A review of “The Mirror And The Light” by Hilary Mantel
April 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I owe a special debt of gratitude to award-winning author Hilary Mantel for her superb trilogy of novels providing a fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief counsellor to England’s 16th century King Henry VIII.
I read the first part, the 650 page “Wolf Hall”, during a trip to China; I consumed the second section, the 400 page “Bring Up The Bodies”, on a holiday in Australia & New Zealand; and I devoured the third and final component, all 900 pages of “The Mirror And The Light”, during this lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis.
“Wolf Hall” covered the period 1527-1534 when Henry failed to acquire a male heir with Catherine of Aragon; “Bring Up The Bodies” accounted for just a year in 1535-1536 when the King’s second wife Anne Boleyn proved even less pleasing to him; while “The Mirror And The Light” has a four-year span (May 1536-July 1540) during which Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour finally gives him the son he covets but at the expense of her life and fourth wife Anne of Cleves is such a royal disappointment that Cromwell finally falls from power and loses his head (the title of the last work is a description of the capricious King).
In some ways, none of the three novels is an easy read.
Each has a cast list of more than a hundred characters, many with the same first name and many referred to by title and nick-name as well as proper name, while Cromwell himself is frequently identified only as ‘he’. But each work has a cast of characters and royal and claimants’ family trees before the text. Also Mantel’s writing style is elaborate and her vocabulary extensive, but she is a wonderful novelist and, for this trilogy, exhibits a formidable knowledge of the history, politics, personalities, clothing, food, traditions and beliefs of the period.
Mantel’s three novels present a sympathetic portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a poor, originally uneducated, boy from Putney who rises to be Henry’s VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and eventually Earl of Essex, while managing the departure of England from the Church of Rome.
His talent can be summarised in his advice to two colleagues: “I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.” But the author does not present him as an innocent, ascribing to him the thought: “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets, and sits in the corner with his quill blunted, wailing and ripping out his curls.”
Mantel’s near 2,000 page trilogy is a literary tour de force. The first two segments won the Man Booker Prize and it would be splendid if “The Mirror And The Light” made it a hat trick.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How do we decide who will live and who will die in this global pandemic?
April 24th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Three years ago, I did a blog posting which posed an ethical dilemma.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:
Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. What would you do? Which is the most ethical choice?
I don’t want to overdo the analogy, but there is a real sense in which governments around the world are facing a similar dilemma in relation to the coronavirus crisis. For the sake of simplification, let’s assume that the objective of public policy is to minimise the number of lives lost and that somehow we forget about all the other social, economic and environmental issues. As with the thought experiment that I quoted, there are no options in which nobody dies. The issue is how many, who and how.
If governments do nothing and just let the virus rip – the equivalent to letting the trolley run its course – we know that there will be deaths and we can quantify those deaths fairly accurately. We can collate the number of deaths in hospitals within days of them occurring and we can collect the number of deaths in care homes and the community within weeks. And we know, more or less in real time, not just how many are dying but who they are.
Now suppose the government actively introduces lockdown measures – the equivalent to pulling the lever and diverting the trolly – we know that fewer will die of the actual virus – that is, on our hypothetical railway system – but if this action requires closure of the economy – in our model the closure of the railway system – we can only guess at the additional deaths and the causes and identity of the people dying and that information will only become available months or even years in the future.
This is where we are now. We do not know how many of those dying from Covid-19 would have died anyway in the next few months or years and we want to maximise longevity and not simply balance the number of deaths in the long run. We do not know how many extra deaths will occur as a result of ill people not going to doctors or hospital plus loss of life caused by unemployment, poverty, suicide and abuse.
It will be many deaths – maybe more than Covid-19 deaths – but those will not occur now and they will not be broadcast by the media each day, so they will be much less visible to the public but just as tragic for the individuals concerned and for their families and friends.
I don’t know the answer to this dilemma. I just know that we have to balance the knowledge of very visible virus deaths now against the assumption of less visible non-virus deaths now and in the coming months and years. Striking the ‘right’ balance – a decision that will change over time – is a tough call and we should be as transparent as possible about how these complicated decisions are made.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
Happy St George’s Day – but he was not the character you might have thought
April 23rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
There is nothing more English than St George, right? And today we celebrate him and all things English.
St George might be hailed as a national hero, but he was actually born – in the 3rd century AD – more than 2,000 miles away in Cappadocia (modern day Turkey).
He is thought to have died in Lydda (modern day Israel) in the Roman province of Palestine in AD 303. It is believed that his tomb was in Lod and was a centre of Christian pilgrimage.
You can find nine things you didn’t know about St George here.
Posted in History | Comments (2)
Word of the day: quarantine
April 22nd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The current coronaviris crisis is highlighting certain words. My last word of the day was ‘furlough’. Today I want to look at the word ‘quarantine”.
The word comes from the Italian word for 40: quaranta. Originally, when a ship was suspected of being infected with some contagious disorder, it was obliged to lie off port for a period of 40 days.
Now the term is applied to any period of segregation to prevent infection.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
And in other news … this year’s World Press Freedom Index is published and it’s not good for the UK or the US
April 21st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
At this time of crisis and lockdown, many of us are deprived of some basic freedoms – but hopefully this is temporary. Meanwhile media freedom around the world is under challenge. The latest World Press Freedom Index shows that the United Kingdom has slipped to 35th and the United States is no better at 45th.
The top ten countries are as follows:
1. Norway
2. Finland
3. Denmark
4. Sweden
5. Netherlands
6. Jamaica
7. Costa Rica
8. Switzerland
9. New Zealand
10. Portugal
You can check out there full list of 180 countries here.
Posted in American current affairs, British current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (0)
It is now clear that the UK is not going to achieve a “good result” in the coronavirus crisis
April 19th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In mid March, the British government’s health advisers on the coronavirus crisis told Ministers:
- The modelling suggests that, without severe social distancing and isolation practices, the death toll could be around 260,000.
- The modelling suggests that, with the current severe social distancing and isolation practices, the death toll could be around 20,000 or lower.
Days later, the UK went onto national lockdown and we are now four weeks into this lockdown period. We were assured, that if UK deaths from coronavirus could be kept below 20,000 by the end of the pandemic, it would be a “good result” for the country. But the death toll in hospitals now exceeds 15,000 and, with an estimated 6,000 people having already died in care homes from Covid-19, the 20,000 figure is likely already to have been exceeded.
This is not the time to say what we should have done differently – but that time will have to come. Meanwhile we have to keep the death toll as low as possible and to acknowledge that the virus is not indiscriminate. Disproportionately, it affects older people, those with underlying heath issues, ethnic minorities, hospital workers caring for Covid-19 patients, and occupants and staff in care homes.
Clapping each Thursday evening is good, but we need more personal protective equipment, more ventilators, more testing – and a vaccine. Soon.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (2)
A review of the 2014 film”Effie Gray”
April 17th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In 1848, Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray (portrayed here by Dakota Fanning) was 19 when she married the famous critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise), but he was a terrible husband and the marriage was never consummated, a further complication being her attraction to the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge). This famous Victorian love triangle is the stuff of drama, but sadly this version is slow and dull and languid to the point of limpness.
This is in spite of it being beautifully shot in English stately homes, Scotland and Venice and having a script from Emma Thompson plus a stellar supporting cast list including Thompson herself, David Suchet, Julie Walters, James Fox, Derek Jacobi and even Claudia Cardinale (now in her mid 70s). What a waste. What a disappointment.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Evolution got us here and hopefully science will get us out of here
April 16th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
For four weeks now, I’ve been providing a weekly online lesson in Victorian history to two nine year olds who cannot be at school, one a granddaughter and the other the son of a close friend. This week, we covered some developments in science and technology in the Victorian era.
The engineer we looked at was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, while the scientist we discussed was Charles Darwin. Now Darwin, of course, is most famous for his theory of evolution by natural selection involving the survival of the fittest.
We kept it simple for the little ones but, for those of you who are older, you might like to read a short essay which I wrote some time ago on the case for evolution. You can check it out here.
This is not a bad time to remind oursleves of the importance of science and of the need to be guided by the evidence.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Coronavirus is not an enemy; it is a pandemic. This is not a war; it is a crisis.
April 12th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
It’s interesting how some politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson talk of the coronavirus as if it is a person – a cunning arch enemy with evil intent that can be defeated like the Nazis.
On his discharge from hospital today, the Prime Minister declared “We will win”.
What does winning mean when already over 10,000 have died? The crisis will end in some way – but it will not be a victory.
Posted in Science & technology, World current affairs | Comments (0)
Word of the day: furlough
April 10th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Until a couple of weeks ago, most people had never heard the word furlough. Now it is everywhere. But what does it mean? And where did it come from?
As a noun, it has three meanings:
- a vacation or leave of absence granted to an enlisted person
- a temporary leave of absence authorised for a prisoner from a penitentiary
- a usually temporary layoff from work
Clearly, in current circumstances of the coronavirus crisis, it is the last meaning that is relevant.
The origin of the word is the period 1615–25. It is a variant of earlier furlogh or furloff from the Dutch word erlof for leave, permission and the current pronunciation is by association with dough.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)