Letters

Tom Hickman writes that ‘the convention concerning ministerial appointments ensures only that ministers who aren’t already members of either house join the other political appointees in a chamber that has no democratic authority’ (LRB, 15 August). There have been a few exceptions. Three ministers come to mind who sought entry to the House of Commons after their appointment. Ernest Bevin was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union when Churchill appointed him minister of labour and national service in May 1940. He was elected (unopposed) to the Commons the following month in the Wandsworth Central by-election. And after the 1964 general election Harold Wilson appointed two cabinet ministers who weren’t members of either house. The foreign secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, had lost his seat at the election. The minister of technology, Frank Cousins, was general secretary of the TGWU. Cousins was elected to the Commons in the Nuneaton by-election held on 21 January 1965, while Gordon Walker was defeated on the same day in the Leyton by-election. He immediately resigned his office: his constitutionally anomalous position clearly could not be sustained indefinitely. The House of Lords nonetheless served a purpose in these cases. All three by-elections followed the elevation to the peerage of the sitting member.

Tom Hickman is right to point out that ministers appointed from outside government and simultaneously made members of the House of Lords are not directly accountable to the electorate. That raises important constitutional questions in a parliamentary democracy. But in the case of the attorney general, the position is surely different. Although my former colleague Richard Hermer KC was not previously an MP and was given a life peerage when he was appointed in July, this does have the advantage that when he is called on to give independent advice to the government his objectivity ought to be heightened because he hasn’t previously adopted a party political position on any legally controversial matters. He is nonetheless accountable to Parliament through the Lords. Of course, that is no guarantee as to how he will actually discharge his office: Lord Goldsmith, to take one example, was attorney general and never sat in the Commons, yet his advice on the legality of the Iraq War was legally indefensible and tainted by political considerations.

Susannah Clapp notes that Julia Margaret Cameron’s sitter for Iago isn’t named (LRB, 15 August). An intriguing article by Scott Thomas Buckle in the British Art Journal (Vol. XIII, No. 2, 2012) entitled ‘Is this the face of Alessandro di Marco?’ gives enough evidence to suggest that di Marco may be the man who posed not only for Cameron, but also for Burne-Jones’s painting The Beguiling of Merlin and for works by Lord Leighton, Alphonse Legros, William Blake Richmond and Evelyn de Morgan.

Francis Gooding writes that in the UK ‘you can marry anyone you can legally have sex with’ (LRB, 12 September). He is specifically drawing attention to the way the prohibited degrees of affinity for sex and marriage are now co-extensive, but the statement was also accurate more generally – until last year. Under the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022, passed into law in February 2023, you can no longer marry anyone under eighteen, regardless of parental permission.

Tom Carson corrected most of Felice Picano’s claims that the Village Voice did a poor job of covering gay issues and culture, including disco music, during the 1970s and 1980s (Letters, 15 August). Carson mentions that the Voice contributor Vince Aletti wrote about disco, but he could also have included Andrew Kopkind’s ‘The Dialectic of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight’, in the issue of 12 February 1979. The late Kopkind, a gay man, Marxist and disco fan, wrote about the shift that occurred as a formerly underground musical style and culture was absorbed into consumer capitalism:

The performance and production of disco music creates a technical and economic foundation on which the intangible aspects of culture and sensibility develop. The ways in which the sounds are chosen, the records produced, the performers packaged and the cultural artefacts marketed will profoundly influence the styles we see … Sensibility is dialectical – which is to say that it grows from the material of history and the experience of society. It does not descend from the heavens of invention or corporealise out of thin air. The Seventies sensibility emerged from the achievements and excesses, the defeats and triumphs of the years before. Our end is always in our beginning, and we are, as Candi Staton croons, the victims of the very songs we sing.

Thomas Meaney mentions that the Omaha Public Library used to display William Thompson’s scalp (LRB, 18 July). While it is no longer a permanent fixture on the floor (150-year-old human hair doesn’t do well under constant fluorescent light), visitors can still schedule a scalp-viewing appointment in the Local History Room.

Thompson was an Englishman working for the Union Pacific Railroad, an ocean away from home. He took his scalp back to England with him when he returned, before mailing it to the doctor in Omaha who had given him the unfortunate news that it couldn’t be reattached.

A.W. Moore writes that I am not to be trusted as an exegete of Wittgenstein because I attribute to Wittgenstein a view that he does not hold (LRB, 1 August). At one point in my introduction to Alexander Booth’s translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I try to help non-specialist readers make sense of Wittgenstein’s obsession with logic as the ‘incomparable essence’ of thought and language. My proposal is that such an obsession might stem from the experience of necessary truth, and I offer, as an example, comprehension of Euclid’s proof that there is no greatest prime. Moore takes issue with this possibility on the grounds that in 6.21 Wittgenstein claims that propositions of mathematics do not express thoughts.

The simple reply to this objection is that Euclid’s proof is not a proposition in Wittgenstein’s sense. No proofs in mathematics are. At 6.2321, he tells us that a proof is something that allows us to recognise that what a mathematical proposition expresses is correct without having to compare the expression with reality.

A problem remains. While the nature of thought and its relation to language are Wittgenstein’s subjects in the Tractatus, he rarely employs the German word for thought as mental activity, Denken. Overwhelmingly, his focus is on Gedanke – ‘the thought’ or ‘a thought’ – which he defines as a ‘proposition with sense’, tied to the possibility of being true or false about the material world. For this reason, I should not have used the phrase ‘speaks of thought’ in framing my proposal; it was bound to generate confusion. I’m grateful to Moore for the stimulus to reconsider, and to Penguin for the opportunity to remedy the wording for the paperback edition.

A.W. Moore writes that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only book he published within his lifetime. While this is true of his academic work, philosophy was not Wittgenstein’s only career; he also spent six years as a teacher. In 1926, while working at a school in the Austrian countryside, he published a pronunciation and spelling dictionary, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, which aimed to aid his students in learning to read. This book, though almost entirely forgotten by Wittgenstein scholars, took a pluricentric approach to language which held the forms of German widespread in Germany and Austria as distinct yet equally legitimate, years before such an approach became widespread.

Neither Pierre Huyghe’s work Camata, featured in the exhibition Liminal at the Punta della Dogana in Venice, nor John-Paul Stonard’s account of it, offer any reflection on the historical resonances of the gesture of dumping human remains in the Atacama (LRB, 12 September). This was a tactic adopted in the 1970s by Pinochet’s death squads. Relatives of the victims continue, at times successfully, to comb the Atacama’s sands for fragments of bones, a ritual documented in Patricio Guzmán’s film Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Huyghe has been taken to task on various occasions for his ‘imperialist’, ‘Eurocentric’ neglect of the specificities of the places (or creatures) that feature in his work. Camata seems an obvious example of this. Maybe Huyghe hasn’t taken the trouble to inform himself about the history of the work’s location. Or maybe he doesn’t think it matters.

Brandon Taylor castigates Rachel Kushner for ‘the plethora of … ideas and facts’ in her new novel Creation Lake (LRB, 12 September). No, wait, that was Virginia Woolf on H.G. Wells. Taylor proposes that ‘in fiction, information has become the new character, and information is endless.’ Hold on, that was James Wood on Zadie Smith. Taylor writes: ‘We can only hear [the author’s] voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyhold and fines.’ Sorry, that’s Woolf again, this time about Arnold Bennett. It was ‘the effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of factoids’ in Kushner’s novel that tired Taylor. He suggests that she is a refugee of the ‘Attention Span Wars’. Either those wars have been going on for some time or there is a need to admit that there are a number of different approaches to writing novels.

As no doubt many others have pointed out, the instrument referred to by Brigid von Preussen as a stylus is not a stylus but a portecrayon – and Angelica Kauffman was not one of the wild women in the background of Nathaniel Hone’s painting but the admiring pupil leaning on the conjuror’s knee (LRB, 20 June). The depiction of the portecrayon reflects the popularity of drawing with both red and black chalk. Its descendant was the propelling pencil.

I am researching a project with the intention of identifying, tracing, interviewing (where possible) and celebrating the 25 anonymous/uncredited men who appeared as dancing sailors in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, from 1979. Some were student and professional dancers, others were art students or friends of Jarman, and some were people he met on the club scene. So far I have found thirteen of them. If you are – or you know or knew – one of these men, or have any information about them, I would like to hear from you.