Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Six for 2026

Image: Ralf Roletschek, Wikimedia Commons
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD anticipates some of this year’s likely literary successes

As I write this it’s the tail end of January, and I sit at home on the edge of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, which means that it’s one of those times when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us and the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke.

Meanwhile, we’ve collectively at least survived the traditional blizzard of Christmas review roundups, and no doubt – unless we’re all blown to smithereens in the meantime – we’ll soon have the inevitable Easter reading recommendations and summer beach-book lists in our sights, until before long the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness rolls around once more, and with it yet more critical effusions, and so on, ad infinitum.

If for no other reason than to get a head start on the whole craze, I offer here a brazenly subjective midwinter lineup of half-a-dozen worthy candidates culled from among the many thousands of our publishers’ new or forthcoming titles, any one of which is guaranteed to warm the reader’s heart in these otherwise unremittingly bleak days and nights.

Matt Haig, The Midnight Train

Like several million others around the world, you may know the basic outline of Haig’s breakthrough 2020 novel The Midnight Library. In short: the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed (even great writers sometimes struggle with names), in her mid-thirties, single and childless, feels useless. Her cat is dead, she’s alone, and she’s been fired. Late one night, she tries to kill herself. Unpromising, I know, but this is where Haig lifts the whole thing out of itself and into the sort of energetically sustained parallel universe that C.S. Lewis might not have disowned. Instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. All she has to do to step into that life is to open the book. You may possibly recognise some of the plot ingredients of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, itself a product of the so-called many-worlds theory in which a new universe beckons from our every choice and decision.

The whole enterprise possibly sounds a bit strained, but in Haig’s hands it delivers the goods as a serviceable get-away-from-it-all novel that works both on the level of a good yarn and a speculative rumination on what we’re really doing during our brief tenancy of the planet. What’s the best that can happen in your life, and what’s the worst? Those are the questions. Without spoiling the treat, The Midnight Train is broadly speaking in the same vein as its predecessor, only – as the title rather implies – translated from a library onto, well, a train. I’ve slightly furtively read about three-quarters of the new book in what publishers like to call uncorrected proof form, and I can confirm it’s well up to par with its distinguished prototype; both have interesting things to say about how hard it sometimes is for any of us to completely accept ourselves for what we are – and, like the eponymous train itself, it all rattles along at a brisk clip.

Canongate Books, April 2026, £20

Malcolm Galfe, Near Horizons

The author here knows his technology and he knows his psychology, and the two combine in seven wonderfully engrossing stories which themselves incorporate elements of horror, sci-fi, mystery, dystopia and good old-fashioned (it never seems to go out of style) human drama.

That said, I’m pleased to report that we’re not exactly in Stephen King, let alone Stranger Things country in Near Horizons. Without exception, Galfe’s tales have a rich, understated texture to them, weaving together a patchwork of tropes and allusions to create something that feels consistently exciting and new. He achieves his effects by tweaking our anxieties and using the suggestive power of good dialogue, not by the sudden arrival of a race of invading pod-people or their like. It’s the literary equivalent of the way in which the best Hitchcock films play with cinematic techniques to tease and torment us, and in its way just as delectable.

As a matter of fact, it’s not entirely illogical to review this title in close physical proximity to the aforementioned Matt Haig; both are neatly crafted, elegantly written, sharp, shocking and often mordantly funny. What raises Near Horizons above the pack of lesser tech-themed morality stories is Galfe’s wise and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his grasp of the elements of suspense, and the way he weaves fictional characters into recognisably true-to-life crises in consistently gripping ways.

But if Haig’s book stands as a just slightly over-manicured front lawn, complete with reassuringly familiar garden gnomes and even a fluffy household pet or two on hand, Galfe’s has an authentic touch of the jungle to it: it feels exotic and a little dangerous, often disarming the reader with a page or two of seemingly casual exposition before blindsiding them with a sudden plot twist. Or put another way: these are the sort of stories tailor-made for those of us who like to be both entertained and shocked, and perhaps also secretly comforted by the fact that it’s the characters in Near Horizons, not themselves, being manipulated in this way. There’s something inherently reassuring in the notion that nothing here could ever, surely, happen to us – an almost physically soothing sensation, like a welcome descent into a warm bath when the door is firmly locked and bolted against a storm raging outside. I confidently predict that we will be hearing much more of this supremely assured author in the future.

Woodbridge Publishers, November 2025, hardcover £16.12, paperback £13.05

Cheryl Hines. Image: David Torcivia, Wikimedia Commons

Cheryl Hines, Unscripted: A Memoir

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress, who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major film star – you may know her best as Larry David’s foil on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced US cabinet minister who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book been written that straddles the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those as embodied by the current administration in Washington DC. Yet, against the odds, Unscripted turns out to be an enthralling read.

Essentially, what’s on offer here is a well-told and often deftly comic account of a working-class Florida girl with dreams of doing something in life other than following in her father’s footsteps as the manager of a local Burger King outlet. In time, Hines goes on to catch the acting bug, makes her way to the Universal Studios in Orlando, and promptly finds herself staffing a sex chatline. Next she’s offered a part in a cable-TV show called Swamp Thing, where the script calls on her to do little more than emerge from a large manmade puddle on the studio floor and stand there for a while, topless. Another time she appears on an episode of American TV’s The Dating Game, but isn’t chosen to go on a date.

Life was a bit like that for Hines in the 1990s. This may have been her nadir as a working actress, but it’s the high point of her book, which passes over the serial rebuffs and setbacks in breezy, vernacular fashion, with none of the professional biographer’s tendency to choke the pages with a flat-footed account of names and dates. Things slow down a bit once we settle into the groove of Hines’s long and apparently blissfully untroubled run on Curb, and her equally happy marriage to RFK Jr., but the first act of the show is itself worth the price of admission.

Skyhorse, March 2026, £21.59

Sir Anthony Hopkins. Image: Elena Torre, Wikimedia Commons

Anthony Hopkins, We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir

According to its publisher, this book is a ‘raw, honest and moving account’ by one of our foremost living actors. It’s certainly raw. Hopkins lays out his early life in unsparing detail, as the son of a tough, hard-headed Port Talbot baker who didn’t have much time or sympathy for a son with an alarming tendency to slap on makeup and hang out with the local amateur dramatics society. ‘My mother and father were both prone to depression and black moods,’ we learn. ‘They fought and wept. My father drank heavily, which only fueled his heightened emotionality.’ Anthony Hopkins himself liked a drop in later life, to put it no stronger than that, and proved a less than stellar National Service recruit as a result, often brought up on charges of brawling with his fellow soldiers. The fractious reputation followed him back into civvy street, first in the world of semi-professional provincial theatre, and then the more refined halls of RADA in London.

Hopkins assesses his talent in these days modestly. ‘I could barely speak, and had the posture of a camel,’ he writes. But he worked hard, and never turned down a job. In time he came to the notice of Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After standing in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having ‘walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.’ Even so, the young Hopkins was soon bored by the repetition of the stage, one of those people who always seem to want to be elsewhere, doing something else. ‘I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,’ he writes. ‘I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.’

As with the aforementioned Cheryl Hines memoir, this book most comes alive when charting the uphill struggles of the author’s early career, and rather settles into a holding pattern once we come to see him triumph in The Silence of the Lambs and all the rest. Anyone hoping for rollicking Hollywood scandal à la Bette Davis or David Niven may be disappointed, although Hopkins does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino, with whom he worked unhappily on Oliver Stone’s Nixon. In the absence of gossip, there’s a good deal of what’s-it-all-about rumination on the author’s part, some bits of it more compelling than others. The takeaway message of the book is of the essential strangeness of the acting profession, which, like any intelligent observer, the author sometimes struggles to take entirely seriously. For all the money and awards, I grew to feel quite sorry for Anthony Hopkins as I finished We Did OK, Kid. But that’s because he knows how to tell a story.

Simon & Schuster, November 2025, £25

Bob Spitz, The Rolling Stones: The Biography

Ah, the Stones. By now there have been almost as many books on the old devils as records and concerts by the lads themselves over the course of their sixty-plus year career. In no particular order, we’ve had the late Stanley Booth’s fly-on-the-wall account of the band’s notorious 1969 tour of the United States, ending with their disastrous concert at Altamont; an enjoyably gossipy romp through the narcotic days of the 70s by their factotum and sometime heroin dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez; formidably brainy group biographies by the likes of the journalists Stephen Davis and Philip Norman; and, not least, the necessarily sanitised but still quite lively first-hand accounts by Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood themselves, all of them estimable enough in their own right, if perhaps betraying the hand of a ghostwriter. Back in the dark ages, there were even biographies of both Richards and Mick Jagger, and a third book (a glutton for punishment, that author) on the band collectively by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t linger on them.

Now Bob Spitz, an American journalist known for his previous works on pop-cultural figures like the Beatles and several lesser groups, as well as his juvenile nonfiction books (in so far as there can truly be said to be a difference between the two genres), brings us this ‘definitive’ account of rock’s bad boys, which he stretches out to the gatefold triple-album length of 700-plus pages. Does it actually say anything new? Yes and no. The basic story is present and largely correct: an initial eighteen months of struggle, followed by ten years of inspired music and personal debauchery – and in turn by five decades of meticulous decline management – might sum it up. Spitz is at his most engaging when he abandons the weary chronological plod, and instead follows the template of Ian Leslie’s triumphant recent dual-biography John & Paul in putting the Jagger-Richards relationship under the microscope. The author takes on the tired polarities – Mick as the uptight details guy, Keith the agreeably wrecked one – by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: ‘passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of love, riven by jealousy.’ However much they were at odds, seems to be the message, Mick ’n Keef were, or are, still an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Stones, with the others, even the band’s original wayward genius Brian Jones, mere talented add-ons. The cast and basic plot may be familiar, but Spitz has at least succeeded in giving a recognisably human face to the whole star-crossed saga.

Penguin Press, April 2026, £26.14

1918 – Children play on a captured German field artillery gun exhibited in the Mall, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Alwyn Turner, A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

It’s always good to find a readable and well-researched variant on the standard schoolroom account of events, which in this case would have had us see the UK of the years 1918-39 as a uniformly grim place, grey, soupily lit and generally austere, somewhere the Great Depression set in like a chill Channel fog and lifted again just in time for the arrival of the Luftwaffe. What’s most striking about Alwyn Turner’s new book, by contrast, are the similarities between those sepia-toned times, seemingly out of some vanished Jurassic social order, and our own. Consider that, in 1922-24, Britain managed to get through four prime ministers; that politicians as a class were said to be ‘uniquely unpopular’, occupying a place in the nation’s affections only slightly more elevated than that of child molesters; that London itself was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality; that the UK was drowning in debt while simultaneously undergoing the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed an estimated 40-50 million people worldwide, roughly three times more than Covid; and that ‘tariff reform’ divided the nation much as Brexit did a century later.

For that matter, many of the products and institutions of our current daily lives entered service in the 1920s or early 30s. Among other goodies, Turner lovingly catalogues the new confectionery brands manufactured in Britain: ‘Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars Bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.’ That’s not to mention such establishments as the BBC, Butlin’s holiday camps, British Home Stores, NAAFIs, Wembley Stadium and London Transport, or the last’s iconic diagrammatic tube map and double-decker buses.

Maybe the book as a whole tends to be long on lists of this sort, as opposed to locating the human narrative that generally makes a social history come alive on the page, but, that minor cavil aside, A Shellshocked Nation is still a bracing and well-paced read, set against the ever-louder ticking clock of international events, which reminds us why the author’s devoted fans admiringly refer to him as ‘Page’ Turner. You could do much worse than to treat yourself to a copy this winter.

Profile Books, January 2026, £17.99

Posted on by Victoria Moul

Verses and translations by Victoria Moul

VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview, bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)

Seta and Sporophyte

If this were Ovid, Seta would have been

A slim bright girl, whose bead of blood

One day ran down her inner thigh, a seed

Threaded across the warp of veins

Vermilion on cream and blue. He took

Such pleasure in the colour that he slew

Her just to satisfy himself and draw the skein

Of red from her rotting body; a damp, fine

And part translucent sort of stem, though not

To bear a flower, but his tensed pouch, the Sporophyte.

(Seta and sporophyte are terms referring to parts of moss. I had in mind particularly a common moss in which the sporophyte – spore-bearing structure – is formed of a stem-like seta, bright red and standing straight up from the main body of the moss, bearing dark red capsules. None of the transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses refer to moss, but I was struck by the coincidence of the technical term Seta and the Sita of Indian mythology.)

Three poems from The Sanskrit

The Subhasitaratnakosha is a huge 11th century anthology of Sanskrit verse and verse quotations. It was compiled by a Buddhist monk but most of the contents are not (or not obviously) Buddhist, and date from several centuries earlier. It includes some poetry attributed to women.

Subhasitaratnakosha no. 999

As the grime and caustic iron

Of North Sea water, somehow laid

Precisely in the spotless scoop

Of shell is filtered by a cloud

And turns to pearl as sweet and clear

As April rain: so can you raise

The warm and grubby coins of envy

To the gold of praise.

no. 998

Your glory in this world and the next, it is

The ribcage of that royal bird, the soul:

The waters of the seven seas

Fill, like a skull, his little drinking bowl.

Lokāloka is the name of a mountain which is both in and out of the world (loka and aloka), marking the boundary between death and life. The Raghuvamsha by Kālidāsa is a long Sanskrit poem about the lineage of Raghu, and at this point in the poem it is concerned with a difficulty in conceiving a child. Kālidāsa is often considered to have been the greatest poet and playwright of ancient India.

Lokāloka (Raghuvamsha 1.68)

The clouds in Calvi steam on the mountain top:

From the pool we watch them teeter, stir, disperse.

My father has just died

But unbeknownst to me somewhere inside

Dividing cells will in a few months reassemble

His closed eyes.

Two versions of Horace

After Horace, Odes 1.30 O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique

Mary, queen of Walsingham, forget

Your darling Norfolk; turn to hear

In Lowestoft and Dartmouth Park, the thrum

            Of womens’ prayer.

Come with a child, the blazing boy, and bring

The Muses, skirts up to dance; allow

Also the elderly to attend your train;

            And Christ your son.

After Horace, Odes 3.22

The only baby in all of Horace (Odes 3.22)

Lady of the hills and woods

Hear me when my time is come

Preserve me from all dangers and

            Heed too your son.

Above my house a pine-tree looms

And every day that passes I

Pray that one day my baby shall

            Stand as high.

Spare me then the staggered blows

Of a slow labour, or

A dead child. Bring us torn but

            Safe to shore.

Two Translations of Casimir Sarbiewski

Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640) was a Polish Jesuit poet who wrote in Latin. His poetry was an enormous success across Europe in the seventeenth century, with a particularly enthusiastic readership in England.

After Sarbiewski – ‘De divino amore’

Last week I watched Love mending his nets

 (Very dextrous he is too)

His gear was all gold: hooks and line

            The bait, the flies, even the worm.

He was golden himself: but for all his gleam he could find

            No waters to fish in. He asked

“Where then can I cast?”

Pass your nets, boy, to the fisher of men:

In his sea

Packed and wriggling you’ll catch

Men and women like me.

De puero Iesu nato

— Is anything more precious than this child of mine?

Whose mouth with running honey wells and fills again,

As balsam flows unstained in streams that do not fail,

And nectar runs in rivers, free and unconstrained.

In his still curls the stars themselves are bound and borne

And on his nape the locks of heaven turn in light.

Could any mother comb such dazzling weight by hand,

Of he who has been born from shiver of starlight?

— His birth is of the royal line, but royalty is obsolete;

And soonest born he’s lain in filth of foreign town,

His right hand grasps at straw, and clings to scraps of hay,

A baby swaddled only by the chill of snow.

Is anything worth less to us than such a child today?

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Three translations from Culhwch ac Owen

LIAM GUILAR is the poetry editor of The Brazen Head. These are three of his translations from the medieval Welsh prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen (i.m. Michael Alexander)

Translating Culhwch ac Olwen

In popular films the sexy treasure hunter/archaeologist

(they conflate the two, much to my trowel wielding friends’ dismay)

who’s fluent in every lost forgotten ancient language,

confronting the inscription on the recently uncovered wall,

or gazing at the long lost rediscovered legendary text,

looks, then translates, without a pause, the symbols

into fluent, idiomatic, contemporary American.

The reality goes more like this:

Kilyd son of Kledon Wledic

Wanted a wife as noble as himself.

Here is the woman he wanted.

Goleudyt daughter of Anlawd Wledic.

So far so good.

After they stayed together What? Gwest Ah, see note.

They spent the night together. Is that too direct?

The verb’s related to the one for copulation.

They came together. After they were married

….bland. After they slept together,

no, the story teller could have used kysgu gan.

The cruder options? No. Not here. What follows?

The country went to pray they ?might have? offspring

And they got a child/boy through the prayers of the country.

And from the hour she captured, caught?

The next word’s definitely ‘pregnant’. Another note.

‘Became pregnant’ though literally ‘caught pregnancy’.

As though it were an illness, perhaps better than ‘fell pregnant’

which evokes abrupt decline, or woman, falling?

Then she went wild/feral. Another note.

‘She went mad’. Mad or wild is somewhere you go to

in this case beyond the civilised boundaries.

She’s gone mad and won’t go near a building.

Wouldn’t enter a building?

And from the time that she was pregnant,

She went wild and wouldn’t enter any building.

And when her time came, she came to her good sense.

You go mad but come to your senses. The payoff’s here, 

the sudden twist estranging your own language.

You go out of your mind as though it were a car,

and you could leave in the car park to return to

when finished being mad and needed it again. Anyway,

what’s next? Pigs!? What? We’re up to line 7, only

one thousand two hundred and thirty eight to go.

May I marry your daughter?

(The giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr knows he will die when Olwen, his beautiful daughter, marries. Understandably, he doesn’t welcome her suitors. But Culhwch has been told that if he doesn’t marry Olwen, he will never marry anyone. He and his six companions set out to ask the giant for her hand in marriage. What isn’t stated but becomes obvious is that the giant can’t be killed until his daughter is married.)

They killed the nine gatekeepers,

and not a man cried out.

They killed their nine huge mastiffs;

not one so much as squealed.

And so they came into the hall.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr! Greetings

in the name of God and man!’

‘You, where are you going?’

‘We seek your daughter, Olwen,

for Culhwch son of Kilyd.’

‘Where are those rascal servants?

Where are those ruffians of mine?

Raise up the forks under my eyelids

so I can see my future son in law.’

This they did. ‘Come back tomorrow

I’ll have an answer for you then.’

He had three stone spears beside him,

each tipped with poison.

As they turned to go he seized one

and flung it after them.

Bedwyr caught it and hurled it back,

piercing the giant through his knee cap.

‘Cursed savage son in law!

It will be worse for me when I go downhill.

Like the sting of a gadfly,

the poisoned iron has hurt me.

Cursed be the smith who made it

and the anvil on which it was forged.‘              

They stayed that night at Custennin’s house.

And on the second day, they set out to the hall,

in majesty, with fine combs in their hair.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

give us your daughter.

In return for her dowry and marriage fee

to you and her two kinswomen.

And if we don’t get her from you;

you’ll get your death from us.’

‘Her four great-grandmothers

and her four great-grandfathers

are still alive. I must consult them.’

‘You do that. We’ll go eat.’

He took the second spear

and hurled it after them.

Menw mab Teirgwaedd

caught it and threw it back.

It pierced the centre of his chest

and sprung out the small of his back.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

The pain of this hard iron

is like the sting of a horse-leech.

Cursed be the forge wherein it was heated.

Now, when I go uphill,

there will be a tightness in my chest,

stomach aches and frequent nausea.’ 

They went to their food.

On the third day they came to the court.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

stop throwing spears at us.

Do not wish hurt and harm

and death upon yourself.’

‘My eyelids have fallen over my eyeballs –

Where are my servants, raise up the forks

so I may look on my future son in law.’

They arose, and as they rose,

he took the third spear

and hurled it at them. This time,

Culhwch caught it and threw it back,

and as he wished, it pierced the eyeball

went through and out the back of his neck.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

As long as I live the sight in one eye

will be worse than the other.

Whenever I walk in the wind it will water.

I’ll have headaches and giddiness

at the start of each moon.

Cursed be the forge that heated it.

Worse than the bite of a mad dog

is the sting of its poisoned iron.’

Next day they came to the court.

‘Don’t attack us anymore.

You’ll bring hurt and harm

and martyrdom to yourself.

Give us your daughter.’

‘Which one of you was told to seek her?’

‘Me, Culhwch, son of Kilyd.’

‘Come here so I can see you.’

A chair was placed under him,

so they could be face to face.

‘Is it you who seeks my daughter?’

‘I do.’ ‘Give me your word

that you’ll be just?’ ‘I give it.’

‘When you give me what I name,

then you will have my daughter.’

‘Name what you want.’

The Lame Ant

(Ysbaddaden gives Culhwch forty impossible tasks. This poem tells how one of them is achieved. Gwythyr is one of Culhwch’s companions.)

As Gwythyr mab Greidawl

was crossing a mountain,

he heard lamentations:

a most bitter wailing.

Dreadful this noise.

He rushed towards it

drawing his sword,

cutting the anthill

off at the ground

saving the ants from

the blistering flames.

‘God’s blessing and ours upon you,’

they said to him.

‘And that which no man can recover

we will recover for thee.’

These were the ants

who collected the flax,

all the nine hestors

Ysbaddaden demanded.

But one seed was missing.

Until just before sunset.

it was finally brought in

by the last, limping ant.

Posted on by Derek Turner

Deep state

DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head. He is also a novelist, reviewer, travelogist, and the author of the chorography Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (Hurst, 2022). www.derek-turner.com. Twitter: @derekturner1964. Instagram: edge.of.england

“Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England”

‘Pike’, Ted Hughes

The plumber’s van’s been standing since the small hours

At the fishing-place beside the chartered town;

Its driver has been sounding deeper waters

Since he set up as the night was going down.

He saw the sun come wheeling up from ocean,

Watched whitening sky go glowing into gold;

Heard the birds orchestrate their calling,

Stamped booted feet to counteract life’s cold.

Cynosure of today these level courses –

These muddy understated lowland drains

Whose depths hide evolution’s shining forces –

Silver knights swim pricking on these plains.

Other men stare silent at reflections,

Itching for a twitch upon their lines,

Unknowing echo ancient Izaak Walton,

Compleatest anglers, contemplating time.

Coarse fishers here can sit on thrones like Doges

Wedded to the waters of their wealth;

Serene for once among the mace and sedges,

Each man an island nation to himself.

Slow surface holds deep state of planted kingdoms,

Mirrors showing sallow, alder, oak –

Chlorophylled and kingly-symbolled leaves

The royal trees on any English road.

The tops of reeds stand proud among sheet-silver,

Their dirty roots outshone by swelling light –

Excaliburs – or the lances of dead riders

Who rode here once to set the east alight.

Waterfowl calls urgently to offspring –

Brown fuzzy balls bob cheeping at her steer.

The angler cannot stop himself from smiling,

As he casts for luck across the haunted mere.

(Awake by now at home, his fishing widow,

Sipping her first coffee of the day.

Smiling at her grandkids out the window –

Her ducklings’ ducks, so soon to swim away.)

The plants that edge the lake have grown here always;

Reseeded from some Anglo-Saxon store –

Marginalia from the seventh century,

Still richly green if now less filled with lore.

Epona tails of Rome and Celt connections

Vanished lands in floreated forms –

Lush lowland lawn, these thronging herbs of nations,

Forget-me-nots and flags, dog-rose and thorn.

Apothecaries prospected these elixirs,

Water-mint and yarrow, woad and rue –

Cut and dried for daubed dog-Latined ewers,

Cures for flux, stone, plague, and marsh-ague.

Pallid fish slide silent near the surface

Or nose among new-inundated grass,

Animals always searching for advantage,

Ghosts glimpsed in oxidising antique glass.

Carp suck and spap and rise to find him casting;

Their ancestors gaped for God-believing men;

Now endless sky, that abbey’s painted ceiling –

Great fane forlorn, foundation lost in fen.

He throws his line along the deepest margins,

His hook hangs in the decomposing ooze;

He hovers with all fish beyond all ageing –

Quick and dead commingled in long view.

Posted on by Clarence Caddell

Four poems by Clarence Caddell

CLARENCE CADDELL lives with his wife and three children in western Victoria, Australia, where he works as a high school English and humanities teacher, and writes in spare time he doesn’t have. His first collection of poems, The True Gods Attend You, will be published by Bonfire books in 2022. 

Note. The first two poems are situated in the universe of gnostic Christology. The first explores the notion, found in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, that Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross for Jesus, was actually crucified in his stead while the Christ spirit watched in amusement from on high. The second, inspired by The Gospel of Judas, contrasts the materialistic consciousness of the other disciples with the superior understanding shown by Judas, who is represented as Jesus’ only faithful follower and receiver of his highest teachings.

I. Vicar of Christ

Fulfilment’s plenitude, the dénouement

Of life’s afflictions—how can one not crave it?

The Easter feast that ends those weeks of Lent,

Of joy postponed in order then to have it,

And more abundantly! What we deplore

Leads on to joy, as if thus to redeem

The one who died therein. The soldiers saw

The man beneath his cross stumble, or seem

To do so; therefore, with true man replaced

Deceptive God. The spark cannot have been

Within that unknown Simon of Cyrene,

Or else it came through his ordeal ungrazed

And rose in glory to the left-hand side

Of him who laughed as Sakla’s creature died.

II. Generations

Some only care for action—mystery

   They like, but wish to see resolved before

The light comes on and all’s decoded.

   Such stories have their law,

Broken sometimes just to be reinvented.

   They’re thrilled by an exciting murder plot,

Don’t see its flaws. Perhaps they envy

   The hero what he’s got,

And wish him dead, if not picture themselves

   His love-interest (or both, as might a few!).

But when it comes to horror, surely

   They would not wish it true!

In fact, some are ambitious to be burnt

   And flayed for their opinion of the dead,

While dreaming of the Day when others

   Shall suffer in their stead!—

Vicarious atonement! Make me laugh.

   But it grows egregoric, their belief

In tales the most permanent of which are

   Often, lengthwise, most brief.

True stories they like best (as if a thing

   That’s happened in this world were true at all!)

Confused, they look to good’s exemplar

   To render evil’s fall,

But should they fail to misidentify

   The two, black knight and white in that romance

Of many versions—check their eyesight,

   Then lay the blame on chance.

Both absolutes and shades are so opaque

   To them, that all are manifest before

Their opalescent eyes as shadows

   They feel as if they could paw.

A perfect audience, willing to suspend

   All disbelief in all absurdity—

But not so ideal on a jury,

   As their God would agree!

But there are those like us who, in our hearts

   Possess the answering light to recognise

The figure understood by Judas,

    Unseen by mundane eyes.

I. Passover Feasts of the New Covenant

Note. These next two poems engage with some intriguing parallels between Josephus’ account of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD and parts of the Gospels and traditions of the early Church. The first is set during the siege when the rebels are going from house to house requisitioning whatever scraps of food they can find. A woman named Mary, driven to insanity by hunger, has turned her infant son into a human Passover lamb (one of only two in the whole of literature, according to Joseph Atwill). In the second, a Jewish rebel leader named Simon plays a part that can be read as a parody of the Apostle Simon Peter’s career. After Jerusalem’s fall, having tried to escape by tunnelling beneath the ruined temple, he is caught, taken to Rome and crucified.

A pair of lambs, each of them Mary’s son;

The second, not the world-upending one

We think of first, was born in time to see,

Not understand, the truth of prophecy!

He was to be a byword till the end,

His mother said. Nothing would ever mend

For her, except, for now, the pain of hunger.

Take what you will! She cried and no doubt flung her

Compliments on their heels as they backed out,

Those demoniac rebels put to rout

Along with Moses’ Law and Abraham’s

Old Covenant by the power of these two lambs,

The younger surely side-by-side with Jesus,

Who’d warned: To Caesar render what is Caesar’s.

Then which did Mary mean, or Joseph muse

Would seal up the calamities of the Jews?

II. The Other Peter

Simon the cutthroat—you had sought to hide

In stolen robes here where no stone’s liaison

With stone remains. Were you not petrified,

Impersonating high priest and stonemason?

Obdurate as stone, in history’s next minute

Buried beneath an unknown myth’s foundation,

You’d sought to carve out on the earth, then in it,

While stones were crying out that here he comes,

This son of man, and, as they soon would spin it,

Of God, a god himself—a place where Rome’s

Dominion would end. But it was lysed,

Your empery of messianic coxcombs,

And unlike him who would be canonised

Despite denying three times his own master,

Your own post-mortem shadow would be life-sized,

Your master not denied, and Rome would cast her

Anchor, dolphin wrapped, where ebb and flow

Would not dislodge, though Goths and Vandals blast her.

Hands bound to Caesar’s chariot, in tow,

Who lived by the sword but had not sense to die

By it, dragged where you had no wish to go!

And this would take place so that prophecy

Might be fulfilled, the city’s inanition

Avenged and, as at the lake of Galilee

Where your namesake was wont to do his fishing,

Might come to rule the Holy Trinity:

Vespasian, then Titus, then Domitian.

Posted on by Mike Alexander

The Salad Course, and The Hottest Ticket

P & J Poetics, LLC, published MIKE ALEXANDER’s first full-length collection, RETROgrade, in 2013. His most recent chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics), was released by EXOT books. His poems have appeared in Rattle, River Styx, Borderlands, Bateau, Abridged, Measure, Shit Creek Review, Raintown Review & other journals.

The Salad Course

Single-handed, Don Miguel clears the dinner table,

sets his papers in order. The lone inkpot covers

where his wine spilled.

            Fragments of a telling

grind in his mill, like giants in a bad novel.

Start where real people start:

                        An olla rather more beef

than mutton, a salad on most nights,

the scratching of the ink, all the missing…

There’s an aftertaste left on his tongue.

The failed Crusades.

                                    Pirates, all the king’s

enemies, the king, all sit down to the same slop,

scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays,

a pigeon or so extra on Sundays,

lunatics, all, but the heroes are the worst.

Let there be Victories, but food comes first.

Gustave, striving to put all that pretty style aside,

lingers in the shadow of a bistro, studying

how others eat, keeps inventory:

making his way across fields, drinking

milk at farms, dancing with village girls,

finding out about the harvests, carrying back

stalks of greenery in his handkerchief.

                                                Jots down:

handing a lady his handkerchief, like some

gallant in an insipid romance.

                                    While the courses

followed, poule au jus, crawfish, mushrooms,

vegetables tossed in a salad, roasted larks,

many subjects were discussed: the best system

of taxes, agricultural advances, abolition of

the death penalty –

            Let the killing begin.

The Don, having finished off his meager repas,

dons his chamber pot casquette, retrieves

his antique lance from the mantelpiece –

& at length, salutes a damsel,

                                    whose breadth,

which no doubt smelt of yesterday’s salad,

seemed to him to diffuse an aromatic fragrance.

Many scratchings later, the Captive recounts

how he had asked for some herbs to make a salad.

Then, he affected his escape.

                                    By such affectations,

we digest the meat of our daily ergot.

In his Dictionary of Received Notions, Gustave

defines an émigré as one who makes a living

giving guitar lessons or by making salad.

Emma, undressing, adds the dressing.

The Hottest Ticket

                                    i

          in the tophat

topcoat centuries   it was

the thing        to take

the ladies          to the Specola

to see

what they were made of         the body

parts   the kitchen bones    utensils   condiments

essences     the muscle mass

                       after the glass eyed

hair suits    of mammalian strata

the fish the flesh the foul        remainders

from tape worm to madonna with child

dissected twelve ways to Sunday;

                         bring the smelling salts.

                                    ii

                       if she survives

the nerve net                       offal truth

blood batter                       embrace of the body

corridors of display cases                        latinate names

                       there is one

more test                       of your lady’s heart

in the last room                       (just as she thinks

you are going                        to collect her wrap;)

                       the last room

forces her to look                       on homunculi of dead

mothers with children                        of the plague

(we are civilized                        enough to think it

                       a colossal joke,

that the anonymous                       die in such numbers)

refuse heaps blanched                        white with lime,

pockets full of poesy.                       The dead, the dying

                       litter the streets like

a plague of locust-husks,             while the angel

of waxwork swings                       his palette knife

through foetid air.                                 The artist

                       follows stories

of the outbreak spreading                       through all the cities

of Cartesian Europe                       to see first-hand, to show

the blotches, the scars,                       the tell-tale signature.

Posted on by Jacob Riyeff

On First Concert at the Bradley Symphony Center, Milwaukee

JACOB RIYEFF (@riyeff) is a translator, teacher, and poet. His work focuses on the Western contemplative tradition and the natural world. Jacob lives in the Upper Midwestern U.S. with his wife and three growing children.

”A man’s attitude to life.” (Feb 20, 2022)

O Edward Elgar, did you see our faces
rapt in darkness, hearts attuned to your cello
As you lay upon your deathbed, traces
Of joy accompanying the low and mellow
Tones the strings invite our ears to hear
Amid glissando runs to keep the mind
And body clear? You cursed its weak premiere
But here a hundred years past you find
A willing crowd to celebrate your movements
As you lay in Worcester gasping for air‚
From lyric to rondo, fulfillment
In sonic pattern, virtuosic fare.
Could you see, in your final agony,
Our festival of superfluity?

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Chapter Six. The Wedding

This is chapter Six of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, see www.liamguilar.com

The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain where they have been taken on as mercenaries by Vortigern, the newly appointed leader of the Province. Having defeated an army of Picts, Hengist has tricked Vortigern’s son into giving him land where he has built a stronghold.

Holding a feast to celebrate its completion, he intends to use the opportunity to introduce his daughter, Rowena, to Vortigern.

At which point I part company with the Medieval Story Tellers. I don’t believe a hard-headed war lord would throw away everything he’d worked for in his rush to get his hands on his servant’s daughter. While the story of the King who throws away his kingdom for ‘the wrong woman’ repeats throughout medieval versions of the Legendary History, it’s hard to find an historical ruler of Britain before the thirteenth century who did it.

The Wasshail ceremony, central to the story of Vortigern, is possibly a memory of a very old English custom. 

Set up

Hengist’s hall, the feast raucous.

New arrivals at the long benches;

long haired, eager, boastful,

beside their wary British guests.

Behind a door, a room in candle light[i].

Shadows, female laughter. The maids

circle, bob and fuss, like dull moons

orbiting a blazing star. Rowena the still

pensive centre as clothing is adjusted.

They have sprinkled gold dust in her hair.

A jewelled necklace drags attention to her breasts.

A golden belt shows off her slender waist

and amplifies the outward flare of hips.

Hengist, watching from the door, sees her

for once, as any man sees any woman.

Knows lust will strangle Vortigern

and side step all his calculations.

Swats the unwanted images

that flicker bodies rutting on the furs.

What father wouldn’t trade his daughter for a kingdom?

What daughter wouldn’t for a crown?

But when she leaves this room,

she is no longer Hengist’s daughter

but the Wife of Vortigern the King.

Time to take the jewelled cup.

Surprised by her own fear,

thrown from this busy room

alone on the anticipated shore.

The boat has gone and left her here

in darkness. In the distance

Aestrild’s ghost grows restless[ii].

Her hands betray her, spilling wine.

The maids cower, apologizing.

While they clean the cup she will not look at him.

The second time her hands don’t shake.

No words. She moves towards the door.

If you would call her back, now is the time.

Hall-noise heralds the death of Hengist Father.

Who knew this could be so painful?

That she was beautiful,

no one who saw her will deny.

That it was beauty in excess

of human expectations,

all who saw her will attest.

That she was clever,

brave and loyal,

is yet to be revealed. 

As she entered the riot of the hall,

she infected it with silence.

A ripple of turning heads,

abandoned conversations.

Every man who saw her wanted her

but as she moved towards the King,

through the swamp of their desire,

their lust was spittle on a white-hot blade.

And though she moved with the grace of a swan on still water

he was a scarecrow staring at a golden avalanche

and she was the tidal wave bearing down on a mud brick wall.

She kneels before him and lifts the cup:

‘Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin.’

He looks up and she is sunlight exploding in his face,

shattering thought, making everything background 

only except her face in focus, the world its dull penumbra.

Turning to Keredic, who mistranslates shock

as linguistic incompetence

and launches into cultural explanations:

‘It is a custom, in the Saxon’s land

where ever a company gathers to drink,

friend greets friend and says:

Dear friend, be well. The other says, Drinc hail.

The one that has the cup, he drinks it up.

The cup’s refilled. He gives it his companion

and when the cup is brought,

they embrace each other thrice.

This is the practice in the Saxon’s land.

and thought a noble custom throughout Germany.’[iii]

Take the cup, kiss her, drink.

Her breath brushes his cheek.

Her soft lips taste of wine and metal.

Four story tellers all agree[iv]

this is where the Devil puts in an appearance

to mess with Vortigern,

overwhelming his common sense

with lust for a pagan girl.

It’s the adjective that horrifies.

A different Vortigern, emerging from his private earthquake,

green eyes, watching him, soft lips, another drink.

Stumbling out of incoherence,

he understands the myth of the medusa;

how looking at a woman can turn a man to stone.

Negotiations

He has to ask for something he could take:

his servant’s daughter. The power inversion

obvious to both of them, so to preserve the niceties

they pretend this was an accident,

that both of them are taken by surprise.

(No laughing please, this should be serious.)

My daughter? You want to marry her?

Vortigern pretends it is desire that speaks:

how beautiful etc, how desirable etc…

(As if it mattered what she looked like.)

Who would have thought, at his age,

he would be honoured.

Hengist pretending he must ask his brethren.

Then the haggling when they both know Kent

and Thanet are her bride price.

But Vortigern rejects the script.

Her Morning Gift, lands in the west,

in the hill country to its north.

Fine cloths, jewels from the east,

horses, saddles, oils. ‘Kent

is not mine to give.

Thanet’s already yours.

But if your sons will follow me

I will give them all the land

between the turf wall and the stone.’

And that shocks Hengist.

Wedding celebrations

Master Wace wrote: ‘He desired her in the morning when they met,

and had her that same night.’ Our Priest, horrified;

‘There were no Christian rites, no priest nor bishop,

he had her in the heathen fashion

took her maidenhead, defiled himself.’

But you don’t expect twelfth century clerics

to sympathise with physical desire.

Or recognise a business proposition.

They will always blame the woman. 

There will be a celebrant and a venue

appropriate for the ritual.

After the prayers and public promises;

feasting, dancing, speeching, drinking,

obligatory fornication with or without an audience.

‘After the feast they slept together’

is how Welsh story tellers described a wedding.

Was she frightened?

Embarrassed by your greed,

or did her own lust

shade the colour of her eyes?

Did you come to trade?

Or did you come to conquer?

There was a door, there must

have been a door. A room

with fittings, shapes, colours.

There was her body, a blur of

detail, memories, green eyes.

Reduced to naked ape with thumping heart.

The gravity of need, the greed of flesh for flesh.

Then clothed, walking in the daylight world

to find the keys to the castle have been pawned.

Bank, ditch and palisade redundant

and in the inner room, behind the locked door,

watched by the sleepless guard who lets no body enter, 

there’s a stranger in the dimmest corner

and a version of yourself you do not own.

Maelgywn of Gwynedd murders every woman

who shares his bed, refusing to accept

the obligations the act implies.

(And still finds willing takers

convinced the risk is worth the prize).

Cunnedagus of the Demetae 

gives such women to his retinue.

He was petrified.

Then she stepped out of her clothes,

stepped towards him,

breaking one spell

casting another.

Aubade

Familiar words in unfamiliar accents,

soft, golden, fragrant, warm.

We are not children playing in a sandpit

ruling our private universe

with plastic armies that can be replaced,

where cities made of sand can be destroyed

and then rebuilt, forgetting that the adults

will call us in and put an end to all our games.

The world won’t wait for us.

While bodies are engaged,

the mind in search of answers

slips into the darkness

where the Latin titles drift

like burnt pages on the breeze,

past broken statues of dead men

whose names have been forgotten;

through ruined halls and shattered walls:

discarded answers that no longer satisfy.

No matter how delirious the frenzied shoving match

(soft, fragrant, warm) the mind drifts on alone,

in the high passes above the snowline,

looking down into the valleys

to the interminable journey

and fading fast the certainty

that there is an end to travelling

where the answers can be found

soft fragrant adequate and warm.

Stay with me?

He leaves the golden marvel on the furs

and searches for his clothes.

She stretches, mutters, ‘Stay with me.

Sleep here.’ He hesitates.

Locrin tightening his belt,

steps outside the earth house

into the frost of a winter’s morning,

as the whalebone doors slide shut

on his desire.

The great gates of Tintagel grinding shut

behind a man who runs

before his lover can discover who he is.[v]

Both wanting to say, take me back,

before the fog has lifted from the river

or the ice has melted on the castle gate.

Their minds are filled from dawn to dusk

with fantasies of welcome;

blinking, baffled, overjoyed,

as the great gate swings open

the whalebone door is moved aside,

as if the hind will greet the hound

that runs it down to rip its throat out.

He is not suffering from their disease.

Flesh calling to the memory of flesh,

promising oblivion and pleasure.

But there are things he has to do.

[i] This scene, where Hengist watches his daughter being decked out in her finery, although expanded here,  is Laȝamon’s addition to his sources.

[ii] Aestrild’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2020). Rowena hears it in Chapter one and  it haunts her.

[iii] From ‘It is a custom’ to ‘Germany’ is a loose translation of Laȝamon. Even in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s earlier Latin version the words of the ceremony are given in a form of English. It’s possible the custom is very old and also possible it is the origin of ‘wassailing’.

[iv] Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Laȝamon. The implication in all four is that had Rowena been baptised first, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Vortigern makes this point in the previous chapter.

[v] Locrin’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry, Uther’s in the next part of this project. Both men endanger their kingdoms through their infatuation.

Posted on by Peter King

Inner pieces, inner peace

Credit: Shutterstock
PETER KING says inconsistency is not incoherency

We live in fragments. There is nothing that is so large to be all encompassing. There is nothing that is dominant, nothing that is the essence. Of course, we humans are common in our biology, psychology and our mortality, but this is not what defines us as individuals. As individuals we are wholes that are also fragments. We are complete and entire while also being part of something that is beyond us.

We do many different things that make us the whole that we are. All of these things can be ends in themselves, worthwhile without any exterior validation. We watch and play sport, and we do so for no other reason than the enjoyment we gain from the activity itself. Some of us may feel that our sporting allegiances define us, but this is never all that we are. We might describe ourselves by our job, our profession or perhaps our employer. But we come home at night and are someone else – a wife or husband, partner or parent, brother, sister, friend or even enemy. We have political views and we may only wish to associate with those who we agree with or have some affinity to. We may ‘never kiss a Tory’, but we probably work with them, sit next to them on the bus or train, wait behind them in a queue and are taught or treated by them when we are pupil, student or patient. We have tastes in art, and we have tastes in music which might be very different from our taste in art. We can have diverse tastes, admiring El Greco and Rubens as well as Rothko and Twombly; we can listen to Bach and Anthony Braxton and follow it up with Laurie Anderson; we can read James Boswell and Edward Lear before moving on to Vladimir Solovyov; we can watch a sci-fi thriller and the next night lose ourselves in Tarkovsky’s Mirror or Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Is this inconsistent and incoherent? It might be seen to be, but I would say that this inconsistency is actually quite defining of what we are. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The choices of what we listen to, read and watch may be different, but we each have diverse and often contradictory tastes, both at any one time and through time. As a teenager I read lots of war stories and fantasy novels as well as listening to punk music. I actively hated both Wodehouse and Eliot and all they stood for, and I had little time for classical music or jazz. Forty years later, I love both Wodehouse and Eliot and have no interest in going back to the novels of Sven Hassel or Michael Moorcock. But even now, as I have suggested above, I shift from the light to the heavy, the old to the new, the tuneful to the discordant, the easy to the difficult. These are all parts of what I am. They are fragments of my personality. None of them defines who I am; not one of them is me. But each of them says something about me, and each is as real as the any other.

My choices, I am sure, are not confected. I do not listen to certain types of music because I think I should or because it is what ‘people like me’ are supposed to do. I do not watch black and white Russian and Japanese films out of duty, but because I really enjoy them as well as finding them compelling and challenging. I will quite happily read Edward Lear’s nonsense verse while there is Anthony Braxton’s improvised jazz playing in the background.

So I do not see all this variety as incoherent or inconsistent. It is just how I, and, I believe, most others, live. It seems to me to be perverse to believe one should have such a consistency so that if one is a traditionalist in politics one must also be one in art and music. Not only does this forget that these, now traditional artists and composers, be it Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bach or Mozart, were considered outrageously modern in their own time, but it also ignores that different arts progress at different stages. To do this is to put artificial criteria over our individual choices.

There is a lot of debate and disquiet over the issues of difference and diversity. These terms can be used to impose categories on people otherwise unwilling to accept them. They might also be seen as the means to attack traditional values. I can accept both those points while also insisting that each of us is diverse and full of difference. I would go so far as to say that most, if not all, of us have contradictory tastes. I would further state that this is natural and to be relished. If we have different moods, why not diverse tastes that can accommodate those moods? I would suggest we accept difference and diversity for no other reason that this is just how we are. This does not mean that we have to accept these terms beyond categories that apply to an individual. We do not have to accept them in political terms and nor does one have to buy into a postmodern worldview. We can have diverse views, and remain traditionalists.

What I want to suggest is that we are made of fragments. Each of these demonstrate a particular feeling, attitude, mode of behaviour, even view of the world. Each fragment is, at it were, complete. It is entire and we can express it fully, whether it be a particular allegiance or an attitude towards a painting or poem. We can, of course, express negative attitudes and feelings regarding things we do not like or which we feel in some way oppress us or stop our enjoyment.

These are entire unto themselves: we enjoy Bach’s cello suites and that is it. We do not have to qualify our love for this music or justify it to anyone else. We do not love Bach because of his contemporaries or because of the period in which he lived. We can sit and listen and lose ourselves in its sublime qualities. Yet the following day we may be watching a game of football and lose ourselves in the tribe of fellow supporters shouting on our team. Later that day we may read Eliot or watch Saturday night television. We do not have to explain ourselves, and we would resent being made to. We do not question what we are doing either during or after, and the issue of consistency doesn’t enter our heads.

However, these fragments do come together into a whole. This whole is an entire person. We have a complete life that we take to be continuous and coherent and which we know consists of a multiplicity of parts, each of which can satisfy some aim, need or desire. We are seen by others as a whole and are expected to act as such. But this whole is, in turn fragments of a greater whole. We are entire as ourselves, but we can come together in a larger whole we call ‘community’.

What I particularly object to in politics is principle. I tense up when someone says that they act according to principle and I automatically wish to support someone accused of lacking principles. This is not because I have no principles of my own – I like to think I am reasonably principled in the manner I behave. But I make a distinction between the personal and the political. I want to be moral and, despite failing often, I work at being so. And, of course, I want others to be moral as well. What I do not want is for anyone, myself included, to feel enabled to impose their principles on society through control over political institutions. What I object to is not that a politician has principles but that they wish to impose them on everyone else, regardless of what these others may think. In other words, I do not want my principles to be swamped by those of someone else.

Any society is made of diverse and different individuals who believe in many different things. These views may well be irreconcilable. A society may consist of traditional Roman Catholics and radical feminists, and progressive liberals and reactionary conservatives. All of these views are legitimate and we must assume they are sincerely held. People naturally disagree on a whole range of issues such as abortion, immigration, gender, the proper roles of governments and markets, the environment and globalisation. While we hope that we can talk with those with disagree with, it will often be the case that we cannot agree. Some views are simply irreconcilable and all we can agree on is that we differ.

What we need then is some means to ensure we can be left to differ in peace. We might take the view that we accept the majority view, and there is some sense in this. But this does not end the issue of principles. Even if there is a majority in support of an issue, why should we assume that an argument is determined solely by the number of its supporters? A Roman Catholic will still believe they are right to oppose abortion, even if they know they are in a minority. A traditional conservative will not agree with radical views on the fluidity of gender merely because there appears to be a majority of parliamentarians who will vote for it. A majority does not negate or diminish the principles of the minority.

Politics, then, is essentially antagonistic. It is made up a diverse collection of views, deeply held and based on clear principles, but which cannot be reconciled. The proper response of government here is not to impose one view at the expense of the others, but to find a means of balancing these irreconcilable views in such a way that society remains peaceful and stable. This means developing and maintaining institutions that protect different views and maximise the ability of individuals to express them freely and safely.

This suggests that the only purpose to governing is governance itself. Governing is indeed an end in itself. There is no end to governing in either sense of the word ‘end’. Governing does not stop and there is no presumption that we will reach a higher or better state, whether we express that as human perfection, utopia or the end of history. Governing is necessary to hold a balance between antagonistic ends sincerely held by free and competent citizens. It is about protecting those institutions that allow for those views to be expressed in a manner that does not coerce others.

Government then does not believe in anything other than its own maintenance. The reason this is necessary is not because a society believes in nothing, but precisely because it believes in many diverse things. Just as there are irreconcilable ends in a society, so there are within each of us. We act inconsistently because we hold diverse views and act according to the context in which we find ourselves. We try to hold them in balance, but they are not necessarily reconcilable. We can only hold them serially and not concurrently (without making ourselves unwell).

However, it is this serial nature, that at any one time we are committed to a particular end, that allows us to lead untroubled lives. Each fragment of ourselves is complete unto itself and we can live with it. To be consistent is to lack imagination. It is where we do not feel or think. People who are oppressed or coerced appear consistent because they have views imposed upon them. They are told what to believe, what to think and how to act.

We are made up of regrets as well as triumphs, of things half done, things we wished we had done or not done, paths not taken or only part taken, things left unbuilt. These are all fragments, which we did not complete. Yet they stand there as memories or regrets. These too are now complete, in that they cannot be completed or added to. They can only be lost further or retained as they were left.

Think of a valuable pot that has been smashed into a thousand pieces. It is irreplaceable, and we feel we should try to save it, so we painstakingly put back the pieces back together again. From a distance, the pot may look as good as new. But when we get closer we can see the multiple fractures and how the pieces have been joined together. It is skilful work, but we can see that it is not the same. And there may be weak points or even bits missing. But it is still a whole, it is a pot – and it may well now have a different form of beauty that comes from being in this reconstructed state. We can sense its vulnerability and its complexity. We can better sense the love that went into its making and in its preservation. This is how we are, skilfully put together from many, many pieces. We may be scarred and there may be gaps but we are, in our own way, more or less complete.

Posted on by Ken Bell

Castro, Kennedy and Khrushchev – the nuclear option

Image: Shutterstock

Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Serhii Plokhy, Allen Lane, 2021, 464 pages, £25

KEN BELL admires an unusually informed study of one of History’s nearest misses

Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the first work to mine the KGB files that are stored in Ukraine. Out of this, Plokhy has synthesised a new understanding of the crisis which argues that neither side understood the other, and both operated on the basis of faulty intelligence.

Fidel Castro was a caudillo, rather than a Marxist, but he realised that if Paris is worth a mass then Cuba was certainly worth some Marxist rhetoric, so he decided to announce his conversion to the principles of Marxism-Leninism in the aftermath of his victory at the Bay of Pigs.

For Moscow, this was a dream come true, but it did create three issues that needed to be addressed quickly. The first was the need to keep Cuba communist, and the second was how to deter further American aggression against it. Finally, there was a need to keep Peking from seducing Havana into its version of communism.

The installation of medium range nuclear missiles, with the Soviet troops to man them, answered all those issues and gave Khrushchev the added bonus of finally being able to threaten the USA directly; the USSR in 1962 still lacked the intercontinental missiles that the USA had recently developed. Khrushchev remembered the way in which Kennedy had accepted the fact of a Berlin Wall and hoped that the Americans would do the same with Soviet missiles in Cuba, if they could be installed before the Americans discovered their presence.

Things began to go wrong almost immediately. The advance party that was sent to Cuba reported that the country was heavily wooded, and installing the missiles could be done under that forest canopy. When the missile troops arrived, they discovered that palm trees do not provide much cover and rain forests are too dense for large trucks to move through. The country lacked bridges that could stand the weight of the Soviet trucks, and even Soviet rations began to go bad in the tropical heat. The troops began to contract dysentery and the whole thing began to look like a farce before it had got off the ground.

Luckily for the Soviets, the decision was taken to install anti-aircraft missiles first. These were quickly discovered by the Americans, but they had expected them, so did not trouble themselves over the Soviet ships. This meant the strategic and tactical nuclear missiles could be set up courtesy of American misreading of what was actually going on.

When the Americans did find out, Kennedy’s reaction at first was hawkish. But he quickly realised that a nuclear world war was not in anyone’s interests so began to find a political solution. However, by then his aides and military were almost united in speaking for war, so the blockade of Cuban waters that he came up with seems to have been intended to buy time and keep the warmongers off his back until he learned exactly what Khrushchev was willing to concede. For his part, once Khrushchev realised that Cuba was far more important than Berlin to the Americans he was more than willing to reach an agreement, but the problem then became bringing that about against a backdrop of rising chaos.

For instance, an American U2 aircraft over Cuba was shot down seemingly against orders from Moscow. The commander of the unit was in his bed with dysentery, so a less senior officer, under extreme pressure as he and his men had not slept for days while they battled to get their antiaircraft missiles operational, gave the launch order.

At sea, a Soviet submarine had surfaced to recharge its batteries. It carried a nuclear torpedo, and control over that weapon was in the captain’s hands. It was the middle of the night when he went up to the conning tower to communicate with the American ships that surrounded him via a Morse lamp, and the USAF took the opportunity to ignore its orders not to do anything provocative and began to drop flares on the boat so photographs could be taken. The Russians thought that they were under attack, and the captain ordered a crash dive and the torpedo tubes to be flooded. Luckily, the man carrying the Morse lamp got stuck on the ladder and the captain was able to look back at the main American ship and read an apology from its captain. Had that man not been caught for a few seconds with his lamp, most of the American ships would have been destroyed by the nuclear weapon.

Back on land, Kennedy’s willingness to swap the Soviet missiles in Cuba for American ones in Turkey almost came to nothing when the Americans realised that the Turks might just object to a deal about their country that did not involve them, but Khrushchev agreed that part could be kept secret. Then Castro got in on the act and refused to allow American inspections of the Soviet missiles as they were loaded onto ships, so the Russians had to agree to inspections at sea. Both superpowers were quickly discovering that even junior partners could not be treated with that same indifference that the Americans used in central America and the Soviets in eastern Europe.

Yet, there was just enough to trade-off, and just enough willingness to do it, to allow Khrushchev to walk away with an American promise not to invade Cuba, which meant that it would remain a communist country. Awash with Soviet arms and subsidies, Cuba ignored Chinese entreaties and remained a reliable Soviet ally until the USSR finally ceased to exist in 1991.

However, as Plokhy shows, that peaceful end to the crisis was a matter of good luck rather than good management. His work takes us through this period with a lucidity that allows his readers to finally make sense of those autumn days in 1962 when the Cold War almost became a catastrophe.