Fintan O’Toole is always worth reading, and his latest for The TLS is no exception. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, which does a great job of summarising the failure of the current Government while setting out the challenge for the next:

Comparatives make Starmer look good, but they also make his task, if he wins, look overwhelming. Income inequality is higher in the UK than in any other large European country, with the exception of Italy. Typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts and the poorest households are a staggering 60 per cent poorer than their equivalents in Ireland. Almost a third of young people in the UK are not engaged in any formal education by the age of 18 – compared to just one in five in France and Germany. UK hospitals now have fewer beds than all but one OECD advanced economy. Since 2005 UK companies have invested 20 per cent less than those in the US, France and Germany, placing the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of OECD countries in this category. Since 2008 the UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the US respectively has doubled to almost 20 per cent. It is quite possible for an incoming Labour government to do much better than all of this without doing nearly well enough to get the UK back on a par with the countries it used to be able to regard as its peers.

I’ve written many times before about how I could never be a politician, so this is never likely to be a problem for me: but where on earth do you start on sorting out this mess?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Sunderland has a long heritage of making cranes, most notably at the Crown Works site belonging to Coles Cranes. Cranes were built here from 1939 to 1998. In 2015, the site was cleared to make way for the construction of the Northern Spire bridge.

Much as with the Doxford Arch, this stonework was retained when the headquarters of the Crown Works was demolished and has been re-sited nearby in this memorial.

You might reasonably ponder the relevance of the retained 1879. This is the year Coles Cranes was founded, initially based in Derby.

The site is due to have an exciting future, with one of the UK’s most extensive sets of film and television studios planned for construction—the Crown Works Studios. Separate, though seemingly less-developed, plans exist for constructing Shipyard Studios nearby, including re-purposing the old shipyard to create the world’s largest underwater studio.

It seems like Sunderland is making a concerted push to pivot from heavy industry to visual arts.

This book was a gift from some friends, and like all good gifts, it’s something I’d never have chosen for myself: with occasional exceptions, I tend not to read books about wars. This novel is set in Newcastle in County Down, during the First World War. It is a fictionalised portrayal of an army unit set up to manufacture lifelike masks for soldiers who had suffered facial injuries during the war. It became known as ‘the tin nose shop’.

A novel about a British army unit stationed in Northern Ireland is not an obvious choice of subject for an American author, and it felt a little tonally off, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It’s really a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and the horror of war, and Snyder leans in heavily to the obvious allegory of a mask of normality hiding life-changing wounds.

Before reading this book, I had no idea about the historical existence of the ‘tin nose shop’. The venue on which the one in the book is based was actually located in London; Snyder’s introduction talks about relocating it to Northern Ireland after he holidayed there. I’m not sure if this was the right decision: the inevitable inclusion of the Easter Rising felt like an unnecessary additional complication to the plot. It worked for me, though: the imagery was lent a poignant vivacity by my previous visits to the town.

Without wanting to spoil anything, I was also surprised and pleased by the ending. I wasn’t surprised by the revelations at the end of the book, but I was surprised and moved by how they played out.

This isn’t the sort of thing that I’d normally read, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

From 1870, William Doxford & Sons Ltd has a large shipyard in Pallion, Sunderland. After a storied history, the final ship floated out of the yard in 1989.

The yard’s gatehouse, built in 1903, was a local landmark. Many thousands of workers plodded through its archway in the twentieth century. Yet by the twenty-first century, the gatehouse was badly dilapidated and in need of demolition.

In 2019, the gatehouse was knocked down—but the archway was preserved, and reconstructed close to its original location in 2021.

This metal sculpture by Ray Lonsdale in Sunderland city centre commemorates the Vaux brewery. The brewery operated from 1837 to 1999.

The brewery continued using horse-drawn delivery wagons long after other methods became financially preferable. Five delivery horses were rehoused at the Beamish museum after the brewery ceased production in 1998, and the last surviving horse—Justin—died there in 2016. The chains on the sculpture were donated by a former driver, and are part of the original tack.

The Northern Spire bridge in Sunderland opened in 2018. It’s the tallest structure in Sunderland, soaring to 105m—a little taller than Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower.

The A-frame pylon was manufactured in Belgium and brought to Sunderland by barge. Perhaps appropriately, the first three vehicles across the bridge after it opened were locally-built Nissans.

This is Rory Stewart’s memoir of his decade as a Conservative MP, from his election campaigns to his Ministerial posts. It is funny, readable, and a little bit gossipy. I think it will come to be viewed as one of the definitive accounts of this bizarre period in Westminster politics and probably one of the best insider takes. It is very well written.

And yet, I found it a little disappointing. I’ve often been impressed by Stewart when I’ve heard him speak on the radio or his podcast, and I’ve come to think of him as an insightful and intelligent political operator. Yet the experience of reading this book was a little similar to reading Hilary Clinton’s account of the 2016 US Presidential Election: I was left with the sense that Stewart lacked the distance and time necessary to properly reflect on his time in Government.

There are lots of examples I could use to illustrate this, but it was his account as the minister responsible for prisons that stuck with me most. He writes with some pride about his successful work to reduce the level of violence through his ‘ten prisons project’, and to improve the basic standards in those ten institutions. He says that he made a difference through extreme and close focus on the basic issues, including involving himself in detailed operational aspects of running individual prisons.

He hasn’t the distance to recognise the two obvious flaws with this approach.

Firstly, driving improvements in a way which is dependent on the actions and attitudes of an individual minister is guaranteed to make those improvements temporary, as successive ministers will choose different approaches and items of focus. To be truly effective, a minister needs to tackle the much harder job of figuring out how to embed a different approach in a system, with a broad coalition of institutional buy-in, so that the improvements outlive the ministerial appointment.

Secondly, inviting ministers to focus on operational detail is dangerous, firstly—and perhaps most importantly—because it leaves a major gap by having no-one focused on wider strategy, and secondly because it invites less thoughtful ministers to drive through absurd operational changes which are unnecessarily damaging to people’s lives. It comes dangerously close to the ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ view of the world which he criticises in passages about his previous experiences outside of politics.

Neither of these flaws necessarily mean that Stewart’s actions weren’t the right ones for the specific circumstance in which he found himself: they may well have been. But Stewart’s tendency to generalise feels misguided, and his often self-critical reflections feel weaker than they ought to because he doesn’t acknowledge—or perhaps doesn’t see—that he’s missing these bigger questions about his approach.

I’m glad I read this book: the insight it offers and the quality of the writing outweigh the problems. I perhaps hope that there will be another volume to come, maybe a decade hence, when Stewart has had a bit more distance and a bit more space to reflect more expansively on his experiences.

‘A bit of madness is key,’ sang Emma Stone in La La Land, ‘to give us new colours to see.’

In Poor Things, she proves it: the film is absurd, unhinged, and glorious. It’s my favourite film of the year so far, and one I wouldn’t have seen in a million years were it not for this project.

Our setting is a steampunkish, retrofuturistic version of the Victorian era. The plot centres on Stone’s character, Bella Baxter. The film’s Victor Frankenstein-esque character, Godwin Baxter, played by William Defoe, pulls a pregnant suicide victim from the Thames. The victim’s brain is removed and replaced with that of the foetus, and Bella Baxter is created. We follow her growth and development, her betrothal, and her decision to run away with another man.

The set-up makes this sound like a horror film: it’s not. Horrific things happen, but they are treated lightly and comedically. This was a film that had me grinning almost from beginning to end, even as Bella repeatedly stabbed a face with a scalpel.

Poor Things is a completely realised comedic fever dream. Everything about it is pitch-perfect: acting, set design, score, costumes, cinematography, it all adds up to a mesmerising whole. This is a film that embraces its form: sections are in black and white, sections are shot in a circular format, sections use a disorienting fish-eye lens. I am lucky to have seen in on the big screen, and would recommend that others do the same. It looks and sounds gorgeous.

Using its absurd world, the film has interesting observations to make on so many things, from feminism, to parent-child relationships, to the ethics of sex work, to the harmful straightjacket of polite society, to paedophilia. It is wonderfully, delightfully, inspirationally and insightfully odd. It’s richly and outrageously crazy.

Stone’s performance is nothing short of astonishing perfection. I cannot begin to imagine how someone can even attempt to inhabit such a gloriously weird character, with such a wide developmental arc. Stone brings Bella to life, making sense of a totally mad sketch of a character. It is unbelievable.

The other performances are also universally excellent. Of particular note, Vicki Pepperdine made a giant impression from a tiny part, not least with the surely immortal line, ‘She grabbed my hairy business!’

I enjoyed this from the first frame to the last. I’d happily watch it again.

There’s a poster I pass at work regularly about identifying phishing emails. It advises that the content of these emails is frequently ‘mispelled’. I’ve spent more time than I ought pondering whether that misspelling was intentional or not, likely a slightly-less-obvious version of telling us that emails might be full of ‘seplling mystakes’.

Then, I doubted myself and wondered if ‘mispell’ was an acceptable alternative to ‘misspell’. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary: it’s not. There’s no historical context in which it is correct—the etymology is plainly ‘mis’ + ‘spell’. The inclusion of a lonely ‘s’ is simply wrong, whether or not it’s intentionally wrong.

The Dictionary does list a single quotation in which the word appears as ‘mispelling’: England’s 1695 Treason Act. Section XI of the Act provides, among other things, that misspellings in legal documents cannot be used as the sole grounds for dismissing a case unless highlighted before any evidence has been presented (in which case, they could be corrected and the trial could proceed). Amusingly, ‘misspelling’ is misspelt:

noe Indictment for any of the aforesaid … shall bee quashed on the Motion of the Prisoner or his Counsel for miswriting mispelling false or improper Latine

This section of the Act was repealed with the passage of the Treason Act 1945, so you needn’t worry about the misspelling of misspelling still being in force. Unlike the poster, we can, at least, assume the 1695 mistake wasn’t a deliberate pun.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.