I’m Afraid You Can’t Do That Hal

Posted on November 26, 2025 by leslie

Georg Baselitz, Man of Faith

I’m Afraid You Can’t Do That, HAL.
By Hadrian Wise.

There is no more vivid dramatisation of the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence than the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ship’s computer, HAL, refuses to open the pod doors to let the astronaut, Dave, back on board. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” HAL says in his affable if metallic way, explaining that his instructions to maximise the probability of the mission’s success are best carried out by eliminating the ship’s unreliable human element. Stanley Kubrick released the film in 1969, and in the years since then, fears about super-intelligent computers with minds of their own defying and harming their supposed human masters have grown more shrill with the development of the technology. When Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the 1990s, and Alpha Go found a way to beat the world’s best Go players 20 years later, there was an understandable sense that it was only a matter of time; now that Chat GPT can write better essays than some students, many wonder if the so-called “singularity”, the moment an A.I. system becomes in some general sense equivalent to the human mind, is imminent. But what does “equivalent to the human mind” actually mean? If it involves a machine’s being able to think and learn independently like a human, to make its own decisions, to be aware of its own mental life, to have a “mind of its own”, then we can say in summary it means – to be conscious. That would be the singularity.

The most widely known suggestion for determining whether an A.I. system has reached the singularity is the Turing Test, proposed by the British mathematician Alan Turing. If the output of a machine becomes indistinguishable from the output of a human mind – if we cannot tell whether we are talking to a machine or to a human being – then we can say the machine is to all intents and purposes equivalent to a human. If that is the test, we are indeed frighteningly close to the singularity and may well have reached it already. But it doesn’t take long to see that the Turing Test is inadequate, and if it weren’t for Turing’s immense and deserved reputation as a genius, hero and martyr to anti-homosexuality laws, his “Test” would have been consigned to the dustbin of history’s worst ideas long ago. All the Turing Test covers is how well the machine can simulate the output of a mind. But simulating the output of X is not the same as being, or even being equivalent to, X. Simulating a conscious being does not make a machine a conscious being, any more than repeating what my grandmother says makes my grandmother’s parrot an English-speaker. Just because a computer can simulate consciousness, does not mean the computer is conscious.

The most celebrated illustration of this crucial point is John Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment. Searle, one of the greatest philosophers of the last century, asks us to imagine we are in a room with a slit in the wall through which people are posting squiggles we don’t recognise, these squiggles being, unknown to us, characters in “Chinese” (he does not specify which dialect). We have a pile of squiggles of our own, also, again unknown to us, characters in Chinese, and our job is to post back squiggles in response to the squiggles we receive. We have no idea what any of the squiggles means, but we do have an instruction manual, which tells us which squiggles to post back in response to whichever squiggles we get. By using the instruction manual, we are able, without knowing it, to post through grammatical sentences in Chinese that are reasonable replies to the sentences being posted to us, so that the people on the other side of the wall, who do understand Chinese, perceive us to be carrying on a conversation with them. Yet we do not understand a word of Chinese.

This, Searle says, is the condition of the digital computer. It produces content without knowing what that content means. It has syntax, but no semantics. It places symbols in a particular order according to instructions – its programme – without knowing, or needing to know, what those symbols mean. Deep Blue can manipulate enormous quantities of symbolic representations of moves in chess at incomparably higher speed than Garry Kasparov, but unlike Kasparov, Deep Blue does not know it is playing chess, let alone anything else. If the fire alarm goes off in the middle of the game, Kasparov’s chances of surviving any conflagration are far higher than Deep Blue’s.

We have not managed to build a digital computer advanced enough to overcome these problems. Are we ever likely to? Searle’s answer is we shall not, because we cannot, by definition. Could Searle be wrong? Could computers as we know them, digital computers, become conscious? We might be more confident if we could show that the human mind was just a very sophisticated digital computer, because in that case, we at least have an example in nature of a conscious digital computer. And as it happens, there is a long-standing well-supported case in the philosophy of mind that yes, the human mind is indeed a digital computer, and if we accept that the mind is conscious – and believe it or not, there are some philosophers and neuro- scientists who refuse to grant this, but we shall ignore them for now -, then we cannot say a digital computer can never be conscious, because we have a clear example of one that is. We don’t, of course, understand exactly how it works, but that is just because it is a fiendishly complicated digital computer.

You might think this hypothesis, known as mechanism, is on the face of it rather implausible. The other digital computers we know about, which we consider primitive by comparison with the human mind, seem to be an a lot better at doing sums than the human mind is. On the other hand, the human mind is able at an early stage of development to guide the body around a room without bumping into things, something non-human computers still find impossible. But these objections are not decisive. In principle you could have a digital computer that was bad at sums and good at navigating a room. The decisive argument against mechanism is J.R. Lucas’s “Godelian argument”, which goes like this. A digital computer is an instantiation of a formal logical system. This is uncontroversial. Godel’s incompleteness theorem – which, again, while extraordinary, is uncontroversial – holds that in every consistent formal logical system rich enough to accommodate simple arithmetic – which the human mind of course can also do -, there are formulae that are true, yet unprovable within that system, which given that “truth”, in a consistent logical system, means provability-in-the-system, is strange. These are formulae of the type, “Formula 17. Formula 17 is unprovable in the system.” Now if that formula is false, it would be provable in the system, which would make it true – but then it would be true and false at the same time, which is impossible. So it must be true. In which case, it must be unprovable in the system, which means the system cannot produce it as true. But you and I – we can see it is true. And this, however insignificant, is a clear difference between us on the one hand, and the formal logical system, the computer, on the other. As Godelian formulae can be constructed in any consistent formal logical system, it follows that no such system can be a complete model of the human mind, meaning no computer can be a human mind, meaning the human mind cannot be a computer.

There is one caveat. Godel’s theorem applies to consistent systems. Could the human mind be an inconsistent computer? This is plausible if we use the popular sense of “inconsistent”, but in its more specialised sense in formal logic, “inconsistent” means something more than just sometimes contradicting yourself. It means not caring that you’re contradicting yourself, even when it is pointed out. Perhaps Donald Trump is an inconsistent computer? Human beings, by and large, implicitly understand what it means to be consistent and aim to be consistent, and try to iron out inconsistencies when identified. Inconsistent computers, instantiating inconsistent formal logical systems, do not. So it seems implausible that we are inconsistent machines, and the hypothesis we are consistent machines founders on the rock of Godel’s theorem.

Thus, to sum up, if we accept Searle’s characterisation of digital computers it seems implausible they could ever be conscious, and if we cannot overcome Lucas’s Godelian argument we cannot adduce the human mind as a concrete example of a conscious digital machine. But of course, digital computers are not the only type of computer. There are now quantum computers. Could they one day become conscious? The honest answer is we do not know. It is simply too early to say. In the meantime, we can ask, where are all the new antibiotics? If quantum AI were making progress, the one thing we might expect it to be doing is coming up with new antibiotics. We are always being told this is one of the things AI will do for us, so if these exciting new quantum computers are so much better than the primitive old digital ones – where are the new antibiotics? Draw your own conclusions.

None of this is to say AI is nothing to worry about. There is plenty to worry about. The impact on jobs, for example. Even without being conscious, AI could replace and is replacing a lot of the work done by human beings, which we shouldn’t find surprising, since after all, as Dr Johnson said, “It is remarkable how little the intellect is engaged in the discharge of any profession.” Now if our corporate masters and government were agreeable, we could perhaps just find a way to tax the robots and usher in mankind’s long-yearned-for Age of Leisure, but unfortunately that is a big if. Then there is the problem of potential over-reliance on a technology that despite its name, is not in the true sense of the word intelligent, and which has no common sense. If we weren’t alive to the danger of assuming computers are always less fallible than human beings, after the Post-Office-Horizon scandal, we certainly are now. There is the potential for a deadening effect on free thought. Chat GPT and other AI applications are essentially enormous databases containing sentences written on the Web, and they construct sentences by selecting the statistically most probable next word from the database. It is not hard to see how this might reinforce a certain uniformity in a way analogous to the way social-media algorithms tend to distil an individual’s interests into a concentrated feed. What about AI weapons systems with insufficiently precise instructions on whom to target and whom to leave alone? Or indeed instructions that are all too precise? Or the real worry might be that the potential of AI has been over-hyped and we are looking at a gigantic “bubble” that will wreck economies around the world when it bursts. But barring that, machines with enormous computing power that lack the responsiveness to circumstances that comes with consciousness have, in short, all sorts of dangers of their own. I am sure that we can all think of several.

Hadrian Wise is a frequent contributor to conservative journals

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Endnotes, November-December 2025

Posted on November 11, 2025 by leslie

Endnotes, November-December 2025

In this edition: Siegfried Wagner conducts his father’s music  *  Sir Adrian Boult conducts Berg and Vaughan Williams  *  A Miracle in the Gorbals  *  Clare Hammond plays 20th-century British music

Not content with bringing devoted listeners of the late-romantic repertoire vintage Bruckner, SOMM has now come forward with what can only be described as a masterpiece of musical time-travel: a two-CD set of Wagner’s music, recorded in the 1920s, and conducted by his son, Siegfried. We have all listened to the famous Siegfried Idyll – that enchanting Christmas serenade by Wagner to his wife and baby son (the work’s dedicatee, born in 1869) – so it is hugely exciting to find a real, tangible contact with that Wagnerian past, in the form of this audio-restored, cleaned-up and curated collection presented by sound-engineer, Lani Spahr, and producer, Siva Oke.

The discography, marshalled for the CD, comes from the earliest time of electrical recordings – from Parlophone, Columbia and HMV – so the listener will hear Berlin State, Bayreuth and London Symphony Orchestra players, clustered around the primitive equipment of the time, in what will seem to us in the digital age, a dry, even crackly sound-world. Yet such thoughts soon dissolve, as you concentrate on the musicianship, the slowly-unfolding and undemonstrative interpretations under Siegfried’s baton – in short, the type of Wagner performance of a century ago, and longer.

The disc begins with the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, the first opera in The Ring cycle; then, The Ride of the Valkyries and Magic Fire Music from Die Walkure. The Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s last opera, the mystical Parsifal makes an appearance, too; with the second CD opening with the Siegfried Idyll. As Robert Matthew-Walker comments in the CD booklet (quoting George Bernard Shaw): “Siegfried Wagner did not take command of the army, like Hans Richter… but simply gave the orchestra plenty of time… It was a joy to see how he got the very best out of his players.” And that is precisely the feeling that emanates from this collection: Wagner that grows on you, that seems to take longer, lingering in the mind after the works have ended.

Extracts from Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, the monumental Prelude to Act 1 and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde(orchestral version) take us through to the CD’s finale, Siegfried Wagner’s very own opera of 1899, Der Bärenhäuter (The Bearskin) – a Brothers Grimm fantasy, set at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and involving a good measure of tavern, hunting scenes and ghost stories. Siegfried, just like his illustrious father, was steeped in Teutonic tradition, but his music seems to owe more to, possibly, Weber, or the world of Hansel and Gretel, than to the higher-myths of the Rhine and Valhalla. A thorough recommendation from The QR, and perfect listening for the inwardness of winter and Yuletide evenings.

More historic fare, this time, a landmark performance (from recordings in the Harwood Collection) of a March 1949 Royal Albert Hall performance of the post-Wagnerian, post-Mahlerian Alban Berg’s troubling opera, Wozzeck – a story of the mental and physical disintegration of an soldier (the role sung by Heinrich Nillius), now living a life of penury, but who is heading inexorably to a scenario of murderous horror, having suspected the girl upon whom he is fixated – Marie (Suzanne Danco), another inhabitant of this world of squalor – of unfaithfulness. Having been used for a medical experiment by a Doctor (played by Otakar Kraus), Wozzeck truly symbolises the “abyss of man”, his mind unravelling in hallucinations and jealousy, and in the penultimate scene of the opera, “a blood-stained moon” conveying the half-world and half-light in which this saga exists. But what makes this CD so eye-catching is the fact that it is conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, a figure we tend to associate with the blue-remembered hills of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Like Sir Henry Wood before him, we forget that our English conductors were as a radical as they were conservative, and blazed a trail in their own right for new music.

Stravinsky’s Capriccio is also featured on the disc, in a performance with Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and solo pianist, Noel Mewton-Wood, recorded in BBC studios in 1948. And the collection ends in expansive style, with Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, a fraught, torrential, turmoil-filled inter-war work that seems to be by a different composer altogether from the writer of The Lark Ascending. Occasionally, though, a glimpse of the pastoral England can be heard in the Fourth, but a landscape seen, maybe, through Wozzeck’s eyes: a countryside with a slate-grey sky and a febrile tremor in the mind and in the distance… Recorded on the 21st July 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall, the Proms audience gives a magnificent ovation to the Royal Opera House Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian.

Music by Bliss, next: the 1944 ballet set in the backstreets of Glasgow, Miracle in the Gorbals – a piece with all the disembodied, jagged social scenery that you find in Berg’s Wozzeck – suicides, prostitutes, strangers and streets paved with danger. Conductor Michael Seal (himself once an orchestral player) brings the score to dazzling life in a thrilling performance with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Salford. Chandos sound-engineers win yet again with their state-of-the-art sound, which serves well the late masterpiece by Bliss, his 40-minute-long Metamorphic Variations (1972 – first given in 1973 under the baton of Vernon Handley), which begins with an unforgettable, brooding Larghetto Tranquillomovement – the dark saying of the opening oboe line setting a scene of profundity, but which is later dispelled by more disjointed, faster themes.

From BIS recordings, Britten’s Diversions for the Left Hand (1940, revised 1954), the Tippett Piano Concerto (1953-55) and Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante (1927, but revised 16 years later) make a triumphant trio of important, but – strangely – neglected British works. In the hands of Clare Hammond, one of our most admired pianists, these exciting concerto pieces reveal not just the genius of their composers, but (like the Bliss and Vaughan Williams mentioned earlier) the style and form of a whole golden era of our music: the unique fusion of nostalgic lyricism and light – especially in the Walton – interwoven with dynamic, often stretched tonality; and in the Britten and Walton, an intricate embroidery of variation upon variation, of abstract ideas, which somehow managed to sound as though they have been drawn, as if by water-divining magic from the fen, meadow and megalith landscape of England. George Vass and the BBC Symphony Orchestra give a razor-sharp accompaniment to Clare’s brilliant detail, but those who know Vernon Handley’s version of the Sinfonia Concertante may prefer his faster tempo and ‘thicker’ orchestral sound. But that is not to say that the BIS performance is anything other than completely satisfying and substantial in its well-captured recorded studio sound.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.

CD details:

Siegfried Wagner conducts Richard Wagner, SOMM ARIADNE 5043-2.
Berg, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, SOMM ARIADNE 5024-2.
Bliss, Miracle in the Gorbals/Metamorphic Variations, Chandos CHSA 5370.
Walton, Britten, Tippett, BIS -2604. (SACD)

 

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Occupational Hazard

Posted on September 14, 2025 by leslie

Occupational Hazard, by Bill Hartley

There has been a great deal of press coverage of late concerning the Justice Department’s attempt to reduce the prison population. This has tended to shift focus away from the level of violence in the prisons of England and Wales. Usually it takes a particularly serious incident to catch the attention of the media, such as the assault earlier this year on three officers at HMP Frankland in Durham. A useful move towards violence reduction might be to deny prisoners access to cooking oil and perhaps question the competence of the individual who thought providing this means to do serious harm was a good idea. That though is the crux of the problem. On the one hand there are people in prison who present a clear and present danger; on the other there are those in management who wish to take the ‘pain’ out of imprisonment. The fact is than one cannot normalise institutional life and giving dangerous prisoners access to kitchen facilities will not make them better people. Instead, having been imprisoned to maintain public safety, they are being given the opportunity to find new victims.

A few generations ago, should an individual come into custody serving more than say, five years, then an alert would go round the prison warning staff. Such was the rarity of what was then a long-term sentence. The increase in serious crime and terrorism has meant that courts are now handing down terms like cricket scores. There is little alternative and when a prisoner is not in a position to be making any plans this century, then high security prisons in particular are having to cope with people who have nothing to lose. As a psychologist at HMP Wakefield (the clearing house for lifers) once put it: ‘my job is to persuade people that there’s hope, when in fact there isn’t any’.

Prisoners serving this type of sentence present a particular kind of threat and some are not likely to be the type who might respond to efforts at rehabilitation. Go in illiterate and come out with an Open University degree as the joke used to be. How then can prison officers be protected from such people? The simple answer is they can’t, at least not whilst maintaining the kind of staff- prisoner relationships which have always been the basis for keeping order. The statistics bear this out. In the twelve months to September 2024 there were 974 serious assaults on staff, the highest recorded in ten years.

Management have no idea how to improve the situation and neither does the Prison Officer’s Association. The best the latter can do is to mount a ridiculous poster campaign entitled ‘Do not allow violence in the workplace to continue’. They suggest staff report it. Judging by the rather detailed statistics available regarding assaults on staff, reporting is one thing the Service does extremely well. Predictably, since the Frankland assaults, the POA seems to think gadgets are the answer. They are calling for police style ‘stab vests’ and the issue of taser guns to officers. Both are available to police and it’s easy to see why. Police called to an incident are likely to be entering the unknown, where a situation can easily escalate. They don’t know whether a suspect is armed and clearly a stab vest provides useful protection. Given the likelihood of a violent confrontation running out of control, the ability of a police officer to even threaten to deploy a taser may have the potential to reduce risk.

Prison conditions are quite different. Admittedly a stab vest may offer some protection (and not just against a blade) but unlike the police it is not a case of entering the unknown. Prisons always have the potential for violence and carrying a taser will offer no protection. Prisoners tend to be ambush predators. If they are intent on doing violence they are likely to act without warning and least risk to themselves. A taser wouldn’t provide a deterrent. Indeed possession of a taser might put an officer at further risk, should prisoners attempt to get hold of one. The alternative, storing a taser in a secure location, is unlikely to be helpful. Violent incidents in prison tend to begin and end quite quickly. Locating a taser (and an officer trained in its use) probably wouldn’t affect the outcome.

Prison staff are trained in something called Control and Restraint (C&R). It is a system which has been developed over the years for use in a variety of organisations, each setting its own standards according to the perceived need. Apart from the actual restraint training (use of force involving wristlocks and the like) emphasis is also placed on de-escalation. Clearly an organisation where staff are dealing with potentially violent people needs to provide training of some sort, for health and safety reasons. However, if one looks at the basic idea behind such training, it is all about ‘last resort’ and preventing a prisoner hurting himself or others. Also it requires a team of three staff to use it effectively. As a means of self defence it has little or no use. A proper system of self defence training, which increases staff confidence and survivability in a confrontation, is long overdue.

The idea behind Control and Restraint is hopelessly outdated. In a Parliamentary Answer given ten years ago it was noted that the number of violent offenders in our prisons had risen by 40%. It is hardly likely to have reduced since. What the Service needs is a show of effective leadership and instead of parroting the usual clichés about staff safety being a primary concern and that violence against them will not be tolerated, some change must come about. Either that or senior managers in the service ought to have the honesty to admit that if they are going to maintain their current approach to running prisons (access to cooking oil included) then a certain number of staff casualties is the price they are prepared to pay.

William Hartley is a former senior official in the prison service

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Militarisation of the Left

Posted on August 28, 2025 by leslie

Militarisation of the Left

The Red Brigades: The Terrorists Who Brought Italy to its Knees, 2025, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford etc, John Foot, hb, 450 pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

“An oppressed class that does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms only deserves to be treated like slaves”, V I Lenin

In 1970, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) were established in Milan by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, students at the Institute of Sociology in Trento. The BR had their roots in the student movements of 1967-8 and were inspired, accordingly, by the struggle against imperialism in Vietnam and by the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. But political violence from the left, as Professor Foot makes clear, was also engendered by Fordism. Frederick Taylor, author of Principles of Scientific Management (1911), had envisaged “a perfect man-machine symbiosis”. He viewed workers as “predictable, machine-like objects” (see Broken Myths: Charles Sheeler’s Industrial Landscapes, Andrea Diederichs, De Gruyter (2023), reviewed in QR, January 2023, by Leslie Jones). Henry Ford, by his introduction of the assembly line, put Taylorism into practice à outrance. Workers were monitored and restricted to simple, repetitive, “mind numbing” tasks, “beneath the dignity of able-bodied men” according to sociologist Thorstein Veblen. The upshot was absenteeism and a high turnover of labour.

Fiat Mirafiori in Turin, the biggest factory in Italy, had 46,000 workers in 1967. It was run on “Fordist production lines, where discipline was key to profits”.[i] In 1969, Curcio and Cagol established links with militants in the huge Pirelli Biccoca rubber plant in Milan. Discontent with working conditions was rife. The 1968-9 strike wave in Italy took on some novel forms. Traditional trade unions and the Communist Party (PCI) were superseded. In Milan, unprecedented demands were made concerning housing and education. The CUB (Comitato Unitario di Base) brought together workers, students and political militants.

According to Professor Foot, the BR glossed over the differences between armed struggle against military dictatorships in the Third World and armed struggle against the contemporary Italian state. Its leaders were persuaded that the latter was only nominally democratic and irrevocably tainted by its associations with fascism, an idea they shared with the Baader-Meinhof group or Red Army Faction.[ii] Giovanni Pesce’s No Quarter (1967), a “1968ers Bible”, was a profound influence in this context. Pesce, a former member of the Resistance and a leading member of the GAP, had carried out violent attacks against the fascist state. But Foot debunks the idea that BR were the “heirs of Pesce’, since Italy was “a democracy with an anti-fascist constitution”[iii] Yet he acknowledges that neo-Fascists, in conjunction with the secret police, carried out the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan in December 1969 which was falsely attributed to left wing groups. This, arguably, was part of a strategy of tension intended to blame the left for violence and restrict democracy.

State violence and lies were copiously documented in La Strage di Stato (State Massacre), 1970. Multimillionaire Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the publisher of No Quarter, compared the Piazza Fontana bomb plot to the Reichstag fire of 1933. The result was that many Italians ceased to believe in the justice system. Foot concedes that Italy’s “corrupt and unloved state and political system” [iv] legitimised the BR. So did the return of repressive aspects of justice last seen under fascism, such as prisons on remote islands, and the use of torture. The BR’s tactic was to lay bare “the real – supposedly repressive – nature of the state” [v]

Feltrinelli financed armed groups on the left. He considered the Tupamaros, an armed left-wing urban guerilla movement active in Uruguay in the 1960’s, worthy of emulation. The IRA, ETA and the PLF were his other role models. According to such revolutionary luminaries as Regis Debray, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, a small cadre of revolutionaries can provide the spark that ignites a revolution. This notion bespeaks Lenin’s concept of the vanguard of the proletariat and Marx’s notion of a vanguard political party. According to Foot, however, groups like the Tupamaros and BR “turned classic Marxism on its head” [vi]. He contends that this concept of an “elite of trained militants”, of “a tiny compact group” imbued with higher consciousness, rendered the masses not only “irrelevant” but also a “problem”. He strenuously rejects the claim of the BR to represent the proletariat, maintaining that most workers in Italy’s mega factories were at best indifferent to their sloganeering.

BR bank robberies (“proletarian appropriations” for their apologists) were for Foot “armed robberies”, pure and simple. He dismisses the idea that BR’s kidnaps, trials and “people’s prisons” constituted a proletarian form of justice. The collateral victims of BR actions are another of his recurrent themes. Justification of BR terror, such as killing journalists, on the ground that workers are also exploited and killed, is summarily dismissed as “whataboutery”[vii]. 

Foot’s arresting subtitle is The Terrorists who Brought Italy to Its Knees. In May 1972, Luigi Calabresi, head of Milan’s political police office at the time of the Piazza Fontana incident, was assassinated by Lotta Continua. Even when left-wing terrorists were brought to trial, their record of violence and seeming invincibility intimidated magistrates and lawyers and deterred potential jurors and witnesses, threatening for a time to undermine the judicial process. But however much the author deplores the “criminal violence” of BR, he acknowledges their uncanny capacity to manipulate the media. They were “the best-known armed group” on the left [viii] in the 70’s and 80’s. And concerning the kidnap of Genoa public prosecutor Mario Sossi, in April-May 1974, he concludes, “A tiny group of militants had captured the attention of Italy”[ix]  The pièce de resistance, in this context, was the kidnap and execution of former prime minister Aldo Moro in Rome, March-May 1978.

The Red Brigades is painstakingly researched and a compelling read. The author skilfully guides us through a morass of conflicting conspiracy theories. But we were reminded of a sagacious comment made by sociologist Robert Michels, in Political Parties (1911):

Any class which has been enervated and led to despair…through prolonged lack of education and thorough deprivation of political rights, cannot attain to the possibility of energetic action until it has received instruction…from those who belong to…a “higher” class.

Red Brigades logo, credit Wikimedia Commons

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review

 ENDNOTES

[i]  Foot, p36
[ii] See ‘Nazi officials ran German state for decades after war’
Oliver Moody, The Times, August 19th, 2025
[iii] Foot, p16
[iv] Foot, p173
[v]  Foot, p194
[vi] Foot, p23
[vii]Foot, p50
[viii]Foot, p130
[ix] Foot, p112

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Endnotes, September-October 2025

Posted on August 13, 2025 by leslie

Alfred Noack, view of Alassio, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, September-October 2025

In this edition: Vintage Elgar * An Evergreen symphony *  Sir Andrew Davis – ‘King of kings’ * Community music-making * E.J. Moeran – a man for a season, by Stuart Millson

‘We have such food, such wine – at last we are living a life!’ exclaimed Edward Elgar on his 1903 holiday to the elegant little town of Alassio, on the north-west coast of Italy. Despite inclement weather, the composer was captivated by the landscape, the result being the Overture, In the South (subtitled ‘Alassio’). Despite its title of ‘overture’, the piece is more in the style of a dramatic symphonic poem, its rich orchestration, ebullience and breathtaking forward-drive reminiscent of such works as Richard Strauss’s Don Juan. Resurrected from the BBC vaults comes a 1944 performance of In the South from the BBC Symphony Orchestra in its wartime home of Bedford, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. Produced by Siva Oke, with an astonishingly clear digital remastering by historic recordings technician, Lani Spahr, this mono recording dazzles the listener; not least because the Elgar is conducted by an august figure from the concert podium of years ago, Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) – often thought of as an elder statesman of British music, but in his day, a young, pioneering, passionate conductor and artist, steeped in the music of the English Musical Renaissance, championing the composers he knew personally: Holst, Vaughan Williams and Elgar.

The creation of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1930 under the aegis of Boult, was one of the great cultural achievements of a corporation which, in those days, was bound to the principles of Sir John Reith – the BBC founding-father – who consecrated his organisation to the raising of public taste and the promotion of high-culture. Yet it is strange to think that the Boult-Elgar performance from 1944 is not actually issued by the BBC, but by the private CD label, SOMM Recordings. We are indeed grateful to SOMM for giving us this fine account of a classic Elgar work, not to mention a glimpse into the playing style and sound of the BBC SO from over 80 years ago. It seems that the responsibility for the nation’s musical heritage is increasingly passing from the BBC (obsessed as it is by ‘playlists’, mass-entertainment, cookery programmes etc) to committed, private individual curators.

Alassio, credit wikipedia

In the South is well served by Boult’s orchestra, and those of us who know and love his later stereo performances of Elgar on EMI with the London Philharmonic, may – with this CD – pick up on a more idiomatic, ‘quicker step’ to the conducting. Also on the album, you will find a noble reading of Elgar’s valedictory Symphony No. 2 in E flat, Op. 63 of 1911, taken from a 1963 stereo record (Waverley Records), with Boult wielding the baton, this time before the Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow. In the 1970s, Sir Alexander Gibson went on to make many recordings of Elgar and Walton with the Scottish National (later, Royal Scottish National) thus putting Caledonia’s major orchestra on the musical map. Yet the Boult/SNO record, made ten years or so before the Scots musicians’ heyday of exposure on RCA and Chandos, reminds us of what an excellent ensemble audiences ‘north of the border’ have always had.

Sir Adrian shapes an energetic first movement, ploughing through Elgar’s choppy, unpredictable waves; taking us into the emotional semi-funeral march (for Edward Vll) which is the slow movement. Fiery and frenetic, the scherzo is handled with terrific pace but never gets out of control (Elgar likened the music to a fierce throbbing in the head); and we soon then arrive at the ‘maestoso’ finale, satisfied and calm as the sun sets, radiantly. But perhaps, in this symphony, there is a nagging feeling of the world on the brink of change: the certainties and confidence of the First Symphony and Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 having evaporated. Could Elgar sense the Great War that was to come, just three years later? Elgarians and audiophiles will love SOMM’s new CD, as will those who enjoy radio history – as also presented are recordings of conversations with Sir Adrian and Elgar’s daughter, Carice Elgar Blake.

More late-romantic music, but this time from the Austro-German tradition, and the composer, Franz Lachner (1803-1890) whose music (as you might expect) owes much to the sound-world of Schumann and Brahms. Yet Lachner seems to have been overlooked, lagging behind the confirmed ‘old masters’ of those years of post-sturm und drang, and later, Prussian pride and nationalism: just listen to the strains of the German National Anthem in Lachner’s Festouvertüre, to appreciate a true Teutonic musician, steeped in a sense of statehood. The piece can be found on the CPO label, in a bright, sharp, ‘silvery’ recording by Taiwan’s highly-gifted musicians of the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by Gernot Schmalfuss – a student of the great Rudolf Kempe – Lachner’s music is given persuasive readings, the main work on the CD being the nearly-50-minute-long Symphony No. 3. Suffice it to say that if you enjoy the titanic weight of Brahms and the mercurial motion of Schumann, Lachner’s music will not disappoint.

Chandos Records have presented the last-ever studio sessions of the late Sir Andrew Davis, on a CD entitled King of kings: an array of orchestrations of Bach, made by Sir Andrew, who began his life as an organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. A short, sharp musical ‘shock’ awaits listeners at the beginning of Davis’s astringent orchestration of the famous Toccata and Fugue – a version that seems far removed from Stokowski’s more expansive reworkings. Yet precision and detail work well here, and the Chandos sound is, of course, laser-strong and perfect. In Dulci Jubilo, BWV 608 from 1713, and Heut’ triumpheret Gottes Sohn, BWV 630, however, are much smaller in scale, and Sir Andrew brings a delicacy and ‘inwardness’ to his treatment of Bach’s church music. Very sadly, this well-loved conductor did not live to complete the recording project, which was taken over by that equally fine and sensitive conductor, Martyn Brabbins.

Community music-making, recitals and concerts by retired professionals, gifted students and teachers given in local halls and churches may yet provide a mainstay for live music, in an age in which some of our larger artistic institutions – Welsh National Opera, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Wales Opera – struggle for official funding (from a state and arts bodies that seem to have forgotten about culture). In July,  at St. Mary’s Church, Cardigan, some 30-40 local people gathered for an afternoon recital by pianist, Rosalind Powell. Rosalind is a teacher and composer of songs (some in the Andrew Lloyd Webber style) who is passionate about local music-making and choral singing. Her performance of Mozart, Bach, Debussy (with many extracts from sonatas and famous works) made for an enjoyable, relaxed, free-flowing – and free-of-charge – afternoon. Surely, in an age in which we fear for the future of high culture, such events as Rosalind’s recital could enable us to reach out to new audiences?

And finally… as the month of August faded, your reviewer found himself enjoying walks along the Welsh coast, looking out across Cardigan Bay to the horizon and Irish Sea. A piece of music that seems to complement this world of Celtic seascapes and hilly coastal paths is the String Quartet in A minor by E.J. Moeran, a composer who settled for a while in Kent, but whose forebears were Irish. The quartet has a serious, brooding, opening, but is never slow or wrapped up in misery – the music stepping out into fresh air and late-summer light, with the hint of a cool autumnal breeze at its edge. May we recommend the fine Naxos CD, with Moeran faithfully served by the Maggini String Quartet.

CD details: Elgar, In the South etc, SOMM ARIADNE 5037-2; Lachner, Symphony No. 3, cpo 555 081-2; Bach, arr. Sir Andrew Davis, Chandos, CHAN 20400; E.J. Moeran, String Quartets, Naxos, 8.554079.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

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Britain on the Brink

Posted on July 24, 2025 by leslie

White Cliffs of Dover, credit Wikipedia

Britain on the Brink, by Stuart Millson

In 1940, with the massed-armed forces of Nazi Germany over-running Western Europe, the French General, Weygand, faced with his country’s defeat, declared: “The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” Having spent much of the previous decade hoping that the prospect of another European conflict would never materialise, the British political class and public trusted in the politics of what has become known as ‘appeasement’ – the idea that ‘far-away lands of which we know nothing’ should stew in their own juice; that buying time, or even concluding treaties with continental dictators would ensure that we were never again faced with the spectre of world war. Chamberlain’s efforts to ensure such a peace, though well-intentioned, were soon shattered, and as the year 1939 began, Britain was beginning to organise a civil-defence and armaments policy – Mr. Chamberlain, himself, pictured on his way from Downing Street, his gas-mask carrier slung across the shoulder of his immaculate, well-brushed suit.

By May 1940, Chamberlain had been replaced by Winston Churchill, who promised the country little more than ‘blood, tears and sweat.’ The new Premier’s great speech – ‘… we will fight them on the beaches…’, though stirring, alerted the nation to the prospect that it might well be invaded; and that in such circumstances, the remnants of the British army and lion-hearted civilians would have to fight the Germans in county-town high-streets and along country lanes. In the event, despite the shock of being at war again – the nation held together well, through Blitz, evacuation, rationing and privation. The wartime propagandists created an image of a country ‘smiling through’, which was not far from the truth. People simply got on with it.

Today, certain commentators and historians sneer at the ‘patrician society’ of 1939-1940; a time when many people automatically heeded what they were told by the Church, the politicians, the Royal Family, the (Reithian) BBC – in those days, a voice of authority across an Empire. But it was arguably that very ‘conformity’, or more accurately, a relative oneness in its identity and values, that enabled Britain to survive. Long before the days of multiple television channels, multiple ‘lifestyle choices’, the ‘me, me, me’ society, Britons were, broadly speaking, of the same outlook, and thus would respond to calls to stand together, brandish a pitchfork and defend the land.

Eighty years after VE Day, Britain – supposedly a victor of the Second World War – seems more like a defeated country, such is the low morale, notwithstanding the numerous sporting events which are meant to cheer us up. Conversations, on buses, in pubs, between friends and family, on social media, often veer toward: ‘how bad things are’ – ‘isn’t it terrible that such-and-such has happened’ – ‘why can’t the politicians do anything about it?’ – ‘where are the police when you need them, where is a hospital appointment when you urgently want it?’ – and so forth. Political crises unfold at an alarming rate, and news bulletins report on the latest murder, the latest stabbing, or the latest ‘public inquiry’ or ‘government crackdown’; a never-ending series of headlines, announcements, Government initiatives, ‘lessons that will be learned’… all of which end in nothingness. And our news really does reflect the country of today – as in the outrage (from activists and liberal-left journalists) several months ago when a court finally ruled that someone who was born a biological male, could not really be regarded as a woman. Another story beamed into the homes of a numbed public was a bulletin reporting on ‘Border Force’ officials helping ashore hundreds of migrants from beyond Europe’s borders: some 20,000 people came to Britain this year, crammed onto dinghies putting out from the French coast. So much for the Prime Minister’s plan for a new Border Command: so much for the millions of pounds paid to the French Government to help stem the tide.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has other burdens to weep over – not least the £100 billion outlay on sickness and disability benefits, within which, as the Taxpayers’ Alliance observes, are included: a 507 per cent increase in claims to help with ‘Tourettes syndrome’; a 490 per cent increase for assistance with drugs misuse; and a statistic of 365 per cent for those seeking help with depression.

Defence spending, which usually has to wait its turn in Government spending rounds, has had to increase, as those ‘far away countries of which we know nothing’ are, once again, the centres of conflict, threatening to spill across western borders. However, the scale of UK military weakness was laid bare, when at the end of June, pro-Palestinian activists scaled an RAF aerodrome perimeter fence and daubed warplanes with graffiti – the fence, it was later revealed, being little more than the sort of structure one would find surrounding a municipal waste tip. And just over four decades on from the Falklands conflict, in which 250 servicemen gave their lives to restore the sovereignty of these South Atlantic islands, the Government has withdrawn the Royal Naval warship which once patrolled those waters. It was also reported by The Daily Telegraph that the small squadron of RAF fighter-jets, stationed in the Falklands, are only partially operational, leading those of us left who even care, to ponder the question: if re-invaded, could Britain ever mount another rescue mission to those islands?

Britain, in 2025, has lost its way. Whilst Israel protects its people with a hi-tech anti-missile shield, our own Ministry of Defence seems unable to build perimeter fences at its airfields. And as Finland, fearing Russian aggression, organises huge civil-defence programmes, involving large-scale reserve forces enthusiastically drawn from the population (many of those serving, clearly in the younger generation), a recent opinion poll suggested that only 35 per cent of the population would be prepared to fight to defend this country.

In a world bristling with militaristic threats from vastly-stronger states, and a very real sense that in just half-a-century from now, mankind will be grappling with problems concerning food, energy and (for the first time in the northern hemisphere) water supplies, ill-prepared, head-in-the-sand Britain is perilously lurching toward the edge of a precipice.

1982, Falklands War, HMS Broadsword & HMS Hermes, credit Wikipedia

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of QR

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Endnotes, July-August 2025

Posted on June 28, 2025 by leslie

Leopold Stokowski, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, July-August, 2025

In this edition: vintage recordings – de Falla, Bliss – from the SOMM label; a tribute to conductor, Ronald Corp OBE, by Stuart Millson

Siva Oke’s SOMM label continues to enlarge its archive of classic, or more correctly, vintage, recordings taken from the vaults of European and US radio stations. The Bruckner series last year set the gold standard in sound re-engineering, thanks to the employment by SOMM of the audio and recordings specialist, Lani Spahr, who returns with dazzling restorations of live music from the 1960s, of Bliss and Elgar (‘Boult’s Elgar’, to be reviewed by us next time). And accompanying the discs devoted to those two great British composers is an edition of music by the Spanish musical nationalist and folklorist, Manuel de Falla, with some additional French ultra-romanticism from Berlioz conducted by that master of drama and orchestral ‘Technicolor’, the legendary Leopold Stokowski. On the latter disc it is Paul Baily who has supervised the ‘French polishing’ of the sound-textures, delivering astonishing clarity from a 1952 recording from the San Francisco Opera House.

The de Falla disc has as its main work, the ballet El amor Brujo – a score brimming, as the title suggests, with romance, passion and magic. Containing sections entitled, Song of suffering love – The magic circle – The apparition, not to mention the famous, feverish Ritual fire dance – the score is a showpiece for orchestra, although now not often played; de Falla having been displaced in concert-halls by his contemporary, Stravinsky. The performance, given in the last week of the 1964 Proms, was originally captured by the BBC Third Programme (the Radio 3 of the near-past) and is suffused with the atmosphere that only comes when a large and enthusiastic audience is present. Stokowski loved such concerts, revelling in the adulation of the Prommers. He once noted in a television interview his astonishment at “the hunger for music” that existed (and still does) among that Royal Albert Hall summer audience. And thanks to Somm, we can hear on the CD (track 16) some more classic radio: a ‘Frankly Speaking’ interview with Stokowski, in which questioners John Bowen, Reginald Jacques and George Scott, tease out from the maestro his philosophy of life and music. Well worth hearing, and a tribute to the Producer of the disc, a name perhaps familiar to the more vintage Radio 3 listener, music and recordings expert, Jon Tolansky.

Track 14 of the disc is a valuable archive piece: 13 minutes of rehearsal time for El amor brujo – a super sound-sketch from the sidelines of musicians at work, sculpting their interpretation. Stokowski radiates authority, but also good humour, and his admiration for the byways of Spain – the countryside, far from municipal Madrid – reveals a musician trying to convey a spirit-of-place to orchestral players, probably weary from a long concert season!

Next in the line-up, a recording entitled ‘Bliss – the Composer Conducts – a 50th Anniversary Tribute.’ Arthur Bliss, in his early days, post-Great War, was often viewed as a member of the avant-garde. Stravinsky and Ravel infuse his music, but so, too, the inescapable influence – grand, noble lines of sound – of Elgar. Sir Arthur Bliss, who died in 1975, eventually became Master of the Queen’s Musick, the promise of the enfant terrible long gone in the eyes of many – and immediately after his death – became consigned as a conservative figure, supposedly overshadowed at home by Benjamin Britten and (abroad) by modernists, atonalists and minimalists. Thanks to SOMM’s two-disc Bliss set, we can now reappraise him: A Colour Symphony, premiered at Gloucester Cathedral in 1922, the opening work on the first CD, in a magnificent, magisterial performance under the composer’s baton from the 1961 Proms. The London Symphony Orchestra gives its all to the music, in what is a well-paced performance, and somewhat slower than modern, digital versions by Vernon Handley on Chandos and Barry Wordsworth on Nimbus. Lani Spahr’s work on the 1961 sound-quality greatly helps us with our understanding and hearing of all that the composer intended, especially the detailed timpani sound (which I missed in Handley and Wordsworth) in the thrilling second movement, depicting the feelings evoked by the colour, Red.  Green, for Bliss, was the colour of rebirth and victory and is the title of the final movement, the powerful finale (similar in tone to the conclusion of his ballet, Checkmate) inspiring a tidal wave of applause from the Proms audience.

The Piano Concerto – originally written just before the Second World War for New York is also here, with that titanic and tragic figure of 20th-century music, John Ogdon, as soloist; and the much shorter Concerto for 2 Pianos (soloists Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick) is included on the second disc – a ‘filler’ behind the monumental war requiem (perhaps, more authentic than Britten’s?) entitled, Morning Heroes. Bliss served in the First World War and ‘the sorrow of war’ can clearly be heard in the opening section, Hector’s Farewell to Andromache – the universal farewell to hearth and home of the warrior. Yet in the conclusion to this huge choral work, the rising mists on the Somme battlefield carry with them the souls of the men who died for their country: the composer creating, in music, a mystical monument to his comrades-in-arms. All the performances – save for the March, The Phoenix (Homage to France, 1944) and the Melee Fantasque were recorded at the Proms during the 1960s – and well done to SOMM for allowing the tape to play on, thus capturing the wonderfully patrician voices of the Third Programme announcers of the day; a presentational style that has long since disappeared from the airwaves.

Finally, The Quarterly Review would like to pay tribute to conductor, Ronald Corp OBE, who died earlier this summer at the age of 74 and is fondly remembered by audiences and his devoted singers and musicians, alike. ‘Ron’ – as so many people in music called him – combined an approachable style (he was a great communicator and inspirer for young singers) with a platform formality, white-tie-and-tails or dinner jacket for his many concerts with the New London Orchestra and London Chorus. The QR, some years ago now, interviewed this passionate advocate for English music and we well remember his amusing observation on why so many of our native composers were forgotten – Ron observing that many folk songs are about ‘maidens and washer-women’ and thus fall below modern politically-correct standards. A huge discography was, nevertheless, set down by the conductor: Rutland Boughton, Hubert Clifford, Eric Coates, Herbert Howells, to name but a few; with many of his own sensitive compositions (on themes such as war, loss – even the loneliness and isolation of dementia) achieving a place on record.

CD details: Frankly Speaking, with Leopold Stokowski (SOMM Ariadne 5035); Bliss, the Composer Conducts (SOMM Ariadne 5039-2).

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

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A Song that Descended from the Heavens

Posted on June 17, 2025 by leslie

Villa di Livia, Rome, credit Wikipedia

A Song that Descended from the Heavens

by Darrell Sutton

For those who wish to study the astrological content of Manilius’ Astronomica, it is derived from two sources: its Latin text and a much later published English translation. For the former, A.E. Housman’s efforts to establish a critical Latin text should be commended. As to the latter, students are indebted to G.P. Goold for his celebrated Loeb edition (1977; Rev. 1992,1997). He rendered the Latin text into cogently expressed English.

Through the centuries, people have sought to elucidate Manilius’ words. The various books and articles in English, French and German are often written in a manner that is harder to understand than the texts of Manilius or Housman’s Latin Commentary.

Manilius’ poem is incomparable. Not unlike the epic cycle, containing stories of an heroic age, Manilius’ heroes are ageless figures of the zodiac, shapechangers whose powers know no bounds, and whose configurations displayed and possessed mantic features. The only thing in antiquity which might rival it’s esoteric genius, in this writer’s opinion, is Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. But as a literary creation, the Astronomica was spun by the poet’s imagination and is made up of delicate threads, both historical and mythic.

The ancient fable is a genre of study whose roots are firmly established in ancient Greek literature. These fabulous tales [i] were well known, the earliest mention of them being by Hesiod.[ii] No one prior to Aristotle[iii] (384BC-322BC) discussed them in at length, and their origins they remain – like most ancient things – subject to conjecture. It is believed by some scholars working in this field that there is direct linkage to ancient near Eastern maxims.[iv] This indeed may be true, but discussions hitherto have not established this intertextual link. As far as one is able to discern from reading the results of Oriental scholarship, there is little transcriptional evidence to confirm the manner in which these transferences of material were supposedly made. There are numerous instances, too, where tentative interpretations are later reassessed, proven to be correct or set aside on account of better analyses of a cuneiform document.

Obviously the beginnings of astral interests, namely a fascination with the sciences of astrology and astronomy,  cannot be determined. From any literary perspective this interest is pre-historic, predating the recording of fables by no less than one millennium. But it was only a matter of time before someone with genius would be able to compose an original literary piece that merged these two disciplines in order to illustrate the role the heavens play in predetermining events on earth. And Manilius set out to do just that and he achieved his goal.

Manilius’ poem is a fabulous tale in both the strictest and narrowest sense of the terms. His illustrations of celestial bodies in animal and human forms are unique: not unique to zodiac studies; but unique from a literary point in the way his poem luridly depicts a world governed by fate.

In the sphere of translation studies, one encounters a myriad of possibilities for composing, interpreting and critiquing prose and poetry. The Latin text of Manilius’ Astronomica can still be improved. It is a ripe field for conjectural emendation, especially for scholars familiar with the details of primeval Greco-Roman and near eastern astral phenomena. The number of scholars regularly working on this text is small. G.P. Goold’s [GPG] classic translation for the Loeb series is incomparable, but not uncorrectable. In a book of such length there are various ways to say the same thing. Some of his glosses are better than others. Below I offer another rendering of the opening a lines vv.1-5.

Manilius commits himself, in writing, to the notion that Greco-Roman divinity is explicable and suitable for life and living. His assumptions are bold. The lyrics of his song direct readers to the source of his inspiration.

LATIN TEXT

Carmine divinas artes et conscia fati
Sidera diversos hominum variantia casus,
caelestis rationis opus, deducere mundo
Aggredior primus que novis Helicona movere
5 Cantibus et viridi nutantis vertice silvas

By the magic of song to draw down from heaven god-given skills
and fate’s confidants, the stars, which by the operation of divine reason diversify the
chequered fortunes of mankind; and to be the
first to stir with these new strains (astrological poetry) the nodding leaf-capped woods of Helicon. [trans. Goold]

Starry influences descended by divine song, fate’s artistry
and knowledge in different ways visiting people:
celestial reason’s effort to entice the world,
and [be] the first, using new canticles, to have drawn near to disturb Helicon’s swirling green timbers.  [trans. Sutton]

COMMENTS

Of the Iliad, C.M. Bowra, in his posthumously published book Homer, wrote ‘a poet is under no obligation to set out his whole theme at the start; he is free to keep surprises in store…’ I believe him. The Astronomica begins as one would expect, with some sort of justification for undertaking this enterprise. The many issues that readers soon will encounter are kept in reserve in the beginning. The organization of it all is refined. Accidents are non-existent in Astronomica. Manilius believes in fate’s overall determination of the affairs of this world and its inhabitants. Hence he presumes his destiny involves inventing these lines of verse. He supposes, too, that they are inspired by gods whose control of celestial objects ensure that the writing of this song is his lot in life, i.e. by divine means the structure here and now descends into his heart and into print for readers’ enlightenment.

One feature of the broad plan of this sacred chant brings to mind the fervid but contemporary otherworldliness of W.B. Yeat’s Supernatural Songs.

Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn

Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head…

Poets enjoy describing the cruel happenstances of life. Myth supplies a nifty canvas on which to portray strange characters. Discovered in ‘a pitch-dark night’? – Death is the black fluid in Yeat’s inkhorn when composing that line. New life turns up later as one reads on. Chance tells different stories than those conveyed by fate. There is always a story within a story to tell and reasons for the telling of it. And both Yeats and Manilius want their verses learned by readers whose interests are stimulated by such commissions. They contain messages that are to be carried forth. And so, the poetic cycle repeats itself, being reincarnated in individual hearts in each generation.

As a consequence, poems are read and retranslated. You also can see from the above two English renderings of Manilius’ opening lines that the Latin syntax affords different interpretations. My translation is a spontaneous rendering. I gave prominence to ideas that stood out to me. When formed and construed correctly, Latin figures of speech are expressive, sometimes answerable to more than one explanation, all the while radiating the author’s enthusiasm.

Goold employed the word ‘magic’, a term that in this context is inapt and conjures in the mind of modern readers all sorts of witch-wisdom or witchery, cogitations whose adverse overtones undermine Manilius’ literary impression of sideral might. This poem is not a composition of charming enchantments. Its verses take the reader step by step through the transcendent maze of horoscopy.

To be continued

Darrell Sutton[v]

ENDNOTES

[i] As defined by Aelius Theon (c.50AD):, “‘a fable is a fictional narrative which portrays a truth,” so N. Holzberg, p. 20, in An Introduction: The Ancient Fable(2002), Indiana Press. These comparative images make use of animals, humans, gods and other: from larger to smaller ratio in that order. And from such tales, stem a variety of moral dictums, at one time deemed useful for real life. See page 9 of ‘Theon and the History of Progymnasmata’ by M. Heath, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 43 (2002/3), pp. 129-160. For a much longer treatment, see Ethics in Aesop’s Fables: The Augustana Collection (2001) by C.A. Zafiropoulos, Brill.
[ii] Cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, 202-212, regarding the nightingale and the hawk.
[iii] Cf. Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 20th chapter of book 2. 1393a23-1394a18.
[iv] See the lengthy introduction in Babrius (Loeb), by B.E. Perry, Harvard.
[v] Scholarly friends scrutinized this paper. All conclusions represented are mine.

Darrell Sutton is a Classicist

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More Light

Posted on June 9, 2025 by leslie

Sir Francis Galton, by Charles Wellington, credit Wikipedia

More Light

Bernd Roeck, The World at First Light; A New History of the Renaissance, translated by Patrick Baker, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2025, 1144pp, hb, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to Sir Francis Galton, “The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek” (Hereditary Genius, 1869), for at its apogee, the relatively small population of Attica had produced “unsurpassed masterpieces” in “the principal departments of intellectual history”. (In his census of 317 B.C., Demetrios of Phaleron, the Governor of Athens, refers to 21,000 citizens in Attica).[i]) Galton cites fourteen illustrious men from the period 530-430 BC, including statesmen and commanders such as Pericles and Themistocles, and literary and scientific men such as Thucydides, Socrates, Plato and Aeschylus. What, for Galton, was the cause of Greek superiority? Attica, he observed, was open to immigrants but only those able to benefit from its rarefied social life. A system of unconscious selection had thereby produced “a magnificent breed of human animals”. Galton concluded that judging from the capacity of the common people to appreciate great literary and artistic works, the average ability of the Athenian race was two grades higher than our own. Tragically, this “marvellously gifted race” declined when marriage became unfashionable and, immigration and emigration remaining constant, the population was maintained by “the incoming population of a heterogeneous class”.

Professor Roeck, whose scholarship is not to be gainsaid, is a no less fervent admirer of the ancient Greeks. He considers them “the most important intellectual founders in world history”. Without Greek thought, he avers, the Renaissance and European modernity would be “unthinkable”. Attic democracy, in his opinion, encouraged rational philosophy and science. Some of the authors’ assertions on this subject are frankly hyperbolic. Writing about the ancient Greeks, he maintains, is “tantamount to reconstructing the genetics of modernity”. The Greeks of the 5th century were “the greatest inquirers in world history”, in his opinion, for they introduced historiography, ethnology and anthropology. Socrates and Plato, likewise, made the first attempt to “predicate the norms that governed every aspect of life on reason alone”, while Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, emphasised empiricism, i.e. what can be perceived and observed, one of the pillars of modern science.

The author acknowledges that thanks to the influence of the ancient Greeks, competition, the rule of law, science, modern medicine and freedom appeared in the West and only there. But he insists that “people outside of Latin Europe were not [therefore] less intelligent than the Europeans”. Professor Roeck is evidently anxious to avoid accusations of penning “hymns to Europe and its offspring”, in view of what he calls the “crimes of colonialism and imperialism”.

In an indicatively entitled chapter entitled ‘The Luck of Geography’, the author endorses Jared Diamond’s thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies (1997), that the Eurasian landmass “offered optimal conditions for the diffusion of cultural innovations”. Luck then, not innate ability, is for Roeck the basis of Western exceptionalism. Diamond is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist. Magisterially dismissing psychometric evidence of ethnic differences in cognitive ability, he accuses his “white” colleagues in psychology faculties of “trying for decades to demonstrate that black Americans…are innately less intelligent”. Indeed, observation has convinced Diamond that peoples often called primitive, such as hunter gatherers in New Guinea, are “more intelligent, more alert…than the average European or America” because kept up to the mark by selection. In short, Diamond espouses an inverted form of social Darwinism.[ii]

Diamond’s objective is to debunk the “myth” that “…history’s pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves”. Not that Professor Diamond disputes the superior might of those who have the most advanced technology (the guns and steel of his title) compared to those still using stone tools/weapons. But he finds the suggestion that the different technological levels of Aboriginal Australians and Europeans are rooted in racial differences “loathsome”.

Diamond gives an impressively detailed account of those aspects of the bio-geography of the Fertile Crescent (its climate, topography and wild plants and animals) that made possible the early and independent emergence of agriculture, the sine qua non of political organisation and technology. Present Eurasian dominance has its origin, in his judgement, in the precedence of civilisation in the Near East which then spread to Europe.

Why did agriculture fail to appear independently in certain seemingly favourable locations, such as California, sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia? Jared Diamond supposedly has the answer. Insufficient attention has been paid to ecological factors, in his opinion. There was a lack of suitable native plants for domestication in California, sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia. Then there was a distinct shortage of domesticable animal species in Central America and difficulties in producing a staple grain. Concerning rivers, Diamond contrasts Africa and the Americas, main axis north-south, with those of Europe, main axis west-east. Rivers are vital for cultural exchange and historians, he complains, have underestimated how geography has hindered the spread of crops and livestock in Africa and the Americas. Tropical zones and topographical barriers delayed the spread of livestock and crops.

Diamond emphasises the inherent environmental advantage of a continental landmass, Eurasia, with no major geographic barriers to the spread of agriculture and which enjoys sufficient rainfall to support long-term, intensive farming. He notes that almost all domesticable big wild animal species are native to Eurasia. And that extensive west-east zones with similar climatic conditions facilitated the spread of crops and animals adapted to particular climatic regimes.

Roeck eloquently describes the Socratic dialogue as “the mightiest weapon of all enlightenment, dedicated to the search for truth and wisdom, edifying but also corrosive”.[iii] One can imagine such a dialogue between Professor Roeck and Sir Francis Galton, in which the former, who rejects all evidence of group differences in mental ability, is quite unable to explain the intellectual superiority of the ancient Greeks.

ENDNOTES

[i] These figures should be taken with caution
[ii] See Leslie Jones, The Galton Institute Newsletter, issue no 29, June 1998, pp 6-8, review of Guns, Germs and  Steel
[iii] The World at First Light, p32

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review 

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Fire in the Hole

Posted on May 16, 2025 by leslie

Constantin Meunier, Return from the Mine, Wikimedia Commons

Fire in the Hole

By ‘Gas Bill’

Perhaps the greatest threat to life in the British coal mining industry was gas explosions. The total casualty figure attributed to this source between 1837 and 1927 was 3,500. Following loss of life in such an incident, the usual approach was investigation via a coroner’s inquest; perhaps not the most effective means of discovering what had gone wrong. Usually the verdict was the rather vague one of ‘accidental death’. The primary cause was hardly ever looked into. Evidence given at inquests might do little more than speculate about an insecure safety lamp, or a failure to ensure airways were kept clear.  Explosions tended to be caused by a release of methane, known in the trade as fire damp. As if this wasn’t bad enough there could also be carbon monoxide, otherwise called choke, or after damp. In short, if the explosion didn’t kill you, then there was another gas which could cause suffocation.

A curious feature of the South Wales coalfield was that prior to 1845 it had remained largely free of explosions. After this date things changed drastically. By 1849 there had been 52 deaths from explosions. The number of fatalities at individual collieries also rose significantly. In 1852, at Middle Duffryn Colliery, eight miners were killed. This was a modest total at a single colliery compared with what was to follow. In 1856 at Cymmer Rhondda 114 men and boys were killed. The number of explosions recorded in the collieries of South Wales between 1845 and 1852 was 183, causing a total of 291 deaths. Between 1851 and 1869 matters grew worse; 18 explosions took a total of 815 lives, including 120 deaths in a single incident at Black Vein Colliery, Risca, in 1860. With some understatement collieries prone to explosions were described as working ‘fiery’ coal seams.

Ironically there had been significant improvements in safety during this period, notably in the fields of ventilation, inspection and the widespread adoption of safety lamps. Prior to 1845 miners had been using naked flames for illumination without adverse effect, even though coal mined in these collieries could continue to emit gas in the holds of ships up to two weeks after it was loaded.

The man who took an interest in this situation was Thomas Joseph (1819-1890). He was born in Merthyr Tydfil and left school at fourteen to work with his father, a colliery manager. Despite his education being curtailed at such an early age Joseph acquired exceptional mathematical skills. He was even trusted by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, no less; the great engineer used him to carry out preliminary surveys for the Vale of Neath Railway.

In May 1871,  Joseph read a paper to the South Wales Institute of Engineers on the subject of gas explosions. It is a curious mixture of Victorian callousness, reflecting prevailing attitudes and a careful examination of the problem. In his paper, Joseph was dismissive of the notion that additional inspections as supported by ‘trades union leaders from the working class’ could be of assistance. He doubted that this would increase safety to any degree predicting that ‘their frequent officious interference in the details of the mine, presuming as ignorant men would do upon their official position’.

Having dismissed the competence of those who actually risked their lives in digging the coal Joseph went on to state his case, pointing out that the principles he was putting forward are ‘stated with some boldness but are based on lifelong experience and have been used in the winning and development of 5000 acres of fiery coal in the Welsh valleys’. He added that during his 35 years managing collieries only six lives were lost through explosions, a remarkably small figure considering the carnage occurring elsewhere in the district.

Joseph went on to speculate that despite the increases in safety there had been no improvement in the situation and therefore, ‘some violation of physical laws must be at work here’. Evidently colliery owners had convinced themselves that improvements in ventilation were the only defence available in preventing explosions, despite the casualty figures suggesting otherwise.

Joseph noted that one of the standard terms in mining leases was that lessees were required to leave barriers or walls in every seam, usually at least twenty yards in thickness and intended as a safeguard against inundation by water from other collieries. He conceded that a colliery owner had every incentive to promote safety and noted that the loss of a human life ‘can lead to a monetary loss of up to £200 which has the potential to drive an owner into bankruptcy’. Unfortunately he failed to elaborate on this figure but went on to add that much of the ‘teaching, writing and legislation has only dealt with secondary causes and symptoms of danger and with their results as if it were a hopeless task to think of grappling with and mastering the evil at its source’.

Ventilation in collieries was still in a rather primitive state. Some engineers favoured powered ventilation, others open furnaces. Joseph felt that the differences in types of ventilation weren’t significant. He recalled entering collieries in his youth which contained a maze of workings and old roadways ‘where the air was so foul that it was next to impossible to carry a light and yet no explosions occurred’. He described conditions for miners in these collieries as being like working inside a gasometer.

Joseph went on to state that by strict adherence to certain principles collieries ‘may be placed in a state of absolute safety’. The danger he felt was caused by walled in gas; old workings and unworked overlying seams. It all depended, he felt, on working seams in the right order of succession. Joseph recommended beginning with the upper seams of coal and also to avoid working the seams inclining upwards first. There was an obvious practical reason for mining first on the rise side as it was called, since the coal would be moved more easily down to the shaft, before being raised to the surface. Joseph looked at the reports of HM Mines Inspectorate and noted that since 1851 all explosions had occurred in the rise or uphill workings. He advised against exploiting lower seams first since this caused sudden squeezes or creeps which travelled up the plane of the strata. Leaving an unworked seam lying over a ‘favourite’ seam of coal caused a sudden increase in pressure and a flood of firedamp. Once the gas was set free, ‘it can only be compared to the breaking of a great reservoir driven under huge pressure’.

Joseph concluded his address with several recommendations. These principles he said may be applied in absolute safety. Shafts sunk near the summit of coal seams would keep barriers of unworked coal to a minimum. He recommended that every upper seam be worked first and warned that beginning with rise workings would lead to blowers of gas from the roof or floor of the mine, noting that sudden squeezes or creeps invariably travel up the plane of the strata, never down. He also suggested a new role for the mines inspectorate: that of approving future exploitation of coal reserves.

Admittedly, Joseph would have been unaware at that time of the effect of coal dust. It was known that dust exacerbated the effects of explosions. Only later was it learnt that coal dust on its own was capable of spontaneously exploding. Even so, why weren’t his methods tried beyond the area in which he was working? Perhaps the philosopher David Hume had the answer when he referred to ‘avarice, the spur of industry’.

The mining industry in South Wales expanded hugely during the second half of the nineteenth as the demand for steam coal rose. Welsh collieries were the main source for this type of coal and clearly the mine owners wanted the most economically valuable seams to be exploited first. Usually mining on the rise side was the quickest way to achieve this. In short, human life was secondary to profit and the maintenance of good safety standards. Long after Joseph’s death the casualties continued, the most notable being at Senghenydd Colliery near Caerphilly in 1913. Here a gas explosion killed 439 miners. As Luke 4:24 puts it: ‘truly I tell you no prophet is accepted in his hometown’.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

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