Non-US

From The Wall Street Journal:

Most people think of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary as a quintessentially British production, but if you pore carefully over the first edition, compiled between 1858 and 1928, you will find thousands of American words.

There are familiar words describing nature particular to the U.S., like prairie, skunk, coyote and chipmunk, but also more recondite ones, like catawba (a species of grape and type of sparkling wine), catawampous (fierce, destructive) and cottondom (the region in which cotton is grown). Today, Americanisms are easy for modern lexicographers to find because of the internet and access to large data sets. But all of the American words in that first edition found their way to Oxford in an age when communication across the Atlantic was far more difficult.

The OED was one of the world’s first crowdsourced projects—the Wikipedia of the 19th century—in which people around the English-speaking world were invited to read their country’s books and submit words for consideration on 4-by-6-inch slips of paper. Until recently, it wasn’t known how many people responded, exactly who they were or how they helped. But in 2014, several years after working as an editor on the OED, I was revisiting a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement where the dictionary’s archive is stored, and I came across a dusty box.

Inside the box was a small black book tied with cream-colored ribbon. On its pages was the immaculate handwriting of James Murray, the OED’s longest-serving editor. It was his 150-year-old address book recording the names and addresses of people who contributed to the largest English dictionary ever written.

There were six address books in all from that era, and for the past eight years I have researched the people listed inside. Three thousand or so in total, they were a vivid and eccentric bunch. Most were not the scholarly elite you might expect. The top four contributors globally, one of whom sent in 165,061 slips, were all connected with psychiatric hospitals (or “lunatic asylums” as they were called at the time); three were inmates and one was a chief administrator. There were three murderers and the owner of the world’s largest collection of pornography who, yes, sent in sex words, especially related to bondage and flagellation. 

You can’t go a page or two in Murray’s address books without seeing a name that he had underlined in thick red pencil. These are the Americans: politicians, soldiers, librarians, homemakers, booksellers, lawyers, coin collectors and pharmacists. They ranged from luminaries like Noah Thomas Porter, who edited Webster’s Dictionary and became president of Yale University, to unknowns such as 21-year-old Carille Winthrop Atwood, who loved the classical world and lived in a large house with several other young women in a fashionable area of San Francisco. The most prolific American contributor was Job Pierson, a clergyman from Ionia, Mich., who owned the state’s largest private library and sent in 43,055 slips featuring words from poetry, drama and religion. 

Murray marked Americanism with a “U.S” label, including casket (coffin),  comforter (eiderdown), baggage (luggage), biscuit (scone) and faucet (tap). He was often at pains to add details: For pecan tree, he included that it was “common in [the] Ohio and Mississippi valleys.” He noted that candy, not quite an Americanism, was “in [the] U.S. used more widely than in Great Britain, including toffy and the like.”

. . . .

Some American contributors involved in certain causes sought to make sure that their associated words got into the dictionary, like Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia, who hid escaped slaves at her home. Her contributions included abhorrent and abolition.

Others turned to their hobbies. Noteworthy Philadelphian Henry Phillips, Jr., an antiquarian and pioneer of the new language Esperanto, ensured that the dictionary had a generous coverage of words relating to coins and numismatics: electrum (coins made of an alloy of gold and silver with traces of copper) and gun money (money coined from the metal of old guns). 

Francis Atkins, a medical doctor at a military base in New Mexico, read books relating to Native American cultures and sent in sweat-house (a hut in which hot air or vapor baths are taken) and squash (the vegetable), a word borrowed from the Narragansett asquutasquash. He also contributed ranching words: rutting season (mating season), pronghorn (an antelope) and bison (a wild ox).

Others had their favorite authors. Anna Wyckoff Olcott, one of 27 contributors from New York City (she lived on West 13th Street in Manhattan), took responsibility for providing entries from the works of Louisa May Alcott. Those included the term deaconed, from “Little Women,” defined in the OED as “U.S. slang” meaning the practice of packing fruit with the finest specimens on top. (“The blanc-mange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked, having been skilfully ‘deaconed.’”)

In Boston, Nathan Matthews advised the OED for six years before becoming the city’s mayor and the person who spearheaded Boston’s subway system, the first in the U.S. But it was his brother, the historian and etymologist Albert Matthews, who was the second-highest ranking American contributor, sending in 30,480 slips from his reading of American historical sources including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving. 

Albert Matthews in particular enabled the OED to include words that no Brit would have ever have heard or needed to use. He sent in stockaded, whitefish and a rare American use of suck, meaning “the place at which a body of water moves in such a way as to suck objects into its vortex.” His reading of Daniel Denton’s “A Brief Description of New York” (1670) provided evidence for persimmon, possum, raccoon skin, powwow (spelled at the time “pawow”) and the first time that huckleberry ever appeared in print: “The fruits Natural to the Island are Mulberries, Posimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries.” 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Ars Technica:

University of Cambridge historian Renaud Morieux was poring over materials at the National Archives in Kew when he came across a box holding three piles of sealed letters held together by ribbons. The archivist gave him permission to open the letters, all addressed to 18th-century French sailors from their loved ones and seized by Great Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

“I realized I was the first person to read these very personal messages since they’re written,” said Morieux, who just published his analysis of the letters in the journal Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales. “These letters are about universal human experiences, they’re not unique to France or the 18th century. They reveal how we all cope with major life challenges. When we are separated from loved ones by events beyond our control like the pandemic or wars, we have to work out how to stay in touch, how to reassure, care for people and keep the passion alive. Today we have Zoom and WhatsApp. In the 18th century, people only had letters, but what they wrote about feels very familiar.”

England and France have a long, complicated history of being at war, most notably the Hundred Years’ War in the 14th and 15th centuries. The two countries were also almost continuously at war during the 18th century, including the Seven Years’ War, which was fought in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific as England and France tried to establish global dominance with the aid of their respective allies. The war technically evolved out of the North American colonies when England tried to expand into territory the French had already claimed. (Fun fact: A 22-year-old George Washington led a 1754 ambush on a French force at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.) But the conflict soon spread beyond colonial borders, and the British went on to seize hundreds of French ships at sea.

According to Morieux, despite its collection of excellent ships during this period, France was short on experienced sailors, and the large numbers imprisoned by the British—nearly a third of all French sailors in 1758—didn’t help matters. Many sailors eventually returned home, although a few died during their imprisonment, usually from malnutrition or illness. It was no easy feat delivering correspondence from France to a constantly moving ship; often multiple copies were sent to different ports in hopes of increasing the odds of a letter reaching its intended recipient.

This particular batch of letters was addressed to various crew members of a French warship called the Galitee, which was captured by a British ship called the Essex en route from Bordeaux to Quebec in 1758. Morieux’s genealogical research accounted for every member of the crew. Naturally, some of the missives were love letters from wives to their husbands, such as the one Marie Dubosc wrote to her husband, a ship’s lieutenant named Louis Chambrelan, in 1758, professing herself his “forever faithful wife.” Morieux’s research showed that Marie died the following year before her husband was released; Chambrelan remarried when he returned to France, having never received his late wife’s missive.

Morieux read several letters addressed to a young sailor from Normandy named Nicolas Quesnel, from both his 61-year-old mother, Marguerite, and his fiancée, Marianne. Marguerite’s letters chided the young man for writing more often to Marianne and not to her, laying the guilt thick. “I think more about you than you about me,” the mother wrote (or more likely, dictated to a trusted scribe), adding, “I think I am for the tomb, I have been ill for three weeks.” (Translation: “Why don’t you write to your poor sick mother before I die?”)

Apparently, Quesnel’s neglect of his mother caused some tension with the fiancée since Marianne wrote three weeks later asking him to please write to his mom and remove the “black cloud” in the household. But then Marguerite merely complained that Quesnel made no mention of his stepfather in his letters home, so the poor young man really couldn’t win. Quesnel survived his imprisonment, per Morieux, and ended up working on a transatlantic slave ship.

Link to the rest at Ars Technica

From Literary Review:

Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are misplaced – at least according to the linguist Valerie Fridland.

Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude does an excellent job of vindicating words and ways of speaking we love to hate. Tracing your ‘verys’ and your singular ‘theys’ across centuries and continents, Fridland offers a history of linguistic pet peeves that are much older than we might assume and have more important functions in communication than most of us would like to give them credit for.

Take intensifiers like ‘totally’, ‘pretty’ and ‘completely’. We might consciously believe them to be exaggerations undermining the speaker’s point, yet people consistently report seeing linguistic booster-users as more authoritative and likeable than others.

Then take ‘um’ and ‘uh’ (or ‘umm’ and ‘uhh’, and their consonant-multiplying siblings). Both receive an undue amount of flak for being fillers, supposedly deployed when the speaker is grasping for words, unsure what they want to say or lacking ideas. But this is not so. Fridland explains that they typically precede unfamiliar words or ideas, as well as complex sentence structures. Such non-semantic additions do what silent pauses and coughing can’t: they help the speaker speak and the listener listen. Similarly, the widely abhorred free-floating ‘like’ does not cut randomly into a ‘proper’ sentence but rather inserts itself, according to the logic of the language, either at the beginning of a sentence or before a verb, noun or adjective. It’s a form of ‘discourse marker’, used to ‘contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions’, writes Fridland. She points out that Shakespeare used discourse markers frequently, while the epic poem Beowulf begins with one (Hwæt!).

If what we think is ‘bad English’ is so good, why is nobody encouraging us to use those little flashy friends like ‘dude’, ‘actually’ and ‘WTF’? Corporate career guides and oratory platforms like Toastmasters warn against too many interrupters. The reason is that they supposedly make you sound insecure, weak, inexperienced and right-out dumb – like a young woman, basically. The world of power and prestige is rife with bias against ‘like’ and company, and so are our day-to-day interactions with friends and neighbours, who may judge us for that extra ‘literally’ or spontaneous ‘oh’. It’s precisely this prejudice that Fridland sets out to dismantle, arguing that linguistic change is a natural occurrence and that pronouncements on the bad and the good of language are socially motivated.

When we devalue a group’s speech habits, we perceive otherness fuelled by differences in race, class, gender, sexuality and education. To say ‘three dollar’ rather than ‘three dollars’ is not sloppy, Fridland states, but part and parcel of consonant loss at the end of English words that has its roots in the late Middle Ages, when the stress patterns of Norman French and Old Norse led to final letters being cast off. Why should we embarrass others for similar habits?

Fridland does well to burst the bubble of mockery around Californian girls’ vocal fry (think the creaking voices of Paris Hilton and the Kardashians), unpicking the social meanings we attach to verbal patterns we find unacceptable. We tend to dislike (and believe reprehensible) what we’re not regularly exposed to. And that often happens to be the language of vulnerable communities, such as black and brown people, teenagers and women. These groups often propel linguistic change. Children and teenagers, for example, are voracious speakers, eager to explore and play with new forms of language as their speech patterns haven’t quite settled. Women – particularly young women – are the Formula 1 drivers of language change, and have always been. Fridland explains that many modern English forms, such as the S ending of the third-person singular verb (‘it does’ rather than ‘it doth’), were pushed on by women and girls, whose ears tend to be more sensitive to linguistic nuances. While men are likely to snap up already-current words, such as ‘bro’, in order to signal social affiliation, women create new verbal spaces into which other people eventually step. ‘What women [bring] to the fore’, Fridland says, is ‘novelty in the form of this expressivity, not greater expressivity itself’. Once a change has become widely accepted, there is no difference in gender use, despite our perceptions

Link to the rest at Literary Review

For those who don’t know what a vocal fry (formerly glottal fry) is, you’ll hear and see an example below.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) was neither a systematic thinker nor a system builder, neither a philosopher nor a historian. His subject was society—make that societies, their strengths and their weaknesses, which he studied always in search of what gives them their character. Along with Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Max Weber, Ortega y Gasset, Tocqueville was a cosmopolitan intellectual of the kind that appears only at the interval of centuries.

Tocqueville is of course best known for his “Democracy in America,” a work which may be more quoted from than actually read. The first part of it was published in 1835, based on observations made when he visited the U.S. in 1831, at age 26. His powers of observation, and skill at generalization, were evident at the outset. They never slackened over the remainder of his life.

Tocqueville’s skill at formulating observations was unfailingly acute. “In politics, shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships,” he wrote. “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” At the close of “Democracy in America,” he predicted the coming hegemonies of Russia and the U.S. George Santayana, in a letter to his friend Horace Kallen, wrote: “Intelligence is the power of seeing things in the past, present, and future as they have been, are, and will be.” He might have been describing Alexis de Tocqueville.

The first volume of “Democracy in America” was well received. The second volume, published in 1840—more critical and more dubious of the virtues of democracy—was less so. Yet the work stayed in print for a full century, even though its author’s reputation had long since faded. Then, in 1938, with the publication of Tocqueville’s correspondence and other hitherto uncollected writings, that reputation, more than revived, became set in marble.

“Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America” by Jeremy Jennings, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, thus joins a long shelf of books dedicated to the man and his works. Four full biographies of Tocqueville have been published, the last, Hugh Brogan’s “Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life,” in 2006. Nearly every aspect of Tocqueville’s work has been treated in essays, articles and book-length studies. I happened to have published a slender volume myself, “Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy’s Guide” (2006), in which I wrote: “What would have surprised Tocqueville, one suspects, is the persistence with which his writings have remained alive, part of the conversation on the great subject of the importance of politics in life.” It would have surprised him, I believe, because of his innate modesty and his belief that his work was far from finished.

Tocqueville’s trip to America, which would be the making of him, had its origin in his wish to escape the reign of Louis-Philippe, king of France, whose Orléans family had been sympathetic to the French Revolution and were thus viewed askance by the house of Tocqueville. With his friend Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville proposed a visit to America to study penal institutions in the new republic; the two magistrates were granted permission, though they would have to pay their own expenses.

In “Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America,” Mr. Jennings sets out the importance of travel to Alexis de Tocqueville. “In exploring why, where, and how Tocqueville travelled,” he writes, “this volume seeks to show that travel played an integral role in framing and informing his intellectual enquiries.” Throughout his life, we learn, “Tocqueville longed to travel,” and this appetite for travel did not “diminish with either age or illness.” As Tocqueville wrote to his friend Louis de Kergorlay: “I liken man in this world to a traveller who is walking constantly toward an increasingly cold region and who is forced to move more as he advances.”

Mr. Jennings proves a splendid guide to Tocqueville’s travels. These included trips, some lengthier than others, to Italy, Algeria, Germany, Switzerland, England and Ireland. Basing his book on Tocqueville’s rich correspondence and notebooks, Mr. Jennings describes his subject’s preparations, his arrivals, his daily encounters in what for Tocqueville were new lands. Even when he did not publish works about these places, he was recording his thoughts. Above all, the author establishes the unceasing intellectual stimulation that Tocqueville found in travel. The spirit of inquiry was never quiescent in him, and, as Mr. Jennings notes, even on his honeymoon “Tocqueville managed to find time to study the Swiss political system.”

Much of the attraction of “Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America” derives from its chronicle of Tocqueville’s quotidian life and his many interesting opinions of historical and contemporary figures. Tocqueville said that Napoleon was “as great as a man can be without virtue.” His English friend Nassau Senior records Tocqueville saying of Napoleon that his “taste was defective in everything, in small things as well as great ones; in books, art, and in women as well as in ambition and glory; and his idolizers cannot be men of much better taste.”

Tocqueville remarked on the “impatience always aroused in him by the national self-satisfaction of the Germans,” and found Italy “the most unpleasant country I have ever visited on my travels.” As for Switzerland, he noted that “at the bottom of their souls the Swiss show no deep respect for law, no love of legality, no abhorrence of the use of force, without which there cannot be a free country.”

Yet he described America as “the most singular country in the world.” Among other things, during his nine months there, he was taken by its citizens’ enthusiasm for their own system of government. Americans, he found, “believe in the wisdom of the masses, assuming the latter are well informed; and appear to be unclouded by suspicions that the populace may never share in a special kind of knowledge indispensable for governing a state.”

He, Tocqueville, did not share their unabated enthusiasm: “What I see in this country tells me that, even in the most favorable circumstances, and they exist here, the government of the multitude is not a good thing.” Tocqueville was wary of what had been done to the American Indian, and predicted that “within a hundred years there will not remain in North America either a single tribe or even a single man belonging to the most remarkable of Indian races.” His views on slavery in America were even bleaker, harsher. “The Americans are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men,” he wrote. He thought, correctly as we now know, slavery to be “the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States.”

Alexis de Tocqueville was a passionate man, and about liberty he was most passionate of all. By liberty he meant the absence of despotism, whether by monarchs or multitudes. “Liberty is the first of my passions,” he wrote, referring to it as “a good so precious and necessary,” adding that “whoever seeks for anything from freedom but itself is made for slavery.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Literary Hub:

One summer morning in 1883, Alexander John Ellis sat at his desk in front of three large bay windows, opened wide to catch any breeze that London’s Kensington had to give. From his chair, he could hear the birds in the plane trees and see right down Argyll Road, its five-story white stucco Georgian houses resembling layers of an expensive wedding cake. By the time everyone else was rising, Ellis had generally already been up for several hours. Early morning was his favorite time of day. Ellis loved the notion of getting ahead while others were sleeping, and getting work done before his neighbor, a master singer, started his scales and taught his students by the open window. “The nuisance is awful at times,” he wrote to Murray. Ellis always ate the same light breakfast of a French roll with butter, and drank his signature beverage: a cup of warm water with a little milk.

This day, as every day, his first act on waking was to weigh himself naked, before dressing for the day. Always the same boots and coat, affectionately named Barges and Dreadnought, before heading straight to his desk on the second floor. He needed to weigh himself before putting on his clothes for one main reason: Dreadnought was heavy. Dreadnought had twenty-eight pockets, each one stuffed full with eccentric items. Ellis made a noise like a kitchen drawer as he walked. When he sat down, eyewitnesses said that his pockets “stood upright like sentinels.” They were variously full of letters, nail clippers, string, a knife sharpener, a book and philological papers in case of emergency, and two things that a teetotaller and someone who watched his weight rarely needed: a corkscrew and a scone, just in case friends were in want of either. These last two items sum up Ellis; he was kind-hearted and always thought of his friends before himself.

On his desk, there were signs of everything that he held dear: a draft of the fifth and final volume of his monumental book, On Early English Pronunciation, daguerreotypes of Venice and his three children, a tuning fork, and a favorite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism, “Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servant of the heart, and should never be its slave.”

This morning held a special excitement: also spread out in front of him were Murray’s proof sheets for the first section of the Dictionary (words A to Ant)—all 362 pages of them. Murray had sent them to Ellis for his comment. As Ellis’s eyes skimmed the proofs, he could not help looking for his own name in the Introduction. He felt a sense of profound satisfaction to see “A. J. Ellis, Esq, FRS (Phonology)” listed between Prof. Frederick Pollock (Legal terms) and Dr P. H. Pye-Smith (Medical and Biological words).

Ellis’s passions were pronunciation, music, and mathematics, and his expertise in all of these areas had been sought by Murray who had had difficulty finding British academics to help him (by contrast, American scholars were eager to be involved). He had helped Murray with the very first entry in the Dictionary—A: not only the sound A, “the low-back-wide vowel formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips,” but also the musical sense of A, “the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major,” and finally the algebraic sense of A, “as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used to express known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown.” Ellis was happy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, including the words air, alert, algebra.

Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”

Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.

Ellis had raised an important question about inclusion, but he was not quite right about the boundaries of the Dictionary. Murray had included slang but it was true that, so far, he had left out obscenities. We can only imagine the uproar in Victorian society had he not. Murray would agonize over his decision to leave them out, but also had to be mindful of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 which made it illegal to expose the public to any content judged to be grossly indecent.

Murray’s caution proved wise when, a few years later, a fellow lexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, had his own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with William Henley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing the letters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took his publisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jury that writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personally guilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs. Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Act by arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, not the public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henley was published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck and many other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and the public outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

. . . .

Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had to be sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within a larger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising him not to include the word condom. “I am writing on a very obscene subject. There is an article called Cundum…a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well- deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation,” he wrote to Murray. “Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair was named after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.” But he had found a quotation from 1705 referring to a “Quondam” which made him rethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. “I suppose Cundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary,” he concluded. Murray left it out.

Dixon was the man who unwisely advised Murray to delete the entry for appendicitis because it was, according to Dixon, just another itis-word. “Surely you will not attempt to enter all the crack-jaw medical and surgical words. What do you think of ‘Dacryocystosyringoketokleitis’? You know doctors think the way to indicate any inflammation is to tack on ‘itis’ to a word.” The word’s deletion turned out to be an embarrassment to Murray and Oxford University Press when, in 1902, the coronation of Edward VII was postponed because of the King’s attack of appendicitis. Suddenly everyone was using the word, but no one could find it in the Dictionary, and since the letter A was already published it could not be added until the Supplement volume in 1933.

But back to the summer of 1883. Murray received the corrected proofs from Ellis. He not only appreciated Ellis’s feedback but also trusted his judgement: he promptly deleted all claims to exhaustiveness and wrote, “The aim of this Dictionary is to furnish an adequate account of the meaning, origin, and history of English words now in general use, or known to be in use.”

. . . .

I had been wondering how Ellis got to be such a word nerd? I was fascinated by what I discovered. To begin with, something very unusual happened when he was eleven years old. His mother’s cousin, a schoolmaster called William Ellis, offered to give the young boy a substantial inheritance if he would change his surname from Sharpe to Ellis. Mr and Mrs Sharpe agreed, and from then on “Alexander John Sharpe” became “Alexander John Ellis.” The young boy was enrolled at Shrewsbury School and Eton, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and never had to earn money for the rest of his life.

Ellis’s wealth enabled him to be the quintessential “gentleman scholar,” an expert in almost everything he did, be it music, mathematics, languages, phonetics, travel, or daguerreotype photography. He was a polymath for whom life was more a science than an art. He published over 300 articles and books, and his works are quoted in the OED 200 times.

His interest in accent and pronunciation was inspired by the fact that he was born to a middle-class family in Hoxton, east London, where he was exposed to working-class cockney speakers, followed by schooling at Shrewsbury with its Welsh and English accents, and then exposed to the Received Pronunciation of the upper and upper-middle classes at Eton and Cambridge.

Words were like children to Ellis. He loved them equally, regardless of whether they were common, technical, scientific, slang, or foreign. He read the Dictionary as though it were a novel. Some words gave him pure delight in both their sound and meaning such as absquatulate, to abscond or decamp, with a quotation from Haliburton’s Clockmaker. “Absquotilate [sic] it in style, you old skunk…and show the gentlemen what you can do.” But it was their sounds that captured his imagination most. The quality of a whisper or a creak; the stress of a syllable; high pitch or low pitch.

Most people hear sounds, but Ellis saw them. He saw the air move in the mouth, the way the tip of the tongue touched the ridge of the teeth for a t; the vibration of vocal cords to change it to a d; and how the base of the tongue moved back in the mouth to block the flow of air for a g. Every sound was a picture for Ellis. He devoted his life to painting these pictures, describing their systematic order so the world might better understand the fundamentals of language.

His book On Early English Pronunciation, published in five volumes between 1869 and 1889, traced the pronunciation of English from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century and established him as a world authority on English phonology, a pioneer in the field of speech-sound studies. For the nineteenth-century section of the book, Ellis enlisted the help of hundreds of informants across Britain and a small group of experts, including Murray and others within the OED network. The result was the first major study of British dialects.

No language yet existed for the patterns Ellis was identifying, so he often had to invent the words, which subsequently made it into the Dictionary: palatalized, to make a palatal sound (by moving the point of contact between tongue and palate further forward in the mouth); labialization, the action of making a speech sound labial (articulated with both lips); and labiopalatalized, a sound made into a labiopalatal (articulated with the front of the tongue against the hard palate and the lips). He also invented the words septendecimal, relating to a seventeenth (in music); and phonetician, which originally referred to an advocate of phonetic spelling, rather than its current meaning of “an expert of phonetics.” Quite a few of his inventions have since fallen out of use and appear in the Dictionary with a dagger sign (which indicates obsolescence) beside them, such as vocalistic, of or relating to vowels, and phonotyper, an advocate of phonotypy (another term which Ellis invented, meaning “a system of phonetic printing”).

Ellis was one of the phoneticians on whom George Bernard Shaw modeled the character of Henry Higgins, that master of pronunciation, in his play Pygmalion, later turned into the musical My Fair Lady. Higgins (as a bet with his gentlemen friends) teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak “proper” English; but Ellis had none of Henry Higgins’s snobbery or arrogance. He was a generous, down-to-earth man, a frequent correspondent with friends, happy to offer advice when asked, and always working to bring people together and support them.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

PG notes that the OP is from a recently released book titled, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. Since PG has had a long-time attraction to The OED, he is likely going to obtain a copy of The Dictionary People in a reputable manner.

For a long time, PG has owned a copy of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which consists of two heavy volumes in a case that also holds a magnifying glass. (You didn’t think the folks in Oxford could squeeze the 20 heavy volumes in the original set into two heavy volumes without squeezing the original words down to mouse-type size did you?)

During his younger days, PG could read the tiny type in the Compact Edition without using the magnifying glass, but that is no longer true.

However, the many virtues of The Compact Edition notwithstanding, all dictionary nerds know that there is no substitute for the full and weighty Oxford English Dictionary Experience.

And don’t forget the additional three volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, each of which includes about 3,000 new words, for example, buckyball, nanotechnology, and freeware.

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” So were schoolchildren once taught in order to remember the fate of Henry VIII’s six wives. Anne Boleyn, the second one (that would be “beheaded”), was by far the most interesting and intelligent, the only one of the six who engaged actively in politics, and the only one whom the monstrous Henry ever loved.

To understand Anne’s story it is necessary first to understand Henry, and John Guy and Julia Fox, husband-and-wife authors who have each published previous works of Tudor-era history, give a compelling portrait of Henry in “Hunting the Falcon,” an absorbing chronicle of the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.

As a young king, Henry was intelligent and glamorous but “over-indulged by a doting mother and over-protected by an autocratic father,” the authors write. He grew into “a narcissist who saw exercising control as his birthright, a man who never accepted blame for his own actions and always looked for scapegoats.” The Golden Boy became a sullen, terrifying brute, England’s Stalin.

Anne was neither royal nor noble. She belonged to the rapidly rising gentry class. Her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was a greedy and ambitious public servant, employed sometimes on diplomatic missions, an able man who later proved despicable when his daughter’s fate hung in the balance.

In her youth, Anne was sent to France—a sort of finishing school. There she joined the retinue of Henry’s sister Mary, who had, for reasons of state, been affianced to the “gouty, toothless, libidinous” widower Louis XII. Anne would end up spending seven years in France, much of it at the royal court. She became an accomplished young lady and was always a Francophile, encouraging Henry to ally England with France rather than Spain.

Henry fell in love with Anne not long after her return to England in 1522. Her elder sister Mary had already been Henry’s mistress—Mary is the headliner in Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel, “The Other Boleyn Girl”—but Anne held out for marriage and would do so for several years, a remarkable feat.

As we know from the many popular treatments of this story, a marriage between Anne Boleyn and the king would be possible only if Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon could be annulled. When the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, failed to achieve this end, Anne urged Henry to dismiss him. He needed little urging, but readers of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels will remember that the royal adviser’s loyalty to the fallen cardinal made him Anne’s enemy—even though, in politics and religion, they were as one. Anne favored religious reform, like Cromwell, though she was never a Protestant. She is better described as an evangelical Catholic. According to Anne’s chaplain, the authors write, “her apartments were hives of evangelical piety with her ladies reading the English Bible and sewing clothes for the poor.”

The break with Rome, engineered in part by Cromwell’s management of Parliament, finally made the marriage possible. In sure anticipation of the annulment—delivered by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer—Anne had at last gone to bed with Henry. She was already pregnant when the marriage took place, in January 1533, when the still doting Henry arranged a magnificent coronation for his true and only queen. “Anne was determined,” the authors write, “that everyone who mattered should attend,” though Thomas More chose to stay away, feeling that he couldn’t grace the coronation of a queen “he believed to be living in adultery.” The child proved to be a disappointment, a daughter (the future Elizabeth I), not the son Henry craved.

Anne, the authors stress, was never popular. Some called her a whore and were hanged for their impudence. She was a political power as no previous queen had been, but the security of her position and influence depended on her giving birth to a son. Two miscarriages made her position perilous, all the more so because Henry was wearying of her public activity—she “pushed hard for her people,” Mr. Guy and Ms. Fox write, aiming to fill posts and secure preferments. The adored mistress was becoming a tiresome wife. Henry already had his eye on a replacement, a demure girl named Jane Seymour. He wanted to be rid of Anne.

Cromwell was ready to oblige. Anne had been careless, allowing men to mingle with women in her apartments in the style of the French court. Cromwell first seized Mark Smeaton, a young musician reported to have looked longingly at the queen. Cromwell sent him to the Tower to be tortured. Naturally a confession followed. There were other suspects, among them Anne’s brother, George. Materials for a trial were quickly assembled. Anne’s contemptible father, Sir Thomas, escaped the purge by, as the authors put it, “consenting to condemn her.” Anne, briefly hysterical on first being admitted to the Tower, recovered her spirit, but the trial was a grisly farce, a well-managed show trial.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From 1843 Magazine/The Economist:

It started at 6.29 in the morning with a siren going off. I live alone so I just jumped out of bed and ran straight to my safe room. My block of flats is less than a year old and they put a safe room in every apartment.

Usually the siren sounds for rocket attacks and lasts 10-15 minutes. Then you come out and go back to your daily life. But yesterday morning it lasted a very, very long time. Even inside the safe room you could hear the missiles. I heard the ones Hamas fired on Ashkelon, on Ashdod, on Kiryat Gat and on Beersheba, where my daughter lives. We live very close to the Iron Dome battery that intercepts them, so I hear our missiles responding. I couldn’t get access to the internet.

After an hour I was able to get back online. That was when I realised there had been an operation by Hamas to break through the border, enter the city and start to mess things up here. We have never encountered such a situation. At least 20 of them must have entered Sderot. They were running around 300 metres from my home.

I have been in touch with friends across town since it started. We don’t exchange security tips, we don’t know how to. But as much as possible, we try to pass on reliable information. There is also a lot of disinformation around – Hamas do a very good job of circulating it on tv and social media.

We’ve received messages that terrorists have commandeered police vehicles, as well as ones belonging to the army and border guards. And they also took uniforms, to disguise themselves as Israeli soldiers, so we were warned about this as well. There are reports of actions considered war crimes.

I’ve seen our troops underneath my balcony. They’re driving around in hatchback vehicles, the soldiers pointing their weapons out of the window – which is something I’ve never seen in Israel. Normally if they’re loaded they keep them hidden. But now they’re brandishing them.

There seem to have been two main skirmishes in Sderot. We’ve had reports from other places nearby too. In Ofakim, near Beersheba, a Hamas squad reportedly took civilians hostage.

In the kibbutzim around here, which are closer to the border than we are, people were besieged in their homes and their bomb shelters. Hamas squads were trying to enter their safe rooms to murder them. They’ve reported that 25 people are dead, but from my experience – I was an army captain for many years – the numbers that the emergency services initially announce double or triple in the final count. Most of the dead are probably not soldiers.

One of my colleagues lives in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, just on the border with Gaza, and she was trapped in her safe room with terrorists outside. It was an Anne Frank situation. That’s the only way to describe it. She was inside her house, with her children, and her husband who is sick, while Hamas were outside, kicking the door. She feared they would either set fire to her house, or blow up the walls and break in.

Link to the rest at 1843 Magazine/The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

By 1940 the possibility of escape had become so small for the millions of Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe that even the most outlandish-sounding gambit seemed worth a try. One such ploy was to obtain a forged Paraguayan passport. Far-fetched though that plan may have been, the exit papers helped somewhere between 800 and 3,000 Jews flee across Nazi borders and survive the Holocaust.

Put into perspective, that makes the tactic among the most successful wartime efforts to free Jews from the Nazi death machine. (Perhaps the best-known strategy, organized by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, saved approximately 1,200 Jews.) Yet, as we learn in Roger Moorhouse’s valuable but uneven chronicle, “The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation,” for years the Paraguayan-passport scheme remained virtually forgotten. Mr. Moorhouse’s subject thus encompasses a double mystery: how the operation worked and succeeded, and why it seems to have disappeared from the historical record. The author does better explaining the former than the latter.

Of the many threads that weave through the story, perhaps the most intriguing describes the unlikely bedfellows who masterminded the operation: a Swiss-based group of officials from the Polish government-in-exile, working in tandem with Polish-born Jewish community leaders who had found refuge in Switzerland. Then, as now, the very notion of a joint Polish-Jewish humanitarian project can seem surprising against the backdrop of Poland’s long history of often-violent antisemitism. But in numerous documents cited by Mr. Moorhouse, a British World War II historian and the author of “Poland 1939,” the Polish government-in-exile affirmed its intention to protect all Polish citizens, Jewish or otherwise, from Nazi persecution.

The declaration was humanitarian, but the intention was also strategic. Jan Karski—the Polish resistance fighter sent by the government-in-exile on clandestine trips into Nazi-occupied Poland to report on conditions there—warned in early 1940 that Polish antisemitism could “create something akin to a narrow bridge” that would align Polish citizens with Nazi aims and persuade them to collaborate. To counter that, Karski advised building “a common front . . . an understanding that in the end both peoples are being unjustly persecuted by the same enemy.” Karski would later smuggle out his eyewitness accounts of the harrowing conditions in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and at Izbica, the transit camp from which Jews were sent to the Bełżec death camp. He would travel to Washington and London to attest to the mass murder of Jews by cyanide at Auschwitz. To save the Jews of Poland, these reports made clear, additional Allied intervention would be needed.

That help did not arrive. In the breach, the men who would launch the Paraguayan-passports scheme found each other. Their team, called the Ładoś Group, was led by the career Polish diplomat Aleksander Ładoś, who came to the Swiss capital of Bern in 1940 to serve as the unofficial ambassador of Poland’s government-in-exile. In addition to being “positively predisposed toward Poland’s Jewish populations,” Mr. Moorhouse tells us, Ładoś “was not a man overly burdened with respect for the legal sanctity of official documents.” He was the perfect candidate to helm the covert operation.

Rudolf Hügli, a Swiss notary and an honorary consul of Paraguay, would, for a fee, provide the blank passport documents. Joining Ładoś in providing cover for and operating the scheme were three consular colleagues: Stefan Ryniewicz, his deputy; Konstanty Rokicki, whose responsibilities included handling passport applications and often filling in the names of the passport bearers; and Juliusz Kühl, an attaché who himself was Jewish and was the legation’s representative for Jewish affairs.

Kühl became the liaison to several representatives from Jewish aid organizations, most notably Abraham Silberschein, a former member of the Polish Parliament who had helped found the Relief Committee for Jewish War Victims, and Rabbi Israel Chaim Eiss, a founder of the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement. These two community leaders, along with several others, took charge of spreading word of the passport scheme through the ghettos and camps. They also oversaw the coded correspondence used to collect individual information and photos for the fake passports, and managed the passports’ delivery.

After a German spy exposed the scheme in 1943, Swiss authorities arrested or sanctioned most of the group and no more passports were issued. But the documents that had already been distributed still helped some survive, Mr. Moorhouse explains. As the war neared its end, reclaiming soldiers to fight for Hitler took precedence in Germany over vetoing forged passports. And so Germany sought a deal with the Allies to trade German prisoners of war for those Jewish camp inmates who held papers, valid or not, from countries beyond the Reich. Even so, the negotiations were so prolonged that many Jews died while awaiting their release.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

It was a chance invitation to a dinner party that changed Ian Fleming’s life and legacy. In 1960, Fleming, the author of some modest-selling books about a spy called James Bond, was on a trip to Washington, DC, as foreign manager of the Sunday Times. The dinner was with John F. Kennedy, who had just declared himself a presidential candidate and was a James Bond super-fan. As the conversation turned to the problem of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba, Kennedy asked Fleming, “What would James Bond do?” Fleming replied that Bond would make Castro look ridiculous, rather than important.

That Kennedy should have sought Fleming’s (and Bond’s) advice on how to bring down Castro was not as odd as it might seem. Fleming had a wartime career as an officer in British naval intelligence. In 1961, when Kennedy had become president, he told Life magazine that Fleming’s “From Russia, with Love”, the fifth Bond novel, was one of his ten favourite books. The endorsement introduced a relatively unknown English author to American readers. Fleming’s publisher scrambled to relaunch five Bond books ahead of the publication of “Thunderball”.

As Fleming’s literary agent in New York put it, “the gusher burst”. In the remaining two years of his short life, Fleming became an international celebrity. James Bond made his first big-screen appearance in “Dr No” in 1962, launching what would become the longest-running—and one of the most valuable—film franchises of all time.

Well over 100m copies of Fleming’s 14 James Bond books (12 novels and two short-story collections) have been sold. With 27 movies in the can, global box-office revenues are around $20bn in today’s prices. The search is currently on for the eighth actor to play 007. Whoever is chosen for the part may do it for around 15 years, about the same length as Daniel Craig’s tuxedo-clad tour of duty.

“The Complete Man” is only the second biography authorised by Fleming’s estate since the author’s death in 1964. (The first, by John Pearson, a Sunday Times colleague, was published in 1966.) But Nicholas Shakespeare’s is the most comprehensive picture yet of Bond’s creator and offers insights into how his wartime career shaped his fiction.

Fleming’s childhood and early adulthood were privileged but defined by loss. His grandfather was a self-made Scottish financier, who disapproved of Ian’s mother, Eve, who he thought was a social climber. Fleming’s father, Valentine, the mp for Henley, was killed by German shelling in 1917. (Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in the Times.)

Valentine left the equivalent of about £15m ($18.2m) today to care for his widow and four children. With his war-hero father dead, mother in control of the purse strings and brilliant older brother groomed as the male head of the family, “the mould was set…like Peter Pan, part of Ian remained frozen at the age of eight,” Mr Shakespeare writes.

After a miserable time at prep school, Fleming left Eton early for Sandhurst, a military academy. He contracted gonorrhoea, an early sign of the womaniser he was to become. Next came a spell in Switzerland, where Eve hoped learning languages would get him into the Foreign Office. While there he fell in love, but not with someone grand enough for Eve, who threatened to cut Fleming’s allowance if he married her. He capitulated, a decision that would affect his relationships with women for the rest of his life.

Failing to be accepted into the Foreign Office, Fleming worked as a journalist until his family pushed him into stockbroking. Fleming’s City connections recommended him as an assistant to John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence (who would become the inspiration for “M”), when the second world war broke out.

Fleming proved an innovative administrator, who used his ruthless charm to get results. He helped devise “Operation Mincemeat”, a successful ruse to deceive the Nazis with a dead body bearing bogus intelligence, and set up a spying network in Spain. He was one of a trusted few tasked with drawing America into the war. Mr Shakespeare argues (controversially) that Fleming was “one of the three main spearheads” who contributed to the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services, which morphed into the CIA.

The commando unit known as 30 Assault Unit (30au), formed to seize enemy documents from targeted enemy headquarters, was also Fleming’s creation. One of 30au’s triumphs was to capture a German inventor, Dr Hellmuth Walter, at his rocket-motor works in Kiel before the Russians could get to him. A co-operating Walter revealed a trove of advanced weapons including the forerunner of a ballistic missile submarine. In “Moonraker”, the third Bond book, the villain Sir Hugo Drax employs a “Dr Walter” to build a nuclear missile to destroy London.

After the war, Fleming missed the derring-do of the clandestine world. He set up a network of foreign correspondents for the Sunday Times (some were probably recruited as mi6 agents) and found refuge in Jamaica, building “Goldeneye”, a house with steps down to the sea where he could scuba dive with sharks. It was there he mustered the self-confidence and found the time to write novels, starting with “Casino Royale” in 1952. All drew on Fleming’s wartime experiences.

Soon after Fleming opened his typewriter to write the first Bond book, he married Ann Charteris, a socialite with whom he had conducted an affair throughout her marriage to his close friend, Esmond Rothermere, the Daily Mail’s owner. Neither would remain faithful to the other. But Fleming was discreet in the many liaisons he carried on, which the author Roald Dahl, a friend, attributed to the fact that the women “were almost always married”.

Towards the end of his life Fleming was dogged by ill health. He suffered from a heart condition made worse by alcohol and the 70 cigarettes he smoked a day. He was also stressed by litigation related to accusations of plagiarism brought by an Irish director, who had worked with Fleming on a screenplay for “Thunderball” before the novel was written. Fleming felt increasingly trapped by Bond and resentful of the pressure to produce new books. He died at the age of 56, a few days after he played a round of golf.

While there have been at least seven other books written about Fleming, Mr Shakespeare’s is likely to be remembered as definitive, albeit overlong. What he does not do is make Fleming likeable. Despite Fleming’s patriotism and notable contributions to Britain’s war effort, the picture Mr Shakespeare draws is of an entitled, selfish misogynist.

Some think the same could be said of Bond as Fleming wrote him. 

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG notes the publication date is shown as March 12, 2024, and the date first available is listed as January 1, 1970.

The publisher is listed as Harper. The website for HarperCollins has a bit more information about the book than its Amazon listing, but not much.

A check of the book on Amazon’s UK site shows a different cover and a price in British pounds that is lower than Harper’s announced US price of $17.99 for the ebook- £12.99, which at today’s exchange rate is $15.90 US. The UK site already lists used copies of the hardcover for sale as well.

PG has no idea what’s involved in purchasing ebooks from Amazon’s UK site, but some thrifty Scots who have emigrated to the US might have the answer.

From The Economist:

The British empire was and is many things to many people: a civilising endeavour, a bringer of peace, an exploitative force or a project based on white supremacy. Arguments exist for each characterisation. But there is one thing that the British empire is not: completely over.

It lives on in court cases, including one brought in 2019 by indigenous people of the Chagos Islands, whom the British colonial government forcibly relocated between 1965 and 1973 (with American support). It exists in the loyalties of the 15 commonwealth “realms”, including Australia and Canada, for which King Charles III (pictured in 1984) is their monarch and head of state. And it lives on in the demographic make-up of Britain, where one in five people is Asian, black or mixed race. (A similar share of cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, are children of immigrants from the former empire.) As the old saying goes, “We are here because you were there.”

Two new books consider the “here” and “there”. “One Fine Day” is a sprawling account of the British empire by Matthew Parker, a historian. It travels like the never-setting imperial sun across Asia, Africa and outposts of the “new world” in the Caribbean. The book’s organising principle is a day—September 29th 1923—when the British empire reached its maximum territorial extent. The portrait is achieved with a wide-angled lens, but the choice of a single day also brings focus.

Mr Parker’s approach is to find the most interesting currents in the empire’s various corners in September 1923 and to tell them through little-remembered colonial administrators and prominent locals. For example, in what was then Malaya (modern-day Malaysia and its surrounds) readers meet Hugh Clifford, who learnt Malay and fell in love with the country and its people. He was self-aware enough to wonder whether “the boot of the white man” had stamped out the best parts of local culture. Yet Clifford was also responsible, at the age of just 22, for adding 15,000 square miles of territory to the empire and described Malays as “the cattle of mankind”.

In colonies across continents, elites were disillusioned with the obvious hypocrisy of foreign rulers, while foot-soldiers such as George Orwell found themselves uneasy with the violence of colonial rule. What emerges is a picture of an empire straining under the weight of its own contradictions. The British thought of their role as an enlightened one: stopping tribal warfare and introducing modern health care and education. Yet they brought forced labour and colonial massacres, racist rules, and substandard health care and education. Rather than simply stating so baldly, Mr Parker points this out through copious examples and meticulous research. He appears to have read the front page of every newspaper published in the empire on that day.

. . . .

“Imperial Island” by Charlotte Lydia Riley, a historian at the University of Southampton, is half the length and better organised. Starting with the contributions of the empire’s troops in the second world war and the meagre thanks (or even acknowledgment) given to them afterwards, she runs through headline events of post-war British history.

Yet to call this an imperial history is misleading. The book reads more like a history of race relations in modern Britain, and the links to empire often feel forced. Fundraising for a famine in Ethiopia reveals, in Ms Riley’s telling, a guilt-ridden imperial hangover, as do children’s books about India and cookbooks with dishes from around the world. A map of countries where an overseas volunteer organisation operates is—what else?—a throwback to the British empire’s pink map.

This is a shame, because a book that lived up to the promise made by Ms Riley’s would have been revealing and important. The legacy of colonialism, like the empire itself, is riddled with contradictions. It is impossible to attempt to understand Britain today without wrestling with ambiguities. Yes, children of immigrants in Britain carried out the tube bombings in 2005, sparking a national reckoning over homegrown extremism, as Ms Riley describes over several pages; but another child of immigrants, Rishi Sunak, ascended to the highest echelons of government and is not mentioned by Ms Riley. The Brexit campaign to leave the European Union was based on the paradoxical promises of keeping foreigners out while opening up to the foreign empire. It deserves more careful examination than the meagre four pages Ms Riley devotes to it.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Culture.org:

The Case That Flushed Four Years Down the Drain

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your metaphorical plungers because we’re about to dive into the long and winding pipe of the infamous £5 million golden toilet heist at Blenheim Palace. For four years, this crime has mystified investigators, and its audacity has shocked the art world. Now, finally, we might be on the brink of flushing out the truth.

Back in 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan unveiled an art piece that, well, dazzled in the literal sense. It was an 18-carat gold toilet entitled ‘America,’ initially exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Let’s be honest: this toilet was no ordinary John; it was a symbol of opulence, of irony, and it attracted a whopping 100,000 people in New York eager to, ahem, experience it.

The golden spectacle was then relocated to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, strategically placed in a chamber opposite the room where the British Bulldog himself, Winston Churchill, was born. But before anyone could say “seat’s taken,” it was stolen in a high-stakes heist on September 14, 2019, just a day after its grand UK unveiling.

H2: The Hurdles and Whirlpools of a Baffling Investigation

Despite the passage of four years and the arrest of seven suspects—six men aged between 36 and 68, and one 38-year-old woman—the investigative waters have been murky. Not a single charge has been filed. Until now, that is. It seems the cogs of justice are finally turning.

The Thames Valley Police recently submitted a comprehensive file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the organization responsible for pulling the flush, so to speak, on any charges. This move significantly raises the possibility that the seven suspects could soon find themselves in deep water.

Maurizio Cattelan, the mastermind behind the £4.8 million toilet—yes, let’s not forget the 200k difference—initially took the theft with a grain of artistic humor. “Who’s so stupid to steal a toilet? ‘America’ was the one percent for the 99 percent,” he mused. But everyone knows, stealing art is no laughing matter, especially when it’s a toilet that takes on the American Dream, as the Palace’s chief executive Dominic Hare pointed out. The theft didn’t just rob a stately home; it flushed a cultural commentary down the drain.

What Happened to the Golden Throne?

As curious as it sounds, investigators believe the golden toilet was melted down and transformed into jewelry. While not confirmed, this adds another layer of irony to the story—turning an art piece designed for the “99 percent” into an elite object once again, only this time in the form of necklaces and rings.

Link to the rest at Culture.org

PG says the author should have limited herself to fewer garderobe puns.

From Literary Hub:

Lolita was originally published as a limited edition in France in September 1955. The book was released by Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, a company known for specializing in pornography, but which had also built a reputation for publishing challenging literary titles. The first print run had been 5,000 copies and the book received little attention.

Over the next few months, a handful of copies of Lolita were smuggled into England. A single copy made its way into the hands of Graham Greene, who reviewed it favorably in the Sunday Times. This was followed soon after by a scathing article in the Sunday Express, which denounced the book as “sheer unrestrained pornography.” Shortly after, the British Home Office ordered that all copies entering the country should be seized.

When he first read Lolita, George Weidenfeld knew immediately he wanted to publish it. His partner, Nigel Nicolson, was not so sure. Nor were Nigel’s parents. His father Harold Nicolson “hated” the book and said it would be “universally condemned,” while his mother Vita Sackville-West “saw no literary merit in it at all.” As for Nigel himself, he told George that he was not convinced they should proceed with publication.

George was unrelenting. He took legal advice, however, and learned that publication in England would be extremely hazardous. Under the current law, they would likely lose the case, which would result in huge losses. Any copies that had been printed would have to be pulped, not to mention the enormous editorial, marketing, publicity and legal expenses incurred up to that point. Such an outcome would be calamitous for Weidenfeld & Nicolson, placing its future in serious jeopardy.

As luck would have it, the lawyers said, the Labour politician Roy Jenkins was right then guiding a new obscenity bill through Parliament. Under this new law, if the government blocked publication and the case went to court, then the publisher would be able to argue the literary merits of the book by calling authors, academics and reviewers to testify. If this bill was enacted, then just maybe, George might have a chance. The effort would still pose an enormous risk but, for the publisher, it might be worth it.

In the decades leading up to the proposed publication of Lolita, governments had frequently cited “obscenity” as the reason for preventing controversial books being published. In the United States, the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act of 1873 had been used to ban Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Voltaire’s Candide. In Britain, the legal test for obscenity derived from a 1868 case known as Regina v Hicklin, in which a judge ruled that obscene material tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence.”

In 1928 the British government had relied on the Hicklin case to ban Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Opposition to the book was whipped up by the media, particularly the Sunday Express whose editor wrote, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” That same year, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was also deemed to violate the obscenity laws and was commercially published in only an expurgated version. Six years later, the publisher Boriswood was prosecuted for obscene libel and severely fined for releasing Boy, a sexually explicit novel by James Hanley.

Over the summer of 1958, with the lawyers saying that the new bill had a good chance of passing through Parliament, and with Nigel Nicolson’s tenuous but nervous agreement, George reached out to the author, Vladimir Nabokov, in New York and asked for permission to publish Lolita in the United Kingdom and across the Commonwealth. By the end of November, they had reached an agreement on the general terms and Nabokov wrote to George saying “an English edition of Lolita is nearing signature.”

In his reply to the author in New York, George said, “May I take this opportunity of telling you how inspired and moved my colleagues and I feel by the book and how determined we are to see that it launches with dignity and success in this country.” Publication of Lolita in Great Britain seemed a little closer, but then, by the year’s end, George’s plans started to unravel.

When word began circulating in the press that Weidenfeld & Nicolson intended to release Lolita, Nigel’s political colleagues pressed him to change course. At one point the Conservative chief whip Ted Heath (and later prime minister) begged him to cancel publication. Nigel asked him if he had read the book. Heath said he had. “Did you think it obscene?” Nigel asked. “As a matter of fact I thought it very boring,” Heath replied. “If it is boring it cannot be obscene,” Nigel said, which he later admitted was not a very good argument.

A few days later, the Attorney-General, Reginald Manningham-Buller (called “Bullying Manner” behind his back), stopped Nigel in a dark corridor in the bowels of the House of Commons. “If you publish Lolita you will be in the dock,” he said, jabbing a finger at him. “Even after the Obscenity Bill has been passed?” asked Nigel. “That won’t make any difference,” responded the country’s top lawyer. ‘The book is thoroughly obscene. I’ve given you a clear warning.”

On 16 December 1958, a week before Christmas Eve, Roy Jenkins’ new Obscenity Bill was debated in the House of Commons. Midway through the proceedings, Nigel stood up to speak. First, he acknowledged that he had an interest in the matter as a director of the firm Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which was planning to publish Lolita. Then he moved on to the substance of his speech. “The question could be asked,” he declared, “Is an obscene work of art a contradiction in terms? I would answer the question by saying, no, it is not. It is quite possible for a work of art to be obscene.” He then went on to say that the book had already been published in America, where over 250,000 copies had been sold.

Lolita had also been published in France and Italy. “The question arose whether it should be published in England. That was the question which my colleagues and I had to answer,” he continued.

Lolita deals with a perversion. It describes the love of a middle-aged man for a girl of twelve. If this perversion had been depicted in such a way as to suggest to any reader of middle age or, for that matter, any little girl—could she understand it—that the practices were pleasant and could lead to happiness, I should have had no hesitation in advising my colleagues that we ought not to publish this book. But, in fact, Lolita has a built-in condemnation of what it describes. It leads to utter misery, suicide, prison, murder and great unhappiness, both to the man and to the little girl whom he seduces.

At this point, Emrys Hughes, a Welsh Labour MP, rebel and general troublemaker, tried to interrupt, but Nigel brushed him aside and moved on to his conclusion. “I asked myself whether the loss to literature in this country through the non-publication of Lolita was greater than the risk which one ran of offending certain people by its publication.” Pausing to take a breath, he then said, “In the end, I came to the conclusion that it was probably right to publish this book.” Nigel had for the first time publicly declared his support for the publication of Lolita.

Link to the rest at Literary Hub

From The Wall Street Journal:

The average age of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s 450-seat parliament, is 41. Only three of the elected representatives are older than 60, while 17 were under 30 at the time of their election. This means that when Ukraine declared its independence, many of us were essentially children, and some weren’t yet born. What do we remember from Aug. 24, 1991?

I was 6. My memories of that day are of something profoundly significant. People didn’t go to work; they gathered in the city center, on what is now Hrushevsky Street, greeting each other in an atmosphere of incredible joy and uplift.

Now, in the 10th year of Russia’s war against Ukraine and 18 months into its full-scale phase, my thoughts drift back to the Verkhovna Rada elected in 1990, before independence. Its composition was diverse and varied. There weren’t many professional politicians. There were only Ukrainian patriots and Communists.

Everyone had an agenda. Some aspired for greater autonomy within the Soviet Union. Some defended the Ukrainian language. Some were building their careers with an eye toward Moscow. All etched their names in Ukraine’s history when they accomplished what our ancestors had dreamt of for centuries and what society demanded at that moment—independence.

On Dec. 1, 1991, the Ukrainian people overwhelmingly affirmed their desire for independence in a referendum with 84% turnout. In the Crimean peninsula, more than 54% voted in favor of independence. In the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Odesa regions, support was over 80%. Today’s Russian propaganda conveniently forgets these numbers, insisting in its narrative that Ukraine and Ukrainians don’t exist.

Historians often joke that people living through major historical events don’t realize how significant those times are. There’s some truth to that. When the current Verkhovna Rada was elected in 2019, the primary demand of the Ukrainian people was a renewal of political authority. No one could have imagined the challenges we would face in less than three years: working during a full-scale war, making pivotal decisions, defending the nation’s sovereignty, and upholding the rights of Ukrainians to exist.

Like all Ukrainians, I will never forget Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russian troops invaded. By 7 a.m., a full-scale war had been raging for two hours. Russian forces were advancing in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and from the direction of Crimea. From Belarus, they were moving toward the Kyiv region and the capital city itself. Cities like Odesa, Kherson, Kharkiv, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Kyiv, along with their surrounding areas, were under missile attack.

In Kyiv, lines formed at petrol stations, railways and ATMs—but even longer queues formed outside military recruitment offices. Tens of thousands of men and women were eager to take up arms to defend their homes, their loved ones, and their country against the invader. Ukrainians enlisted en masse in territorial defense units. Those ready to fight were given weapons. In Kyiv alone authorities distributed 20,000 rifles on Feb. 24.

. . . .

Ukraine surprised the world, the enemy and even itself. We have managed to unite, support each other, and rally around what’s crucial: our nation, our freedom, and the future of our children.

History is made by ordinary people. They become heroes, and the future depends on them. This isn’t the first time Ukraine has had to fight for its right to exist. We must win. Each and every one of us knows what we are fighting for.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Not exactly about books, but Ukraine is a terrific story. PG fervently hopes for a happy ending.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Fortunately, the author and journalist Dmitry Glukhovsky was not in Russia on Monday (August 7) when a Moscow court found him guilty on a charge of spreading false information about Russia’s armed forces. He has been sentenced to eight years in prison.

Today (August 9), in response to our inquiry, Glukhovsky’s German public relations agent, Dorle Kopetzky at the Weissundblau agency, says that the writer left Moscow shortly before Vladimir Putin began his assault on Ukraine in February 2022, “and did not return after he called the war what it is.”

Glukhovsky, who joined us onstage at Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 18 to 22) in 2018 for a Publishing Perspectives Talk interview, has rarely been complimentary to the Putin administration, and many of his works were openly defiant.

“He has been critical towards the regime all these years now,” Kopetzky says, “and has fortified his efforts in exile.”

The Associated Press account of Glukhovsky’s sentencing points out that he is “the latest artist to be handed a prison term in a relentless crackdown on dissent in Russia,” referencing the May 5 pre-trial detention for theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk.

Most prominently, of course, on Friday (August 4), the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, already imprisoned, was convicted on charges of extremism and sentenced to 19 years in prison. That event prompted the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal to write, “The world hardly needs another reminder of the true nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russian state.”

A Reuters write-up in February spoke to Glukhovsky from an undisclosed location, and confirmed that prosecutors in Russia were “proceeding with a case against exiled science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, accused of publishing ‘false information’ about Russian atrocities in the Ukraine war.” As early as June of 2022, Reuters had reported that Glukhovsky was on a Russian interior ministry wanted list, the author on encrypted communication services having called out the Kremlin’s “special military operation” as a euphemism for Putin’s land-grab.

Glukhovsky, in a 2018 pre-Frankfurt interview with Publishing Perspectives, described the “wonderful times” of the current post-Soviet era for writers willing to see “an epoch of not only post-truth but also post-ethic.”

“These are really the times,” he said, “when all a writer needs to do is sit down and focus carefully on the dubious reality unfolding around him. What’s the point of writing a dystopian fiction nowadays,” he asks, “when the reality is exceeding your wildest fantasies?”

. . . .

Having worked in film, video game, and television development Glukhovsky has particularly broad potency as a storyteller and since the release of his debut trilogy Metro 2033, he has cultivated a loyal international following, propelling his writings into broad international translation and publishing deals.

Kopetsky describes his latest two-volume “Outpost” series as being set “in a Russia isolated from the West and ruled by a new czar from Moscow.” In the books, “a disease in Russia turns people into man-eating zombies after they hear a special combination of words, a ‘somewhat pandemic neuro-lingual infection.’”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says Russia has experienced a huge brain drain as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. A great portion of the nation’s young highly-educated and talented people left the country to live in Eastern Europe and points beyond during the weeks following the outbreak of the war. PG thinks most will never return to Russia. They will certainly not return if Putin or someone who emulates Putin is the nation’s ruler.

Not far into the war, Russia instituted a program to take convicted criminals out of the nation’s prisons with a promise of a full pardon if the convicts agreed to fight on the front lines for a period of time – often one-two years. These conscripts have been used for roles such as leading charges toward dug-in Ukrainian troops armed with machine guns, and artillery.

Such charges define the term, “cannon fodder” and the Russian conscripts have been killed and severely wounded in large numbers. Needless to say, regular Russian soldiers have priority for the treatment of their wounds, and the convicts are left to treat themselves or each other as best they can.

Russia had a shrinking population before the invasion and the death and crippling of so many young Russian men will certainly accelerate the population decline. Russian ex-pats are unlikely to bring their families back to Russia in the aftermath of the war, regardless of how it ends.

An old saying goes, “The future belongs to those who show up.” Fewer and fewer Russians are going to show up for Russia’s future.

From Publishing Perspectives:

As Publishing Perspectives readers know, the academic and scholarly world’s march toward open-access models hasn’t moved as quickly as many would like. The late-June release of Europe’s Coalition S initiative for open access called “Plan S” was plainly presented as a disappointment.

Closer to the ground, if you will, however, there are parties gamely announcing progress and achievements, among them the London-based 182-year-old Royal Society of Chemistry (the URL of which, yes, looks like that of the Royal Shakespeare Company).

In its media messaging today (August 11), the society—which has an international membership of more than 50,000—is focusing on what may be to some a surprising number of transformative agreements in North America, 46 all told. They are:

• 2018: One agreement (the society’s first in the United States, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• 2019-21: Three agreements (all in the United States)
• 2022: Seven agreements (all in the United States)
• 2023: 35 agreements (21 in the United States, one in Mexico, and 13 in Canada)

The Biden administration in August of 2022 announced its controversial requirement that by the end of 2025 all taxpayer-funded research will have to be made freely available to the public as soon as a final peer-reviewed manuscript of a report is published. The chemistry society in England is now mentioning this as one of the factors that has accelerated its agreements, along with the society’s own plans.

“On the back of the US government’s open-access mandate and our own open-access commitments,” the society reports, “the number of deals has grown rapidly within the region every year, with 2023 seeing 28 new deals, including our first agreements with partners in Canada and Mexico.”

. . . .

Sara Bosshart is the Royal Society of Chemistry’s head of open access, and she’s quoted today, saying, “We were very excited last year to announce that we aim to make all of our fully society-owned journals open access within the next five years. Open access is at the core of our mission to help the chemical sciences make the world a better place and by making our 44 society-owned journals free-to-read, we’ll be providing unrestricted global access to all of the cutting-edge research we publish.

“A key priority for our transition,” Bosshart says, “is to ensure that our international author base continues to have the same ability to publish in our journals. For this reason, we’re planning to spend the next two years working with our world partners, institutions, and community to develop new open-access models that function at an institutional level, rather than relying solely on author publication charges.

“Transformative agreements are an essential stepping stone in our [progress] toward 100-percent open access as they form the basis for future open-access agreements and allow us to transition gradually from subscriptions to open access. They also strengthen the relationships we have with our United States institutional partners and create a forum for conversation and collaboration toward a joint open-access future.

“Our end goal is an open-access future that ensures that everyone, everywhere, has the same potential to access and contribute to the latest discoveries in the chemical sciences and beyond—and we’re looking forward to working collectively with our community to achieve this vision.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Wall Street Journal:

If there was a Roman version of “1066 and All That,” the satirical romp through English history, the year 476 would surely be one of those suspiciously bold lines in our collective historical imagination. It was then that Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor, was deposed in the west. On one side of his 10-month reign lay Antiquity. On the other, the Middle Ages.

Where does that leave Theoderic the Great, the Ostrogothic king who reigned in Italy from 493 until his death in 526? Under the rule of this Gothic-speaking warrior, the Colosseum still rang with the roar of spectators, crisp mountain water still streamed through the aqueducts, and giants of Latin literature, like Cassiodorus and Boethius, still served in the senate.

Hans-Ulrich Wiemer’s “Theoderic the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans” is a monumental exploration of the life and times of this remarkable leader. It is the most important treatment of its subject since Wilhelm Ensslin’s 1947 biography, and since Mr. Wiemer’s book (here in John Noël Dillon’s fluid English translation) surpasses its predecessor in breadth and sophistication, the author can claim the laurel of having written the best profile of Theoderic we have.

The story of Theoderic is epic and improbable. He was born in 453 or 454 in the ever-contested Danubian borderlands, probably in what is now the east of Austria, to an elite Gothic warrior and a mother of obscure background. The Gothic tribe to which Theoderic belonged had just emerged, following the recent death of Attila, from a long spell of domination by the Huns. In 461, the boy Theoderic was shipped to Constantinople as insurance for a treaty. He spent almost a decade, his formative youth, in the great metropolitan capital of the Roman Empire.

Theoderic’s power derived less from his distinguished ancestry or the Gothic respect for royal legitimacy, Mr. Wiemer emphasizes, than from his success as a warrior. As an upstart prince, he killed the Sarmatian King Babai with his own hands. As a commander at the head of a fearsome Gothic army, he proved a fickle ally for the eastern Roman Empire, whose emperors were hardly models of loyalty themselves. In the early 480s, he was named commander-in-chief by the Romans. Within a few years, he was besieging Constantinople.

If his career had ended there, Theoderic’s name would belong among the distinguished mercenary warlords of the troubled fifth century. But fortune favors the bold, and Theoderic had even grander ambitions. In 488, he set off with some 100,000 followers—men, women and children—in an armed wagon train on an uncertain journey from the banks of the Danube (in what is now Bulgaria) to Italy. Their goals were to unseat Odoacer—the deposer of Romulus Augustulus—and to find for themselves a permanent home. Theoderic cornered Odoacer and his forces in the major stronghold of Ravenna, and the two signed a treaty by which they were meant to share power. The treaty lasted all of about 10 days, before Theoderic personally clove his rival in two (“with a single sword stroke,” Mr. Wiemer tells us, “slicing him apart from collarbone to hip”). From such sanguinary beginnings emerged a generation of peace in Italy.

What makes Mr. Wiemer’s survey so rich is his mastery of recent research on the twilight of antiquity. Theoderic’s reign cuts to the heart of virtually every great debate among scholars of this period. Were his Ostrogoths an essentially Germanic tribe, or is ethnicity a fiction ever reconfigured by contingent power dynamics?

For Mr. Wiemer, a professor of ancient history at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, Ostrogoths were a “community of violence” whose material basis was war and plunder. But the author recognizes that the masses who followed Theoderic on his Italian adventure were a people of shared history and culture, setting them apart from the natives in Italy and drawing them closer to other groups, such as the Visigoths who had settled in Spain and Gaul.

Mr. Wiemer is convincing on the main lines of Theoderic’s domestic and foreign policy. At home, Theoderic pursued functional specialization between the Goths and the Romans. The former were warriors (if also landowners), the latter civilians. A two-track government reflected this essential division of labor. Theoderic sought complementarity, not fusion.

Abroad, he sought legitimacy from the eastern Roman capital, along with stability in the post-Roman west. By means of strategic treaties and an astonishing network of marriage alliances among the Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians and others, Theoderic emerged as the most powerful ruler west of Constantinople. Thanks to opportunistic expansion, he came to control wide swathes of the Balkans, much of southern Gaul and (nominally) the Iberian Peninsula. In the early sixth century, it would not have been obvious that the Frankish kingdom would prove more enduring and consequential.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Coin depicting Flavius Theodoricus (Theodoric the Great). Roman Vassal and King of the Ostrogoths. Only a single coin with this design is known; it is in the collection of Italian numismatic Francesco Gnecchi, displayed in Palazzo Massimo, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Mausoleum of Theoderic, built in 520 AD by Theoderic the Great as his future tomb, Ravenna, Italy Source: Wikimedia Commons

From Reason:

Pocket gadgets were all the rage in Adam Smith’s day. Their popularity inspired one of the most paradoxical, charming, and insightful passages in his work.

The best known are watches. A pocket timepiece was an 18th century man’s must-have fashion accessory, its presence indicated by a ribbon or bright steel chain hanging from the owner’s waist, bedecked with seals and a watch key. Contemporary art depicts not just affluent people but sailors and farm workers sporting watch chains. One sailor even wears two. “It had been the pride of my life, ever since pride commenced, to wear a watch,” wrote a journeyman stocking maker about acquiring his first in 1747.

Laborers could buy watches secondhand and pawn them when they needed cash. A favorite target for pickpockets, “watches were consistently the most valuable item of apparel stolen from working men in the eighteenth century,” writes historian John Styles, who analyzed records from several English jurisdictions.

But timepieces were hardly the only gizmos stuffing 18th century pockets, especially among the well-to-do. At a coffeehouse, a gentleman might pull out a silver nutmeg grater to add spice to his drink or a pocket globe to make a geographical point. The scientifically inclined might carry a simple microscope, known as a flea glass, to examine flowers and insects while strolling through gardens or fields. He could gaze through a pocket telescope and then, with a few twists, convert it into a mini-microscope. He could improve his observations with a pocket tripod or camera obscura and could pencil notes in a pocket diary or on an erasable sheet of ivory. (Not content with a single sheet, Thomas Jefferson carried ivory pocket notebooks.)

The coolest of all pocket gadgets were what antiquarians call etuis and Smith referred to as “tweezer cases.” A typical 18th century etui looks like a slightly oversized cigarette lighter covered in shagreen, a textured rawhide made from shark or ray skin. The lid opens up to reveal an assortment of miniature tools, each fitting into an appropriately shaped slot. Today’s crossword puzzle clues often describe etuis as sewing or needle cases, but that was only one of many varieties. An etui might contain drawing instruments—a compass, ruler, pencil, and set of pen nibs. It could hold surgeon’s tools or tiny perfume bottles. Many offered a tool set handy for travelers: a tiny knife, two-pronged fork, and snuff spoon; scissors, tweezers, a razor, and an earwax scraper; a pencil holder and pen nib; perhaps a ruler or bodkin. The cap of a cylindrical etui might separate into a spyglass.

All these “toys,” as they were called, kept early manufacturers busy, especially in the British metal-working capital of Birmingham. A 1767 directory listed some 100 Birmingham toy makers, producing everything from buttons and buckles to tweezers and toothpick cases. “For Cheapness, Beauty and Elegance no Place in the world can vie with them,” the directory declared. Like Smith’s famous pin factory, these preindustrial plants depended on hand tools and the division of labor, not automated machinery.

Ingenious and ostensibly useful, pocket gadgets and other toys epitomized a new culture of consumption that also included tea, tobacco, gin, and printed cotton fabrics. These items were neither the traditional indulgences of the rich nor the necessities of life. Few people needed a pocket watch, let alone a flea glass or an etui. But these gadgets were fashionable, and they tempted buyers from a wide range of incomes.

A fool “cannot withstand the charms of a toyshop; snuff-boxes, watches, heads of canes, etc., are his destruction,” the Earl of Chesterfield warned his son in a 1749 letter. He returned to the subject the following year. “There is another sort of expense that I will not allow, only because it is a silly one,” he wrote. “I mean the fooling away your money in baubles at toy shops. Have one handsome snuff-box (if you take snuff), and one handsome sword; but then no more pretty and very useless things.” A fortune, Chesterfield cautioned, could quickly disappear through impulse purchases.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759, Smith examined what made these objects so enticing. Pocket gadgets claimed to have practical functions, but these “trinkets of frivolous utility” struck Smith as more trouble than they were worth. He deemed their appeal less practical than aesthetic and imaginative.

“What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility,” Smith wrote, “as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number.” Toys embodied aptness, “the beauty of order, of art and contrivance.” They were ingenious and precise. They were cool. And they weren’t the only objects of desire with these qualities.

The same pattern applied, Smith argued, to the idea of wealth. He portrayed the ambitious son of a poor man, who imagines that servants, coaches, and a large mansion would make his life run smoothly. Pursuing a glamorous vision of wealth and convenience, he experiences anxiety, hardship, and fatigue. Finally, in old age, “he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys.”

Yet Smith didn’t condemn the aspiring poor man or deride the lover of toys. He depicted them with sympathetic bemusement, recognizing their foibles as both common and paradoxically productive. We evaluate such desires as irrational only when we’re sick or depressed, he suggested. In a good mood, we care less about the practical costs and benefits than about the joys provided by “the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system….The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety.”

Besides, Smith suggested, pursuing the false promise of tranquility and convenience had social benefits. It was nothing less than the source of civilization itself: “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.”

Then Smith gave his analysis a twist. The same aesthetic impulse that draws people to ingenious trinkets and leads them to pursue wealth and greatness, he argued, also inspires projects for public improvements, from roads and canals to constitutional reforms. However worthwhile one’s preferred policies might be for public welfare, their benefits—like those of a pocket globe—are secondary to the beauty of the system.

“The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects,” he wrote. “The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions.” Only the least self-aware policy wonk can fail to see the truth in Smith’s claim.

Here, however, the separation of means and end can be more serious than in the case of a trinket of frivolous utility. Buying a gadget you don’t need because you like the way it works doesn’t hurt anyone but you. Enacting policies because they sound cool can hurt the public they’re supposed to benefit. “All constitutions of government,” Smith reminded readers, “are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.” Elsewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith criticized the “man of system” who imposed his ideal order, heedless of the wishes of those he governed.

Link to the rest at Reason

From The Economist:

Customers at the Scruton cafe in Budapest don’t turn up for its chicken and buttered cauliflower. Nor for its decor. Instead they come for the peculiar contents on show. Scattered around the room are a writing table, a blue-and-white china tea set and a collection of vinyl records (classical) all shipped from England. Odd goods are also on sale. Spend 4,900 forints (about £11) and you can pick up a T-shirt emblazoned with “Conservatism is more an instinct than an idea”. A plaster bust of a tousle-haired, middle-aged man costs twice that. The figure depicted was a political thinker, Roger Scruton.

It’s peculiar to see a cafe in Budapest devoted to Scruton, a conservative Englishman who died in 2020. Stranger yet, two more such cafes exist in the Hungarian capital. In each are scattered “Scrutopia”: various items donated by his widow from his flat in London and farm in Wiltshire. Most striking is the sight of a saddle and riding crop. Scruton was not born to hunt, but took it up with enthusiasm in middle age, perhaps because the hobby chimed with his political philosophy and love of tradition. The author of over 50 books, he wrote about values of community, reciprocal obligations, courtliness and kingship, and more. These all, he believed, were embodied in the hunt.

In Britain, Scruton’s ideas have gained some traction. As prime minister, Theresa May appointed him to lead official efforts to rewrite planning rules to ensure new constructions went up along traditionalist lines—a process dubbed “building beautiful”. (It fell apart.) A summer school for avid Scruton disciples in Britain takes place each June. And his ideas still have a strong pull on the New Right of the Conservative Party, which tends to avoid taking detailed policy positions other than being in favour of tradition. Whereas Thatcherism involved ideas of borderless free-market capitalism, which went together with smashing up old ways of doing things, for Scrutonites there is much to be said for harking back to old ways. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was a senior figure in government until recently, and Suella Braverman, the home secretary, are two Scruton-enthusiasts.

Where Scruton really stirs up strongest interest, however, is among those on the right fringe of continental European politics—the most notable adherent is Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban. Scruton’s ideas of the home and his talk of the rituals of a nation seem to resonate especially strongly. Mr Orban can employ such ideas to try to justify his hostility to immigrants and to international institutions such as the European Union (even as it simultaneously subsidises his country’s economic growth). Some right-leaning Swedes are fond of Scruton, too. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is another fan. She likes to quote one saying of his: “it is always right to keep things as they are, in case worse things are proposed”.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG had never heard of Scruton, but he is sometimes drawn to authors who collect a lot of negative attention, especially if they write non-fiction.