Read about the Francophile sleuth who helped AngloFiles solve the mystery of the lost letter.
Oscar contender Helen Mirren
The weekly AngloFiles round-up of U.K. news – sober, stylish, sentimental, sporty, or outright silly.
An Education, Colin Firth and Helen Mirren top British Oscar contenders. Mirren starred as Tolstoy’s wife in The Last Station and Firth was nominated for Best Actor in A Single Man. An Education, the 1960s social drama by Nick Hornby (who also wrote High Fidelity) is up for Best Screenplay and, for Carey Mulligan, as the ravished/ravishing, naive yet knowing schoolgirl, Best Actress.It also snagged a Best Picture nomination in a year when, for the first time since before World War II, the category was opened up to ten films, from five. But can it beat Avatar?
“Cesspit” England radicalized the airborne Underwear Bomber, and not Nigeria, according to Nigerian political activist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, in an interview with the Daily Beast. Soyinka called England, “the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims,” where a history of colonialist arrogance has lead to over-tolerance which leads to… Well, it’s complicated. Less complicated was his complaint that the “knee jerk” U.S. decision to place Nigeria on a terror watch list targeted the wrong country, as it was in England, where he attended university, that the Nigerian would-be bomber went fundie.
“Deficit” sounds the same on both sides of the pond: Their dialects may diverge, but Gordon Brown sounded a lot like Barack Obama this week when he defended his government’s decision to spend beyond its means in the name of job-creation and stimulating the economy.
Bloody Monday? Horror writers, take note of the creepy scenario that played out yesterday at an East Sussex architecture firm. Sadly, it was real when a bloody ceiling drip led to the discovery of a murdered corpse on the floor of the flat above.
Dame Helen Mirren photo by Caroline Bonarde Ucci.
Outrunning the past? Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and "Lord Lindsey" (Nigel Havers) in "Chariots of Fire."
Anthony Julius, lawyer to Diana of Wales, wrote in the London Times this week that his work for the 
misunderstood princess exposed him to “a subtle form of anti-Semitism that I had neither expected nor experienced at any previous time in my life.” Anglofiles stumbled around this minefield recently, in a post touching on Einstein, Orwell and Anglo-American newsman Roger Cohen, but failed to nail any specifics to her sense (and Cohen’s) that anti-Semitism persists in Britain in ways no longer tolerated this side of the pond.
Julius’s account, along with mordant insights into Diana’s character, offers the beginnings of a map. An outcast representing an outcast was how newspapers tended to characterize Diana’s choice of counsel in profiling him during her divorce proceedings. Julius recalls almost universal, but glancing, newsprint references to his tribal affiliation. But vague musings on his Jewishness turned to flagrant racial stereotyping in a profile by the conservative Daily Telegraph in July, 1996, that followed the divorce settlement.
Prince Charles’s lawyer, royal-family retainer Fiona Shackleton, was known for a “conciliatory approach,” the Telegraph reported, continuing,
“Unfortunately, her softly-softly approach is at odds with the more bullish attitude of the princess’s solicitor. Anthony ‘Genius’ Julius, 39, is not a divorce lawyer but a specialist in media law, acting for Robert Maxwell and once employed by the Daily Mail.
“His background could not be further from the upper-class world inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual and Labour supporter and less likely to feel restrained by considerations of fair play.
“‘I’d be very worried if I were the royal family,’ says a Cambridge don who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them’.”
Where to start? With “bullish,” “intellectual” (why not “cosmopolitan”?), and “he’ll get lots of money”? With the client Maxwell, a publishing titan, who was of course Jewish. Or with the anonymous (!) don, who could have been quoting his fictional forebears in Chariots of Fire. In their discussion of the extraordinary (and not fictional) scholar-athlete Harold Abrahams, one college master sniffs to another regarding the profession of Abrahams père, “Financier? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I imagine he lends money,” drawls his colleague. Even the college’s chief porter has an opinion of the young Jew’s inclinations. “What’s your friend studying,” he asks Abrahams’s sidekick, eyebrows raised. “Backroom law?”
The admirably thick-skinned Julius (author of several scholarly works on anti-Semitism*) took a mostly superior view to the Telegraph’s slight. When an abashed editor phoned to offer a correction, Julius advised the paper to “do what it liked.” The half-hearted print apology that followed proved the slurs to have shown, he says, “an edgy, easily embarrassed anti-Semitism — quick to run for cover …
For Anglo-Jewry in general, anti-Semitism is the background noise against which we make our lives. Almost always barely audible, one then must strain to detect it, although very occasionally it irrupts into a dissonant, heart-stopping din. The question of the extent of my experience of anti-Semitism, then, is perhaps best answered thus: just enough.
Julius’s insights about Diana are likewise sharp (if you’ll excuse the term). He recalls her regret at having married into “a German family,” a statement inviting several possible interpretations. Was it an affinity for Jewish victimhood? Certainly, Diana had learned from her earliest days with “The Firm” at Buckingham Palace what it meant to feel alienated. Did it reflect the post-World-War resentment of her parents’ generation’s? (Before the war, British aristocrats had admired their Teuton neighbors, of course. It was the French they couldn’t abide — and, of course, the Communists.)
More likely, the author suggests, it was Diana’s famed empathy at work, and a worldview fogged by the social wind tunnel in which she’d been reared. “Under-educated in the approved style of her class and gender,” he writes, she operated more on gut instinct than knowledge:
She had a strong desire to please, to leave her interlocutor happy, but often without quite understanding what that person was “about”. She was intuitive, but not always accurate in her assessments of people. Sometimes she went wildly wrong — not just in the big things, but also in odd misreadings of moods or sentiments… She was interested in Jews but had no idea about them, save that Jewish men (she had heard) were more likely than the men of her own class and background to treat women decently. She was happy to take Jews to be hostile to everything to which she herself was hostile… [S]he had a tendency to esteem a thing just because it was not part of her world — even more if it was excluded by her world. She herself was not quite of that world, but did not belong to any other either.
In her choice of Julius, one has to admire, in the end, Diana’s steadfast, perhaps naive, trust in anyone offering stability in her topsy-turvy life. Julius first represented her in a lawsuit over surreptitious photos taken of Diana at the gym. When both Charles and his mother later demanded a divorce, she turned to this proven advocate with a dewy but determined faith: “I told her that it would be my first divorce case. She replied that it didn’t matter — this would also be her first divorce.”
*NOTE: Updated 2/1/10 to reflect Julius’s research on anti-Semitism and also to correct the reference to him as a barrister. He is a solicitor.
The weekly AngloFiles round-up of U.K. news – sober, stylish, sentimental, sporty, or outright silly.
Brother, can you spare a krona?
- Nordic reparations? Iceland’s cold, hard — well, cold — cash will be on the line in a March 6 referendum on whether the Reykjavik government should have to repay some $5 billion in UK and Dutch investment losses from the collapse of IceSave bank, via legislation sullenly termed the “IceSlave bill.” Overseas funders including Norway, Finland and Denmark say they’ll pull the plug on IMF-coordinated aid to Iceland if it doesn’t make good on the debts. But the island nation’s taxpayers aren’t so sure.
- Because some old fogies can’t take a joke, the Facebook site for “Hitler — the Drinking Game” was shut down last week, disappointing some 12,000 followers. It was really fun! Players give Nazi salutes, “interrogate” one another, and drink shots with Holocaust puns (swastika body paint optional), until everyone ends up blitzed. But the site’s two co-founders pulled the plug, one told the Huddersfield Examiner, fearing they would be branded “boorish.” People can be so judgmental.
- Gordon Brown’s purse is still open. President Obama might be freezing government spending (well, some of it), but P.M. Brown won’t be baited by Conservative critics into changing course and cutting expenses. Tory leader David Cameron warns Britain will go south, like Greece, if deficits aren’t pared, but Brown contends the situation is well in hand under his four-year plan.
- Putting a kitschy twist on kitschy pop-up shops, a giant Tiffany box has sprung up in the courtyard of Neoclassical, 18th-century Somerset House to shill cupcakes and diamonds. It stands beside what Tiffany & Co. calls “London’s most glamourous ice rink,” sponsored by (did you guess?) Tiffany & Co. Thanks to Fresh Eyes on London, a favorite eye-candy blog, for this snap (click the picture for more “fresh eyes”):
- I must be getting hungry, or why else post this flagrant incident of mouth-watering, grease-dripping reportage? The Times has rated chip shops. Thanks (I suppose!) to our friends at Anglotopia for making me drool with their update. For anyone who delivers trans-Atlantic, I like my chips with lots of salt and vinegar. Oh, and I like ‘em hot:
(My husband can have my mushy peas.)
Fish and chips photo by LoopZilla.
UPDATE: We have a winner! Our esteemed official accounting firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe have pulled the winning name from their official accounting hat — a bowler, of course — and drawn the name of Lisa P., writing from her home in the south of France. Congratulations, Lisa! Which magazine prize do you choose?
The answer: The lost correspondent was “clearly Sebastian Flyte to Charles Ryder,” Lisa wrote, naming the protagonists of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Lisa also answered correctly the follow-up bonus question, identifying “A—” as Aloysius, Sebastian’s stuffed bear.
About Lisa: Lisa humbly suggested that, as a native Englishwoman, she should perhaps withdraw on account of her presumably unfair edge over AngloFiles’s presumably American readers. But, as AngloFiles chief, I didn’t even require the professional services of D., C. and H. to overrule all such unnecessary modesty. “Readers is readers,” I reasoned, with my usual literary flair.
Just to make the rest of us jealous, Lisa offered this about her location:
Greetings from the south of France, where this morning we woke to a light dusting of snow! (Lest I sound too horribly glamorous about the whole thing, I’m not noddling around Nice, but looking out of my sitting room window at the castle of Puilaurens!).
Chateau Puilaurens, onetime Cathar fortress.
In 2005, when AngloFiles was playing FrancoFile, she visited a different Cathar fortress — teetering similarly on a rocky tor near Puilaurens, which she includes here just for fun:
Queribus (photo by Mandy)
For a taste of quirky history, look up the Cathars — 11th-century feminist, vegetarian, religious free-thinkers. Brutally quashed by Crusaders and the French monarchy, of course.
The original contest: Help! Wedged between her inlaid-satinwood secrétaire and the wainscoting behind, your favorite AngloFile found a letter “written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper, black-coroneted and black-bordered.” [Late-breaking hint: Don't let the paper's provenance distract you!] I’ve lost the envelope, alas, and the signature– well, you can see for yourself, below.
In case of multiple correct i.d.’s, AngloFiles will draw a winner after placing the names of all eligible entries in this Sevres bowl, her favorite for white raspberries.
Here’s the letter. Sleuth away:
Dearest C.,
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.
Soon I am off to Venice to stay with my papa in his palace of sin. I wish you were coming. I wish you were here.
I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe.
I have a good mind not to take A— to Venice. I don’t want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up a lot of bad habits.
Love or what you will.
S.
Dearest C…, —
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.
I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe.
I have a good mind not to take A— to Venice. I don’t want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up a lot of bad habits.
Love or what you will.
S.
Congratulations to Steve Graubart, Chicago-based blogger, confirmed AngloFiles-phile, and winner of our first-ever storytelling contest. You also-rans should watch this space for another crack at a coveted AngloFiles prize with all its attendant glory. Tomorrow will bring a new contest but, as it’s more of a reader’s than a writer’s challenge, one that gives literary cognoscenti the edge.
But Mr. 
Graubart’s newest challenge is to choose his prize. Ooh, it’s a tough tough one — either English biscuits (“cookies,” for the rest of you Chicagoans) or a tin of veddy, veddy British tea. Steve, I’m partial myself to McVitie’s chocolate-coated HobNobs, but a cuppa’s always nice, especially for those elevenses:
Contest mavens among you will recall that Steve’s Sweet Dreams Challenge was to provide a backstory for “Visit to Cassiopoeia” (at right), a 1905 watercolor by W. G. Robertson. The work’s dreamy quality had led me to expect narratives along the lines of A.A. Milne meets Kenneth Grahame. But Steve’s rather more Larry-David-inflected setpiece swept the field.
Now, there may be cynics among you who observed that Steve’s was, ahem, the contest’s only entry. (People, where are you?!? Have you never tasted a HobNob? Supped on Ceylon brews? Release those inner Muses!) Come to think of it, for not only winning but having the gumption to enter our contest in the first place, Steve deserves BOTH the AngloFiles prizes.
So, Steve, please send us your address and tell us (via anglofilesmail-AT-gmail.com) whether it will be shortbread or McVities AND Assam tea or Earl Grey that you reap for this coup.
Your final prize is a reading recommendation: Given your somewhat snarky fictional predilections, the Anglophile in you might enjoy the saucy Bagthorpe Saga youth novels. Imagine the 5 Little Peppers on chardonnay, or the Addams family as suburban muggles, where Pop ought to find a real job and Grandma cheats at Scrabble.
Update, Jan. 11, 2010: Steve has opted for Assam tea, no biscuits. There was no weeping on the medal platform, but our winner did allow that he’s touched by the judges’ (all right: “judge’s”) decision.
Robertson artwork courtesy of Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries.
Queen Victoria: Don't cut her mic.
Ho ho ho? With the on-air comment, “Two words: Bo-ring,” a Birmingham radio presenter Tom Binns cut off Queen Elizabeth mid-sentence after he accidentally started airing her annual Christmas speech two weeks ago, the Guardian recently reported. Recalled the unrepentant Binns, “I then went into an old riff about how people say the royal family are good for tourism but the French beheaded theirs and people still visit France.”
To top it off, in what he considered a parody of “cheesy” dj’ing, Binns sniped, “from one queen to another,” as he segued to a track by Wham!
Then, wham! He was sacked.
Even salacioius British tabloids and independent biographers like Kitty Kelley, thanks to their country’s strict libel laws, tread lightly or avoid England all together when revealing royal secrets and innuendo. On a casual basis, too, deference to the monarch and kin remains a longstanding rule — one that has withstood, with only a few nicks and dinks, even the Windsors’ own best efforts to tarnish their image through decades of marital and behavioral turmoil.
Back in August 1954, the U.S. Defense Department offered its servicemen with a firm reminder of the Windsors’ untouchable status in its handy Pocket Guide to Great Britain [price, 25¢; coded, for you archival types, as "DA Pam 20-175"]. The 47-page booklet’s single use of all-caps lettering, appearing on page 37 admonished, “NEVER criticize the Royal Family.”
Are you listening, Mr. Binns?
AngloFiles’s weekly round-up of U.K. news – sober, stylish, sentimental, sporty, or outright silly.
- UK’s deep freeze, the longest since 1981, has led to snowfalls across northern and central England. Accumulations up to four inches were enough to close schools in Northumberland and exhaust local supplies everywhere of “grit” for sanding streets. Highways closed in Cumbria and, in Manchester, buses and planes were idled. And morning trains into London have already been curbed in the south, which faces its first snow of the season tonight, possibly more than 10 inches. But cold news is good news near Aberfoyle in Scotland’s Trossachs (or lower Highlands); just one more inch of ice on Loch Menteith would enable the first outdoor curling Grand Match in 30 years.
What’s in a question? Full body scanners, in-flight restrictions and long security lines at airports nearly everywhere are all the buzz, thanks to the Christmas Day terror attempt above Detroit, Michigan. But counter-intelligence authority Daniel Pipes this week recalled a seemingly routine El Al interview at Heathrow in 1986 that reminds us no amount of robotic technology can match the value of highly trained human screeners.
UK Attorney General Scotland tries to mend fences with Israel, seeking a way the government could shelter visiting foreign leaders from automatic arrest. Baroness Scotland had to meet with Israeli officials on their own turf because, if the visits went the other way, ministers like Tzipi Livni could be hauled in on outstanding arrest warrants for alleged war crimes.
- I’ve been missing old BoJo (Mayor Boris Johnson), so thanks be to GQ magazine’s British edition for putting him back in the spotlight. Yes, it’s on the magazine’s annual Worst-Dressed List, as BorisWatch points out. And, yes, he’s only fourth, while dour Arctic Monkeys fan Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, ranks Number One. Say what you like about Gordon, but that loudmouth albino, Boris, will always be my man. (Question, though, Bo: Of the bare dozen or so feeds you follow on Twitter, why is one of them @ijustine? Tsk, tsk. Don’t you know brainy girls are more fun? Follow @anglofilia and her hot friend, @mizparse!)
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the larder, my friend bookofjoe (“world’s most popular blogging anesthesiologist”) sends word of a U.S.-based Marmite Museum — an abomination, like Marmite pop-up stores, we thought possible only in the Commonwealth!
London snow photo by Paolo Camera. Scanner photo by Piotrus.
The British, with their tidy minds
Divide themselves up into kinds.
The common kind they call the masses,
The better kind — the upper classes.
In either case it’s really not
A specially inspiring lot.
The common ones play darts in pubs,
The others slowly die in clubs.These clever lines by Graham Laidler are an extension of his famous cartoons. Laidler, calling himself Pont, is perhaps most famous for a series called “The English Character,” which he produced in the 1930s for the noted humor magazine Punch (which published from 1841-1992 and again from 1996-2002). His caricatures appeared above captions like “Love of Fresh Air,” “Inability to Learn Foreign Languages” and “Hatred of Throwing Things Away.” “Adaptability to Foreign Conditions” portrayed a foursome elegantly clad in gowns and black tie, decorously playing cards at a folding table under a camping lantern in the African bush as a half-dressed black servant comes runing with a tray of cocktails.
For the British, like any nation, characterizing themselves can be an entertaining hobby. (One of my favorite, and most academic, recent attempts, is anthropologist Kate Fox’s Watching the English.) Explained the London Times in 2006:
The English middle classes have always loved Pont’s depictions of them. Most identify qualities in ourselves that we ought to blush about, but are rather proud of, such as our reluctance to treat anything entirely seriously. A Pont cartoon of 1940 showed an outraged housewife confronting a German stormtrooper in her garden, saying: “How dare you come in here!” Britain’s reluctance to get serious about Hitler nearly sunk us [sic], of course, likewise our resistance to industrial change, languages, collaboration with Europe, etc. Yet until recently, most of us have been pretty smug about what we think we are — more cultured than the Americans, nicer than the French, prettier than the Germans, funnier than almost everyone, and pretty good at fighting once we get going.
Even the government gets in on the act, as in this footnote on that “resistance to industrial change” noted b by the Times as a pronounced trait on the sceptered isles — apparently, the British military concurs: In 1954, The U.S. Department of Defense produced tiny booklet that could have been called, “How Not to Be a Loud, Overpaid Ugly American in Britain. Its actual title was far more prosaic — A Pocket Guide to Great Britain — and it advised against crowing that “we” won the war, obsessing about “the biggest” this and that (Britons give more deference to age and heritage), and starting arguments. “The British Are Reserved,” advised another section. A glossary “translated” terms like parcel, braces and draughts (“package,” “suspenders” and “checkers”). Other helpful “tips on getting along” including not mocking the local accents, badmouthing the royal family, or referring to U.K. currency as “funny money.” In a sign of the times, the booklet also advised against judging the English for dressing poorly, given that post-war rationing was still in effect.
In its final chapter, “Mutual Respect,” the Pentagon publication quoted extensively from a similar brochure, Meet the Americans, produced in England for British servicemen: No matter how oddly they talk or dress, “respect for American achievement is one of the ways by which we shall discover the Americans. Look, for example, what they’ve done to refrigerators and combustion engines and acknowledge them as the world’s inventive wizards.”
They may be brash and annoying, in other words, but those Yanks know their way around a machine.
Princess Elizabeth of York (now Queen Elizabeth II) at age 7, by Philip de Laszlo.
Queen Elizabeth II was but a 14-year-old princess when, with little sister Margaret by her side, she delivered her first radio address. It was October 1940, during a terrifying world war, and her shy pep talk was directed to her fellow youth of England, many of them exiled from urban homes for safety from German bombs. Elizabeth’s father, George VI, occupied the throne at the time, and he and his hardy queen were revered for their decision, rather than evacuating themselves, to remain in London alongside their people.
The Queen still addresses her people regularly in the annual Christmas homilies begun by her grandfather.
The tradition has seen as much change over the years as its presenter, now a self-assured matron whose tresses match her diamonds. On a technical level, she successfully moved her address from radio to TV in 1957 (see that broadcast at the end of this post). Since then, it’s taken on a documentary style, in contrast to the traditionally static queen-facing-camera format. Like her medium, the Queen’s material, too, has tried to keep pace with modern times. The Queen once again addressed concerns of war in her Christmas talk yesterday, in a somber tribute to casualties of Afghanistan, but then turned her lens outward, toward the 60-year-old Commonwealth of Nations over which she, loosely speaking, presides.
After her opening focus on casualties and sacrifices in Afghanistan, her text this year made a bow to (dare we say) political correctness (or, in a more generous light, offered a queenly nod to the United Kingdom’s decided diversity) by highlighting the contributions of the multi-hued youth of the the 54 Commonwealth nations.
As Pigtown Design pointed out with her usual optimism, the whole setpiece is worth it if only to hear a steel drum ensemble of Jamaican school children — including a rare girl percussionist — tapping out God Save the Queen.
The broadcast begins this year with elegiac footage of Buckingham Palace. The groundbreaking black-and-white 1957 broadcast opened with scenes of the royal palace at Sandringham, where the royals traditionally spend Christmas. In it, a much younger queen also devoted her remarks to celebrating the Commonwealth, a nation of “friends” because “we have always tried to do our best to be honest and kindly and because we have tried to stand up for what we believed to be honest and right… Today, I cannot lead you into battle, but I can .. give you my heart, and my devotion to these old islands, and to all the people of our brotherhood of nations.” Watch and enjoy:
Buckingham Palace portrait courtesy of Agência Brasil.
