A review of the new film “On Chesil Beach”
May 22nd, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Ten years ago, I read the novella by Ian McEwan [for my review click here] and now he himself has adapated the story for the screen with director Dominic Cooke making his first feature film.
The work was shot on location on the Dorset coast and deploys much use of classical music, but this is a starring vehicle for two young and impressive actors: Saoirse Ronan who made her cinematic debut in another McEwan story (“Atonement”) and newcomer Billy Howle of whom we will soon see a lot more. In fine performances, they play Florence, a music graduate and talented violinist, and Edward, a history graduate whose music tastes are more popular and contemporary.
The time is 1962 before the sexual revolution and the painful heart of the narrative is the wedding night of these two virgins with limiting backgrounds revealed in a series of flashbacks. For the flash forwards over decades, McEwan has provided a neater, but even sadder, sequence than occurred in the novella. It is all achingly painful but so well done.
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Can we really control the tech giants?
May 21st, 2018 by Roger Darlington
The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sports Matt Hancock has said that the Government will enact legislation to control social media firms and online abuse but, in a television interview this weekend, he admitted:
- When he called in representatives of 14 leading Internet companies to discuss his concerns, only four turned up.
- It is likely to be two years before the Government has worked out detailed proposals and finds the time to legislate.
More information here.
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Word of the day: antidisestablishmentarianism
May 19th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
In the many debates on political reform in the UK, one idea is disestablishment of the Church of England.
Rightly in my view, it is argued that the UK population is no longer largely devoted to the Anglican faith and that, in multicultural Britain, it is wrong for one religious denomination to be privileged over others with automatic seats in the House of Lords for instance. Therefore church and state should be totally separated.
The opposite position is called “antidisestablishmentarianism’ which is one of the longest non-scientific words in the English language.
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British political institutions (6): devolution & Brexit
May 19th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended the sixth and final session of the course at the City Literary Institute on “British Political Institutions“. This session was on devolution and Brexit and delivered by two lecturers: American Dale Mineshima-Lowe and British Mark Malcolmson.
The UK has a devolved system of government with a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly and a Northern Ireland Assembly (currently not in operation), but this is categorically not a system of federal government such as in the United States or Australia, partly because less than a fifth of the citizens of the UK are covered by the three bodies in question and partly because the three bodies themselves have different or asymmetrical powers from one another.
The planned exit of the UK from the European Union has further complicated the devolution debate, since there is fierce argument about whether the powers to be repatriated from the EU to the UK should be held by the government at Westminster or devolved to the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
You can read the devolution section of my guide to the British political system here.
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Reviews of my last two films: “Sherlock Gnomes” & “Let The Sunshine In”
May 16th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
The last two films that I’ve seen – on consecutive days last weekend – could not have been more different.
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“Sherlock Gnomes”
Like the Smurfs, garden gnomes make cute characters for a children’s animated movie. I missed the first outing, the Shakespeare-themed “Gnomeo & Juliet”, because it was issued in the year of my first grandchild’s birth.
Seven years later though, my granddaughter was delighted to be taken to see this return of the little people, this time playing with Arthur Conan Doyle’s character and, like the original “Paddington” film, featuring evil-doing at London’s Natural History Museum and other London locations.
The cast of voices is wide, including James McAvoy and Emily Blun, back as Gnomeo and Juliet, and Johnny Depp and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Sherlock and Dr Watson. There are jokey lines for children and adults and music from Elton John but, as is so often the case with children’s films, minimal plot.
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“Let The Sunshine In”
Despite the title of this French-language film and the British marketing of it, this is not a cheerful rom-com, but a rather sad and dispiriting tale of an emotionally vulnerable woman in her 50s looking for love and finding only callousness and abuse.
The work has a female director (Claire Denis) and female writers (Christine Angot & Claire Denis – although the screenplay is based on a book by a male author), and it is a starring vehicle for the wonderfully-talented Juliette Binoche (who still looks enchanting 30 years after I first saw her in “The Unbearbale Lightness Of Being”) as the divorced mother and artist Isabelle.
The whole thing is classically French: lots of talking, some love-making, plenty of jazz, and frustratingly opaque (we understand nothing of Isabelle’s background and very little of her motivation). But, heh, I could watch Binoche reading a telephone directory.
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Word of the day: homunculus
May 15th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
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A review of the fascinating book “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker (2018)
May 11th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
The Enlightenment took place from the mid 17th century to the late 18th century but, 300 years later, the triumphs of Enlightenment thinking and values, with their emphasis on reason, science and humanism, still need explaining and defending to a world in which populism and so-called post-truth are seeking to challenge the fruits of progress.
The aim of this book by the renowned American professor of psychology Steven Pinker is “to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century” and the main theme is that, if we look beyond the headlines to the trendlines, we find that on so many measures of human welfare we are on the whole living in the best of times for humankind. As Pinker puts it: “Here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”
This is quite a tome: a main text of some 450 pages and then another 70 pages of notes and references. The opening three and closing three chapters are quite heavy going, but the middle 17 chapters – replete with informative data and containing no less than 75 fascinating graphs – eloquently and convincingly make the case for just how far humankind has progressed, especially on the following 14 dimensions:
- Life: For most of human history, average life expectancy was around 30 years but today it is over 70 years and still rising.
- Health: More than five billion lives have been saved by medical advances ranging from the discovery of blood groups to the development of vaccines.
- Sustenance: The use of machines, the development of fertilisers and the Green Revolution have enabled us to feed billions more with less land and much less labour.
- Wealth: In the last 200 years, the rate of extreme poverty in the world has fallen from 90% to 10%, while GDP per capita has soared in almost every country.
- Inequality: In the past 30 years, global inequality has declined (most notably in China) although inequality within rich countries has increased (especially in the US and the UK).
- Environment: Although climate change is a massive challenge, “environmental problems, like other problens, are solvable, given the right knowledge” and a range of intiatives and technologies are discussed.
- Peace: It is argued that “War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent” and battle deaths have fallen dramatcially (with the notable recent exception of the civil war in Syria).
- Safety: Over the last century, the rate of deaths from homicides, motor vehicle accidents, aircraft crashes, occupational accidents and natural disasters have all plummetted.
- Terrorism: Except for 9/11, deaths from terrorst acts are tiny compared to other causes of violent deaths and are not particularly increasing.
- Democracy: The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56% of the world’s population while, of the people living in the 60 non-democratic countries, four-fifths reside in a single country, China.
- Equal rights: The rights of racial minorities, women and gay people continue to advance worldwide and surveys show that, in almost every part of the world (even the Islamic Middle East), people are becoming more liberal.
- Knowledge: Now 83% of the world is literate and the number of years spent in schooling has been rising dramatically in most countries.
- Quality of life: Today almost half of the world’s population has Internet access and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone, while the developed world is leading the way on reductions in working time and more access to leisure activities including tourism.
- Happiness: The data shows that, as countries become richer over time, their people become happier, athough the United States is an outlier from the global trend in subjective well-being.
My attempt to summarise such a long work might give the impression that Pinker thinks that all is well in the world, but this is not the case. He recognises the challenges we still face but believes we have the tools – including knowledge and reason – to tackle those challenges and, in the meanwhile, we should look at the big picture (and this book has a very broad canvas) and consider the evidence (and this book has so much data). The result is a view of the world which is encouraging and hopeful.
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British political institutions (5): the civil service
May 10th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended session 5 of the six-week course at the City Literary Institute on “British Political Institutions“. This session was on the civil service and delivered by two lecturers: Phil Chamberlain, who was a former civil servant in what is now the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sports, and Philip Geering, who was once a crown prosecutor and worked in the Attorney-General’s Office.
I have some personal experience of the civil service, since I was a Special Adviser to Merlyn Rees in the Northern Ireland Office from 1974-1976 and in the Home Office from 1976-1978. I have covered the civil service in the section on Government in my guide to the British political system – updated to take account of what I learned from this lecture.
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In short, what is the nuclear deal with Iran?
May 9th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
“Iran and a six-nation negotiating group reached a landmark agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015. It ended 12 years of deadlock over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Struck in Vienna after nearly two years of intensive talks, the deal limited the Iranian programme to reassure the rest of the world that it would be unable to develop nuclear weapons, in return for sanctions relief.
At its core, the JCPOA is a straightforward bargain. Iran’s acceptance of strict limits on its nuclear programme in return for an escape from the sanctions that grew up around its economy over a decade prior to the accord. Under the deal, Iran unplugged two-thirds of its centrifuges, shipped out 98% of its enriched uranium and filled its plutonium production reactor with concrete.
Tehran also accepted extensive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has verified 10 times since the agreement, and as recently as February, that Tehran has complied with its terms. In return, all nuclear-related sanctions were lifted in January 2016, reconnecting Iran to global markets.”
This is the opening of a short question & answer briefing on the deal in today’s “Guardian” newspaper.
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The continuing tragedy of Syria’s civil war
May 8th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
I spent two hours this Bank Holiday weekend watching a double programme about the civil war in Syria. It was broadcast by the BBC and presented by its Canadian-born chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet. You can check it out here.
The seven-year Syrian civil war is a conflict which has now lasted longer than the Second World War. Around half a million have been killed, more than 7 million are internally displaced, and some 5 million have been forced to flee the country.
I have followed the war with special anguish because, just a couple of weeks before it began, I spent a week travelling all around Syria and I wrote up an account of the trip here.
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