More than two dozen jurisdictions around the world – including New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, 10 states in the US and all six states in Australia – allow some form of assisted dying.
Bills to legalise assisted dying are now going through parliaments in the Isle of Man, Jersey and Scotland. What about the rest of the UK?
The Westminster parliament is expected to debate the issue in the coming months. The Labour peer Charlie Falconer, a former Lord Chancellor, has published a Lords’ Private Member’s Bill to legalise assisted dying, and the Labour MP Jake Richards is considering bringing forward a Commons’ Private Member’s Bill after coming 11th in a ballot last week. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has backed a free vote on the issue.
This week, we learned that a citizens’ jury has overwhelmingly backed the legalisation of assisted dying for terminally ill people after hearing from experts over a period of eight weeks. Twenty out of 28 jurors based in England agreed the law should be changed, with seven disagreeing and one person saying they were undecided. More information on that citizens’ jury here.
I would support the legalisation of assisted dying in particular circumstances with appropriate safeguards. Now aged 76, one day I might want it.
Fascinated though I am by American politics, I was never going to stay up and lose sleep watching live the ABC one and a half hour presidential election debate between current Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. But I made a point of recording the debate and watching every minute today.
I rather enjoyed it. It was reasonably coherent and civilised and we saw the clear differences of both character and policy between the two candidates. I thought that Harris won the debate easily with a confident, fluent and empathetic performance. But the vagaries of the Electoral College mean that, while I am certain she will win the majority of votes nationwide, I can’t be sure that she will the president.
I’ve been a fan of Kamala Harris since I first blogged about her seven years ago. When Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, however, I was not sure if she had proved herself ready to be president. The last two months have surprised and delighted me. We can now but hope – but I believe: yes, she can.
We tend to think of film noir as primarily a genre emanating from America and typically set in Los Angeles, but this classic of the genre is a British production shot on location in post-war Vienna. Written for the screen by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, the cast is a mixture of American (Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles), British (Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee), Italian (Alida Valli) and German (most of the support characters).
In fact, Welles, as the ‘third man’, does not appear until well into the narrative – his first appearance is an iconic shot – and is not on screen that much, but he steals the show, not least with a short speech that he himself wrote:
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Shot largely on location, war-ravaged, occupied Vienna – corrupted by widespread black marketing – has a starring role of its own in this black and white film full of ruin and rubble, dark streets, gloomy buildings and grotesque shadows. Reed frequently deploys sharply tilted camera angles reminiscent of the work of German Expressionism. Even the music is unusual: in the hands of Anton Karas, the zither provides a haunting backdrop as well as a memorable theme.
This week, I saw “The Third Man” in a cinema when a newly-restored version was screened for the 75th anniversary of the work.
This 1939 novel by Anglo-American writer Isherwood has long been a classic and was the inspiration for the musical and the film “Cabaret”. In many respects, it is an unusual novel.
It is substantially autobiographical, based on the author’s time in the German capital during the dying days of the Weimar Republic in 1929-1931. The central character has the author’s name and all the other leading characters are based on actual persons that Isherwood encountered in Berlin, notably the flamboyant Sally Bowles – inspired by teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross – who became the centre of the “Cabaret” story.
Furthermore, although clearly a novel, it was first written as six, loosely-connected pieces, most of which were previously published in separate form, and the whole work has no real plot, being instead essentially a set of portraits of various colourful characters.
The obvious claim to fame of the novel is that it is a beautifully-written early work from a gay writer who went on to develop an important canon of literature. Additionally, it is a fascinating book because it chronicles the seedy nightlife of Weimar Berlin and the growing influence of the Nazi movement.
In fact, initially Isherwood – both the character in the novel and the author himself – was so apolitical and self-absorbed that he was barely aware of the incipient political crisis but, as the narrative develops, it is less about his socialising and hedonistic lifestyle and more and more about anti-semitism and casual violence with the bland observation “Hitler came, and the Reichstag fire, and the mock-elections.”
Ultimately, the novel can be seen as a warning. At a charade of a boxing match, Isherwood notes: “The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.” As he is about to leave Berlin, he notes how people are already adapting to the new regime, saying of his landlady: “She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.”
As I was reading the novel, a far Right political party won a regional election in Germany for the first time since the 1930s.
The publication of my new book of interviews “Rennie & River” has stimulated some new interest in my previous publication, my memoir “Roger And (Not) Out”. A Facebook contact – whom I’ve never met – has posted a review of the memoir to Amazon as follows:
‘Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I found much to recognise and relate to in the early chapters of this very readable memoir. Just a few examples are a street party for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, having tonsils removed, free school milk, sitting the Eleven Plus, Saturday cinema club, Beatlemania, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and much more besides!
The attitudes, values, feelings and aspirations acquired by the author during these formative years are then played out in an interesting, well lived and very full life, the telling of which is elevated by the ability to structure a wealth of detail into an accessible and readable narrative. This is also an account of personal development and there are thoughtful and respectful reflections regarding relationships and emotional upheavals that have been generously and openly shared. I recommend this memoir to the general reader.’
By the time that I read this work published in 1925, it had long been a candidate for ‘the Great American Novel’ and had been filmed no less than four times (I’ve seen the 1974 and 2013 versions).
Ostensibly, it is an American Jazz Era story of the obsessive love exhibited by the enigmatic, new-rich Jay Gatsby for lost love Daisy Buchanan, but the eponymous character does not appear until a quarter of the way into the book and disappears before the end, while the whole account is offered by Nick Carraway who is Gatsby’s neighbour and Daisy’s cousin and Nick’s narrative is clearly a self-interested version of events.
It is a short novel of just 170 pages, exquisitely written, a joy to read, and no doubt a rich source for students, since it has so many themes, notably disillusionment with the American Dream, and issues of class, gender, race and sexuality. A measure of the complexity of the work is that my Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction (which I read after the story) which itself runs to 50 pages.
As the writer of the analysis (Tony Tanner) explains “there is a special kind of sadness to the book” and “to the extent that Gatsby is excessive, foolish and foredoomed, so, the whole book suggests, is America“. He opines: “‘The Great Gatsby’ is, I believe, the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to have come out of America”. However, he did write that in 1990 and today I would suggest that several works by Barbara Kingsolver would be contenders for such an accolade.
I’m fascinated by the sudden debate about the desirability or otherwise of having a branch of Gail’s in your neighbourhood.
Since the end of the first Covid lockdown, we’ve had a Gail’s at the corner of my street in London’s South Bank, so close that I can see it from my flat window. I use it all the time to buy lunch or have coffee with friends. I know and like Walthamstow Village where there is opposition to a new branch of Gail’s.
So I’ll follow the debate. Meanwhile today’s “Guardian” article tells me something I didn’t know – the origin of the chain’s name: “Gail’s was founded by an Israeli baker, Gail Mejia, in the 1990s, initially as a wholesale bakery in Hendon, supplying London’s restaurants. The site still exists and is described as its ‘mother’ bakery.”
I’ve just returned from my eighth visit to Germany – a short break in Bonn, Aachen and Cologne. This set me thinking again about the idea of different Germanys.
At the end of the Thirty Years’ War in the mid 17th century, there were some 2,000 German statelets. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there was a German Confederation of 39 sovereign states. A single Germany was only created by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. It was not to last.
From 1945-1949, Germany as such did not exist since there were four zones of occupation in the country as a whole and in the city of Berlin. Germany was then divided into two states, West and East, between 1949 and 1990 before the collapse of communism enabled rapid reunification. Germany today comprises 16 constituent states – called Lander – with its own constitution and considerable autonomy. This story is well told in the Museum of Contemporary History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn where I spent a day of my recent visit to the country.
Yet, there is an interesting history of Germany in which the author James Hawes suggests that culturally there have long been two Germanys. A theme of the book is how, in spite of many, many territorial changes, the geographical idea of Germany has remained broadly constant over two millennia with the West Germany of 1949-1990 being extraordinarily similar to the Germani planned by Augustus Caesar around 1 AD. The east has been another story.
Dawes highlights the continuing cleavage today between the largely Catholic and industrious west and south on the one hand and the predominately Protestant and poorer north and the east on the other. He maps onto this division the voting for Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s and the voting for the extreme left and right in today’s united Germany.
I’ve been catching up with the pacing on my website of accounts of my recent ravels overseas. Last year, I had a fascinating trip to the Caucasus: Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia.
These three nations have a common 20th century history as parts of the former Soviet Union and are all modestly-sized countries with small populations in a minor and compact region of the world. Yet they are so different politically, culturally, religiously, linguistically.
Azerbaijan is the most modern and confident, aided by plentiful oil and authoritarian leadership. It has the powerful support of Turkey in its territorial conflicts with Armenia.
Georgia has no problems with Azerbaijan or Armenia, but has lost control over a fifth of its territory as a result of intervention by Russia. It is the most western-orientated, very much hoping for entry to the European Union and NATO.
Armenia suffers from a lonely, victim complex, having lost a major part of its original land to Turkey and losing out in its recent and then still active conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Franco-Prussian War took place between 19 July 1870 and 28 January 1871. At the beginning, it was a conflict between the Second French Empire led by Emperor Napoleon III and the North German Confederation led by the King of Bavaria. However, following early defeat of French forces at Sedan, Napoleon resigned and the Second Republic was created and then, as the war eventually ended, the four southern German states joined the Confederation to create the German Empire.
German territory was barely touched, but nearly a third of French territory was occupied and the capital Paris was under brutal siege for over four months. Altogether some two million soldiers took part and more than 180,000 died. Chrastil, professor of history at Xavier University in Cincinnati, highlights that “it was the largest war in Europe between Waterloo and the Great War” and calls it “one of the most dramatic and one-sided defeats of any modern European army”.
In over 400 pages of smallish text, she provides a meticulous account of the military engagements and civilian hardships of that horrific six months, drawing upon many sources, including contemporary letters and diaries. Yet, this otherwise impressive work of historical scholarship is seriously lacking in both context and politics.
There is no history to the conflict (the account opens with the French declaration of war); there is minimal explanation of the cause of the war (the French objected to attempted German influence over the succession to the Spanish throne); there is only very brief reference to the Paris Commune (for socialists, this is an iconic event); there is too little material on developments after the war (yet the subtitle of the book refers to “the making of modern Europe”); and there is inadequate explanation for the book’s title (was it really Bismarck’s war?).
