press has published the King James Bible since the seventeenth century, and will soon be publishing three books to mark the quatercentenary: David Crystal, the Anglophone world’s greatest living linguist, has written a sparkling book entitled Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language; I have written a biography of the Bible’s first 400 years, and edited a version of the 1611 Bible which lovingly preserves both the preliminary pages and the printer’s errors. Lesser presses will also be publishing celebratory accounts. In the UK the BBC will be broadcasting two television programs on the subject, one presented by Adam Nicolson on the making of the King James Bible (I make a cameo appearance on this one) and the other presented by Melvyn Bragg on the heritage of the King James Version. I hope that there will be similar programs in other countries.

Why all the fuss about an old translation of an ancient book? There are two reasons: first, it is the founding text of the British Empire (including breakaway colonies such as the United States), and was carried to every corner of the English-speaking world by migrants and missionaries; second, it matters now, both as a religious text and as the finest embodiment of English prose. Its history in the intervening centuries has been complex. The text has evolved over the centuries, and there are thousands of small changes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. The commissioning of a revised translation was suggested by a puritan to King James, but the KJV was subsequently repudiated by some puritans, because of its inclusion of the Apocrypha and its use of ecclesiastical terms (e.g. ‘baptize’ instead of ‘wash’, ‘church’ instead of ‘congregation’, ‘bishop’ instead of ‘elder’). In the twenty-first century its most loyal advocates are those at opposite ends of the Protestant continuum: Anglo-Catholic ritualists who revere it alongside the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and evangelicals who think that God answered the prayers of the translators by helping them to produce the most authoritative of all translations.

Is it a good translation? The answer is yes and no. On the affirmative side, it is certainly the most scrupulous of all translations, in part because the scholarly fire-power of the original translators could not be matched in our less educated age. Where could one now find fifty translators with competence in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopic and Arabic (the languages of the English polyglot Bible of the period) and a command of patristic, rabbinical and Reformation commentaries? Another reason for its scholarly probity is the scrupulous process through which the KJV was produced. The time lavished on the translation by the learned translators was secured by relieving them of other duties; no modern publisher would buy out fifty scholars for several years in order that they might devote their full attention to a translation of the Bible.

In this sense the KJV is the best of all translations. Against this, the authority of the Greek and Hebrew texts which formed the basis of the translation has been subverted by the publication of earlier Greek texts (notably the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) in the nineteenth century, and earlier Hebrew texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls, which antedate previously-known manuscripts by a millennium) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The challenge to the texts used in 1611 means that the scholarly authority of the KJV may have been subverted. The debate may be reaching a new phase, in that after 59 years OUP has just completed publication of the 40 mighty volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, which contains the transcriptions, translations and notes needed to carry the argument forward.

Challenges to the authority of the King James Version are a proper part of the critical scrutiny to which all texts should be submitted in an open society. What is remarkable that such scrutiny does not subvert the affection that English speakers have for the KJV. The principal reason for this affection, even for readers who use other translations, is the aural quality of its prose. Modern translations are normally intended for private study, and so are usually read silently. The KJV was, as its title-page pronounces, ‘appointed to be read in churches’: it was a translation intended to be read aloud and understood, and so it was in countless churches, chapels and households. Its prose has a pulse that makes it easy to read aloud and easy to memorize. When Adam ungallantly blames Eve for the fall, he says (in the KJV) ‘she gave me of the fruit and I did eat’ (Genesis 3: 12); he uses ten simple monosyllabic words arranged in a line of iambic pentameter, which was the verse form used by Shakespeare. This is prose with the qualities of poetry, and it would be hard to think of any modern translation of which that can be said. Other translations may reflect more recent scholarship or satisfy particular doctrinal requirements, but the KJV is the best loved of all translations, and rightly so.

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Leicester. His recent books for OUP include The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (2003), Renaissance Art and Architecture (2004), The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts (2 vols, 2006), Milton and the manuscript of ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (2007), The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture (2 vols, 2007), John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (2008) and The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art (3 vols, 2009). In October 2010 OUP will publish his Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 and his 400th anniversary edition of the Bible.

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By Christopher Wills

As my blood thins with age, I tend to SCUBA dive in the tropics. But in July of 2010, loaded with twenty-four pounds of lead weights to overcome the buoyancy of my thick wet suit and the dense salty water of the frigid Japanese Current, I found myself plunging into cold water to investigate an ecological success story off California’s Channel Islands. I wanted to see what happens when a damaged ecosystem recovers. Can it ever return to its former self?

A sheephead, Semicossyphus pulcher, cruises through a kelp forest off the coast of California’s Anacapa Island. Such large and tempting fish are among the first to disappear in coastal ecosystems. If they can be persuaded to return, can such ecosystems revert to their undamaged past?

In my forthcoming book I take the reader to different parts of the world and explore their long evolutionary history. But my cold-water dives will form part of a projected sequel to the book, in which I ask whether evolutionary and ecological forces can overcome centuries or millennia of damage to our planet by humans.

One of these damaged regions is the kelp forest ecosystem of southern California, which has been overfished for more than a century. I had picked what I thought would be a warm July to visit these forests, but the summer turned out to be the coldest along the Southern California coast in thirty years. When I swam down about 10 meters I hit the thermocline, and the water temperature suddenly dropped more than ten degrees. The cold pierced me to the marrow. Even the smaller fish, dancing in rays of sunlight near the surface among the fronds of brown algae, seemed to prefer the warmer water!

But the scenes that greeted me, both above and below the thermocline, were lively and healthy. Rockfish were common near the shore, and the bottom was rich in sea slugs and sea hares. Lobsters swarmed in the shallow submerged caves that line the coasts of the islands.

Perhaps most critically, during my three days of diving I saw several large black sea bass, including one that appeared to be (even after discounting a diver’s tendency to exaggerate) well over a meter long. The largest caught have been over two meters in length. Along with the rarer white sea bass, sea lions, seals, porpoises and the occasional shark, these fish are top predators in this ecosystem. Black sea bass are highly endangered because of overfishing — the catch plummeted from hundreds of tons to just a few tons in the 1970s and 1980s. Fishing for these giants of the sea was banned in California in 1981, but they still get tangled in nets and fishermen are still permitted to catch a few in Mexican waters.

Black sea bass, Stereolepis gigas, are among the top predators in the kelp forest. They move quickly, so this is the best of my pictures! Scars like the one you see on the fish’s side are common, but it is unclear what causes them.

The waters around the Channel Islands were declared a marine sanctuary in 1980 by President Carter, though fishing is allowed in some areas. Populations of large fish such as the sea bass have bounced back in the subsequent thirty years, but some smaller fish have declined in numbers in the reserves. This might seem to be worrying, but it can also be interpreted as a return to a healthier ecosystem.

Ecologists have shown, for terrestrial ecosystems, that predators that occupy the top of a food chain are responsible for maintaining the ecosystem’s diversity. Because predators tend to switch their attention to the prey species that happens to be commonest at the moment, no single prey species can multiply and overwhelm the others. In a terrestrial ecosystem, in which these “top predators” tend to be mammals or birds, each predator needs a lot of energy. As a result, there are few of them. In a marine ecosystem, cold-blooded top predators with lower energy requirements can be more numerous. At the undisturbed Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific, sharks swarm and their prey are relatively rare.

The Channel Islands may be moving slightly in that direction as the cold-blooded top predators multiply. But the recent gains are fragile, and pressure from fishing in the waters outside the reserve is increasing.

A kelp rockfish, Sebastes atrovirens, peers from the base of the kelp forest. Healthy diversity, aided by the re-emergence of top predators, is characteristic of the Channel Islands Marine Reserve.

Christopher Wills is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California. His research interests include the maintenance of genetic variability in human populations, the forces that maintain variation in complex ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs, the evolution of diseases, and the evolution of our species. His forthcoming book is The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the world through evolutionary eyes. The photos in this post are the author’s own.

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By Roderick D. Buchanan

The corporate corruption of science is a familiar theme to anyone whose reading stretches beyond celebrity tattle-tale. The well-documented venality of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma have become cautionary fairy tales for modern times. That money can buy researchers, their results and their authority has become well-accepted but worrying truism. Perhaps this is not all bad, for it has truly buried the anachronistic image of the disinterested scientist untouched by vested interests and hard politics. In its place is a wholesale cynicism washing over any number of thorny issues: GM crops, climate change, the etiology of cancer…

A large portion of this cynicism has been generated by posthumous revelations of sponsored advocacy. Part of the reason for this ‘grave desecration’ is tied up in the practicalities of archival access and legal constraints. Nevertheless, the old adage that you should not speak ill of the dead should not apply if you believe at all in science as cumulative enterprise. Understanding past mistakes can help correct them and help avoid them in future, even if it costs a few lofty reputations.

I have spent years researching a case in point, controversial psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, who died in 1997. Eysenck appeared to relish the lime-light, often taking heterodox positions on contentious topics. Probably the best example of this was his persistent denial of the carcinogenic effects of tobacco. Eysenck steadfastly maintained that cigarettes should be given the benefit of the doubt, despite the mounting evidence. However, Eysenck was heavily funded by the American tobacco industry in the 1970s and `80s, only some of which was declared at the time. Litigation-driven archival stores made it possible to investigate just how deep this relationship went. Up to two million pounds were channelled into Eysenck’s coffers in exchange for a range of research initiatives, scientific and popular writings, consultations and expert testimony.

Eysenck cast himself on the wrong side of debate that was all but settled in his lifetime. In hindsight, in appears he landed there for reasons not purely intellectual. These revelations are important not just because they place a red-flag on his research and writings on this issue, they also imply something about the man’s scientific legacy, his work habits and his ethics.

So far, so familiar.

Eysenck worked in an age when mandatory declarations of conflicts of interest were not quite the norm; indeed, his was the kind of behaviour that helped usher such codes in. Even so, roundhouse condemnations should still be tempered with an appreciation of the realities of contemporary science, especially when you consider who he was up against. If Eysenck was the villain of the piece, then the white-hatted hero would have to be Richard Doll. Doll was a knighted pioneer in disease epidemiology, doing more than any other to put the ink on the link between smoking and cancer – the very link Eysenck was apparently paid to dispute. Late in his life and especially since his death in 2005, awkward questions have been raised about Doll’s dealings with industry, with Monsanto, Dow, ICI and British asbestos manufacturers. The extent to which these consultancies were kept secret and whether possible conflicts of interest affected Doll’s views on environmental carcinogens is still being debated. Doll’s friends, such as Richard Peto, have been quick to defend him, as has a recent authorized biography.

To his credit, Doll changed tack dramatically near the end of his life, admitting that he had greatly underestimated environmental factors. In this way Sir Richard may also prove a pivotal figure in death, pointing the way toward a more interventionist public health effort. The postwar compromise between clinical and social medicine made the individual the unit of analysis, poor lifestyles the likely and convenient causes. The anti-smoking campaign was the modal exemplar of this approach. Difficult-to-isolate environmental causes were neglected in comparison. How much the chemical, agriculture and food industries contrived to protect their interests and divert attention from their products depends on your taste for conspiracy theories. But while cancers related to ‘lifestyle errors’ like smoking have decreased in accordance with the effectiveness of the quit message, other cancers, including childhood cancers, seem to be increasing beyond genetic propensities and poor diet. It won’t be enough to tell people to choose the right lifestyles in a toxic world, and it will come to resemble victim-blaming. Much more research-based regulation of what we eat, breathe and are exposed to will surely be needed meet this challenge, as well as turn back the rising tide of obesity and diabetes.

Meanwhile the specter of Doll versus Eysenck highlights the moral ambiguities of the McScience age, as one potentially compromised voice is pitted against another. We should kiss the notion of independence goodbye. No funding source, public or private, amounts to an agenda-less gift. Getting research done always involves meeting patron expectations, however tacit. This still doesn’t make all sponsors equal however. It should still concern us that the corporate reach into science has if anything extended – in spite of and maybe even because of disclosure codes.

By themselves, declarations of interest amount to little more than a perfunctory ritual. While they may serve to head off later embarrassment, they don’t stop naked interference and they don’t provide much of a calculus to weigh up results. For example, the mere disclosure of Eysenck’s cigarette sponsorship might look damning. But one can only get realistic estimate of how much Big Tobacco influenced him by considering his case in context, by considering his interests and history set against those of his patrons.

We should thus seek to optimize the resources we have for this kind of scrutiny, with the science-watch ‘industry’ treated as a more integral part of science itself. This industry has grown up as a loose network of STS academics, advocates and activists, whistle-blowers and bloggers. With its unruly, nutty edges, it still has a kind of dissenting, outsider status. It needs to be cleaned up and brought in from the cold. It’s the only way producers and consumers of McScience can make informed judgments about what’s on offer.

Roderick D. Buchanan was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia. He has taught science and technology studies at Deakin University, Swinburne University of Technology, and Melbourne University. From 2001 to 2004 he was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Groningen. His previous writing has focussed on the history of clinical psychology, psychiatry and personality testing. He is the author of Playing With Fire: The controversial career of Hans J. Eysenck.

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By Jeremy Taylor

On Friday, 20th August, I joined the panel for a Great Debate entitled “Are We Masters Of Our Own Destiny?” at the University of Newcastle, organized as part of the Green Phoenix Festival, 2010. My fellow panelists were science writer Rita Carter, most famous for her books on neuroscience: The Brain Book and Mapping The Mind, and local philosopher David Large. The debate was chaired by Caspar Hewett. As we suspected, this pitted two biology-oriented commentators against a more conventional philosopher who answered the question in the affirmative because he believed we can control our own destiny in the sense that Joyce could write his masterpiece Ulysses and Wittgenstein formulate his idiosyncratic theories. The nature of Joyce-ness, Ulysses-ness, Wittgenstein-ness, and the product of the mind and skill of great artists – Rembrandt-ness if you like – transcended “mere” functional explanations of what the mind is. He took umbrage with psychology which, he claimed, pretends its functional explanation of how the mind works is the explanation. It isn’t.

Rita Carter saw things very much from the bottom up rather than the top down. The mind is made up (literally!) by myriads of tiny, unconscious neuro-chemical events in our brains. She therefore believed free will is an illusion deeply wired into the brain as a set of mechanisms which automatically create the sense of self and agency to make it feel as though we decide what our acts will be – that we are responsible for them – rather than merely responding to stimuli.

I agreed strongly with Rita by suggesting that – like the illusion of free will – a large school of modern neuroscientists believe that our moral behaviour is produced not by moral reasoning but by input of extremely simple neurochemical data from our sense organs and receptors which is turned into moral intuitions in our brains by processes of which we are oblivious – the intuition simply pops into our heads. We then apply moral reasoning to our intuitions in a post-hoc sense in order to justify these instinctive beliefs. I agreed with one prominent such neuroscientist who claims that the conscious mind is like the mahout on an elephant. The elephant is the other 99% of what is going on in our minds – things that are unconscious and automatic. If free will and morality are the unconscious products of the way our brains work, thought a number of members of the audience, what, then, is the advantage to us of the illusion that we are in control? Carter argued that without the illusion that we are responsible for our own actions, and that we are therefore accountable for them, no society could possibly function; while I argued that the illusion of moral responsibility is a social phenomenon which evolved as a sort of social glue holding human groups together by commonly agreed norms and principles “outsiders” do not share. In that sense it is similar to the evolution of theory of mind – by which we explain other peoples’ actions by inferring to ourselves the hidden states of mind – their wants, beliefs and knowledge – that must be guiding them. If a teacher could have no inkling that he owned a state of knowledge his pupil lacked, and could not learn unless that knowledge was efficiently transferred from one brain to another, no culture could thrive and be built upon.

How can unconscious process explain the more spiritual side of our nature, thought others. What is the nature of love – affairs of the heart? Near-death experiences? Phantom limbs? The experience of strong emotions like love, I argued, are similar to the experience we have of the presence of a hand after amputation. Both are registered and processed unconsciously in the brain. We do not physically feel love in our hearts though our hearts may send raw autonomic data to our brains, along with data from our eyes, ears, nose and gut, to form the basis of our feelings. Large was not convinced. “I cannot approach the love of my life”, he exclaimed, “And tell her ‘I love you with all my…..brain!’, it just wouldn’t work!”

What were the limits to science in a full explanation of human agency, wondered others. Reductionism can never provide the answer. Large agreed. The creation of a great work of art on canvas is invulnerable to dissection by the scientific method. Science, in attempting a reductionist explanation, was forever throwing babies out with bath-water. There must be explanations at other levels. But what other explanations? What other levels? What other heuristics? For Carter, however, science was the only game in town. What else could any other form of enquiry be based on, if not science and the scientific method, she asked. Neither is science pathologically reductionist, I argued. We no longer have to explain how the machine works by examining one single cog. Psychologists are Skinnerians no longer. Modern technologies like brain-scanning allow them to view phenomena like the mind-brain in multi-dimensional, dynamic terms.

Perhaps, said Large, tongue firmly in cheek, it is scientists who are the masters of our destiny, after all? I responded that we might have an invidious choice in trying to master our destiny: Reduce our civilization to the level which corresponds to the complexity faced by our stone-age intuitive moral minds scores of thousands of years ago – as some primitive philosophers have argued – or behave more like scientists (and philosophers!) by training our pre-frontal cortices – the most recent evolved additions to our brains – to squeeze out as much moral reasoning as possible – over-riding our intuitive inclinations. Only then can we stand a chance of a rational, unbiased approach to facing the extremely complex problems standing between us and any secure future. Hunter-gatherers or geeks?

Carter shuddered at either possibility. Ultimately, she said, there is great humility to be gained from the understanding that much of what we take for granted in terms of will and reasoning is actually the invisible and unknowable activity of trillions of molecules in our brains responding to the laws of nature in much the same way as rain-drops falling through the atmosphere.

Jeremy Taylor has been a popular science television producer since 1973, and has made a number of programmes informed by evolutionary theory, including two with Richard Dawkins. His latest book is Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human, out now in paperback. You can read his previous OUPblog post here.

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By Jennifer Coopersmith

Energy is the go of things, the driver of engines, devices and all physical processes. It can come in various forms (electrical, chemical, rest mass, curvature of spacetime, light, heat and so on) and change between these forms, but the total is always conserved. Newton missed energy and it was Leibniz who discovered kinetic energy (he called it vis viva). The idea was promoted on the continent, chiefly by one family, the Swiss family of feuding mathematicians, the Bernoullis, in the first half of the 18th century. The more subtle concept, potential energy, slipped in over a hundred years, uninvited, like the 13th fairy at the party.

In Feynman’s profound allegory (‘Dennis the Menace’ playing with blocks), energy is defined by its property of being conserved. But, this doesn’t answer to all our intuitions about energy. Why does it change smoothly between its various forms? For example, when a child swings on a swing, her kinetic energy decreases as the swing climbs (and gains gravitational potential energy) and then, as the swing descends, she goes faster and faster.

A different approach holds the answer. Consider the walk to the shops. You could take the shortest route or you could optimize other aspects, e.g. take a longer route but less hilly, or more shady or with the least number of road-crossings. Nature also works in this optimizing way: it tries to minimize the total ‘action’ between a starting place and a final destination. ‘Action’ is defined as ‘energy’ times ‘time’, and, in order to minimize action, the energy must be able to change in a prescribed way, smoothly and continuously, between its two forms, kinetic and potential energy, (The Principle of Least Action was discovered by an eccentric Frenchman, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, while head of the Berlin Academy of Science, in the mid 18th century.)

What are kinetic and potential energy? Kinetic energy is the energy of motion of an individual body whereas potential energy is the energy of interaction of parts within a system. Potential energy must be specified for each new scenario, but kinetic energy comes in one essential form and is more fundamental in this sense. However, as potential energy relates to internal aspects (of a system), it doesn’t usually change for differently moving ‘observers’. For example, the game of billiards in the lounge of the ocean liner continues unaffected, whether that liner is coasting smoothly at 30 kph or whether it’s moored to a buoy. The kinetic energy of the liner is vastly different in the two cases.

But sometimes potential energy and even mass do change from one ‘reference frame’ to another. The more fundamental quantity is the ‘least action’, as this stays the same, whatever the (valid) ‘observer’.

Heat energy is the sum of the individual microscopic kinetic energies. But the heat energy and the kinetic energy of an everyday object are very different (e.g. the kinetic energy of a kicked football and the heat energy of a football left to warm in the sun). In fact, for the early 19th century natural philosophers, considering heat as a form of energy was like committing a category error. The slow bridging of this error by people like Daniel Bernoulli, Count Rumford, Robert Julius Mayer and James Joule makes a very interesting tale.

With regards to the looming energy crisis and global warming, here are the things we must remember:

1. Nature always counts the true cost, even if we don’t
2. There is no such thing as safe energy – it is energetic, after all
3. As the sink of all our activities becomes warmer, so all our ‘engines’, cars and humans etc, will run less efficiently
4. We must consider not only energy but also ‘least action’ – and take action.

Jennifer Coopersmith is the author of Energy, the Subtle Concept: The discovery of Feynman’s blocks from Leibniz to Einstein. She is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Civil Engineering and Physical Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia. You can read her previous OUPblog post here.

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How many of us appreciate just how fortunate we are to be living at a time of scientific discovery? How many realise that the scientific age is but a brief, transitory phase in the evolution and development of humankind? One day it will all come to an end.

I am not talking about technology; there will always be scope for developing new applications of scientific knowledge. No, I refer to fundamental science – the process of understanding the basic laws of nature, what the world and ourselves are made of, and how things come to be the way they are.

Many assume that, by its very nature, science always makes fresh advances, and this will continue indefinitely. Others disagree, pointing out that fundamental science must come to an end when our knowledge of the world is complete – nothing left to discover. My own position is that the end will come much sooner than that. Science will grind to a halt when we have discovered whatever is open to us to discover. Not the same thing at all.

Why is our knowledge likely to be limited? Three reasons come immediately to mind:

Firstly, we must ask what we do our science with. Our brain obviously. But what is the brain, and how do we come to have it? It is a product of evolution by natural selection. Ancestors with superior brains had a better chance of surviving to a point where they could mate and pass on their advantageous genes to their off-spring. That was the brain’s basic function; it was not something ‘designed’ to understand everything about the world.

Secondly, there are practical considerations to take into account. The Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory is currently the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. It is 27 kilometres in circumference. But suppose it would take a much larger machine to unlock the last of nature’s secrets? A favourite theory of physicists these days describes the fundamental building blocks of nature (the electron, neutrino, quarks, etc.) as tiny vibrating strings. But these strings are expected to be tiny – so small we would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy in order to be able to see them. There is no reason why the experiments needed to verify a final, complete theory of everything should be geared to what we can afford and can physically build.

Finally, there is the suspicion that, down certain lines of investigation, we might already be up against what I call the boundaries of the knowable. These are questions that have been around for so long, and are of such a nature, that one suspects that the answers to them are inaccessible to us. It is an intriguing exercise to lay out all the deepest questions facing science today and to then speculate as to which of them, if any, come into that category. And it is an important exercise – certainly for budding research scientists. After all, one presumably does not want to devote one’s entire career to addressing a question that cannot be answered – especially if one could have opted for a different line of research more amenable to producing a worthwhile result.

I use the word ‘speculate’ advisedly. There is, after all, no way of proving that a particular question is, for whatever reason, unanswerable. Which leaves us with an uncomfortable thought. I have said that fundamental science will come to an end. But how will we know that the scientific age has ended? We, or more likely our descendents, will not know. Looking back, they might note the lack of any recent significant advances. But who knows? Perhaps science is just going through a ‘bad patch’. The next Newton or Einstein might be just round the corner. Or not, as the case may be. I suppose when it is noted that the physics text books have not required updating for the past millennium the penny might drop.

One final point. Please don’t tell me that there have been previous claims that science has ended. As everyone knows, towards the end of the 19th century some prominent scientists expressed the view that with the formulation of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, everything was just about wrapped up. And that was before relativity, quantum theory, and elementary particles came along! And indeed, in our own time there have been those, like John Horgan, who claimed that science was now finished. I make no such claim. I foresee many, many years of exciting and important discoveries being made. All I am saying is that at some point in the future science must come to an end, and that for certain lines of investigation we might already have encountered the boundaries of the knowable.

Russell Stannard is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University where for 21 years he headed the Department of Physics and Astronomy. A high-energy nuclear physicist, he has carried out research at CERN in Geneva and at other labratories in Europe and the USA. Among his awards he has the OBE, the Bragg Medal from the Institute of Physics, and is a Fellow of University College London. His many books includes the bestselling Uncle Albert trilogy, which introduces younger readers to relativity and quantum theory, and Relativity: A Very Short Introduction. His latest book is The End of Discovery, out in the UK on September 23.

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The greatest case of mistaken identity in literature – and what follows may well seem to some readers as verging on blasphemy!

To judge from a quick poll of friends, acquaintances, students, and the ladies in the village shop, The Wind in the Willows is fondly remembered, even by those who don’t actually remember reading it. It is a children’s book, it is about small animals – and it is somehow quintessentially English: for almost everyone I spoke to, it conjured up endless summer, boating on a quiet river, large hampers of food, a peaceful, unthreatening way of life. One or two people looked thoughtful and remembered being frightened by being lost in the wild wood, and some thought immediately of the wild and happy Toad, dashing about the lanes crashing motor cars. But for everybody, it’s a classic – a classic Children’s Book. How could it be anything else? We read it as children, we read it to children, and the hundreds of editions in print are clearly aimed at children, and live in the children’s book section of bookshops. It was even (some of my more erudite interlocutors pointed out) written for a child, and was everything that a children’s book should be – fun, safe, adventurous, and innocent. The idea that I had just produced an edition for adults was regarded as distinctly eccentric (although eccentric in a very English way, so that’s not so bad).

The trouble with all that amiable thinking is that it’s almost entirely wrong. Memory of much-loved books (or books which are somehow in the cultural bloodstream) does play tricks. For example, there are twelve chapters in The Wind in the Willows: only two are set on the river; only four are set in summer – although eight do feature copious amounts of food. (But even then we might pause: who does copious amounts of food actually appeal to? Children aren’t naturally greedy – and the kind of food on display here (fried ham, mulled ale, lobster salad, guava jelly, ‘a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask containing bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.’) is not conspicuously children’s food. Even the most devoted nostalgic adult might begin to wonder whether this looks suspiciously like adult’s fantasy.

As for it being fun, safe, adventurous, and innocent…

Take ‘adventurous’. The Mole, Mr Mole (wearing a smoking-jacket) is invited onto the river by Mr Rat, a chap of independent means, a riverside house, and, Grahame himself said, ‘I strongly suspect him of a butler-valet and cook-housekeeper.’ Mole is certainly excited, in a child-like way, at this sudden opening of his narrow, underground horizons and looks out across the country: What, he wants to know, is out there…

‘Where it’s all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn’t, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?’

And what does his new friend say? Encouragement? Excitement? Adventurousness? That, says Mr Rat is

‘the Wide World… and that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here’s our backwater at last, where we’re going to lunch!’

Not much excitement about that – or much to appeal to adventurous children.

And safe?

At the centre of the book is the Wild Wood, full of evil Stoats and Weasels and Ferrets, who terrorise the Mole when he strays into their territory, and then rise up and violently take over Toad Hall, beating the Badger and the Mole and throwing them out into the rain. Badger’s underground house is semi-fortified against intruders, there are policemen and jailors ready to quash any law-breaking, and even the most English of the characters, Mr Rat, is nearly seduced into embarking on a hedonistic trip to the lazy, wine-soaked Mediterranean.

And innocent – well, I’ll come back to that, because how innocent we think the book is rather depends on what we think it is actually about.

Let’s go back to basics: The Wind in the Willows is a children’s book – that is, a book written for children.

Well, no. It wasn’t. To begin with, neither the author nor the publisher thought it was a children’s book. Grahame was famous for books about childhood, The Golden Age and Dream Days: the publisher’s announcement described it as ‘a whimsical satire upon life’, reviewers described it as ‘an urbane exercise in irony at the expense of English character and mankind’ and Grahame himself called it ‘a book of Youth – and so perhaps chiefly for Youth,’ by which he meant those who liked an idyllic life, ‘free of problems, clean of the clash of sex…’ Which we might think, is an interesting way of putting it.

Of course, it began as a bedtime-story, and perhaps a third of it was drafted in letters to Grahame’s young son, but, as Roald Dahl said about Carroll’s Alice books: ‘I refuse to believe that Carroll wrote Alice for that little girl. It’s much too complex for that.’ Even in the letters to his son, it is clear that the book was being written for the author, not the child: many more layers were added to the original narrative.

But – wait – it’s about small furry animals (and a toad). To which I reply – show me where the characters behave as animals. On page one, Mole scrabbles with his four paws; Mr Otter, apparently an upper-class sporting gentleman, suddenly, in the middle of a pic-nic turns into a may-fly eating animal, and a bargewoman suddenly sees the distinguished land-owner, Mr Toad, as a ‘horrid, nasty, crawly toad.’ But where else on the remaining 143 pages? All the rest of the time, they are grown men, with houses, servants, cars, money, influence: of course, they are types rather than realistic characters – Toad is the spirit of rebellion, Badger the spirit if English tradition – but they are never children, and for 99% of the book, not animals.

So, what is the book actually about?

First, it’s a snapshot of a literary age. Grahame took the fashionable genres of his time and stitched them together: the boating book (there are many resemblances to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat), the caravanning book, and the motor-car thriller, with nods to Gilbert and Sullivan, and a whole chapter of fin de siecle pseudo mysticism. (Quite apart from the in-jokes: Toad Hall as described in The Wind in the Willows is the same house that Henry James describes in the first chapter of Portrait of a Lady.)

Secondly, it’s the portrait of a worried generation of males, faced with the destruction of the rural way of life by the motor car, the rising power of women (who are feared or excluded from the book), and the fear of a rebellious underclass, lurking on the horizon in the Wild Wood. For them, the idyll would be rural, leisured, ‘clean of the clash of sex’ – perhaps compensated for by orgies of food, and rebellion could be crushed by a little violence and superior military intelligence. Is this actually ‘innocent’?

Perhaps most of all, The Wind in the Willows is an allegorical self-portrait: all the main characters can be seen as facets of Grahame – the Banker seduced by the warm south, the outsider trying to become an insider, the man among men who loved messing about in boats, and male rather than female company. Literary psychologists have, of course, had a field day.

So, why the mistaken identity? The answer to that requires another blog – or a book – but it has a good deal to do with how adults relate to childhood. For much of the 20th century, childhood was seen as a place of innocence and lack of responsibility – a protected, retreatist, nurtured space, a place where you want to stay – regardless of the fact that in reality, for real children, it is pretty much the opposite. The Wind in the Willows spoke to this image of childhood, and gradually became, as A. A. Milne called it, ‘a household book’, a classic, a quintessential ‘children’s book.’ To suggest that it is not what it has always seemed to be, is upsetting for many readers who are reluctant to see an idyll violated. I don’t think they need worry – it is unlikely that the book’s status will ever change, but if adults read it as an adult’s book, they will be amply rewarded, and probably surprised.

Peter Hunt was the first specialist in Children’s Literature to be appointed full Professor of English in a British university. He has written around twenty books on the subject, together with hundreds of articles and reviews. He has also published four novels for young adults and two shorter books for young children. He the editor of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Wind in the Willows, as well as the forthcoming Oxford World’s Classics edition of Treasure Island (January 2011).

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This week the world famous Edinburgh International Festival kicks off, beginning three weeks of the best the arts world has to offer. The Fringe Festival has already begun in earnest with countless alternative, weird, and wacky events happening all over the city. Later in August sees the Edinburgh International Book Festival and there will be several OUP authors giving talks over a fortnight, including David Crystal, Tariq Ramadan, Frank Close, Ian Glynn, and Robin Hanbury-Tenison. To find out more about the Festival, I turned to The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy.

Edinburgh International Festival One of the world’s leading arts festivals, for three weeks in August Edinburgh hosts a selection of the best international theatre, opera, dance, and orchestral and other music in the city’s major theatres and concert halls and other prestige venues. The festival was founded in 1947 as a symbol of postwar European reconciliation, a parallel to the Avignon Festival of the same year. The first director was Rudolf Bing. It aimed to present a programme of work that would be representative of the highest possible artistic standards, presented by the foremost artists in the world. As with many international events the organizers have to balance the needs of Scottish audiences with those of the significant tourist market drawn to the festival. Significant Scottish companies and artists that have been featured include the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, Scottish Opera, and Traverse Theatre. The Festival is programmed by an artistic director, and artists and companies perform on invitation.

From its beginnings the festival also attracted to the city many more amateur and professional groups than those invited to the official events. It was not long before this peripheral activity was formalized as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, and now many hundreds of shows are presented in its programme. Although there is a director, any company or individual who wants to perform, can locate a venue, pay the appropriate fee, and find a spot on the fringe. The range of work presented in this context is extraordinarily wide, from prestige productions to the eclectic and the bizarre. The Fringe in turn has spawned a series of satellite festivals, including the Military Tattoo, the International Film Festival, the Book Festival, and the Jazz and Blues Festival.

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In the early 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease. More scientists, writers, composers, and artists than ever before earn a living from their creative output. During the 20th century, performance standards and records continually improved in all fields—from music and singing to chess and sports. But where is the Darwin or the Einstein, the Mozart or the Beethoven, the Chekhov or the Shaw, the Cézanne or the Picasso or the Cartier-Bresson of today? In the cinema, the youngest of the arts, there is a growing feeling that the giants—directors such as Charles Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles—have departed the scene, leaving behind the merely talented. Even in popular music, genius of the quality of Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix, seems to be a thing of the past. Of course, it may be that the geniuses of our time have yet to be recognized—a process that can take many decades after the death of a genius—but sadly this seems unlikely, at least to me.

In saying this, I know I am in danger of falling into a mindset mentioned by the great 19th-century South American explorer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, ‘the Albert Einstein of his day’ (writes a recent biographer), in volume two of his five-volume survey Cosmos. ‘Weak minds complacently believe that in their own age humanity has reached the culminating point of intellectual progress,’ wrote Humboldt in the middle of the century, ‘forgetting that by the internal connection existing among all the natural phenomena, in proportion as we advance, the field to be traversed acquires additional extension, and that it is bounded by a horizon which incessantly recedes before the eyes of the inquirer.’ Humboldt was right. But his explorer’s image surely also implies that as knowledge continues to advance, an individual will have the time to investigate a smaller and smaller proportion of the horizon with each passing generation, because the field will continually expand. So, if ‘genius’ requires breadth of knowledge, a synoptic vision—as it seems to—then it would appear to become harder to achieve as knowledge advances.

The ever-increasing professionalization and specialisation of education and domains, especially in the sciences, is undeniable. The breadth of experience that feeds genius is harder to achieve today than in the 19th century, if not downright impossible. Had Darwin been required to do a PhD in the biology of barnacles, and then joined a university life sciences department, it is difficult to imagine his having the varied experiences and exposure to different disciplines that led to his discovery of natural selection. If the teenaged Van Gogh had gone straight to an art academy in Paris, instead of spending years working for an art dealer, trying to become a pastor, and self-tutoring himself in art while dwelling among poor Dutch peasants, would we have his late efflorescence of great painting?

A second reason for the diminution of genius appears to be the ever-increasing commercialisation of the arts, manifested in the cult of celebrity. True originality takes time—at least ten years, as I show in my book Sudden Genius?—to come to fruition; and the results may well take further time to find their audience and market. Few beginning artists, or scientists, will be fortunate enough to enjoy financial support, like Darwin and Van Gogh, over such an extended period. It is much less challenging, and more remunerative, to make a career by producing imitative, sensational, or repetitious work, like Andy Warhol, or any number of professional scientists who, as Einstein remarked, ‘take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes when the drilling is easy.’

Thirdly, if less obviously, our expectations of modern genius have become more sophisticated and discriminating since the time of the 19th-century Romantic movement, partly as a result of 20th-century advances in psychology and psychiatry. The ‘long hair, great black hats, capes, and cloaks’ of the bona-fide Victorian hero, ironically mentioned by Virginia Woolf, are now period pieces, concealing psychological complexes more than genius.

There is also the anti-elitist Zeitgeist to consider. Genius is an idea that invites attack by scientific sceptics and cultural levellers. In 1986, the psychologist Robert Weisberg published a short and readable book with the title Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius: What You, Mozart, Einstein, and Picasso Have in Common. Perhaps the second subtitle was chosen by the hopeful publisher (who reprinted the book in 1993), rather than the author. At any rate, it encapsulates a widespread desire to vaunt genius whilst simultaneously cutting it down to normal size. A cartoon strip published in Scientific American during the centenary of Einstein’s 1905 breakthroughs parodied this paradox with a sketch of a book called The Einstein Diet captioned: ‘What did this mega-genius eat? Read this book and unlock Albert’s diet secrets.’ A snip at $84.99.

Genius is not a myth, and it is worthy of our aspirations. But it comes at a cost to the individual—expressed in the ten-year rule—that most of us are unable or unwilling to pay. There are no short-cuts to becoming a genius. The breakthroughs achieved by geniuses did not involve magic or miracles. They were the work of human grit, not the product of superhuman grace. From this truth about genius we can surely derive both strength and stimulus for our own life and work—if we sincerely desire to.

Andrew Robinson was Literary Editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006. His latest book is Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. He has written many other books including biographies of Albert Einstein, the film director Satyajit Ray, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, and the archaeologist Michael Ventris. He is also the author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, and his Very Short Introduction to Genius is forthcoming in Spring 2011. You can read his previous OUPblog post here.

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I couldn’t help noticing this story, which states that many of the names still popular in English-speaking countries originate from the Normans, who won control of England in 1066. Meanwhile, names that were popular in England at the time – such as Aethelred, Eadric, and Leofric – have disappeared. With that in mind, I turned to Babies’ Names, by Patrick Hanks and Kate Hardcastle, to find out more about Norman names. Below are a selection, along with their meanings.

Adele This was borne by a 7th-century saint, a daughter if the Frankish King Dagobert II. It was also the name of William the Conqueror’s youngest daughter (c. 1062-1137), who became the wife of Stephen of Blois. The name went out of use in England in the later Middle Ages, and was revived in the 19th century. It is the stage name of English singer-songwriter Laurie Blue Atkins (b. 1988).

Alison From a very common medieval name, a Norman French diminutive of Alice. It virtually died out in England in the 15th century, but survived in Scotland, with the result that until its revival in England in the 20th century it had a strongly Scottish flavour. The usual spelling in North America is Allison.

Bernard Norman and Old French name of Germanic (Frankish) origin, meaning ‘bear-hardy’. This was borne by three famous medieval churchmen: St Bernard of Menthon (923-1008), founder of a hospice on each of the Alpine passes named after himl; the monastic reformer St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153); and the scholastic philosopher Bernard of Chartres.

Emma Old French name, of Germanic (Frankish) origin, originally a short form of compound names such as Ermintrude, containing the word erm(en), irm(en) ‘entire’. It was adopted by the Normans and introduced by them to Britain. Its popularity in medieval England was greatly enhanced by the fact that it had been borne by the mother of Edward the Confessor, herself a Norman.

Hugh From an Old French name, Hugues, of Germanic (Frankish) origin derived from hug ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ‘spirit’. It was originally a short form of various compound names containing this element. This was borne by the aristocracy of medieval France, adopted by the Normans, and introduced by them to Britain.

Leonard From an Old French personal name of Germanic origin, derived from leon ‘lion’ + hard ‘hardy’, ‘brave’, ‘strong’. This was the name of a 5th-century Frankish saint, the patron of peasants and horses. Although it was introduced into Britain by the Normans, Leonard was not a particularly common name during the Middle Ages. It was revived in the 19th century and became very popular. The spelling Lennard is also found.

Rosalind From an Old French personal name of Germanic (Frankish) origin, from hros ‘horse’ + lind ‘weak’, ‘tender’, ‘soft’. It was adopted by the Normans and introduced by them to Britain. Its popularity as a given name owes much to its use by Edmund Spenser for the character of a shepherdess in his pastoral poetry, and by Shakespeare as the name of the heroine in As You Like It.

William Probably the most successful of all the Old French names of Germanic origin that were introduced to England by the Normans. It is derived from Germanic wil ‘will’, ‘desire’ + helm ‘helmet’, ‘protection’. The fact that it was borne by the Conqueror himself does not seem to have inhibited its favour with the ‘conquered’ population: in the first century after the Conquest it was the commonest male name of all, and not only among the Normans. In the later Middle Ages it was overtaken by John, but continued to run second to that name until the 20th century, when the picture became more fragmented. There are various short forms and pet forms, including Will, Bill, Willy, Willie, and Billy.

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