Vorsprung durch Natur

The German company Festo makes a wide range of fascinating devices, many of which are based upon some kind of naturally occurring model of movement.

Among their products are various drones, and I have to say that the AquaPenguin is among my favourites.



The AirPenguin is obviously less based on actual penguin characteristics; still, it must be one of the most lovely and elegant drones created so far.



Still: stick a Hellfire launcher on that puppy and it'd make the most elegant Flying Robot of Death in the world.

A guy can dream, can't he?

(The BionicKangaroo, BionicOpter and SmartBird are also worth looking at.)

Touring the ghostly technopolis

Via Reason, a video tour around Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

It's a short, interesting and eerie journey through a kind of eco-Ballardian "community" in the desert: there's even an empty swimming pool 53 seconds in!



Whether this particular venture is sustainable or economically viable over the long term, I can't say.

But it does give me the urge to re-read Super-Cannes.

The dragons are already slain

An entertaining performance at the Bundestag today in an event related to the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It helps if you speak German, but if not, Alex Harrowell has provided a description and a few highlights in English at A Fistful of Euros:

Where do we start here? Obviously there’s the bit where he calls the Left Party MPs the “wretched remnants of everything we so fortunately overcame”. There’s the speaker of parliament, the CDU’s Norbert Lammert, a man who looks and talks exactly like a conservative called Norbert, who calls him to order on the grounds that he was invited to sing, dammit, and if he wants to speak he can always get elected. Biermann remarks that the DDR didn’t manage to shut him up and Lammert won’t.

The original:

Full English Brexit

...comes, perhaps, one step closer.

Indeed, as Britain's conservative government is rapidly approaching a red line, it looks from Berlin as though Cameron is neither willing nor able to apply the brakes. Should Cameron move to establish numerical limits on immigration from EU member states, "there will be no going back," say sources in Berlin. First, they say, Cameron's proposal would be torpedoed in Brussels by Germany and several other EU countries and then he would return home and lose the referendum on Britain's exit from the EU.

Special journal issue: Crime Stories

I am very pleased to be able to announce that a special issue of Media History edited by myself and Paul Knepper -- "Criminality, Policing and the Press in Inter-war European and Transatlantic Perspectives" -- has now left the printers (which I can confirm since I received my copy today).

The four main articles (access to which will require an institutional subscription, probably through a university) consider a variety of topics:

In "Rogues of the Racecourse: Racing Men and the Press in Interwar Britain", Heather Shore (Leeds Metropolitan) considers the often dramatic (and sometimes violent) world of racecourse gangs and their presentation in both the serious and sensationalist newspaper press. (Among those gangs considered in the article are then then-infamous Sabinis, who have featured recently in fictional form in the hit British television show Peaky Blinders.)

In "Two Suspicious Persons: Norwegian Narratives and Images of a Police Murder Case, 1926-1950", Per Jørgen Ystehede (University of Oslo) takes a cross-media look at a case of police murder that, although legendary within Norway, has yet to be given the attention it deserves outside of that national context. Featuring stills from the 1949 feature film based on the case (which was banned in 1952 and not shown again until 2007), the article locates the Norwegian discourse around the case both within national and broader European trends involving perceptions of crime.

My own article, "The Constables and the 'Garage Girl': The Police, the Press, and the Case of Helene Adele", considers the controversy that arose when two London Metropolitan Police constables arrested a young woman for alleged disorder in the summer of 1928. She accused the constables of attempting to sexually assault her and use false charges to discredit her story, leading to a trial (and the eventual conviction) of the two men. Placed within the context of the period's sensationalist press and a long series of police scandals, the case has much to say about the complexities of "human interest" journalism in the 1920s.

Paul Knepper (University of Sheffield), in "International Criminals: The League of Nations, the Traffic in Women and the Press", explores one of the lesser known aspects of the League's activities in the inter-war period: the campaign against the traffic in women (previously known as "white slavery"). An important stage in the evolution of the modern language of "human trafficking", the League's investigations and reports were not only given widespread coverage but served as an important justification for the international organisation's existence.

In addition, Paul and I present an introductory essay (access to this is FREE) that explores some European and transatlantic contexts of recent crime-and-media historiography, which has--certainly for the inter-war period--become a very active field in recent years.

The special issue had its origins in a session of the 2012 European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow that I organised, though there have been a few twists and turns since its origins.

It has been a great experience to work with such talented colleagues who are, truly, not only engaged in some fascinating research but also capable of framing their work in clear and vivid language.

Furthermore, it was a very positive experience working with Media History, and we are all quite happy with the result.

Should anyone be interested in a copy of these essays but not have access to them through their institution, please do contact me. (Drafts of the introductory essay and my own article are available via my academia.edu page).

[Cross-posted at The Most Remarkable Woman in England]

On directing "the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage"

While I certainly don't agree with everything in Gary Indiana's review of a new biography of William Burroughs (is it really necessary to disparage realism and coherent narrative in praising more experimental fiction? I think not), it is certainly a readable engagement with an author about whose work I know far too little.

In any case, I also liked these passages:

The radically anti-authoritarian, left-libertarian notions he espoused probably look like irresponsible nihilism (or ‘antinomian morality’, in Schjeldahl’s solecism) to many of those ensconced at their computer screens during most of their waking life, or bedazzled by mobiles and ubiquitous electronic signage in a society overloaded with information yet drained of authentic experience. It now seems almost logical that the insight Burroughs offers into the brain-scrambling technical synaesthesia spreading everywhere would be precisely what brands him a crackpot, rather than the silly religions and fatuous disciplines he so often became fascinated by. Still, I feel it’s necessary to say how stupid this inverted logic is.

On social media legions of isolated individuals, with the brainless malice of a concierge, spread ‘the real dirt’ on artists, writers, actors, musicians, athletes and others in the public eye. A tsunami of ugly feelings surges across the global clothesline at the mere mention of ‘Woody Allen’ or ‘Roman Polanski’ in the press; Burroughs, too, has an anti-claque of Torquemada wannabes, enraged over his accidental shooting of his wife in 1951. Social media can launch a witch hunt or pogrom just as readily as a ‘progressive’ uprising, and in either instance directs the madness of crowds to unexamined targets of outrage; the technology itself is probably as addictive as heroin, since it acts directly on neural synapses, and its instantaneous transmission eliminates any space for reflection or analysis between emotional impulse and action. 

It rather seriously overworks the biological analogy of the-internet-as-drug, but as a description of the ultimately frustrating nature of social media discussions these days (one wave of overheated tribal screaming after another...), it certainly struck a chord with me.

   

Forthcoming article on ethnicity and the British criminal justice system, 18th and 19th centuries

I have just noted that an article by myself and Prof. Peter King -- "Black People and the Criminal Justice System: Prejudice and Practice in Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century London" -- has now appeared in an "advance access" version at Historical Research.

I'm not sure exactly when it'll appear in its final form, but for those of you with institutional access, it might be of interest already.

The abstract:

This article explores how attitudes to black people were translated into practice by examining how they fared as victims, witnesses and especially as the accused when they came to the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concludes that there was no significant discrimination against blacks as prosecutors and witnesses. Moreover, between 1791 and 1805, when a source containing systematic evidence on the ethnicity of the accused is briefly available, black people probably formed a smaller proportion of the accused than they did of the London population as a whole, and those who were prosecuted were less likely than average to be convicted and more likely to have their charges reduced. Although punishment patterns for black convicts included rather greater emphasis on transportation, an investigation of criminal justice practice in London reveals little or no systematic prejudice towards black people, thus indicating important contrasts with the experience of black people in colonial contexts and with the ways other ethnic groups such as the Irish were dealt with at the Old Bailey.

I'm quite pleased that this is finally seeing the light of day. This article was my first excursion into a more quantitative approach to history--though ultimately there was a lot of qualitative analysis as well--and it gave me the opportunity to focus for a while on the interesting and difficult history of ethnicity and "race."

The article emerged from a broader project led by Pete King, and it is best enjoyed in conjuction with his publication on the treatment of the Irish in the London courts: Peter King, "Ethnicity, Prejudice, and Justice: The Treatment of the Irish at the Old Bailey, 1750-1825," Journal of British Studies 52, no. 2 (2013): 390-414.

I will also note when the article appears in its final, printed form (with actual page numbers and everything).

"Quite simply an absorbing read"

The June issue of the English Historical Review contains a very fine review of The Most Remarkable Woman in England which is all the more enjoyable because it was written by Adrian Bingham, who is not only one of the leading historians of the twentieth-century British press but also someone whose own work influenced my approach to some of the topics in my book on the Pace murder trial.

I'm particularly pleased by the review as it is attentive to a difficult problem with which I wrestled throughout the more than five years I spent researching and writing the book: how to combine an exciting story that would appeal to as broad an audience as possible (essentially anyone who is interested in real-life human drama and not overly averse to endnotes) while also maintaining enough academic street cred for my professional historian peers to still take it seriously.

Or, as Bingham puts it in his review:  

What is the best way for academic historians to broaden their audience? How should they reach out to the much-sought-after ‘general reader’? One option (the Niall Ferguson or Simon Schama route) is to produce bold grand narratives and dazzle the public with new ways of looking at the ‘big picture’. An alternative, pursued here by John Carter Wood, is to narrow the scale, and to focus upon a dramatic human story, which can then be used to illuminate the period in question.

Happily, he finds that I have succeeded in this effort: 

The spectacular success of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2009), based on a murder mystery that unfolded in Wiltshire in 1860, seems to have created a demand for real-life historical detective stories, and Wood has produced a pacy, scholarly and thought-provoking contribution to the genre. ...

Although this book is clearly designed to appeal beyond the academy, it will be of interest to scholars.... Firstly, it is quite simply an absorbing read. The case itself is a fascinating one, and Wood does it full justice. He writes crisply and vividly, and shows a real empathy for his protagonists, teasing out the likely motivations for their actions.... He has clearly learned well from the crime novelists, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, who so entertained the British public in the 1920s.

At the end, Bingham raises a potential problem that was always on my mind (and which plagued my efforts to publish the book until I made contact with the wonderful people at Manchester University Press):

There is a danger that books like this may fall between two stools. Wood is far more measured in his approach than a writer such as Summerscale, and he is too scrupulous a historian to let his imagination take him further than the evidence allows in order to entertain the reader. At the same time, some of those working in the field would undoubtedly have been interested in seeing some of the underlying themes developed further. 

However, this dilemma has a very happy ending:

On its own terms, though, as a forensic historical examination of one of the decade’s most intriguing murder cases, this is an undoubted success. I hope it gets the wider readership it deserves.

It goes without saying, I suppose, that I do too.

I've had a fairly detailed look at reviews of the book at the blog for The Most Remarkable Woman in England, and there is also a shorter and more concise reviews page if you just want to skim all the nice things that people have been saying about it.

And if you feel so inclined, please do order The Most Remarkable Woman in England from your local bookstore, from Manchester University Press or from the online retailer of your choice.

Rumour has it that you may be glad you did. 

[Also posted at The Most Remarkable Woman in England blog]

Hotel art #10

Part of an occasional series.

Le Petit Hotel, Turin, Italy (July 2014).

"The last gasp of romantic hatred of the twentieth century"

I happen to have been reading Philip Roth's 1990 novel Deception today (which is engrossing and quite interesting, though not at the top of my list of Roth-so-far), and as this passage seemed relevant to events today--25 years later--I thought I would place it here.

This is more, please note, to mark this personal coincidence (so that I might find it again) and as a contribution to the broader cultural debate about what's going on in European countries rather than as a comment on the complicated and horrifying Middle Eastern conflict that I've been watching news reports about since I was old enough to watch TV (so we're getting on nearly 40 years now) and having debates about since I was old enough to debate politics (so going on about 30 years now). 

So: keep your simplistic partisan sloganeering--from either side--to yourselves, please. That's not what I'm on about here.


For background: the passage (like much of the book), consists of a conversation between a pair who is conducting an affair, a male American author of Jewish background and an upper-middle-class Englishwoman.

The American author's question begins the exchange:  

"Why does everybody around here hate Israel so much? Can you explain that to me? I have an argument every time I go out now. And I come home in a fury and can't sleep all night. I am allied, in one way or another, with the planet's two greatest scourges, Israel and America. Let's grant that Israel is a terrible country—"

"But I won't."

"But let's grant it. Still, there are many countries that are far more terrible. Yet the hostility to Israel is almost universal among the people I meet."

"I have never been able to understand it myself. It seems to me one of the most curious freaks of modern history. Because it's just an article of faith among left and left of center, isn't it?"

"But why?"

"I simply don't understand it."

"Do you ever ask people?"

"Yes, often."

"And what do they say? Because of the way they treat Arabs. That is the greatest crime in all of human history."

"Oh, sure, that's what they say. I don't believe a word of it. I think it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of hypocrisy in human history."

"Do they know Arabs?"

"Of course they don't. In English high culture, you could say it's because of this Foreign Office fantasy about Arabs, and Lawrence of Arabia, all this, coupled with a serious knowledge of Arab interests, and families with all sorts of contacts with sheikhs and who still get watches for Christmas and all that rubbish. It's a kind of feudal thing which the British quite like. You know, our boys and their boys. But that's sort of establishment—the actual antagonism comes from the so-called intelligentsia of this country."

"And what do you think is at the root of it?"

"I don't think it's anti-Semitism."

"No?"

"Not in the main. no. It's just the fashionable left. They're very depressing. I can only come to the conclusion that some people are so wedded to certain unrealistic ideas of human justice and human rights that they can't make concessions to necessity of any kind. In other words, if you're an Israeli you must live by the highest standards and therefore you can't do anything really, just go back and turn the other cheek, like J.C. said. But also it seems to me an unspoken corollary that you criticize most harshly the people who actually behave best, or the least badly. It's quite banal, isn't it? These hotheaded people disapprove selectively and most strongly of the least reprehensible things. It's just unreal, isn't it? I think it has to do with the last gasp of romantic hatred of the twentieth century. But it's not really as strong in this country as you may think."

"You think not."

"I'm sure not."

"Well. I'd feel much better if that's true. About this country, and about you too."

Laughter.

Laughter being in such short supply these days, I'll just leave it there. 

[Text from Philip Roth, Deception (London: Vintage, 1990), 79-81.

Hotel art #9

Part of an occasional series.

John Dodgson House (a UCL residence hall), King's Cross, London (July 2014)

Switch it off

Although I'm someone who once had (cautiously) high hopes for the Internet becoming a force for creating a better informed, better connected and more tolerant global public sphere, I have been becoming increasingly aware--like a lot of us--that it's about as likely to be a tool for pervasive surveillance, tendentious propaganda and unhinged misinformation.

And although I participate in various forms of social media (because--at least so far--its benefits seem to outweigh its costs for me personally), I've found it, over the last five years or so, to be increasingly a source of frustration and even despair.

Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "Diary" at the London Review of Books crystallises a lot of what I've been thinking along these lines with reference to recent events in Ukraine.

As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the ‘creatives’ who make up the semi-mythical Russian middle class – that normally apolitical but vaguely anti-Putin iPhone crowd who’d joined the protests in 2011 and 2012 – were suddenly frothing with patriotic passion. I imagined myself in some downmarket horror movie where you wake to find your neighbours are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic bite marks on their necks.

I was talking to a work colleague just today about a very similar trend that she had noticed among Russian and Ukrainian friends on Facebook.

More generally, this is good to remember:

A common myth about social media is that it’s a priori a tool of liberation, taking publishing out of the hands of power. But Facebook and Twitter are a perfect vehicle for postmodern authoritarian regimes that focus on opposition narratives instead of simply suppressing them. You can switch off the TV, but you can’t stop a political technologist getting inside social media and generating memes from within.

This is also true for radical Islamism.

For myself, I've certainly been aghast (though not surprised) by Russian propaganda; what has disturbed me more has been the number of Western journalists willing to echo it.

Pomerantsev is eloquent here on this "strange complicity with the Kremlin's cause":

When she wasn’t repeating news from Brighton Beach my New Jersey cousin was sending me links to the Guardian. Comment is Free has become well known for its references to the Ukrainian fascist takeover. My Kiev friends began to message me, looking for an explanation: ‘Is Seumas Milne in the pay of the Kremlin?’ they would ask. Probably not, I said. ‘It all fits into a larger pattern of English racism towards Eastern Europeans,’ Oksana Forostyna, executive editor of the Ukrainian cultural magazine Krytyka, told me. She too spoke of the Ukrainians as ‘the new Untermenschen who get called whores and fascists. All those English jokes and novels about Ukrainian sluts; the weird fixation you had during Euro 2012 that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazi hooligans – there was even a BBC documentary warning football fans not to come – when in truth there are fewer racist attacks in Ukraine than in Britain … Now Putin can play on those prejudices.’

(Germany, has a very similar problem.)

Finally, I can't say that I disagree with this entirely:

‘The only thing to do if you want to stay sane in this war is quit social media,’ Alexey said when I Skyped him.

On related points, I would recommend that people read Evgeny Morozov's insightful book The Net Delusion.

See you online.

Hotel art #8

Lindner Hotel and Spa (near Speyer), 22 June 2014

La liberté vint de la mer

The Normandy American War Cemetery and Memorial,  Coleville-sur-Mer (2006)

On the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, I have to think of two members of my family who were, to varying extents, involved.

In going through some of my parents' war-time correspondence not that long ago, I ran across the following in a letter from my uncle George--who was serving on a US Navy warship--to my father, who was in the army.

In October 1944, George was filling his brother in on what he'd been up to that year. He got to talking about Normandy:

"Then 6 weeks of Normandy--from D Day until days later when the sea lanes were cleared--we had all the excitement I could possibly want. Our ship got several commendations and quite a bit of publicity for our part in the operation. The miraculous fact that we weren't even hit still amazes me. Bombs hit the water so close to us that spray showered our decks, seven torpedoes were thrown at us all missing from 200 yards to 25 feet, 88mm shells narrowly missed us a dozen times but [our] luck held out. Our salvoes knocked out many a shore battery that was holding up the army's advance on the beach and it was a swell feeling to know that we were saving some of those soldiers. Those Nazis were pretty tough in Normandy." 

By the time the letter arrived, my father's unit--the 316th Army Station Hospital--had been relocated to Glasgow, but from the autumn of 1943 to the summer of 1944, he was near the Devonshire coast. On 6 June 1944 he was, therefore, not all that far away, geographically speaking, from where his brother was having what sounds like a pretty harrowing day.  (Though he wouldn't have been aware of this fact at the time.)

(My mother's main memory of that day was wondering where all the Yanks had suddenly disappeared to.) 

I recently ran across a fairly detailed unit history online (it seems to take a while to load, but the link should work), and the section for D-Day is interesting.

Having heard SHAEF’s official communiqué about the Invasion, the Hospital was now ready to fulfil its particular mission in the grand-scale assault on “Fortress Europe”. It was not however until the first casualties from the D-Day landings arrived on 11 June 1944, that the unit was confronted with “real” war! They were 23 German Prisoners of War, accompanied by armed MPs! The unit was now temporarily acting as a Transit Hospital. Five days later, it was 7 July 1944, the first Hospital Train filled with American battle casualties arrived at the nearby Heathfield Station of the Great Western Railway, and the Hospital settled down in earnest to its real war job. The top number of patients occupying the installation was reached on 30 July, when the Registrar had 819 patients listed. 

We're fairly often in Normandy--though in a different part than where the landings took place--but a few reminders of the war are still very visible.

It's not, really, all that long ago.

Values for money

Something I've just run across in the course of research: a brief passage from a critique of the English [sic*] educational system by Geoffrey Vickers:

"Although education costs money and although it shows in the long run an economic return, there is an insuperable antipathy between education and commercialism. We [in England] start with this handicap. Something vital in the character of a nation lies in the answer to the question – which of its public services is a model to the world? Our plutocracy is world famous for its – police."

Geoffrey Vickers, "Education, War, Change" (18 December 1939), Institute of Education (London), Fred Clarke archive, MOO /13, p 5.

[UPDATE]

Something else just run across, from about the same time and on a similar theme: a comment from a paper by Harold Dent, at the time editor of the Times Educational Supplement.

"Our present systems of education...are highly undemocratic. They are socially stratified to a degree, and they present the very essence of inequality of opportunity. They offer adequate training only to the few, and their basic philosophy is that not of a democratic, but of an acquisitive and competitive society, in which the prizes are privilege, power, and the well-filled purse."

H. C. Dent, "Reform in Education" (16 May 1942), Institute of Education (London), Fred Clarke archive, MOO /81, p 1.

*"We are worse off in this respect [i.e., having ‘enough education of the right kind’] than most of the smaller and poorer democracies. [...] Scotland is the poorer half of the United Kingdom – and the better educated." (Vickers, p 5).

Pasquinades, plethoras and proles

From the conclusion to Will Smith's Guardian review of Rod Liddle's new book:

Liddle is a typical petit bourgeois, afraid of either being absorbed into the proletariat he champions, or destroyed by the capitalist bogeyman he excoriates but depends on for his wonga. The cultural cringing of the squeezed intellectual middle is creased into every line of this baggy diatribe, in the form of scores of French loan words, pasquinades poorly aimed at intellectuals he regards as pretentious, and of course that plethora of fucks.

That would be a negative review, then, I take it

It's safe to say Liddle's book isn't going to be on my reading list anyway. But it's nice to have that confirmed.

(This blog has in its distant past, it should perhaps be noted, featured critical remarks on writing by Messrs. Liddle and Self, the latter being himself not averse to a few "French loan words".) 

Irony, historical

So, Germany is getting ready for its festival summer, and the educated and not so educated elites with too much time on their hands flock to green and pleasant places to indulge, al fresco and with a glass (or two) of Winzersekt in hand, in a bit of cultcha. Among the smaller venues is the charming town of Röttingen in the gentle vale of the river Tauber (if you think "festival" in Germany means Glastonbury, you're wrong). 

Among Holocaust scholars Röttingen is known as the place where the first of a whole spate of massacres of Jews which swept the south of Germany in the 13th-century took place, sparked by the divinely inspired accusation by one Herr Rindfleisch (who either was a butcher or merely a crazy provincial aristocrat with a fanciful name) that the Röttingen Jews had (what else?) desecrated a host.   

Of course, no mention is made of that exceptional claim to fame on the town’s official website  (which, like those of untold other communities in Germany, is also in blatant denial about the period between 1914 and 1945. Simply didn't happen.).  

And so it strikes me as a bit of a historical irony that the organisers of this year’s Frankenfestspiele (merrily advertised all over the national press) have decided to put on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. 

Now I'm not trying to prohibit performances of this particular play, or performances that do not aim at challenging the play's ascription to the genre of "comedy". But in this case a very particular idiocy seems to be at work: The kind of idiocy that probably comes from a total historical cluelessness, exacerbated by a half-baked, vaguely apologetic awareness of 20th-century German history (anything beyond that is terra incognita). Of course, the festival's website reassures us, this is not an anti-Semitic play – indeed, Shakespeare couldn't even have had anti-Semitic intentions. After all, there were no Jews in England at this time, for they had been "banished by law" ("Shakespeare wollte mit dieser Komödie sicher keinerlei antijüdische Stimmung machen, da es zu dieser Zeit in England offiziell keine Juden gab. Sie waren per Gesetz verbannt").

No Jews, no anti-Semitism. Somehow that formula sounds familiar. That doesn't make it any less stupid, however (or less embarrassing in a place with a history like Röttingen).

"A precipice before which democracy stands"

Something I ran across today during project-relevant research that--given recent events--seemed somehow relevant:

“We must be determined to adapt the genuine principles of democracy to mass society, instead of regarding certain democratic devices as sacrosanct in themselves. If we consider the plebiscitary element in democracy, we are justified in saying, after the experiences of the last epoch, that of all democratic institutions, it has made the largest contribution to the destruction of the system. The plebiscitary principle drives people towards what we have described as crowd psychology.

This crowd psychology is one of the chief evils to be feared, a precipice before which democracy stands. The mobilization of the entire populace to hold a plebiscite in circumstances which are more characteristic of a farce than of a turning-point in the national destiny, is one of these democratic customs which are apt to become meaningless, once the social background and the social techniques have changed.

The referendum was only reasonable when it applied to the citizens of a small community. Now since it appears in the guise first given it by Napoleon III, that of a managed display of mass emotion, it no longer has an honest part to play in democratic society.  …

The purpose of democracy is not to play on the emotions of the masses, but to prevent the vacillating reactions of popular feeling from frustrating the rational and considered opinions of the nation. … It will then be obvious that the function of the plebiscite in the context of a mass society has been completely reversed. For it no longer interprets the general will as the expression of the considered intentions of the citizens, but is rather the result of skilful agitation and a powerful propaganda machine.” 

Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940), pp. 356-57 (paragraph breaks added).

Positive reviews of The Most Remarkable Woman in England

Academic reviews, by nature, take a little while to start appearing.

I've already noted a few reviews from history journals of my last book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace which appeared at the end of last year. I've just noted that two others have appeared.

Happily, they both say very nice things about the book, though they focus on different things.

In Women's History Review, a review by Caitriona Clear is currently appearing as 'advance access' online (meaning that it hasn't yet appeared in the print version).

Clear focuses on, and largely summarises, the dramatic story aspects of the Pace case. She calls the book a 'page-turner' and observes:

In telling this story, [Wood] references all the main authorities and rehearses all the arguments of gender history and British social history in the inter-war period. He does this so skilfully that there is no sense of being dragged away from the scene of the crime to listen to teacher. Nor does he shy away from speculating about what really happened to Harry Pace. 

Clear, however, finds my suggestion that Harry Pace may have killed himself via arsenic poisoning to be 'baffling'.

My actual argument about Harry's death is a bit different than she describes; however, this is one of those things where I would definitely encourage people to read the book and make up their own minds.

In the current issue of Crime, Media, Culture, Lucy Williams (who is herself a specialist on the history of women and crime) writes:

John Carter Wood's The Most Remarkable Woman in England  may at first seem little more than historical coverage of a real-life whodunit mystery, but this impressive scholarly work quickly shows the trial of Beatrice Pace to be a landmark court case--socially, culturally, and legally. ...

In a fascinating display of meticulously collected evidence, Wood at first draws the reader in to ask 'who killed Harry Pace?', but the real triumph of this book is the seamless way in which the author unravels the social and cultural impact of the case as the evidence and hearsay surrounding the murder mounted.

Quickly, The Most Remarkable Woman in England becomes not about the guilt or innocence of Beatrice Pace in the death of her husband, but a series of more complex questions for the reader to consider. These relate both to situating the case as a product of its time and in thus reading its significance, and also in evaluating the role which the media played in constructing well-defined personae for both harry and Beatrice Pace, as well as the extent to which this influenced public reaction to the trial. ...

In analysing the Pace case, John Carter Wood offers an in-depth exploration of attitudes towards inter-war crime, gender, media sensation and criminal justice, and at the same time delivers a comprehensive overview of a murder mystery that captivated the nation. 

Many thanks to both reviewers for the careful readings and positive verdicts.

Those of you interested in learning more about The Most Remarkable Woman in England can do so at the book-related blog. 

A complete list of reviews can be found here. 

Ye shall know them by their "outstandingly good social and moral fruits"

My current research project deals with some British Christian responses to the European crises of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the confrontation with 'totalitarianism'. The interactions between faith and 'secularism' was one of the central issues in the group on which I'm concentrating, and, here, 'science' was a recurring topic.

To make a long story short, the particular Christians I'm looking at tended to be quite enthusiastic about science (and sociology), and criticised their fellow believers for ignoring the value of the knowledge thereby produced. The position they reached is complicated, but it resembles what Stephen Jay Gould much later referred to as 'non-overlapping magisteria': i.e., the view that science and religion concern themselves with different (and separate) realms of experience, and within those respective realms each approach is appropriate and generates legitimate knowledge. (Like some people, I'm sceptical about how well this actually works, but that's another topic for another day.)

More specifically, within my group the tendency was to ascribe to science a justified predominance with regard to understanding natural phenomena while reserving for religion authority over things like ethics and morality.

But looking through the pages of the predominantly Anglican journal Theology from the period of the Second World War, I ran across this interesting statement from W. G. Symons in an article titled 'A Forgotten Frontier', which takes the religious praise of science much further than it usually went, even giving it a positive moral value.

(Symons was a Methodist and active in the British Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Student Christian Movement and other Christian organisations.)

After noting what he saw as the increasing engagement of scientists in social and moral issues of the day (often, he pointed out, from a Marxist perspective, citing figures such as Bernal and Haldane), he observed:

The outlook on the theological side is not encouraging. A great many of our Christian writers and thinkers seem almost unaware of what is going on in the world around. The vital schools of theology (and I mean by that the orthodox schools, Catholic and Reformed, rather than the Liberals) are just not interested in scientific affairs, and maintain an attitude of cultured and dogmatic aloofness. Those who do refer to science do so without adequate equipment....

...

Finally, can we have an examination of the positive contribution of science to our moral and social thinking? Science may form an inadequate basis for a complete morality, and it is patently obvious to-day that it does not provide a solvent for all our social ills; yet it is a simple historical fact that the scientific outlook has yielded outstandingly good social and moral fruits well outside the limits of the applied sciences.

Professor Whitehead has written: “The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering, and of the obvious demand of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing.” Science has not merely told us how to relieve suffering (by improved knowledge of medicine, hygiene and so on); intertwined with it has been an attitude of mind which has recognized cruelty and oppression and social shams, and has exerted a disinfectant influence in our whole social life.

The Church, in some periods of its history, has woefully lacked such disinfectant. Yet in Church circles there are frequent attempts to belittle the moral fruits of science, to dismiss it as “mere technicality.” Such an attitude betrays invincible ignorance, or still worse, the mortal sin of “calling good evil” in the unconscious interest of ecclesiastical self-conceit. (Surely, Matt. xii, 24-31 is relevant here.)

(W. G. Symons, 'A Forgotten Frontier', Theology, XLV, No. 269, November 1942, 225. Paragraph breaks added.) 

The biblical verses Symons cites are (as ever) open to interpretation, but involve Jesus' confrontation with the Pharisees and contains the well known verse 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.'

The rest, though, seems clear enough.

Recent publications: violent drunks and overzealous cops

In recent(ish) months a couple of my essays have seen the light of academic day in a pair of fascinating collections.

The first actually came out at the beginning of the year: a chapter in a wide-ranging collection on Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Perspectives in Economic and Social History, edited by Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Pickering and Chatto 2014).

My contribution is a re-focused and updated version of some of my older work on violence and crime in nineteenth-century England, titled 'Drinking, Fighting and Working-Class Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Britain' (the link will take you to the final draft of the essay at my academia.edu page).

A brief excerpt:

A few nineteenth-century London trials suggest a similar pattern. At the skittle ground at ‘The Bell’ public house, Abraham Pomroy had been drinking with Richard Dukes and others for about three hours in June 1830. As a witness put it, ‘they were a little fresh, but they knew what they were doing’. At some point, ‘Pomroy took up a pot of beer, and stood before the skittle-ground to prevent their playing’. He then ‘threw the pot of beer across the ground, and bent the pot nearly double’. The dispute escalated: ‘Dukes said, “Don't throw that beer away, you did not pay for it”—Pomroy then said he had paid for as much as [Dukes]; Pomroy then gave [Dukes] a shove—they had a scuffle together, and they both fell.’  Pomroy died of internal bleeding caused by a fractured skull.

In October 1850, a fight broke out in ‘The Ship’ in Limehouse between James Northeast and William Arnold.  ‘A few words passed’ between Arnold and Northeast, who were both drunk. ‘The prisoner was rather in liquor’, said a witness, and ‘the deceased was intoxicated’. Arnold had provoked Northeast: ‘As soon as Arnold came in he began blackguarding, singing, and dancing, and making use of very bad language.’ (A witness described Arnold as ‘a very drunken dissipated little fellow’.) Northeast dragged Arnold into the street, striking him fatally. A surgeon testified that Arnold’s ‘concussion of the brain’ may have been ‘caused by a fall.’ ‘Drunken persons’, he added, ‘have a good many falls.’

The second essay, 'Public Opinion and the Rhetoric of Police Powers in 1920s Britain', deals with another aspect of the space-crime continuum and arises out of my research into a significant series of police scandals in 1920s Britain.

It appears in the collection Justice et Espaces Publics en Occident du Moyen Âge à Nos Jours: Pouvoirs, Publicité et Citoyenneté, edited by Pascal Bastien, Donald Fyson, Jean-Philippe Garneau and Thierry Nootens (Quebec: Presses de l'Université de Québec, 2014).

One of the thing I looked at in that research is the reaction of various kinds of newspapers to what was perceived (by some) as the excessive and intrusive policing of public morals in London's public parks.

The more conservative or populist press expressed itself similarly. The World’s Pictorial News referred to Hyde Park as “Spied Park” and observed, “the public might have a very British objection to Nosey Parker business”: “The spy, the sneak, the preventive agent, however successful from a crude detective point of view are abhorred by the people. Their methods can be summed up in the most expressive phrase as un-English period.”  The Times thought “something—it may be called the system or the atmosphere or the tradition of the War years—is ripe for revision”. The Sunday Pictorial viewed the plainclothes surveillance methods in Hyde Park cases as “repugnant to British instincts” and condemned the “officiousness and mild fanaticism” behind such policing . ...

Negative comparisons were often drawn with other countries. Labour MP Tom Johnston—while recounting Savidge’s charges in Parliament—said his party must “offer resolute and determined opposition to anything in the nature of the ‘Cheka’, a Turkish system, Star Chamber methods, or what was known in the United States of America as the Third Degree”. The United States was in fact the key counter-example for British policing in the early twentieth century. ...  Likewise, during the late 1920s police debates the Manchester Guardian stated, “there is nothing in the United States that corresponds to the old British attitude towards a person merely suspected of a crime”: in America, “the police seem to be regarded as possible oppressors of the public quite as often as they are saluted as its protectors. That is not our way in England”.

As usual, you'll find (reasonably) up-to-date publication lists and/or downloadable documents here and here.

Hotel Art #7

Part of an occasional series.

Hotel Kummer, Vienna Austria (April 2014)

Deine Zauber binden wieder...

I am usually allergic to anything with the phrase 'flash mob' in the title.

But this is magnificent.


"Saturday, March 22, 2014, 10:29 am. Odessa Fish Market ('Privoz'). Members of the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra and Odessa Opera Chorus, Hobart Earle, conductor, perform music from Beethoven's 9th symphony."

I admit it: I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. This brought tears to my eyes.

The view from (not-so) afar

Some incisive trans-cultural political commentary from a pro-Russian demonstrator in Donetsk (via Luke Harding's reporting in today's Observer):

"There's no democracy in Europe," he told the Observer. "I've been to Germany. They give porno lessons in schools. It's homosexual fascism. They impose their values on others." 

It's amazing that I've been able to get by here in Germany for 15 years without becoming aware that I was living under 'homosexual fascism'.

So it's good to get an outsider's view.

Certainly, one never finds values being imposed in Russia. Never. Ever.

Glad we could clear that up.

Silent Posting