17 July 2009 | Doomsday Men
Clare Dudman, author of Wegener’s Jigsaw and 98 Reasons for Being, has written a wonderful piece on my book Doomsday Men for her blog, Keeper of the Snails. Here’s an extract:
“I suppose the story of the Doomsday Men has been a constant background to my life. Most of the time I have successfully pushed it to the back of my mind because it seemed too frightening and too impossible to be true. But reading the Doomsday Men has forced me to confront it and understand. Recently the threat of weapons of mass destruction has been overshadowed by natural plagues, global warming and economic crisis, but it is still there. It can still happen.”
You can read the rest here and also watch Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965) .
10 July 2009 | cities, Reviewing |
You may not have noticed, but our cities are changing. As Anna Minton shows in her excellent new study, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-century City, the development of Canary Wharf in the 1990s blazed a trail that is now being followed in cities across the UK, creating privatized, personality-free zones stripped of any historical or cultural uniqueness. These hi-tech “defensible spaces” are promoted as being “clean and safe”. But they are also sterile and soulless. Pat, a hairdresser who has lived on the Isle of Dogs for 37 years, says of Canary Wharf today: “I don’t like going there. It always gives me the fear.”
Sections of our city centres are being sold off to private developers to create shopping monocultures such as Westfield London or “malls without walls” like Stratford City, which is being built for the 2012 Olympics and is one of the largest retail-led developments in Europe. It is, says Minton, “a private city within a city” and represents a return to the early 19th century when aristocrats owned great swathes of London, fortifying their estates of up-market housing with gates and private security forces.
Now, “land and property which has been in public hands for 150 years or more is moving back into private hands”. Minton argues that today’s privatised city centres and gated communities are fostering “a new culture of authoritarianism and control”. Private security guards watch and record our every move with CCTV: the UK now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of Europe combined. The small city of Coventry will soon have 700. At Stratford City they intend to use unmanned aerial drones to watch the streets. In these privatized zones, security guards routinely move on beggars and the homeless, and they can even ban groups of young people and prevent the taking of photographs.
Our modern houses and streets may be “secured by design” (to quote the jargon), but Minton’s compelling argument is that “we are making the city a far more fearful place”. The obsession with security and the privatisation of public space is also “a challenge to a type of public life, public culture and democracy in British cities” that has existed since at least the nineteenth century. Instead of local councils “owning” the city for us, now our streets and buildings (for example, Manchester’s Free Trade Hall) are being bought by investors. According to Minton, “today the ‘public good’ is what makes the most money”. It is government policy to sell off local authority assets worth £30 billion by 2010. The manager of one “Business Improvement District” controlling a city centre tells her: “Bugger democracy. Customer focus is not democratic.”
Clearly, it is important that cities should have vibrant economies. But in Britain the pursuit of profit threatens to undermine the quality of urban life. Minton’s book is a powerful indictment of urban planning in the UK under both Conservative and New Labour governments. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about how our cities will feel and function in the future.
08 July 2009 | Reviewing, TLS
The Times Literary Supplement has just published my review of Philip Hoare’s Leviathan or, The Whale, the deserving winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson prize.
“Perhaps it is because I was nearly born underwater.” The first sentence of Philip Hoare’s memorable study of whales points teasingly to an early affinity between author and subject. His mother began to feel labour pains while on a tour of a submarine in Portsmouth harbour. As a boy he lay awake at night listening to the “clanking dredgers” gouging a channel through Southampton Water for the liners and container ships.
But although the sea was a formative influence it was also a source of anxiety: “I have always been afraid of deep water.” School trips to Southampton’s municipal swimming pool did nothing to cure his fear. He only learnt to swim as an adult. But now he admits to feeling claustrophobic if he is far from the sea and, like Ishmael in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851), Hoare is “haunted” by the whale.
Read my review here and listen to Claire Armitstead’s interview with the author at the Guardian.
07 July 2009 | Einstein, Szilard |
Fred Jerome has just published what sounds like an interesting new book examining Einstein’s attitudes towards Israel and Zionism. Eric Herschthal, a writer for the Jewish Week in New York, asked me about my view of this complex subject.
I think it’s important to remember that Einstein didn’t believe in nationalism. Like his great friend Leo Szilard, he was an internationalist. He once said: “I should much rather see a reasonable agreement with the Arabs based on living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.” (Our Debt to Zionism, 1938)
Nevertheless, Einstein hoped that Zionism would revive a Jewish sense of “community” and enable them to “regain a dignified existence”. Einstein committed himself to the cause of founding a Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in 1921 he agreed to accompany Chaim Weizmann, a biochemist and president of the World Zionist Organization, on an American fund-raising tour. It was, he said, “his sacred duty” to help. But even then Kurt Blumenfeld, an official of the Zionist movement, knew that Einstein’s support for them was limited: “Einstein, as you know, is no Zionist,” he told Weizmann.
You can read Herschthal’s article here.
24 June 2009 | cities, Reviewing, TLS
The Times Literary Supplement has just published my review of Stephen Verderber’s superb study Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an extraordinary American city (University of Texas Press). It’s not on their site yet but you can read my version here.
